• U.S. COVID-19 Cases Top 500,000; India Extends Lockdown

    The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States passed 500,000 yesterday, and deaths topped 20,000, while on the international front, India’s president extended the country’s lockdown and health officials urged Belarus to take new steps to curb its growing outbreak. The number of deaths in the United States is now higher than Italy’s total. At the global level, the total reached 1,767,855 cases yesterday from 185 countries, with 108,281 deaths reported.

  • Next potential shortage: Drugs needed to run ventilators

    As hospitals scour the country for scarce ventilators to treat critically ill patients stricken by the new coronavirus, pharmacists are beginning to sound an alarm that could become just as urgent: Drugs that go hand in hand with ventilators are running low even as demand is surging.
    Michael Ganio, of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, told Michael Rezendes and Linda A. Johnson of the Associated Press that demand for the drugs at greater New York hospitals has spiked as much as 600 percent over the last month, even though hospitals have stopped using them for elective surgery.
    “These ventilators will be rendered useless without an adequate supply of the medications,” Society CEO Paul Abramowitz said in an April 1 letter to Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.
    Nationwide, demand for the drugs surged 73 percent in March, according Dan Kistner, a pharmaceuticals expert at Vizient, Inc., which negotiates drug prices for hospitals throughout the country. Supplies, according to Vizient data, have not kept pace.

  • Could an Existing Drug Help against the New Coronavirus?

    Perhaps no new drug against the novel coronavirus SARS CoV-2 needs to be found, as it is possible that existing active substances could help against the COVID-19 pathogen. Alexander Freund writes in Deutsche Welle that the advantages of using drugs that are already on the market are obvious: Not only is it cheaper to repurpose drugs that have already been approved or developed, but, above all, it is much faster because the lengthy clinical test phases can be shortened. Although at least 68 vaccine projects have been started worldwide, the German pharmaceutical association VfA  believes that even if a suitable vaccine is found in 2020, mass vaccinations are unlikely to be carried out even in Germany this year. So the only alternatives are either further isolation for months or treatment with already existing or developed active substances.

  • Aberdeen-Based NovaBiotics to Test Life-Saving Cystic Fibrosis Drug on COVID-19 Patients

    Aberdeen life sciences firm NovaBiotics plans to test one of its drugs on Covid-19 patients with secondary lung infections. Hamish Burns writes in Insider that Nylexa ‘supercharges’ antibiotics to help them tackle difficult to treat and drug-resistant bacteria. Many of the lung infections in Covid-19 patients do not respond to antibiotics and more than half of the patients who died in Hubei province, the epicenter of the pandemic in China, succumbed to a secondary bacterial infection or sepsis.
    NovaBiotics could begin making Nylexa for trials in May and in partnership with the NHS and subject to regulatory approvals, clinical studies could get under way soon after on patients hospitalized with Covid-19.
    The active ingredient of Nylexa has proven to be safe and effective in clinical studies carried out across the UK, Italy and the US for bacterial lung infections associated with cystic fibrosis (CF). Nylexa could be repositioned as a Covid-19 therapy and tested on patients in the second half of 2020, ahead of any vaccine being available.

  • Coronavirus: People in Tall Buildings May Be More at Risk – Here’s How to Stay Safe

    The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged health systems and public health authorities worldwide. When you have a rapidly spreading virus with a high transmission rate, you have to investigate all possible infection risks.
    Michael Gormley writes in The Conversation that one area of risk that is yet to receive any attention is big buildings such as tower blocks or hospitals. While direct person-to-person transmission is still the most common means of acquiring the illness, our research suggests that occupants in tall buildings could become infected if defects occur in the plumbing system. It’s important for people to be aware of this and take steps to keep themselves safe.
    His group’s work at the Institute for Sustainable Building Design at Heriot-Watt University stems from an outbreak of the SARS virus in 2003 at an apartment block in Hong Kong, known as Amoy Gardens. In a building complex ranging from 33 to 41 storeys with some 19,000 residents, there were more than 300 confirmed cases and 42 deaths – around one-sixth of all SARS infections and fatalities on the island as a whole.

  • COVID-19 and the Built Environment

    Social distancing has Americans mostly out of the places they usually gather and in their homes as we try to reduce the spread of COVID-19. But some buildings, such as hospitals and grocery stores, have to remain open, and at some point, most of us will go back to the office or workplace. What is the role of building design in disease transmission, and can we change how we design the built environment to make it healthier? Modern buildings are generally designed to promote social mixing — from open plan living areas in homes to open offices where many workers share space. By promoting interaction and chance encounters, these layouts are thought to generate more creativity and teamwork. At the same time, they are probably also really great for spreading viruses around.

  • Wary Spain Starts to Ease Restrictions

    Spain is taking its first steps towards ending its lockdown today with some businesses reopening despite the latest figures showing a rise in coronavirus deaths after three days of decline. Pablo Sharrock writes in The Times that Spain has suffered more deaths than any country except the United States and Italy and has the highest mortality rate at 35.5 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University
    Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, insisted that the state of emergency and the lockdown were still in force. “We are not entering a phase of de-escalation,” he said yesterday. “The state of emergency is still in force and so is the lockdown. The only thing that has come to an end is the two-week extreme economic hibernation period.”

  • The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back

    The latest U.S. data proves the world is in its steepest freefall ever—and the old economic and political playbooks don’t apply.
    Adam Tooze writes in Foreign Policy that this collapse is not the result of a financial crisis. It is not even the direct result of the pandemic. The collapse is the result of a deliberate policy choice, which is itself a radical novelty. It is easier, it turns out, to stop an economy than it is to stimulate it. But the efforts that are being made to cushion the effects are themselves historically unprecedented. In the United States, the congressional stimulus package agreed within days of the shutdown is by far the largest in U.S. peacetime history. Across the world, there has been a move to open the purse strings. Fiscally conservative Germany has declared an emergency and removed its limits on public debt. Altogether, we are witnessing the largest combined fiscal effort launched since World War II. Its effects will make themselves felt in weeks and months to come. It is already clear that the first round may not be enough.

  • Boris Is Worried Lockdown Has Gone Too Far, but Only He Can End It

    The British government had asked Britons to stay at home, but Fraser Nelson writes in The Telegraph that government modelers did not expect such obedience: they expected workers to carry on and at least a million pupils to be left in school by parents. The deaths caused by COVID-19 are shocking, he writes, but so, too, are the effects of the lockdown. “Work is being done to add it all up and produce a figure for ‘avoidable deaths’ that could, in the long-term, be caused by lockdown. I’m told the early attempts have produced a figure of 150,000, far greater than those expected to die of COVID.” The decision about when and how to reopen the economy is a tough call to make, but “it’s a decision that will be better made sooner rather than later,” Nelson writes.

  • Acute & Chronic Economic Considerations of COVID-19

    Just as the high probability of a pandemic was foreseen so, too, were the economic effects of such an event. COVID-19 is no black swan, nor is it an event for which we were not given warning shots. In the last three years, the U.S. intelligence community, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Department of Homeland Security, among other government agencies, specifically and in disturbing detail warned of the grave risk a pandemic would pose to U.S. health and economic wellbeing – with the U.S. intelligence community specifically warning of a “novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat,” and listed pathogens H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and MERS-CoV as potential culprits. Even as we weather COVID-19, the questions remain as to when, not if, the next infectious disease will emerge. We were unprepared for COVID-19, but, hopefully, we will learn a few lessons from it. Specifically, to better prepare for the next pandemic, we need a plan to sustain our economy at the individual, household, and firm levels so that we are not forced to shut down, accrue more debt, and, perhaps, never recover from the economic losses the outbreak causes.

  • National Security in the Age of Pandemics

    For the first time since the Second World War, an adversary managed to knock a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier — USS Theodore Roosevelt — out of service. Only this time the enemy was a virus, not a nation-state. Gregory D. Koblentz and Michael Hunzeker write in Defense One that the fact that we “lost” the ultimate symbol of American military power to an invisible opponent should send shock waves through the national security community, because in its race to prepare the country for renewed great power competition with Russia and China, it has largely ignored a potentially greater threat: pandemic disease.

  • The Weeks’ Main Developments

    The past week saw several encouraging developments: China has lifted the lockdown at Wuhan, while Austria, Denmark, Israel, and Germany announced that this coming week they will begin easing the stay-at-home restrictions in order to allow some economic activity to resume. President Trump will announce in Tuesday the names of members of a task force charged with examining different ways to begin reopening the American economy in May. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that a small group of patients showed improvements after receiving remdesivir, an experimental coronavirus treatment made by Gilead Sciences. The drug is seen by global health authorities as the best shot at becoming a treatment for COVID-19. And an Oxford scientist said her group will start human testing of a coronavirus vaccine this week, adding that it is likely that the vaccine will be ready for general use by September.

  • Data Do Not Back Cloth Masks to Limit COVID-19, Experts Say

    Limited, indirect evidence from lab studies suggests that homemade fabric masks may capture large respiratory droplets, but there is no evidence they impede the transmission of aerosols implicated in the spread of COVID-19, according to a paper published yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
    Mary Van Beusekom writes in CIDRAP that in the paper, the National Academies’ Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats said that, because no studies have been done on the effectiveness of cloth masks in preventing transmission of coronavirus to others, it is impossible to assess their benefits, if any.

  • The Maths Logic That Could Help Test More People for Coronavirus

    Rapid testing of patients is of great importance during a pandemic. But at a time when there aren’t enough COVID-19 tests or testing has been slow, is there a way to enhance the process? As a mathematician and engineer, I asked myself if there was anything a theoretician could do to help meet the demands of the World Health Organization to test as many patients as possible. Well, there might be a way to test many patients with a few test tubes. Instead of using one test tube to produce a result for one sample, we can use several test tubes to test many more samples – with the help of some logic. The general idea is simple. A sample taken from each of our theoretical patients is distributed to half of the test tubes that we have, in different combinations. If we have ten test tubes, for example, we would distribute the samples from each patient into a different combination of five of them. Any tube that tests negative tells us that all the patients that share that test tube must be negative. Meanwhile, test tubes that test positive could contain samples from a number of positive patients – and an individual patient will test positive only if all their associated test tubes are positive.

  • The U.S. Army Wants Your Ventilator Ideas

    The U.S. Army has opened a design competition for ventilators intended for “short-term, rugged field operation…that will support field hospitals,” service officials announced Thursday. Patrick Tucker writers in Defense One that the winners, as determined by judges with the Army’s xTech Covid-19 program, will get $100,000 to develop a prototype. “Select technologies may receive follow-on contracts for additional production and deployment,” the announcement says. Interested participants can enter via the project website. There will be a virtual pitch session on April 13.