• UN Warns of Measles Spike as COVID-19 Halts Vaccination Campaigns

    Essential measles vaccination programs around the world are being postponed indefinitely for more than 100 million children as healthcare systems focus on coronavirus and countries enforce lockdowns and social distancing. The UN urges governments to keep track of unvaccinated children.

  • Safe Paths: A Privacy-First Approach to Contact Tracing

    Fast containment is key to halting the progression of pandemics, and rapid determination of a diagnosed patient’s locations and contact history is a vital step for communities and cities. This process is labor-intensive, susceptible to human memory errors, and fraught with privacy concerns. Smartphones can aid in this process, though any type of mass surveillance network and analytics can lead to — or be misused by — a surveillance state.

  • Putin’s Long War Against American Science

    A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses. The Putin regime mandates vaccination at home, but has launched a broad and sophisticated disinformation campaign in an effort to lower vaccine rates in Western countries, with two goals in mind: discredit Western science and medicine, and weaken Western societies by facilitating the re-emergence of diseases such as measles, long thought to have been eradicated. The COPVID-19 epidemic has not escaped the notice of the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda specialists. “As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information,” William Broad writes. “Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.”

  • Empty Non-Coronavirus Beds Raise Fears That Sickest Are Avoiding NHS

    Close to half the beds in some English hospitals are lying empty in a sign that people may be failing to seek help for other life-threatening conditions during the coronavirus pandemic. Sarah Neville, Andrew Bounds, Mure Dickie, Federica Cocco, and Bethan Staton write in the Financial Times that the National Health Service in England moved aggressively last month to release more than 30,000 beds in anticipation of a flood of patients infected by Covid-19, halting all non-emergency surgery from mid-April and discharging anyone medically fit into the community.
    However, people familiar with the situation say that the speed and scale of the drop in demand for other services has surprised health leaders, fueling concerns that people are failing to seek help even for conditions as serious as suspected heart attacks.
    NHS England said that across the country, about 60 percent of beds in acute hospitals were currently occupied. A year ago, the equivalent figure was a little over 90 percent.
    A similar phenomenon has been seen in Scotland.
    As the U.K. government considers how and when to lift the lockdown, ministers are also concerned about the knock-on health impact on citizens who are staying away from hospitals and not receiving treatment for other ailments.

  • 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.