• Blood from People Who Recover from Coronavirus Could Provide a Treatment

    An old idea for fighting infections — an approach most physicians know about only from medical lore — is being revived as people wait for drugs and vaccines to thwart the novel coronavirus. If it works, the blood plasma of people who have recovered from covid-19 would be used to protect health-care workers and help sick people get well.
    Carolyn Y. Johnson and Ben Guarino write in the Washington Post that the possible therapy is based on a medical concept called “passive immunity.” People who recover from an infection develop antibodies that circulate in the blood and can neutralize the pathogen. Infusions of plasma — the clear liquid that remains when blood cells are removed — may increase people’s disease-fighting response to the virus, giving their immune systems an important boost. The approach has been used against polio, measles, mumps and flu.
    The Telegraphreports that blood donated by patients who have recovered from COVID-19 will imminently be used as part of efforts to treat victims of the disease in NHS hospitals,  can disclose. Senior officials said the health service will start giving hospital patients plasma from those who have recovered from coronavirus, “in the very near future”, after the move was approved by the U.K. medicines watchdog.

  • Italy and France Are Now Prescribing Hydroxychloroquine and Chloroquine as Treatments for Coronavirus Patients

    We’ve been talking about anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for about three weeks now.  However, U.S. health agencies like FDA and CDA, are still very cautious about the effectiveness and safety of the two drugs due to small trial size and lack of sufficient data. Techstartups reports that in France, the government caved to pressure from renowned Dr. Didier Raoult, who led the new additional study on 80 patients, results show a combination of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin to be effective in treating COVID-19. Dr Didier Raoult, a professor of infectious diseases who works at La Timone hospital in Marseille, then declared in a video on YouTube that chloroquine was a cure for Covid-19 and should be used immediately.

  • Identifying Factors Affecting COVID-19 Transmission

    Much remains unknown about how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads through the environment. A major reason for this is that the behaviors and traits of viruses are highly variable – some spread more easily through water, others through air; some are wrapped in layers of fatty molecules that help them avoid their host’s immune system, while others are “naked.”
    Rob Jordan writes in Stanford News that this makes it urgent for environmental engineers and scientists to collaborate on pinpointing viral and environmental characteristics that affect transmission via surfaces, the air and fecal matter. Alexandria Boehm, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Krista Wigginton, the Shimizu Visiting Professor in Stanford’s department of civil and environmental engineering and an associate professor at the University of Michigan. co-authored a recently published viewpoint in Environmental Science & Technology calling for a broader, long-term and more quantitative approach to understanding viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, that are spread through the environment. 

  • Coronavirus Treatments and Vaccines – Research on 3 Types of Antivirals and 10 Different Vaccines Is Being Fast-Tracked

    Just three months after China first notified the World Health Organization about a deadly new coronavirus, studies of numerous antiviral treatments and potential vaccines are already underway. Never has science advanced so much in such a short period of time to combat an epidemic.
    Ignacio López-Goñi writes in The Conversationthat many of the proposals now under study come from research groups that have spent years working to combat similar coronaviruses, particularly SARS and MERS. All that accumulated knowledge has allowed scientists to advance at unprecedented speed.
    We know, for example, that the genome of the novel coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, is 79 percent like that of SARS. We know the “key” used by the virus to get into human lung cells is protein S and that the “lock” in the cell is the ACE2 receptor. We also know that the entry of the virus is facilitated by a protease, or an enzyme that breaks down proteins, from the cell itself, called TMPRSS211.

  • Debate Flares over Using AI to Detect COVID-19 in Lung Scans

    A series of studies, starting as a steady drip and quickening to a deluge, has reported the same core finding amid the global spread of COVID-19: Artificial intelligence could analyze chest images to accurately detect the disease in legions of untested patients.
    Casey Ross writes in STAT that the results promised a ready solution to the shortage of diagnostic testing in the U.S. and some other countries and triggered splashy press releases and a cascade of hopeful headlines. But in recent days, the initial burst of optimism has given way to an intensifying debate over the plausibility of building AI systems during an unprecedented public health emergency.

  • Not All Genetic Tests Convey Risk in the Same Way, Scientists Warn

    Research presented virtually at the World Congress of Cardiology meeting over the weekend suggests that some direct-to-consumer or lab-based genetic tests may not convey the full risk of inherited disease. Scientists analyzed de-identified data from more than 14,000 patients who were referred to genetic testing for cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition that can lead to heart failure. Patients were subject to two different kinds of genetic sequencing, and the results were compared to a simpler genetic test that only screens for nine variants in two genes known to cause cardiomyopathy. If patients had been screened using the simpler test, 96% of the patients who actually had a risk for cardiomyopathy would have been falsely reassured that they didn’t have a such a risk. The scientists behind the study warn against relying on limited tests that paint an inaccurate picture.  

  • How Sick Will the Coronavirus Make You? The Answer May Be in Your Genes

    COVID-19, caused by the new pandemic coronavirus, is strangely—and tragically—selective. Only some infected people get sick, and although most of the critically ill are elderly or have complicating problems such as heart disease, some killed by the disease are previously healthy and even relatively young. Jocelyn Kaiser writes in Science that researchers are now gearing up to scour the patients’ genomes for DNA variations that explain this mystery. The findings could be used to identify those most at risk of serious illness and those who might be protected, and they might also guide the search for new treatments.

  • Lessons from Italy’s Response to Coronavirus

    As policymakers around the world struggle to combat the rapidly escalating Covid-19 pandemic, they find themselves in uncharted territory. Much has been written about the practices and policies used in countries such as China, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan to stifle the pandemic. Gary P. Pisano , Raffaella Sadun, and Michele Zanini write in the Harvard Business Review that unfortunately, throughout much of Europe and the United States, it is already too late to contain Covid-19 in its infancy, and policymakers are struggling to keep up with the spreading pandemic. In doing so, however, they are repeating many of the errors made early on in Italy, where the pandemic has turned into a disaster. “The purpose of this article is to help U.S. and European policymakers at all levels learn from Italy’s mistakes so they can  recognize and address the unprecedented challenges presented by the rapidly expanding crisis,” they write.

     

  • Understanding the Economic Shock of Coronavirus

    As the coronavirus continues its march around the world, governments have turned to proven public health measures, such as social distancing, to physically disrupt the contagion. Yet, doing so has severed the flow of goods and people, stalled economies, and is in the process of delivering a global recession. Economic contagion is now spreading as fast as the disease itself.
    Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak , Martin Reeves, and Paul Swartz write in the Harvard Business Review that this didn’t look plausible even a few weeks ago. As the virus began to spread, politicians, policy makers, and markets, informed by the pattern of historical outbreaks, looked on while the early (and thus more effective and less costly) window for social distancing closed. Now, much further along the disease trajectory, the economic costs are much higher, and predicting the path ahead has become nearly impossible, as multiple dimensions of the crisis are unprecedented and unknowable.
    “In this uncharted territory, naming a global recession adds little clarity beyond setting the expectation of negative growth. Pressing questions include the path of the shock and recovery, whether economies will be able to return to their pre-shock output levels and growth rates, and whether there will be any structural legacy from the coronavirus crisis,” they write.

  • MIT-Based Team Works on Rapid Deployment of Open-Source, Low-Cost Ventilator

    One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the COVID-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use, which could be built quickly around the world. The goal is to support rapid scale-up of device production to alleviate hospital shortages.

  • Preventing Quantum Cyberattacks

    From defense and health information to social networking and banking transactions, communications increasingly rely on cryptographic security amid growing fears of cyberattacks. However, can such sensitive data be unhackable?

  • Online Economic Decision Tool to Help Communities Plan for Disaster

    Preparing a community’s buildings and infrastructure for a hurricane or earthquake can be an incredibly complicated and costly endeavor. A new online tool from NIST could streamline this process and help decision makers invest in cost-effective measures to improve their community’s ability to mitigate, adapt to and recover from hazardous events.

  • COVID-19 Preventative Vaccine Trial for Healthcare Workers

    Professor Kathryn North AC, Director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, has announced its infectious disease researchers are preparing to roll-out a multi-center randomised controlled clinical trial of the BCG vaccine against COVID-19. 
    The trial has been endorsed by the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, who has called for global support and assistance in the fight against COVID-19.  

  • Initial Results of a New Symptom Tracking App: About 10% of Britons Are Infected

    The first app monitoring symptoms of people in Britain with suspected coronavirus shows that, at present, one in 10 users have a mild form of the virus at present. The app, developed by researchers in King’s College London, was made available to the public on Wednesday. Within the first 24 hours of the app being made available, some 650,000 people had signed up – and an initial analysis revealed that 10 percent of people were showing mild symptoms of the virus.

  • App Helps Doctors Find the Right Dose of Corona Medication

    Researchers have developed an app that doctors can use to more easily determine the right dosage of medication for corona patients. At the moment, doctors are prescribing many existing kinds of medication to patients. Using the app, they can determine a safe and effective dosage.