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Category: Health

Kumbh Mela: How a superspreader festival seeded Covid across India

Kumbh Mela: How a superspreader festival seeded Covid across India

The Guardian reports: On 12 April, as India registered another 169,000 new Covid-19 cases to overtake Brazil as the second-worst hit country, three million people gathered on the shores of the Ganges. They were there, in the ancient city of Haridwar in the state of Uttarakhand, to take a ritual dip in the holy river. The bodies, squashed together in a pack of devotion and religious fervour, paid no visible heed to Covid protocols. This was one of the holiest…

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Covid pandemic: How rising inequalities unfolded and why we cannot afford to ignore it

Covid pandemic: How rising inequalities unfolded and why we cannot afford to ignore it

Hyejin Kang/Shutterstock By Ian Goldin, University of Oxford Historian Walter Scheidel argues in The Great Leveler that pandemics are among the four great horsemen that, through history, have led to greater equality – the others being war, revolution and state failure. Economist Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century similarly points out that the world wars and the flu pandemic in 1918 and 1919 contributed to the decline in inequality after 1945. But while mass death can drive up…

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Covid’s deadliest phase may come soon

Covid’s deadliest phase may come soon

Zeynep Tufekci writes: If world leaders don’t act now, the end of the Covid pandemic may come with a horrible form of herd immunity, as more transmissible variants that are taking hold around the world kill millions. There’s troubling new evidence that the B.1.617.2 variant, first identified in India, could be far more transmissible than even the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in Britain, which contributed to some of the deadliest surges around the world. In countries with widespread vaccination, like…

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U.S. is said to have unexamined intelligence to pore over on virus origins

U.S. is said to have unexamined intelligence to pore over on virus origins

The New York Times reports: President Biden’s call for a 90-day sprint to understand the origins of the coronavirus pandemic came after intelligence officials told the White House they had a raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery, according to senior administration officials. The officials declined to describe the new evidence. But the revelation that they are hoping to apply an extraordinary amount of computer power to the question of whether…

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Even without definitive proof, the lab-leak theory is a call for action

Even without definitive proof, the lab-leak theory is a call for action

Daniel Engber writes: Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-board veteran—did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise…

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Had Covid (or been vaccinated)? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

Had Covid (or been vaccinated)? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

Nature reports: Many people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. So suggest researchers who have identified long-lived antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-19. The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect,” says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash…

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The Wuhan lab leak question: A disused Chinese mine takes center stage

The Wuhan lab leak question: A disused Chinese mine takes center stage

The Wall Street Journal reports: On the outskirts of a village deep in the mountains of southwest China, a lone surveillance camera peers down toward a disused copper mine smothered in dense bamboo. As night approaches, bats swoop overhead. This is the subterranean home of the closest known virus on Earth to the one that causes Covid-19. It is also now a touchpoint for escalating calls for a more thorough probe into whether the pandemic could have stemmed from a…

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Biden: Intelligence community split on Covid-19 origin

Biden: Intelligence community split on Covid-19 origin

Politico reports: President Joe Biden said Wednesday that the U.S intelligence community is split between two origin theories for the Covid-19 pandemic. In a statement Wednesday, Biden notably did not detail the two theories between which the intelligence community is split. The president’s statement did note that he had ordered a review of the pandemic’s origins, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” but did not say whether either of those…

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How do we know that Covid isn’t a bioweapon?

How do we know that Covid isn’t a bioweapon?

Since the revival of the lab-leak theory will once again enliven conspiracy theorists, it’s worth being reminded why it’s wildly implausible that SARS-CoV-2 was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a biological weapon. (Also keep in mind that the possibility that the virus accidentally leaked from the lab does not contradict the still widely held view that it originated in the wild.) Last July, Ruby Prosser Scully wrote: [C]reating this virus in a lab and knowing that it…

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Facebook calls links to depression inconclusive. These researchers disagree

Facebook calls links to depression inconclusive. These researchers disagree

NPR reports: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ biggest fear as a parent isn’t gun violence, or drunk driving, or anything related to the pandemic. It’s social media. And specifically, the new sense of “brokenness” she hears about in children in her district, and nationwide. Teen depression and suicide rates have been rising for over a decade, and she sees social apps as a major reason. At a hearing this March on Capitol Hill, the Republican congresswoman from Washington confronted Facebook CEO…

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Intelligence on sick staff at Wuhan lab fuels debate on Covid-19 origin

Intelligence on sick staff at Wuhan lab fuels debate on Covid-19 origin

The Wall Street Journal reports: Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory. The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers…

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World’s worst pandemic leaders: 5 presidents and prime ministers who badly mishandled COVID-19

World’s worst pandemic leaders: 5 presidents and prime ministers who badly mishandled COVID-19

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko visits a hospital for COVID-19 patients, unmasked, in Minsk on Nov. 27, 2020. Andrei Stasevich\TASS via Getty Images By Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University; Dorothy Chin, University of California, Los Angeles; Elizabeth J King, University of Michigan; Elize Massard da Fonseca, Fundação Getulio Vargas; Salvador Vázquez del Mercado, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, and Scott L. Greer, University of Michigan COVID-19 is notoriously hard to control, and political leaders are only part of the calculus when…

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The pandemic’s mental wounds are still wide open

The pandemic’s mental wounds are still wide open

Ed Yong writes: This time last year, the United States seemed stuck on a COVID-19 plateau. Although 1,300 Americans were dying from the disease every day, states had begun to reopen in a patchwork fashion, and an anxious nation was looking ahead to an uncertain summer. Twelve months later, the situation is very different. Cases are falling quickly. About half as many people are dying every day. Several vaccines were developed faster than experts had dared to predict, and proved…

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CDC chief Walensky keeps changing her story — and confusing everyone

CDC chief Walensky keeps changing her story — and confusing everyone

The Daily Beast reports: The most remarkable moment of national frustration over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s coronavirus guidelines began two days before the agency’s controversial new mask guidance was even announced. “Dr. Walensky, I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, last week, in detailing her belief that the CDC has been slow to keep up with the science. “I always…

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Covid is bringing a global divergence between the wealthiest and poorest nations

Covid is bringing a global divergence between the wealthiest and poorest nations

The Wall Street Journal reports: Covid-19 is reopening a rift between economies in the world’s richest and poorest nations, driven by growth rates that are moving firmly in opposite directions. In the U.S., economists are forecasting a return to boomtime growth levels of the “roaring 20s”; China’s economy expanded at a record 18.3% in the first quarter; and the U.K. is growing faster than at any time since the end of World War II. Yet across the developing world, where…

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The once dismissed lab-leak theory is becoming increasingly plausible

The once dismissed lab-leak theory is becoming increasingly plausible

Donald G. McNeil Jr. writes: In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not a Lab Leak,’ Scientists Say.” It never ran. For two reasons. The chief one was that inside the Times, we were sharply divided. My colleagues who cover national security were being assured by their Trump administration sources — albeit anonymously and with no hard evidence — that it was a…

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