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Category: Health

Cloth masks do protect the wearer – breathing in less coronavirus means you get less sick

Cloth masks do protect the wearer – breathing in less coronavirus means you get less sick

When people wear masks, they can still get infected, but they’re more likely to have milder symptoms. Wenmei Zhou/Digital Vision Vectors via Getty Images By Monica Gandhi, University of California, San Francisco Masks slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by reducing how much infected people spray the virus into the environment around them when they cough or talk. Evidence from laboratory experiments, hospitals and whole countries show that masks work, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends face coverings…

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CDC makes ‘potentially dangerous’ guidelines change for people exposed to coronavirus

CDC makes ‘potentially dangerous’ guidelines change for people exposed to coronavirus

The New York Times reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly modified its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus. Experts questioned the revision, pointing to the importance of identifying infections in the small window immediately before the onset of symptoms, when many individuals appear to be most contagious. Models suggest that about half of transmission events can be…

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How Mike Pence slowed down the coronavirus response

How Mike Pence slowed down the coronavirus response

Politico reports: Mike Pence had just accepted the biggest assignment of his political life, overseeing the nation’s response to the emerging Covid-19 virus, when White House officials confronted the vice president with an urgent question: what to do about the cruise ships? It was the last weekend of February, and the nation’s top health officials had concluded that cruise lines were a major factor in spreading the virus — each vessel a potential hothouse of invisible infections. Hundreds of passengers…

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Wade Davis on the unraveling of America

Wade Davis on the unraveling of America

  Wade Davis writes: Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science. In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than…

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Why do some people catch coronavirus without getting sick?

Why do some people catch coronavirus without getting sick?

By Emily Laber-Warren, Undark, August 24, 2020 One of the reasons Covid-19 has spread so swiftly around the globe is that for the first days after infection, people feel healthy. Instead of staying home in bed, they may be out and about, unknowingly passing the virus along. But in addition to these pre-symptomatic patients, the relentless silent spread of this pandemic is also facilitated by a more mysterious group of people: the so-called asymptomatics. According to various estimates, between 20 and…

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FDA ‘grossly misrepresented’ blood plasma data for Covid patients, scientists say

FDA ‘grossly misrepresented’ blood plasma data for Covid patients, scientists say

The New York Times reports: At a news conference on Sunday announcing the emergency approval of blood plasma for hospitalized Covid-19 patients, President Trump and two of his top health officials cited the same statistic: that the treatment had reduced deaths by 35 percent. Mr. Trump called it a “tremendous” number. His health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, a former pharmaceutical executive, said, “I don’t want you to gloss over this number.” And Dr. Stephen M. Hahn,…

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Trump’s plasma push stands to delay clearer reading on science

Trump’s plasma push stands to delay clearer reading on science

Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration’s decision to authorize the use of a blood-plasma treatment for Covid-19 with no clear evidence it works could frustrate efforts to better understand the therapy’s benefits. Several clinical trials are examining the use of so-called convalescent plasma for Covid-19, but none have been completed and results aren’t expected for at least several more weeks. Some of the studies are struggling to attract participants because of programs that give patients a more certain path to the…

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Long-haulers are redefining Covid-19

Long-haulers are redefining Covid-19

Ed Yong writes: Lauren Nichols has been sick with COVID-19 since March 10, shortly before Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis and the NBA temporarily canceled its season. She has lived through one month of hand tremors, three of fever, and four of night sweats. When we spoke on day 150, she was on her fifth month of gastrointestinal problems and severe morning nausea. She still has extreme fatigue, bulging veins, excessive bruising, an erratic heartbeat, short-term memory loss, gynecological problems,…

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California prisons overwhelmed by Covid outbreaks and approaching fires

California prisons overwhelmed by Covid outbreaks and approaching fires

The Guardian reports: California’s raging wildfires have created a crisis at multiple state prisons, where there are reports of heavy smoke and ash making it hard to breathe, unanswered pleas for evacuation, and concerns that the fire response could lead to further Covid-19 spread. A massive fire in the Vacaville area, north of San Francisco, has rapidly spread within miles of two state prisons this week, including one that imprisons terminally ill people in hospice care and the elderly and…

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Inside Biden’s plan to take over a tumultuous Covid-19 response

Inside Biden’s plan to take over a tumultuous Covid-19 response

STAT reports: No president has ever inherited a pandemic. But if Joe Biden is elected in November, he has made clear that his first moments in office would mark a dramatic shift in the nation’s approach to Covid-19. Biden’s first post-election phone call, he has said, would be to Anthony Fauci, requesting that the renowned infectious disease researcher continue his government service. For months, he and his staff have pressed for specific answers about how many coronavirus tests the U.S….

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1.5 million antibody tests show which parts of New York City were hit hardest

1.5 million antibody tests show which parts of New York City were hit hardest

The New York Times reports: New York City on Tuesday released more than 1.46 million coronavirus antibody test results, the largest number to date, providing more evidence of how the virus penetrated deeply into some lower-income communities while passing more lightly across affluent parts of the city. In one ZIP code in Queens, more than 50 percent of people who had gotten tested were found to have antibodies, a strikingly high rate. But no ZIP code south of 96th Street…

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Local officials in China hid coronavirus dangers from Beijing, U.S. intelligence agencies find

Local officials in China hid coronavirus dangers from Beijing, U.S. intelligence agencies find

The New York Times reports: Trump administration officials have tried taking a political sledgehammer to China over the coronavirus pandemic, asserting that the Chinese Communist Party covered up the initial outbreak and allowed the virus to spread around the globe. But within the United States government, intelligence officials have arrived at a more nuanced and complex finding of what Chinese officials did wrong in January. Officials in Beijing were kept in the dark for weeks about the potential devastation of…

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Air pollution is much worse than we thought

Air pollution is much worse than we thought

Vox reports: In the late 1960s, the US saw regular, choking smog descend over New York City and Los Angeles, 100,000 barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and, perhaps most famously, fires burning on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. These grim images sparked the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day, and a decade of extraordinary environmental lawmaking and rulemaking (much of it under a Republican president, Richard Nixon). From the ’70s…

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Immunity studies provide ‘a bit of blue sky’ about protection from Covid-19, experts say

Immunity studies provide ‘a bit of blue sky’ about protection from Covid-19, experts say

CNN reports: A recent batch of studies, many early stage and not yet peer reviewed, show that humans have a “robust” immune response to Covid-19 that may protect them from further infection, even if they had mild symptoms. How long that protection lasts is still unclear, but the studies indicate it could last for months. One leading immunologist says the findings provide optimism that people will not have to endure repeated coronavirus infections. It also provides evidence a vaccine might…

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Can New York hold off a second wave of the coronavirus?

Can New York hold off a second wave of the coronavirus?

The New York Times reports: Health experts in New York City thought that coronavirus cases would be rising again by now. Their models predicted it. They were wrong. New York State has managed not only to control its outbreak since the devastation of the early spring, but also to contain it for far longer than even top officials expected. Now, as other places struggle to beat back a resurgence and cases climb in former success-story states like California and Rhode…

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Southeast Asia detects mutated coronavirus strain sweeping the world

Southeast Asia detects mutated coronavirus strain sweeping the world

Bloomberg reports: Southeast Asia is facing a strain of the new coronavirus that the Philippines, which faces the region’s largest outbreak, is studying to see whether the mutation makes it more infectious. The strain, earlier seen in other parts of the world and called D614G, was found in a Malaysian cluster of 45 cases that started from someone who returned from India and breached his 14-day home quarantine. The Philippines detected the strain among random Covid-19 samples in the largest…

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