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Category: Health

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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How to use ventilation and air filtration to prevent the spread of coronavirus indoors

How to use ventilation and air filtration to prevent the spread of coronavirus indoors

Open windows are the easiest way to ventilate a room. Justin Paget / Digital Vision via Getty Images By Shelly Miller, University of Colorado Boulder The vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs indoors, most of it from the inhalation of airborne particles that contain the coronavirus. The best way to prevent the virus from spreading in a home or business would be to simply keep infected people away. But this is hard to do when an estimated 40% of cases…

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FDA clears saliva test for Covid-19, opening door to wider testing

FDA clears saliva test for Covid-19, opening door to wider testing

STAT reports: The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday authorized emergency use of a new and inexpensive saliva test for Covid-19 that could greatly expand testing capacity. The new test, which is called SalivaDirect and was developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health, allows saliva samples to be collected in any sterile container. It is a much less invasive process than the nasal swabs currently used to test for the virus that causes Covid-19, but one that…

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Long after the fire of a Covid-19 infection, mental and neurological effects can still smolder

Long after the fire of a Covid-19 infection, mental and neurological effects can still smolder

STAT reports: Early on, patients with both mild and severe Covid-19 say they can’t breathe. Now, after recovering from the infection, some of them say they can’t think. Even people who were never sick enough to go to a hospital, much less lie in an ICU bed with a ventilator, report feeling something as ill-defined as “Covid fog” or as frightening as numbed limbs. They’re unable to carry on with their lives, exhausted by crossing the street, fumbling for words,…

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Postal Service warns 46 states their voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots

Postal Service warns 46 states their voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots

The Washington Post reports: Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest. The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people follow…

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The plan that could give us our lives back

The plan that could give us our lives back

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal write: Michael Mina is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, where he studies the diagnostic testing of infectious diseases. He has watched, with disgust and disbelief, as the United States has struggled for months to obtain enough tests to fight the coronavirus. In January, he assured a newspaper reporter that he had “absolute faith” in the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to contain the virus. By early March, that conviction…

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The real coronavirus death toll in the U.S. has already surpassed 200,000

The real coronavirus death toll in the U.S. has already surpassed 200,000

The New York Times reports: Across the United States, at least 200,000 more people have died than usual since March, according to a New York Times analysis of estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is about 60,000 higher than the number of deaths that have been directly linked to the coronavirus. As the pandemic has moved south and west from its epicenter in New York City, so have the unusual patterns in deaths from all causes….

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Population immunity is slowing down the pandemic in parts of the U.S.

Population immunity is slowing down the pandemic in parts of the U.S.

MIT Technology Review reports: The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states. Millions of US residents have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One effect is that the pool of susceptible individuals has been depleted in many areas. After infection, it’s believed, people become immune (at least for months), so they…

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Russia doesn’t really know whether its Covid vaccine works

Russia doesn’t really know whether its Covid vaccine works

Max Nisen writes: Russia is prematurely declaring victory in the race for a vaccine against Covid-19, with potentially dangerous consequences for the Russian population. President Vladimir Putin says his government has approved a vaccine and will start inoculating teachers and medical workers this month, before embarking on a mass vaccination effort in the fall. Yet the shot is not backed by evidence from a complete phase 3 trial, the gold standard for confirming safety and efficacy. Deciding to move ahead…

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‘A smoking gun’: Infectious coronavirus retrieved from hospital air

‘A smoking gun’: Infectious coronavirus retrieved from hospital air

The New York Times reports: Skeptics of the notion that the coronavirus spreads through the air — including many expert advisers to the World Health Organization — have held out for one missing piece of evidence: proof that floating respiratory droplets called aerosols contain live virus, and not just fragments of genetic material. Now a team of virologists and aerosol scientists has produced exactly that: confirmation of infectious virus in the air. “This is what people have been clamoring for,”…

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