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Category: Health

Global surge in coronavirus cases is being fed by the developing world — and the U.S.

Global surge in coronavirus cases is being fed by the developing world — and the U.S.

The Washington Post reports: When the United States began shutting down this spring, a virus that emerged months earlier as a mysterious outbreak in a Chinese provincial capital had infected a total of fewer than 200,000 people worldwide. So far this week, the planet has added an average of more than 200,000 cases every day. The novel coronavirus — once concentrated in specific cities or countries — has now crept into virtually every corner of the globe and is wreaking…

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Trump administration strips CDC of control of coronavirus data

Trump administration strips CDC of control of coronavirus data

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public. The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the…

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The pandemic may get much, much worse. We must act now

The pandemic may get much, much worse. We must act now

John M. Barry writes: When you mix science and politics, you get politics. With the coronavirus, the United States has proved politics hasn’t worked. If we are to fully reopen both the economy and schools safely — which can be done — we have to return to science. To understand just how bad things are in the United States and, more important, what can be done about it requires comparison. At this writing, Italy, once the poster child of coronavirus…

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Aerosols are a bigger coronavirus threat than WHO guidelines suggest – here’s what you need to know

Aerosols are a bigger coronavirus threat than WHO guidelines suggest – here’s what you need to know

Aerosols are made up of tiny respiratory droplets suspended in the air. Jeffrey Coolidge via Getty Images Byron Erath, Clarkson University; Andrea Ferro, Clarkson University, and Goodarz Ahmadi, Clarkson University When someone coughs, talks or even breathes, they send tiny respiratory droplets into the surrounding air. The smallest of these droplets can float for hours, and there is strong evidence that they can carry live coronavirus if the person is infected. Until this week, however, the risk from these aerosols…

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We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has

We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has

Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan, David Satcher and Richard Besser write: As America begins the formidable task of getting our kids back to school and all of us back to work safely amid a pandemic that is only getting worse, public health experts face two opponents: covid-19, but also political leaders and others attempting to undermine the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the debate last week around reopening schools more safely showed, these repeated efforts to subvert sound public…

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Elite hospitals have an epidemic of greed

Elite hospitals have an epidemic of greed

Washington Monthly reports: In early March, public health officials issued warnings about what the spreading coronavirus could mean for the Pittsburgh region. Debra Bogen, director of the health department for surrounding Allegheny County, forecast that between 40 to 60 percent of the adults in western Pennsylvania could come down with COVID-19 unless strong mitigation measures were taken. The Harvard Global Health Institute predicted that Pittsburgh-area hospitals could need between 480 to 720 percent more beds than were currently available. Meanwhile,…

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Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests

Immunity to Covid-19 could be lost in months, UK study suggests

The Guardian reports: People who have recovered from Covid-19 may lose their immunity to the disease within months, according to research suggesting the virus could reinfect people year after year, like common colds. In the first longitudinal study of its kind, scientists analysed the immune response of more than 90 patients and healthcare workers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust and found levels of antibodies that can destroy the virus peaked about three weeks after the onset of…

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Larry Brilliant on how well we are fighting Covid-19

Larry Brilliant on how well we are fighting Covid-19

WIRED interviews epidemiologist, Larry Brilliant: WIRED: We talked 100 days ago. What is different about the pandemic now? Larry Brilliant: A hundred days ago we didn’t really understand the pathophysiology—the way the virus and the human body interact, the illness as opposed to the epidemic. The unexpected things that it’s doing are not epidemiological—they are virological. In March, we were just beginning to see these horrific CT scans or x-rays of people with ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome, where they…

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The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris write: Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective,…

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Global ‘catastrophe’ looms as Covid-19 fuels inequality

Global ‘catastrophe’ looms as Covid-19 fuels inequality

The Observer reports: The pandemic has exposed and reinforced deep inequalities across the world, with the true extent yet to be seen, according to a major new report. The crisis in the poorest countries threatens to escalate into a catastrophe as job losses and food insecurity mount. “The economic, social and political impacts are only starting to unfold,” says Building Back with Justice: Dismantling Inequalities after Covid-19, to be published by Christian Aid later this month. The number of people…

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Shoot the messenger: White House seeks to discredit Fauci amid coronavirus surge

Shoot the messenger: White House seeks to discredit Fauci amid coronavirus surge

NBC News reports: The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response. In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official told NBC News on Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.”…

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Angela Merkel skewers Trump: ‘You cannot fight the pandemic with lies’

Angela Merkel skewers Trump: ‘You cannot fight the pandemic with lies’

Stephen Collinson with Caitlin Hu write: Angela Merkel may not scream down the phone at President Donald Trump — but she knows how to insert a dagger. Trump, as well as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, must have felt his ears burning when the German Chancellor demolished their approaches to the coronavirus in a speech Thursday. “As we are experiencing firsthand, you cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation any more than you can fight it with…

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I’ve seen a future without cars, and it’s amazing

I’ve seen a future without cars, and it’s amazing

Farhad Manjoo writes: As coronavirus lockdowns crept across the globe this winter and spring, an unusual sound fell over the world’s metropolises: the hush of streets that were suddenly, blessedly free of cars. City dwellers reported hearing bird song, wind and the rustling of leaves. (Along with, in New York City, the intermittent screams of sirens). You could smell the absence of cars, too. From New York to Los Angeles to New Delhi, air pollution plummeted, and the soupy, exhaust-choked…

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Another Covid-19 disparity: Black and Hispanic Americans are dying at younger ages than white Americans

Another Covid-19 disparity: Black and Hispanic Americans are dying at younger ages than white Americans

STAT reports: Long after calls for more data on the disproportionate number of Covid-19 infections and deaths among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday released limited additional information, which revealed non-white and Hispanic Americans under age 65 are dying in greater numbers than white people in that age group. The agency reported that more than a third of deaths among Hispanic Americans (34.9%) and almost a third of deaths among non-white Americans…

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America is refusing to learn how to fight the coronavirus

America is refusing to learn how to fight the coronavirus

David Wallace-Wells writes: Just before the holiday weekend, on the day that Donald Trump stood beneath Mount Rushmore and warned against “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history” and the day before his Washington, D.C., fireworks display generated air pollution 15 times the EPA standard and roughly equivalent to the choking megacities of India and China, the state of Arizona reached a terrible pandemic milestone. For the first time in its history, indeed for the first time in any…

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Women are most affected by pandemics — lessons from past outbreaks

Women are most affected by pandemics — lessons from past outbreaks

Clare Wenham et al write: Women are affected more than men by the social and economic effects of infectious-disease outbreaks. They bear the brunt of care responsibilities as schools close and family members fall ill. They are at greater risk of domestic violence and are disproportionately disadvantaged by reduced access to sexual- and reproductive-health services. Because women are more likely than men to have fewer hours of employed work and be on insecure or zero-hour contracts, they are more affected…

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