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Category: Health

Trump’s response to coronavirus reflects his contempt for science

Trump’s response to coronavirus reflects his contempt for science

The New York Times reports: At a March visit with doctors and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the public health agency at the heart of the fight against the coronavirus, President Trump spoke words of praise for the scientific acumen in the building — particularly his own. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability,” Mr. Trump said. It was a striking boast, even…

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No testing, no treatment, no herd immunity, no easy way out

No testing, no treatment, no herd immunity, no easy way out

Yascha Mounk writes: The past few months have been bleak. Every day has brought word of new casualties from the coronavirus. The world economy entered free fall. And even for those who do not have a sick relative or a mortgage that can’t be paid, the isolation imposed by social distancing has begun to take a heavy psychological toll. In these circumstances, I—and, I imagine, many others—couldn’t resist latching onto any piece of news that promised quick deliverance from the…

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Antibody surveys that seem to indicate a vast undercount of coronavirus infections may be unreliable

Antibody surveys that seem to indicate a vast undercount of coronavirus infections may be unreliable

Science reports: Surveying large swaths of the public for antibodies to the new coronavirus promises to show how widespread undiagnosed infections are, how deadly the virus really is, and whether enough of the population has become immune for social distancing measures to be eased. But the first batch of results has generated more controversy than clarity. The survey results, from Germany, the Netherlands, and several locations in the United States, find that anywhere from 2% to 30% of certain populations…

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Trump to order meat plants to stay open during pandemic — a potential death sentence for workers

Trump to order meat plants to stay open during pandemic — a potential death sentence for workers

Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump plans to order slaughterhouses to remain open, setting up a showdown between the giant companies that produce America’s meat and the unions and activists who want to protect workers in a pandemic. Using the Defense Production Act, Trump will order plants to stay open as part of the critical infrastructure needed to keep people fed amid growing supply disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak, a person familiar with the matter said. The government will provide additional…

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The pandemic hasn’t stopped ruthless medical-debt collection

The pandemic hasn’t stopped ruthless medical-debt collection

By Alec MacGillis, ProPublica, April 28, 2020 Darcel Richardson knows she’s fortunate in one sense: She still has her job as a vocational counselor in Baltimore. But despite that, she won’t be able to make her rent payment this month because she’s not getting her full salary for a while. More than $400 per biweekly paycheck — about a quarter of her after-tax income — has been siphoned off by Johns Hopkins University for unpaid medical bills at one of…

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In race for a coronavirus vaccine, an Oxford University lab leaps ahead

In race for a coronavirus vaccine, an Oxford University lab leaps ahead

The New York Times reports: In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University. Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university’s Jenner Institute had a head start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations — including one last year against an earlier coronavirus — were harmless to humans. That…

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Trump’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat in January and February

Trump’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat in January and February

The Washington Post reports: U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials. The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments…

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The more we learn about the coronavirus, the harder it is to understand

The more we learn about the coronavirus, the harder it is to understand

David Wallace-Wells writes: We are now almost six months into this pandemic, which began in November in Wuhan, with 50,000 Americans dead and 200,000 more around the world. If each of those deaths is a data point, together they represent a quite large body of evidence from which to form a clear picture of the pandemic threat. Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious…

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Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

The Guardian reports: The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned. “There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We…

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In rural Georgia: ‘For black folks, it’s like a setup: Are you trying to kill us?’

In rural Georgia: ‘For black folks, it’s like a setup: Are you trying to kill us?’

The Washington Post reports: Sheryl Means already has lost so much to the invisible virus burning through her hometown. Her mother and her aunt died within days of each other. Her sister has been on a ventilator for weeks in a hospital miles away, and there are no visitors allowed in the covid-19 isolation unit. She has this tightness in her chest, and she’s scared she might be next. But Means can’t get a test. Even now, six weeks into…

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How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic

How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic

Franz Xavier Winterhalter’s ‘The Decameron’ (1837). Heritage Images via Getty Images By Kathryn McKinley, University of Maryland, Baltimore County The coronavirus can infect anyone, but recent reporting has shown your socioeconomic status can play a big role, with a combination of job security, access to health care and mobility widening the gap in infection and mortality rates between rich and poor. The wealthy work remotely and flee to resorts or pastoral second homes, while the urban poor are packed into…

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Unlike New York, Seattle’s approach to Covid-19 mirrored Epidemic Intelligence Service’s guidelines

Unlike New York, Seattle’s approach to Covid-19 mirrored Epidemic Intelligence Service’s guidelines

Charles Duhigg writes: The first diagnosis of the coronavirus in the United States occurred in mid-January, in a Seattle suburb not far from the hospital where Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious-disease specialist, works. When he heard the patient’s details—a thirty-five-year-old man had walked into an urgent-care clinic with a cough and a slight fever, and told doctors that he’d just returned from Wuhan, China—Riedo said to himself, “It’s begun.” For more than a week, Riedo had been e-mailing with a…

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Global Covid-19 death toll could be 60% higher than reported

Global Covid-19 death toll could be 60% higher than reported

Financial Times reports: The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries. Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods. If the same level of underreporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death…

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A Japanese island shows what happens when a coronavirus lockdown is lifted too soon

A Japanese island shows what happens when a coronavirus lockdown is lifted too soon

Time reports: Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido offers a grim lesson in the next phase of the battle against COVID-19. It acted quickly and contained an early outbreak of the coronavirus with a 3-week lockdown. But, when the governor lifted restrictions, a second wave of infections hit even harder. Twenty-six days later, the island was forced back into lockdown. A doctor who helped coordinate the government response says he wishes they’d done things differently. “Now I regret it, we should…

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Prof. Neil Ferguson defends UK Coronavirus lockdown strategy

Prof. Neil Ferguson defends UK Coronavirus lockdown strategy

  Swedish epideomiologist Johan Giesecke has claimed that the UK was wrong to implement its lockdown measures, and singled out Professor Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College study for being too pessimistic in its worst-case prediction of 500,000 corona deaths. In an interview for LockdownTV, Freddie Sayers speaks to Prof Ferguson to get his response to Giesecke’s critique.

SARS-CoV-2 acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen

SARS-CoV-2 acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen

Science reports: In Brescia, Italy, a 53-year-old woman walked into the emergency room of her local hospital with all the classic symptoms of a heart attack, including telltale signs in her electrocardiogram and high levels of a blood marker suggesting damaged cardiac muscles. Further tests showed cardiac swelling and scarring, and a left ventricle—normally the powerhouse chamber of the heart—so weak that it could only pump one-third its normal amount of blood. But when doctors injected dye in the coronary…

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