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Category: Science/mathematics

Most patients hospitalized for Covid-19 still have symptoms six months later, China study finds

Most patients hospitalized for Covid-19 still have symptoms six months later, China study finds

STAT reports: Three-quarters of Covid-19 patients still have at least one symptom six months after first falling ill, researchers who followed hospital patients in China reported Friday. The new findings suggest symptoms linger longer and in a higher proportion of patients than previously thought. The largest and longest analysis to date of post-Covid recovery also warns that some patients’ antibody levels fell sharply, raising concern that while waiting for a return to full health, they could be reinfected with the…

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U.S. is blind to contagious new coronavirus variant, scientists warn

U.S. is blind to contagious new coronavirus variant, scientists warn

Carl Zimmer reports: With no robust system to identify genetic variations of the coronavirus, experts warn that the United States is woefully ill-equipped to track a dangerous new mutant, leaving health officials blind as they try to combat the grave threat. The variant, which is now surging in Britain and burdening its hospitals with new cases, is rare for now in the United States. But it has the potential to explode in the next few weeks, putting new pressures on…

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Britain takes a gamble with Covid-19 vaccines, upping the stakes for the rest of us

Britain takes a gamble with Covid-19 vaccines, upping the stakes for the rest of us

STAT reports: In an extraordinary time, British health authorities are taking extraordinary measures to beat back Covid-19. But some experts say that, in doing so, they are also taking a serious gamble. In recent days, the British have said they will stretch out the interval between the administration of the two doses required for Covid-19 vaccines already in use — potentially to as long as three months, instead of the recommended three or four weeks. And they have said they…

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What the San Francisco Bay Area can teach us about fighting a pandemic

What the San Francisco Bay Area can teach us about fighting a pandemic

Jay Caspian Kang writes: On March 10th, the day before Tom Hanks announced that he had tested positive for Covid-19, I drove my three-year-old daughter to her day care in Berkeley, California. The drive took us up College Avenue, where white-haired professors huddled at sidewalk café tables; we passed the fraternity houses where students gathered on the lawns. Just a few blocks from my daughter’s school, there’s a coffee shop with a clientele split equally between students and senior citizens….

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The mutated coronavirus variant is a ticking time bomb

The mutated coronavirus variant is a ticking time bomb

Zeynep Tufekci writes: A new variant of the coronavirus is spreading across the globe. It was first identified in the United Kingdom, where it is rapidly spreading, and has been found in multiple countries. Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a…

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The worst idea of 2020: Natural herd immunity

The worst idea of 2020: Natural herd immunity

Brian Resnick writes: It’s year-end-list season. Usually, the Vox science team has some fun and compiles a year-end list of bad ideas in health and science that ought to die with the end of the year. In the past, we’ve targeted homeopathic medicine, declared it was time to end the relevance of the fatally flawed Stanford Prison Experiment, and dispelled myths about climate change. This year, though, we have only one target for intellectual demolition. With the end of 2020,…

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The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

James Hamblin writes: The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human…

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Herd immunity may be further away than most Americans realize

Herd immunity may be further away than most Americans realize

Donald G. McNeil Jr. reports: At what point does a country achieve herd immunity? What portion of the population must acquire resistance to the coronavirus, either through infection or vaccination, in order for the disease to fade away and life to return to normal? Since the start of the pandemic, the figure that many epidemiologists have offered has been 60 to 70 percent. That range is still cited by the World Health Organization and is often repeated during discussions of…

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Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But let’s be clear about what ‘safe’ means

Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But let’s be clear about what ‘safe’ means

STAT reports: Unprecedented collaborative efforts in vaccine development have culminated in multiple vaccines being tested in advanced clinical trials all in less than one year since global leaders understood we were in the midst of a global pandemic. One is now being given to health care workers, and another will soon follow. As the first Covid-19 vaccines are being distributed in the United States and in other countries around the world, the main question now on many minds is, “Are…

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How science beat the coronavirus — and what it lost in the process

How science beat the coronavirus — and what it lost in the process

Ed Yong writes: In Fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed…

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How the ‘deep state’ scientists vilified by Trump helped him deliver an unprecedented achievement

How the ‘deep state’ scientists vilified by Trump helped him deliver an unprecedented achievement

The Washington Post reports: The timing of the hastily arranged White House “vaccine summit” last Tuesday bewildered many invitees. It was days before the authorization of the first coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech — and nearly a week before millions of vaccine doses would be loaded onto trucks bound for every state in the nation. Wouldn’t those milestones and the mass vaccination effort that followed be what the White House would want to spotlight? That was…

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The CDC needs social science

The CDC needs social science

By Robert A. Hahn, Sapiens, December 11, 2020 The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the primary agency in the United States that monitors, predicts, and responds to chronic disease, injury, outbreaks, and pandemics, should have social science at its heart. It does not. Despite decades of trying to get the agency to take the social sciences more seriously, and some movement on its part, insights from anthropology, along with other social sciences, have yet to penetrate the…

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The Covid-19 vaccines were designed almost a year ago

The Covid-19 vaccines were designed almost a year ago

David Wallace-Wells writes: You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all…

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Drug reverses age-related mental decline in mice within days

Drug reverses age-related mental decline in mice within days

University of California, San Francisco: Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer, and even enhance cognition in healthy animals. In the…

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‘Absolutely remarkable’: No one who got Moderna’s vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

‘Absolutely remarkable’: No one who got Moderna’s vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19

Science reports: Continuing the spate of stunning news about COVID-19 vaccines, the biotech company Moderna announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its candidate in a press release today: Only 11 people who received two doses of the vaccine developed COVID-19 symptoms after being infected with the pandemic coronavirus, versus 185 symptomatic cases in a placebo group. That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few…

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Eschewing Occam’s razor, China seeks to change Covid origin story

Eschewing Occam’s razor, China seeks to change Covid origin story

The Observer reports: Nearly a year after doctors identified the first cases of a worrying new disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the country appears to be stepping up a campaign to question the origins of the global Covid-19 pandemic. State media has been reporting intensively on coronavirus discovered on packaging of frozen food imports, not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and research into possible cases of the disease found outside China’s borders before December 2019. The…

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