Music: Bill Evans — ‘Time Remembered’
We are probably only one-tenth of the way through the coronavirus pandemic
David Wallace-Wells writes: We are, finally, beginning to see some real plans from people with the power to enact them. On Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a sort of road map for a gradual “reopening” of the state — including benchmarks for testing and hospital capacity, and continued social-distancing guidelines and even temperature checks. A handful of serious, sobering national proposals have been put forward by think tanks and the like in the U.S., and the White House has…
Early data on antiviral drug suggests Covid-19 patients are responding to treatment
STAT reports: A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned. Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and…
Still too early to determine which potential Covid-19 treatments are effective
The Washington Post reports: The journey of EIDD-2801, from laboratory to the mouth of a human, unfolded with head-snapping speed. On March 23, a division of Emory University in Atlanta licensed the experimental drug to a Miami company owned by a wealthy hedge-fund manager and his wife. Just three weeks later, a pill was given to a person for the first time in a test of its safety, in Britain. It marked the beginning of an accelerated testing regimen that…
Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say
STAT reports: A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.” “It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited”…
Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’
The Financial Times reports: Unlike other world leaders, from Donald Trump in the US to Xi Jinping in China, who are trying to return their countries to where they were before the pandemic, the 42-year-old [French president] Mr Macron says he sees the crisis as an existential event for humanity that will change the nature of globalisation and the structure of international capitalism. As a liberal European leader in a world of strident nationalists, Mr Macron says he hopes the…
U.S. intel warned about outbreak in November but White House ‘did not deem it of interest,’ report says
The Times of Israel reports: US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China already in November, Israeli television reported Thursday. According to Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document. Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government. US intelligence informed…
EPA regulation changes will weaken controls on mercury and other toxic pollutants
The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic. The new Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental…
Music: Bill Evans — ‘A Child Is Born’
How Portugal became Europe’s coronavirus exception
Politico reports: Portugal’s streets are empty, its beaches cordoned off, the economy asphyxiated — yet there is cautious optimism the country may be pulling off an unlikely victory over the coronavirus. With a quarter of the population of neighboring Spain, Portugal has around one-tenth of the number of cases. And while its coronavirus mortality rate hovers just above 3 percent, the figure is over 10 percent in Spain, 12 percent in the U.K. and 15 percent in France. This in…
Infectious disease reporter, Jon Cohen, talks about the research to develop a COVID-19 vaccine
Jon Cohen is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on infectious diseases for 40 years. He tells Hari Sreenivasan about the remarkable research being done now–even as many still seem determined to ignore the facts–and about his recent, revealing conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Most Americans say Trump was too slow in initial response to coronavirus threat
Pew Research Center reports: As the death toll from the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to spiral, most Americans do not foresee a quick end to the crisis. In fact, 73% say that in thinking about the problems the country is facing from the coronavirus outbreak, the worst is still to come. With the Trump administration and many state governors actively considering ways to revive the stalled U.S. economy, the public strikes a decidedly cautious note on easing strict limits on…
Trump’s prefrontal cortex is entirely offline
Jennifer Senior writes: From the beginning, Donald J. Trump has taken a rather peculiar view of the new coronavirus: If he can’t see the damage it’s doing, it’s not doing any damage. It was how Trump justified saying nothing to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who blithely kept his state open through April 2. “They’re doing very well,” Trump said of Floridians on March 31. “Unless we see something obviously wrong, we’re going to let the governors do it.” It…
Covid-19 is rapidly becoming America’s leading cause of death
The Washington Post reports: In just weeks, covid-19 deaths have snowballed from a few isolated cases to thousands across the country each day. The U.S. surgeon general had warned that last week would be like Pearl Harbor as he attempted to create context for the threat — but it turned out that more than five times as many Americans died from covid-19 last week than were killed in the World War II raid. You can grasp the scale when you…
Trump-hyped malaria pill doesn’t help clear coronavirus, study indicates
Bloomberg reports: Hydroxychloroquine, the 65-year-old malaria drug that President Donald Trump has praised, appeared not to help patients get rid of the pathogen in a small study. The pill didn’t help patients clear the virus better than standard care and was much more likely to cause side effects, according to a study of 150 hospitalized patients by doctors at 16 centers in China. The research, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed, was released Tuesday. The drug did help alleviate some clinical symptoms…
Experts know the new coronavirus isn’t a bioweapon. But some say it could have leaked from a lab
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports: Much remains uncertain about the new coronavirus. What treatments will prove effective against COVID-19? When will a vaccine for the disease be ready? What level of social distancing will be required to tame the outbreak, and how long will it need to last? Will outbreaks come in waves? Amid all these vital forward-looking questions remains a more retrospective but still important one: Where did SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, come from in the…