Skin patch coated in Covid-19 vaccine may work better than injections

‘Covid-19 vaccines in use today have to be stored at cold temperatures, but a patch covered in tiny plastic spikes coated in a vaccine could provide an alternative...

‘A skin patch for administering covid-19 vaccines gives greater immune protection than traditional injections, according to a study in mice. The patch can be stored at room temperature and be self-administered, making it suitable for use in places that lack cold storage facilities and medical staff.

‘Although covid-19 vaccines are now widely available in many countries, they have to be transported and stored at cold temperatures. “We wanted to come up with an alternative that would be stable long enough to go that last mile, especially in resource-limited settings,” says David Muller at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.’

Read here (New Scientist, Oct 29, 2021)

Is Sweden's coronavirus strategy a cautionary tale or a success story?

‘Sweden was one of the few European countries not to impose a compulsory lockdown. Its unusual strategy for tackling the coronavirus outbreak has been both hailed as a success and condemned as a failure. So which is it? Those who regard the strategy as a success claim it reduced the economic impact, but it isn’t clear that it did. What is clear is that so far Sweden has had a more protracted outbreak with far more deaths per capita than its neighbours.

‘While it is sometimes implied that Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, it did. It was just largely voluntary, with only a few legal measures such as a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people. “Voluntary restrictions work as well as legal ones,” says the architect of Sweden’s strategy, chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.

Read here (New Scientist, August 13, 2020) 

Mild cases as infectious as severe ones? There are strong correlations in Lombardy and Guangzhou. If proven true, this would underscore the need for tweaking social-distancing policies for the longer term...

 ‘If you have a high viral load, you are more likely to infect other people, because you may be shedding more virus particles. However, in the case of covid-19, it doesn’t necessarily follow that a higher viral load will lead to more severe symptoms.

‘For instance, health workers investigating the covid-19 outbreak in the Lombardy region of Italy looked at more than 5,000 infected people and found no difference in viral load between those with symptoms and those without. They reached this conclusion after tracing people who had been in contact with someone known to be infected with the coronavirus and testing them to see if they were also infected.

‘Similarly, when doctors at the Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital in China took repeated throat swabs from 94 covid-19 patients, starting on the day they became ill and finishing when they cleared the virus, they found no obvious difference in viral load between milder cases and those who developed more severe symptoms...

‘It is early days, but if the infectious dose doesn’t correlate with the severity of disease symptoms, this would mark covid-19 out as different from influenza, MERS and SARS...’

Read here (New Scientist, March 27, 2020)