‘While the vaccines don’t protect against infection as well as they do against severe disease, the shots are keeping people off ventilators and from dying, Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease pediatrician at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, said August 26 in a news briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “We cannot lose the forest for the trees.”
Read here (ScienceNews, Aug 31, 2021)
‘New Cornell-led research finds “little to no evidence” of a link between a person’s normal blood levels of vitamin D and risk of getting COVID-19, or the severity of an infection, in the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.
‘Multiple studies had suggested an association between vitamin D and COVID-19 risk, raising hopes that vitamin D supplements might help to prevent or minimize infections – speculation that has received widespread media attention and boosted consumer interest.
‘The new study, however, which analyzed a publicly available genomic data bank and 38 different COVID-19 studies worldwide – a total sample including nearly 1.4 million people – does not support those claims.’
Read here (Cornell Chronicle, May 7, 2021)
‘India, home to the world's worst ongoing coronavirus outbreak, has reported more than 17.6 million cases since the pandemic began last year. But the real number, experts fear, could be up to 30 times higher -- meaning more than half a billion cases. Health workers and scientists in India have long warned that Covid-19 infections and related deaths are significantly underreported for several reasons, including poor infrastructure, human error, and low testing levels.’
Read here (CNN, Apr 28, 2021)
‘Sweden has reported Europe’s highest number of new coronavirus infections per head over the past week and has more patients in intensive care than at any time since the pandemic’s first wave.
‘The Scandinavian country, which has opted against strict lockdowns but gradually ratcheted up its still mostly voluntary restrictions, has a seven-day average of 625 new infections per million people, according to ourworldindata.org.
‘That compares with 521 in Poland, 491 in France, 430 in the Netherlands, 237 in Italy and 208 in Germany, the data showed. The figure was many times higher than the 65, 111 and 132 per million in Sweden’s Nordic neighbours Finland, Denmark and Norway.’
Read here (The Guardian, Apr 13, 2021)
‘The UK government published a report on the infection risk associated with various occupations, based on data on COVID-19 cases in England from September 2020-January 2021. The analysis compared the likelihood of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 during the study period for 25 standardized occupation categories. The occupation-specific risk ranged from 2.1% to 4.8%, with an overall risk of 3.9%. None of the individual occupation groups had a statistically significant difference from the overall average; however, some of the occupations with the highest risk showed a significant increase over those with the lowest risk.
‘Occupation groups at the upper end include professions such as teachers, law enforcement and prison staff, childcare and home care, and secretarial professions. Occupation categories with lower infection risk include professions such as farmers and gardeners; scientists, engineers, and researchers; legal, social work, and news media; and textiles and printing services.’ (Summary by John Hopkins Centre for Health Security)
Read here (Government of UK, Feb 21, 2021)
‘Reported daily coronavirus infections have been falling across the world for a month and on Tuesday (Feb 16) hit their lowest since mid-October, Reuters figures show, but health experts warned against apathy even as vaccines are being rolled out worldwide. Falls in infections and deaths coincide with lockdowns and severe curbs on gatherings and movement as governments weigh the need to stop successive waves of the pandemic with the need to get people back to work and children back to school.
‘But optimism over a way out of the crisis has been tempered by new variants of the virus, raising fears about the efficacy of vaccines. "Now is not the time to let your guard down," Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization's technical lead on COVID-19, told a briefing in Geneva.’
Read here (Channel News Asia, Feb 19, 2021)
‘India’s southern state of Karnataka alone may have had 31.5 million cases of COVID-19 or nearly 95 times greater than have been reported, says a new study that puts a question mark on the 10 million plus cases reported for the whole country so far.
‘Published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study is based on data collected from a representative sample of households in 20 districts of Karnataka, home to 70 million of India’s 1.3 billion people.’
Read here (SciDev, Feb 17, 2021)
‘By the middle of last week, India was barely counting an average of 10,000 Covid cases every day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease slid to below 100. More than half of India's states were not reporting any Covid deaths. On Tuesday, Delhi, once an infection hotspot, did not record a single Covid death, for the first time in 10 months.
‘So far, India has recorded more than 10 million infections - the second-highest in the world after the US. There have been over 150,000 reported deaths from the disease. The number of deaths per million people stands at 112, much lower than what has been reported in Europe or North America. It is also clear that the decline in cases is not because of lower testing.
‘Most pandemics typically rise and fall in a bell-shaped curve. India has been no exception. Also, it has seen a high proportion of cases and deaths of people above the age of 65 living in densely packed cities, hewing to infection trends around the world. "There's nothing unusual about infections dropping in India. There's no miracle here," says Dr Shahid Jameel, a leading virologist. Experts say there's no dearth of possible causes - explained below - for the relatively low severity of the disease and its toll.’
Read here (BBC, Feb 15, 2021)
‘Infection rates in the over-80s have fallen by 36 per cent this month. Other age groups have seen similar falls. The biggest drop was recorded in people in their 20s. Rates in that age group have halved. Prof Harnden said: “The data we have is still is very early because it only reflects approximately three or four weeks of the program and it’s mainly based on the Pfizer vaccine.”
Read here (News.com, Feb 1, 2021)
‘Last September, India was confirming nearly 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day. It was on track to overtake the United States to become the country with the highest reported COVID-19 caseload in the world. Hospitals were full. The Indian economy nosedived into an unprecedented recession.
‘But four months later, India's coronavirus numbers have plummeted. Late last month, on Jan. 26, the country's Health Ministry confirmed a record low of about 9,100 new daily cases — in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. It was India's lowest daily tally in eight months. On Monday, India confirmed about 11,000 cases.
"It's not that India is testing less or things are going underreported," says Jishnu Das, a health economist at Georgetown University. "It's been rising, rising — and now suddenly, it's vanished! I mean, hospital ICU utilization has gone down. Every indicator says the numbers are down." Scientists say it's a mystery. They're probing why India's coronavirus numbers have declined so dramatically — and so suddenly, in September and October, months before any vaccinations began.
‘They're trying to figure out what Indians may be doing right and how to mimic that in other countries that are still suffering.’
Read here (NPR, Feb 1, 2021)
‘Malaysia is projected to experience a continuous rise in Covid-19 cases until mid-March 2021, hitting over 5,000 infections daily on February 25, according to US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
‘The IHME model, which is also used by the Trump administration, predicted 2,987 new coronavirus cases in Malaysia on January 1, increasing to 4,176 Covid-19 infections on February 1, and 5,130 cases on March 1. The trend is projected to rise until March 21 with 5,379 infections that day, and then declining to 5,301 cases on April 1.’
Read here (Code Blue, Dec 11, 2020)
‘The number of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia is expected to rise steadily over the next four weeks unless stronger interventions are introduced to curtail its spread, according to projections by Imperial College London’s MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis.
‘Its model estimated that the number of Covid-19 infections in Malaysia is projected to increase steadily to about 7,467 infections per day by Dec 8 if no new measures are introduced to curb its spread. It also projected there would be about 16 Covid-19 deaths per day.
‘This is an increase from the model’s estimate of 4,413 infections per day as of Nov 10. The figure is vastly different from the official tally of 869 confirmed cases that day due to the model’s particular approach to account for underreporting of Covid-19 cases.’
Read here (Malaysiakini, Nov 14, 2020)
‘According to the New York Times, the study followed the movement of 98 million people to and from indoor public spaces, then calculated traffic to each spot visited as well as how long people stay and each venue’s square footage. Using the area’s infection rate, they then used “standard infectious disease assumptions” to determine how the illness spread across cities.
‘Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec, the senior author of the report, tells the Times that “restaurants were by far the riskiest places” for new infections, “about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels,” he says. It’s news that jibes with another recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which said in September that a study of adults across 11 U.S. cities who tested positive for the novel coronavirus were twice as likely to have dined out within the last two weeks than those who tested negative.’
Read here (Eater San Francisco, Nov 11, 2020)
‘We all probably have a sense-memory of iodine: the blood-like drop to purify a camping can of stream-water or the inky dab with which your grandmother stained your grazed knee. It feels like an old-fashioned, primitive home remedy, yet could it also be an intriguing new weapon against our most modern threat: coronavirus?
‘One of the world’s leading authorities on infection in the mouth and nose believes the answer is yes. Stephen Challacombe is a professor of oral medicine at King’s College London, with a specialism in the immunology of the mucous membranes. His decades of experience meant that when the pandemic hit, his mind went immediately to one — literal — solution. Iodine mouthwash. “Yes. I have no doubt that this should be used,” Challacombe says, “and had it been, it would have saved lives.”
‘Bottles of this form of iodine, called povidone-iodine, also known by the most common brand Betadine, used to be on sale in British chemists, before the public began to favour fluoride rinses. It is still popular as a sore-throat gargle in many European countries, America, Australia and Far East countries such as Japan. When the pandemic struck, Challacombe and his colleagues wrote to the British Dental Journal reminding the scientific world of its potential.’
Read here (King's College Journal, Nov 9, 2020)
‘Data gathered worldwide are increasingly suggesting that schools are not hot spots for coronavirus infections. Despite fears, COVID-19 infections did not surge when schools and day-care centres reopened after pandemic lockdowns eased. And when outbreaks do occur, they mostly result in only a small number of people becoming ill. However, research also shows that children can catch the virus and shed viral particles, and older children are more likely than very young kids to pass it on to others. Scientists say that the reasons for these trends are unclear, but they have policy implications for older children and teachers.’
Read here (Nature, Oct 29, 2020)
‘A large study out of the UK suggests immunity after a COVID-19 infection reduces fast, especially among older people. This is a quick fact check on the following: (1) How long am I immune after a COVID-19 infection? (2) Why does research on immunity differ? (3) Do people who have recovered from a COVID-19 infection continue to use protective measures? (4) Do some people, who have had a COVID-19 infection, show no immunity?’
Read here (DW, Oct 28, 2020)
‘China's disease control authority said on Saturday (Oct 17) that contact with frozen food packaging contaminated by living new coronavirus could cause infection. The conclusion came as the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detected and isolated living coronavirus on the outer packaging of frozen cod during efforts to trace the virus in an outbreak reported last week in the city of Qingdao, the agency said on its website.
‘The finding, a world first, suggests it is possible for the virus to be conveyed over long distances via frozen goods, it said.’
Read here (Straits Times, Oct 17, 2020)
‘Beyond case numbers and widespread infection, there are other indicators of the growing intensity of Covid-19 in Sabah. Foremost is the stark number of unlinked cases, cases that show no clear tie to another infected patient. An estimate by Dr Amar-Singh places the most recent unlinked cases as high as 91 percent. This indicates that the virus is in the community and being spread untraceably in the community.
‘Second, the strain of the virus reported in Sabah is among one of the most infectious, contributing to higher rates of transmission. Third, even more troubling is the fact that more people are dying – a toddler last week, more women (who disproportionately are less mobile within Sabah and should be less at risk) and those without underlying health conditions...
‘The time for a “normal” response has passed. The normal response has repeatedly disadvantaged Sabahans as federal authorities lack adequate appreciation of the realities on the ground. It is important to understand those federal failures surrounding Covid-19 add to the deep resentments and divisions that already exist.’
Read here (Malaysiakini, Oct 11, 2020)
‘The new coronavirus may remain infectious for weeks on banknotes, glass and other common surfaces, according to research by Australia’s top biosecurity laboratory that highlights risks from paper currency, touchscreen devices and grab handles and rails.
‘Scientists at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness showed SARS-CoV-2 is “extremely robust,” surviving for 28 days on smooth surfaces such as glass found on mobile phone screens and plastic banknotes at room temperature, or 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). That compares with 17 days survival for the flu virus.’
Read here (Bloomberg, Oct 11, 2020)
‘The Rose Garden event may come to be regarded as the most unscientific, and unethical, experiment in the world. If all of these people bounce back, maybe COVID-19 isn’t such a big deal. If several of them don’t fare well, then the liberal inclination to take it more seriously is justified. Either way, it would be an experiment of zero statistical value, but this event has captured the attention of the nation, and these outcomes will count for more than they should—more, for some, than the evidence of 210,000 dead.
‘But the Rose Garden wasn’t the only place where people were infected. During four days of debate prep (the worst debate prep in history, but that’s another matter), Chris Christie got it. Will the man ever learn? When has his relationship with Trump ever brought him anything but misery? Some people are drawn to bullies. They have a need to endlessly repeat the suffering of their childhood, always hoping for a different outcome. To see a healthy and chipper George Stephanopoulos, sitting in his neon bright Good Morning America studio interviewing a pale and clearly anxious Christie, quarantined in Jersey, was heartbreaking. “No one was wearing masks,” he said of the four days he had spent with the president, and you weren’t sure whether he was angry about it or maybe a little bit proud of it; at last he’d been given a seat at the cool kids’ table.’
Read here (The Atlantic, Oct 8, 2020)