Compare the flu pandemic of 1918 and COVID-19 with caution – the past is not a prediction
by ilene - June 4th, 2020 7:47 pm
Compare the flu pandemic of 1918 and COVID-19 with caution – the past is not a prediction
A pandemic from a century ago doesn’t necessarily chart the course of the pandemic happening now. National Photo Company Collection/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, CC BY
Courtesy of Mari Webel, University of Pittsburgh and Megan Culler Freeman, University of Pittsburgh
People have turned to historical experience with influenza pandemics to try to make sense of COVID-19, and for good reason.
Influenza and coronavirus share basic similarities in the way they’re transmitted via respiratory droplets and the surfaces they land on. Descriptions of H1N1 influenza patients in 1918-19 echo the respiratory failure of COVID-19 sufferers a century later. Lessons from efforts to mitigate the spread of flu in 1918-19 have justifiably guided this pandemic’s policies promoting nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as physical distancing and school closures.
Current discussions about scaling back social distancing measures and “opening up” the country frequently refer to “waves” of disease that characterized the dramatic mortality of H1N1 influenza in three major peaks in 1918-19. As COVID-19 rates begin to steady in some parts of the U.S., people today are nervously eyeing the “second wave” of influenza that came in autumn 1918, that pandemic’s deadliest period.
Waves evoke predictability, however, and COVID-19 has been hard to predict. Despite the valuable lessons drawn from past influenza outbreaks, how pandemic influenza struck in 1918 isn’t a template for what will happen with COVID-19 in the coming months.
As a historian and a virologist, we believe this comparison of two pandemics has contributed to public confusion about what to expect from “flattening the curve.” Key divergences in the sociopolitical contexts of 1918-19 and now, in addition to clear virologic differences between influenza and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,…
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You don’t need to worry about spreading the coronavirus with cash
by ilene - June 4th, 2020 3:20 am
You don't need to worry about spreading the coronavirus with cash
Cash is unlikely to give you the coronavirus. Rolf Bruderer/Getty Images
Courtesy of Marilyn Roberts, University of Washington
Some people worry that cash may be spreading the coronavirus.
Earlier this year, both China and South Korea began sterilizing their bills using UV light or high heat before putting them back into use. They also quarantined their bank bills for 14 days in hopes that any lingering viruses would die off during that time.
In early March, a World Health Organization spokesperson suggested that people should not use cash if possible, but then clarified that the WHO was not issuing a COVID-19 specific guidance with regards to using contactless payments.
I’m a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences and global health, and I believe that we don’t need to worry about money as much as some might believe.
Do surfaces spread the coronavirus?
Recent articles indicate that some microbes, including COVID-19, are unlikely to spread through contaminated surfaces such as cash.
The only potential way to acquire COVID-19 from a contaminated surface is to get the virus on your hands and then touch your mouth, eyes or nose.
This is why everyone from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the WHO to local governments have stressed that hand-washing is critically important, especially after handling money.
Bacteria and some viruses have been identified on currency. It’s just that COVID-19 has not been examined.
Little is known about how long COVID-19 might survive on currency. Laboratory testing on influenza suggests viability lasts from one hour to one day without mucus.
However, viability in nature would depend on temperature, humidity and exposure to sunlight. Nothing has yet been done with COVID-19 survival on cash, though on other surfaces, COVID-19’s survival has again varied.
The problem with going cashless
One proposed solution is going cashless, meaning using methods of money that are not paper or coins, such as debit cards or cryptocurrency.
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Antibody injections could fight COVID-19 infections – an infectious disease expert explains the prospects
by ilene - June 1st, 2020 2:58 pm
Antibody injections could fight COVID-19 infections – an infectious disease expert explains the prospects
Antibodies (pink) attacking a virus particle (blue). STEVEN MCDOWELL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Courtesy of Dimiter Stanchev Dimitrov, University of Pittsburgh
Antibodies are part of us – literally.
We have billions of them in our bodies with a combined weight of about 100 grams, or about the weight of a bar of soap. If there are so many antibodies inside our bodies then they must be safe and very important, right?
Indeed, antibodies are perhaps the safest type of therapy and have many important functions. One of them is to protect and cure infections caused by viruses. The human immune system can produce antibodies specific for each type virus that bind strongly to the virus and block it from infecting our cells – so-called neutralizing antibodies.
I am an infectious disease scientist and am interested in antibody therapeutics because they are a relatively safe way to prevent severe disease and save lives, particularly when a new, deadly virus emerges.
To stop the spread of COVID-19, billions of people will need to have antibodies to protect against the new coronavirus. So the question is how can we isolate and produce neutralizing antibodies in large enough quantities to serve everyone who needs them, including research laboratories and pharmaceutical companies?
What are antibodies?
Our immune system makes antibodies in response to a foreign pathogen, whether that be a bacterium, virus or fungi.
Antibodies are Y-shaped blood proteins made by white blood cells called “B cells.” They neutralize pathogens by attaching to their surface, blocking them from entering our cells and signaling our immune system to clear the pathogen from our bodies.
Humans have all sorts of different antibodies floating around inside us at any given time looking for foreign pathogens to attack. When a specific virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, infects our bodies, our immune system will try to produce enough specific antibodies against it before the infection becomes overwhelming.
This process can happen faster and be more successful in preventing infection if we already have existing antibodies against the pathogen.
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Does nicotine protect us against coronavirus?
by ilene - May 31st, 2020 7:20 pm
Does nicotine protect us against coronavirus?
Shutterstock
Courtesy of Adrian Bauman, University of Sydney; Leah Shepherd, University of Sydney, and Melody Ding, University of Sydney
If you noticed headlines recently suggesting smoking could protect against COVID-19, you might have been surprised.
Smokers seem less likely than non-smokers to fall ill with coronavirus — Nicotine may play an indirect role that makes it harder for the virus to gain to access cells https://t.co/Psx0uMjy6g
— Alfons López Tena (@alfonslopeztena) May 4, 2020
After all, we know smoking is bad for our health. It’s a leading risk factor for heart disease, lung disease and many cancers. Smoking also reduces our immunity, and makes us more susceptible to respiratory infections including pneumonia.
And smokers touch their mouth and face more, a risk for COVID-19 infection.
Initial observational findings suggested a history of smoking increased the risk of poor outcomes in COVID-19 patients, as the World Health Organisation and other bodies have identified.
But a recent paper which examined smoking rates among COVID-19 patients in a French hospital hypothesised smoking might make people less susceptible to COVID-19 infection.
So what can we make of this?
What the study did
This study was a cross-sectional survey where the researchers assessed the exposure (smoking) and the outcome (COVID-19) at the same time. This type of research design can’t prove the exposure causes the outcome – only that there may be an association.
There were two groups included in the study – 343 inpatients treated for COVID-19 from February 28 to March 30, and 139 outpatients treated from March 23 to April 9. Among other data collected, participants were asked whether they were current smokers.
The researchers compared smoking rates in both groups with smoking rates in the general French population.
The results
The study found 4.4% of inpatients and 5.3% of outpatients with COVID-19 were smokers, after adjusting for differences in age and sex.
This was only a fraction of the prevalence…
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Is COVID-19 a Blood Vessel Disease?
by ilene - May 31st, 2020 5:54 pm
Worth reading, the theory presented here is strongly supported by the evidence.
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Antigen tests for COVID-19 are fast and easy – and could solve the coronavirus testing problem despite being somewhat inaccurate
by ilene - May 29th, 2020 12:16 pm
Antigen tests for COVID-19 are fast and easy – and could solve the coronavirus testing problem despite being somewhat inaccurate
Antibodies are incredibly good at finding the coronavirus. Antigen tests put them to work. Sergii Iaremenko/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
Courtesy of Eugene Wu, University of Richmond
In late February, I fell ill with a fever and a cough. As a biochemist who teaches a class on viruses, I’d been tracking the outbreak of COVID-19 in China. Inevitably I wondered: Did I have COVID-19, or did I have the flu?
At the time, COVID-19 testing was very restricted but I knew I could get quickly tested for the flu. I drove myself to an urgent care clinic, the nurse easily checked my temperature and took a throat swab and 30 minutes later I got the results: positive for influenza.
The flu test I took is a type of viral screening called a rapid antigen test that looks for viral proteins. For the flu, these antigen tests are easy to administer, decently accurate and give results almost immediately.
Widespread testing for SARS–CoV–2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is critical to knowing if, when and how people can start to return to their normal lives. An antigen test for the coronavirus could be a huge help in expanding testing.
On May 9, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first antigen test for emergency use in the U.S. These tests are starting to be available across the country and could dramatically change the COVID-19 testing landscape when they become widely available.
What is an antigen?
The human immune system, and in fact the immune systems of most vertebrates, work on a simple idea: Any protein in your body that isn’t encoded by your own genes is probably from a pathogen and should be captured and destroyed.
When the immune system detects a foreign protein, your white blood cells, specifically your B-cells, create antibodies to trap and destroy these proteins. Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that use their arms as grabbers for foreign proteins. The first round of antibodies aren’t particularly well matched to the shape of…
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How coronavirus contact tracing works in a state Dr. Fauci praised as a model to follow
by ilene - May 28th, 2020 5:33 pm
How coronavirus contact tracing works in a state Dr. Fauci praised as a model to follow
Pairing widespread testing with fast, effective contact tracing is considered essential for controlling the coronavirus’s spread as the U.S. passes 100,000 deaths. AP Images/Rick Bowmer
Courtesy of Jenny Meredith, University of South Carolina
After weeks of keeping people home to “flatten the curve,” restrictions on U.S. businesses are loosening and the coronavirus pandemic response is moving into a new phase.
Two things will be critical to keep COVID-19 cases from flaring up again: widespread testing to quickly identify anyone who gets the virus, and contact tracing to find everyone those individuals might have passed it to.
It’s a daunting task, but states are working hard to take the necessary steps to reopen safely. When Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, explained that task to the U.S. Senate recently, he pointed to South Carolina as a model for the country, one that he would “almost like to clone.”
So, what is South Carolina getting right?
Part of it has to do with contact tracing. Since early March, when South Carolina’s first coronavirus case surfaced, investigators have reached out to every person who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the state, and all of the people they came into close contact with. To help prevent the virus from spreading farther, they hired 1,800 additional workers who will follow up with those contacts each day for 14 days to make sure they haven’t become ill.
Fauci’s compliment didn’t surprise me. I spent the first nine years of my career as a public health microbiologist in South Carolina at the Department of Health and Environmental Control’s State Public Health Laboratory. South Carolina already had disease reporting requirements in place and the cutting-edge laboratory technology needed for testing. Together with skilled epidemiologists, these laid the groundwork for an effective response to a pandemic that, nationwide, has now claimed more than 100,000 U.S. lives.
Knowing where to look
The first step was scaling up testing…
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Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: A new review of several studies shows flaws in research and no benefit
by ilene - May 28th, 2020 2:33 pm
Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: A new review of several studies shows flaws in research and no benefit
President Trump says he has been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive for the coronavirus. Getty Images / Drew Angerer
Courtesy of C. Michael White, University of Connecticut
President Donald Trump revealed on May 18, 2020 that he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent contracting COVID-19. News media reports run the gamut from saying hydroxychloroquine is 91% effective to it being both ineffective and dangerous. How do people know what to believe?
Our Health Outcomes, Policy, and Evidence Synthesis (HOPES) group at the University of Connecticut has conducted many high profile projects in the past, studying conditions such as cystic fibrosis and asthma. We published an assessment on May 27, 2020, of all of the controlled studies that have been conducted around the world through May 8, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Like our other projects, we used search strategies and methods that are sanctioned by international bodies like the Cochrane Group to determine whether hydroxychloroqune was effective and safe. Based on the media reports you have heard, the results may surprise you.
There are no controlled studies, says the author, that assess the use of hydroxychloroquine to prevent the coronavirus. Getty Images / AFP / George Frey
What did we find?
We focused our assessment on controlled studies, those that compare the effects of a drug in one group versus those who did not receive therapy in another. This is critical when establishing the effectiveness of a therapy because without it, the results are meaningless. If 100 people took hydroxychloroquine and 10 died, it could mean that therapy was great if 20 were going to die without it but horrible if two were going to die.
The first thing we found is that there are no controlled studies assessing the use of hydroxychloroquine to prevent getting COVID-19. So there is no evidence one way of the other that you can prevent COVID-19 by taking hydroxychloroquine.
We did find 14…
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Trump Vaccine Czar Still Stands to Profit
by ilene - May 26th, 2020 7:03 pm
Will there really be several hundred million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020, which would be record fast vaccine develop, or is this just wishful thinking? Moncef Slaoui, former executive at GlaxoSmithKline and board member of Moderna (till recently) and newly appointed Trump official, says the vaccine will be ready. Either way, Moderna (MRNA) has received nearly half a billion dollars from the government, and its stock price has soared. Amee Vanderpool tells more of the story:
Trump Vaccine Czar Still Stands to Profit
Courtesy of Amee Vanderpool, SHERO
The Trump administration has announced an ambitious plan to develop and produce millions of doses of a new COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020, a lofty and risky process that stands to shift conventional wisdom about the vaccine process and seems to have yielded substantial stock profits for the pharmaceutical executive Trump has appointed to lead the initiative.
On May 15, in a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, Trump and his deputies rolled out an initiative to speed up access to a vaccine for the novel coronavirus while calling it, “Operation Warp Speed.” At the time, Trump admitted the project was “risky and expensive” and Gustave Perna, a four-star general who oversees logistics for the U.S. Army, called the task “Herculean.” Defense Secretary Mark Esper has pledged to deliver a vaccine to the U.S. and its foreign partners by the end of the year.
Interestingly, this new messaging on the “impending” vaccine has been hyped by the White House at the same time that some states with Republican governors have been re-opening businesses within their localities, despite the warnings from the CDC and the guidelines set out by the White House.
(Trump delivers remarks and an update on COVID-19 vaccine development from White House Rose Garden on May 15, 2020.)
Image by pearson0612 from Pixabay
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Coronavirus in States
by ilene - May 26th, 2020 11:08 am
Via Jean Luc
Good Twitter thread about cases around US states:
https://twitter.com/TopherSpiro/status/1265007908707860487
According to the best-performing model, transmission will be widespread throughout the summer. Very high baseline incidence heading into fall.
Look at the entire thread with some good charts. Some states are careening toward trouble it seems!
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.