Two Indian states have decided to distribute the controversial anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a preventative measure, MedPage Today reports.
Goa, on the west coast, and Uttarakhand, a northern state in the Himalayas, will give the anti-parasitic to wide swaths of their population as a preventative measure in hopes of preventing future outbreaks.
Leaders of both states insisted that their recommendations were evidence-based. “An expert medical panel has recommended this,” Om Prakash, chief secretary of Uttarakhand, told Reuters. Vishwajit Rane, health minister of Goa, also said an expert panel from Europe found the drug shortened recovery time and reduced the risk of death, the news agency reported.
Yet no large randomised controlled trial has proven the drug’s efficacy against COVID, and no prominent health group — the NIH and the WHO among them — has recommended the drug in treatment or prophylaxis.
The use of ivermectin for COVID has been the subject of bitter debate in South Africa, and human administration of ivermectin was approved for compassionate use with guidelines released in January. Following a court order, pharmacists and doctors in South Africa are allowed to make up small batches of medicines containing Ivermectin on prescription by a doctor and in small quantities, and can be used.
Madhu Pai, MD, PhD, professor of epidemiology and global health at McGill University in Montreal, tweeted a link to guidelines developed by collaborators in the UK and India, led by Cochrane and Christian Medical College Vellore in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
On May 15, the group updated their guidance to state that it recommends “against using ivermectin for treatment of patients with any severity of COVID-19. Ivermectin should only be used in the context of a randomized controlled trial.”
Officials in Goa said the state will give ivermectin tablets to anyone aged 18 or over. Through most of the recent COVID surge, the popular tourist destination has remained open to holidaymakers, only imposing a 15-day lockdown last week.
Meanwhile, Uttarakhand plans to distribute the drug even more widely, giving it to anyone over age 2, with the exception of pregnant and lactating women, according. The state has been struggling with high caseloads, which rose from under 300 a day in early April to more than 7000 a day last week, Reuters reported.
The state recently hosted Kumbh Mela, a huge festival which drew millions of people from across the country for a two week long celebration including bathing in the river Ganges. Reports indicated many people did not wear masks and were closely packed. This became a massive superspreader event, with cases all over India being traced to it. Some districts of Madhya Pradesh reported that 20% of cases were festival returnees.
Goa and Uttarakhand’s moves have not gone unnoticed by ivermectin advocates. The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a long time champion of the drug, paid scant attention to the difference between causation and correlation in a recent tweet on the issue: “Case counts and deaths are falling in India! A close look … shows that the declines occurred as the Health Ministry [sic] began its widespread distribution of #ivermectin.”
Coming just days after a third wave was officially declared in Gauteng, and months of delays, frustration and confusion, South Africa’s COVID vaccination programme is at last rolling out on Monday.
The vaccination programme will start off mostly on old age homes, at 87 sites across 9 provinces.
Fanned out across nine provinces and 87 sites, healthcare workers and those licensed to administer vaccines will start the mammoth task, which will kick off mostly at old age homes.
Those who are registered and eligible will receive a vaccination date and site to visit where they will either receive the once-off Johnson and Johnson vaccination – or the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine with another to be taken a fortnight later.
A vaccine site such as a pharmacy may charge up to R354.75 per dose of Pfizer, and R330 for a dose of Johnson and Johnson, according to a memo released by the department of health.
Additionally, a R70 fee for administering the vaccine will be billed to the recipient’s health insurance company or the government if uninsured.
The programme will also cover the hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers who have not yet received their vaccinations.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize, health MECs and other representatives described their plans for the nation on Sunday night.
Dr Mkhize is under no illusion about what lies ahead and what it will take to get it all done.
“Five million senior citizens are targeted to be completed by the end of June, provided that the supply of vaccines flow as anticipated.”
To put this into context, that’s just 44 days for this target to be met and given some of the setbacks experienced during the Sisonke implementation study, the government will face many sceptics.
“We know that everyone has been very anxious to know what will happen and how we will start to vaccinate our most vulnerable citizens and then move onto vaccinating the general population,” Dr Mkhize said.
According to the minister, over 1.2 million senior citizens have registered to be inoculated thus far. Officials are also hoping to vaccinate an additional 700 000 health workers during this time.
Text messages are being sent out to citizens aged 60 years and over, to get help them prepare.
As the campaign begins, there should be over 975 000 doses of Pfizer vaccines in stock, which have stringent, ultra-cold storage requirements.
Dr Mkhize emphasised that Monday or this week is not open to all senior citizens 60 year and above, rather that old age homes will be the priority.
“We recommend that as many people as possible register beforehand. We will not accommodate people walking into the vaccination sites, the program has been designed to avoid long queues, that’s why we want to keep people on going in based on the message inviting them for vaccination.”
However, some provinces with smaller populations,such as Mpumalanga and the North West, have stated they would try to accommodate senior citizens who would have travelled long distances to vaccination sites.
Dr Mkhize underscored the difficulty of conducting such a programme.
“This is just to know how many vaccines you will get out of a vial and how you draw out the requisite amount, to allow us a few days to iron out teething problems and we expect there will be many teething problems so we are expected to start slow.”
In a letter in the journal Science, eighteen scientists from world-leading research institutions are urging their colleagues to dig deeper into the origins of the coronavirus responsible for the global pandemic.
They argue that there is still not enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab in China, and they call for a “proper investigation” into the matter.
“We believe this question deserves a fair and thorough science-based investigation, and that any subsequent judgment should be made on the data available,” said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University who helped pen the letter.
They were motivated partly by the March 30 publication of a report commissioned by the World Health Organization that sought to discover the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The report’s authors, jointly credited to the WHO and China, ranked each of four possible scenarios on a scale from “extremely unlikely” to “very likely.” After assessing evidence provided by the Chinese team members, the authors concluded the probability that the virus jumped from animal to humans via an intermediary animal was “likely to very likely,” while an accidental laboratory release was deemed “extremely unlikely.”
Other potential pathways the investigators considered were a direct jump from animal to human without an intermediate host (“possible to likely”) and transmission from the surface of frozen food products (“possible”).
“We’re reasonable scientists with expertise in relevant areas,” Relman said, “and we don’t see the data that says this must be of natural origin.”
Ravindra Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge who signed the letter, said he would like to review lab notes from scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and see a list of viruses used at the institute over a five-year period.
The WHO report documents a meeting between its investigators and several members of the institute, including lab director Yuan Zhiming, who gave the joint team a tour of the facility.
At the meeting, representatives of WIV refuted the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could have leaked from the lab, noting that none of the three SARS-like viruses cultured in the laboratory are closely related to that virus.
They also pointed out that blood samples obtained from workers and students in a research group led by Shi Zhengli, a WIV virologist who studies SARS-like coronaviruses that originate in bats, contained no SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, which would indicate a current or past infection.
However, Relman said that, as a scientist, more than this thirdhand account was needed for him to exclude the possibility of of an accidental laboratory leak.
“Show us the test you used: What was the method? What were the results and the names of the people tested? Did you test a control population?” Relman said. “On all accounts, it was not an adequate, detailed kind of presentation of data that would allow an outside scientist to arrive at an independent conclusion.”
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was similarly cautious about the report’s findings.
“Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy,” he said in an address to WHO member states on March 30. “Let me say clearly that, as far as WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table.”
Michael Worobey, who studies viruses at the University of Arizona to better understand pandemics, also signed the letter. From the beginning of the pandemic, he considered that it was either an escape from a lab or natural transmission from animal to human. His stance is still unchanged.
“There just hasn’t been enough definitive evidence either way,” he said, “so both of those remain on the table for me.”
Worobey works in his own lab with a grad student who collects viruses from bats in the wild, and he’s considered how this kind of work could introduce new pathogen to humans.
“As someone who does this, I’m very aware of the opening that creates for new viruses to get close to humans, and so I think that’s another reason I take this seriously,” he said. “I’m concerned about it in my own work.”
SARS-CoV-2 has been shown not to be a laboratory construct genetically modified to make it more transmissible to humans, Worobey said. But an unmodified virus could have been brought into the lab and then moved into humans.
“I’ve seen no evidence that I can look at and say, ‘Oh, OK, this certainly refutes the accidental lab origin and makes it virtually 100% certain that it was a natural event,'” he said. “Until we’re at the stage, both possibilities are viable.”
Scientists said there was one piece of conclusive evidence that would indicate the virus had indeed spread to humans through a natural event—the discovery of the wild animals in whom the virus originated.
Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology and epidemiology at Yale University, noted that the WHO report mentioned the testing of more than 80 000 animal samples collected across China. None of those tests turned up a SARS-CoV-2 antibody or snippet of the virus’ genetic material before or after the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China.
“However, it is possible that an animal reservoir was missed and further investigation may reveal such evidence,” said Iwasaki, another signatory to the letter.
David Robertson, the head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow had not signed the letter, saying he didn’t understand the point.
“Nobody is saying that a lab accident isn’t possible—there’s just no evidence for this beyond the Wuhan Institute of Virology being in Wuhan,” he said, adding that viruses naturally jump from animals to humans all the time.
Although he agreed with the authors of the letter that it was essential to find the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to prepare for the next pandemic, “wasting time investigating labs is a distraction from this,” he said.
Relman disagrees.
“If it turns out to be of natural origin, we’ll have a little bit more information about where that natural reservoir is, and how to be more careful around it in the future,” he said. “And if it’s a laboratory, then we’re talking about thinking much more seriously about what kinds of experiments we do and why.”
The letter’s authors noted that in this time of anti-Asian sentiment in some countries, it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus.
“We should show the same determination in promoting a dispassionate, science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue,” they wrote. Source: Medical Xpress
Journal information: Jennifer Sills et al. Investigate the origins of COVID-19, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj0016
Earlier today, Gauteng Premier David Makhura has announced that the third wave of COVID has hit the province, home to 15 million people.
The province had been recording over 1 000 positive cases for the past two days. In particular, there had been a spike in the number of new COVID cases over the last three weeksthe in the Vaal’s Emfuleni region.
“Having seen over 1000 cases a day we cannot afford to close down the provinces economy but definitely we want to see an increase in restrictions,” said Makhura. Businesses meanwhile had been warning of lockdowns ahead of a third wave.
He made the remarks during the official opening of a refurbished mining hospital in Carletonville, west of Johannesburg.
Test positivity rate had risen to 7.45% on Wednesday, the highest in five days and for a month the rate had hovered close to or above the 5% threshold of what is considered too high.
On Thursday, the health department reported that COVID cases had increased by 3 221 in the last 24 hours, further evidence that a third wave was imminent.
Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize said in a statement that the national tally of confirmed cases to date now stood at 1 605 252, with 29 362 of these being active cases. Meanwhile, the recovery rate now stands at 94.7% after 1.52 million patients beat COVID.
Meanwhile, eight new cases of B.1.617.2, known as the Indian variant, have been detected in South Africa.
Professor Tulio de Oliveira, the director of the KZN Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, said that these were found in crew members of a commercial vessel that arrived in Durban Port from India.
De Oliveira tweeted: “The Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, confirmed detection of eight more genomes B.1.617.2 (Indian variant) and two community transmission of B.1.1.7 (UK variant) in South Africa.”
New research shows that individuals living with HIV and AIDS have an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and death from COVID.
An estimated 38 million people around the world are living with HIV/AIDS, according to the World Health Organization, 7.5 million of whom are in South Africa, according to UNAIDS.
In their review, researchers at Penn State College of Medicine found that people living with HIV had a 24% higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and a 78% higher risk of death from COVID than people without HIV. They analysed data from 22 prior studies with nearly 21 million participants in North America, Africa, Europe and Asia to determine to what extent people living with HIV/AIDS are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and death from COVID.
Participants were mostly male (66%) and the median age was 56. The most common comorbidities among the HIV-positive population were hypertension, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic kidney disease. Most patients (96%) were on antiretroviral therapy (ART).
“Previous studies were inconclusive on whether or not HIV is a risk factor for susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and poor outcomes in populations with COVID-19,” said Dr Paddy Ssentongo, lead researcher and assistant professor at the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering. “This is because a vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS are on ART, some of which have been used experimentally to treat COVID-19.”
Pre-existing conditions common among people living with HIV/AIDS, may contribute to the severity of their COVID infections, noted the investigators. It remains inconclusive as to whether antiviral drugs, such as tenofovir and protease-inhibitors, reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and death from COVID in people with living with HIV/AIDS.
“As the pandemic has evolved, we’ve obtained sufficient information to characterize the epidemiology of HIV/SARS-CoV-2 coinfection, which could not be done at the beginning of the pandemic due to scarcity of data,” said Vernon Chinchilli, fellow researcher and chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences. “Our findings support the current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance to prioritize persons living with HIV to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.”
A South African perfume expert has developed a treatment to help people who have lost their sense of smell due to COVID.
Loss of smell and taste is one of the most prominent symptoms and after-effects of COVID infection. A meta-analysis of 27 studies showed that 48.47% of COVID patients reported loss of sense of smell, and loss of taste was reported in 20 studies with a prevalence of 41.47%.
While some people only experience a minimal loss of smell, others, especially those who have experienced prolonged COVID infection, may wait months for their sense of smell to return, if it all.
For those patients who battle with their sense of smell after recovering from COVID-19, it is a disheartening experience. Luckily Scenterprises Inc founder, Sue Phillips, has found an amazing way to help these patients smell all the wonderful things in life again.
Phillips is a renowned South African fragrance expert and a self-proclaimed ‘scentrepreneur’, with over 40 years’ experience in the fragrance industry. She is a vocal advocate for the amazing qualities of fragrances and is the author of a book, titled The Power of Perfume.
In an interview with Cape Talk, Phillips described her breakthrough discovery – the role perfume can play in helping those who have had COVID regain their sense of smell.
A perfume is made up of a complex blend of notes – the top, middle and base notes, explained Phillips. She said that she met with a woman who had lost her sense of smell for over a year due to COVID. The woman was unable to identify the lighter, or top notes of the perfume. However, the woman was able to pick up on the stronger notes.
“Suddenly we had a breakthrough and she was quite emotional. She finally said, and she was crying, ‘Oh my goodness, I can finally smell something beautiful’,” Phillips told Cape Talk.
Phillips observed that as they continue with the process, more and more fragrances can be identified by patients.
The perfume expert is now offering Zoom sessions educating people about this process and is producing ‘scent kits’ to help patients battling with their sense of smell.
The World Health Organization said on Monday that a SARS-CoV-2 variant circulating in India is of global concern.
“We classify it as a variant of concern at a global level,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID, told a briefing. “There is some available information to suggest increased transmissibility.”
India’s daily COVID statistics are down slightly but remain high. The health ministry said Monday there were 366 161 new cases and 3754 deaths from the virus in the previous 24-hour period. Public health experts believe the new cases and deaths to be an underestimate of the true picture.
India has 22.6 million COVID cases so far, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. India’s case load is surpassed only by the US, with 32.7 million COVID cases.
There is also growing concern in India about ‘black fungus’ or mucormycosis, an opportunistic fungal infection which is affecting COVID patients and also those who have recovered from the disease. It typically only appears in immunocompromised patients. COVID patients with diabetes are particularly susceptible to mucormycosis, medical experts said. Meanwhile, struggling to contain its own COVID outbreak, Nepal is running short of oxygen and oxygen tanks and has asked Mount Everest climbers and guides not to abandon their oxygen cylinders on the mountain, rather bringing them back down so that medical facilities can fill them to give to COVID patients.
Kul Bahadur Gurung, a senior official with the Nepal Mountaineering Association, told Reuters, “We appeal to climbers and Sherpas [Himalayan people living around Nepal and Tibet, well known for climbing mountains] to bring back their empty bottles wherever possible as they can be refilled and used for the treatment of the coronavirus patients who are in dire needs.”
A Nepal health ministry official speaking to Reuters said the country needs 25 000 oxygen tanks immediately.
While COVID has been long known to be more dangerous in men than women, research which is still in its early stages shows that some of this increased risk could be from having a gene for male balding.
A team of researchers in the US first suspected the link when they noticed that men with a common form of hormone-sensitive hair loss, known as androgenetic alopecia, were also more likely to be hospitalised with COVID. They presented their findings May 6 at the virtual spring meeting of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV).
“Among hospitalized men with COVID-19, 79% presented with androgenetic alopecia compared to 31%-53% that would be expected in a similar aged match population,” said researchers led by Dr Andy Goren, chief medical officer at Applied Biology Inc in California.
The researchers noted that androgenetic alopecia is due to the activity of the androgen receptor (AR) gene, which can lead to balding in some men. An enzyme called TMPRSS2, key to COVID infection, is also androgen-sensitive, and might be affected by the AR gene as well, explained Dr Goren’s group.
One key segment on the AR gene seems to affect both COVID severity and male balding.
In the new study, the Irvine group enrolled 65 men hospitalised with COVID, and conducted a genetic analysis on them. The results showed that participants with certain structural differences in the AR gene were at greater risk of developing severe COVID. Speaking in a meeting press release, Goren said the AR gene anomaly “could be used as a biomarker to help identify male COVID-19 patients most at risk for ICU admissions.”
He added that he believes that “the identification of a biomarker connected with the androgen receptor is another piece of evidence highlighting the important role of androgens [male hormones] in COVID-19 disease severity.”
Dr Teresa Murray Amato has seen many severe cases of COVID. She is chair of emergency medicine at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills in New York City. Though not connected to the new research, but said it “did show a significant correlation between a higher number of androgen receptors and a higher incidence of ICU admissions for patients infected with COVID-19.”
Dr Amato added that, “While the study is small and the exact association is not completely understood, it may show at least one answer to why men were more likely to be admitted to ICU and have overall higher morality with COVID-19 infections.”
According to Amato, further investigations are necessary to determine whether “medications that block androgen receptors will be useful in treating a subset of [COVID-19] patients.”
Since the findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
A comprehensive review of what is so far known about the coronavirus its functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, explaining why COVID is so difficult to treat and often leaves survivors with debilitating ‘long COVID’ symptoms.
In a review recently published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, the authors review what is currently known about COVID, and find that it works differently to most pathogens.
Evidence increasingly points to the virus infecting both the upper and lower respiratory tracts. In contrast, ‘low pathogenic’ human coronavirus sub-species typically settle in the upper respiratory tract, causing cold-like symptoms, while ‘high pathogenic’ viruses, such as those that cause SARS and ARDS, typically settle in the lower respiratory tract.
Additionally, COVID has evolved a uniquely challenging set of characteristics as evidenced by more frequent multi-organ impacts, blood clots, and an unusual immune-inflammatory response not commonly associated with other similar viruses.
While animal and experimental models imply an overly aggressive immune-inflammation response is a key driver, it seems things work differently in humans: Although inflammation is a factor, it is a unique dysregulation of the immune response that causes our bodies to mismanage the way they fight the virus.
This could explain the ‘long COVID’ phenomenon that some people experience after infection, struggling with significant health issues months after infection. Long COVID is characterised by symptoms of fatigue, headache, difficulty breathing and loss of sense of smell. It is more likely with increasing age, body mass index and female sex
“The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus two (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, has resulted in a health crisis not witnessed since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Tragically, millions around the world have died already,” said co-author Ignacio Martin-Loeches, Clinical Professor in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Medicine, and Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine at St James’s Hospital.
“Despite international focus on the virus, we are only just beginning to understand its intricacies. Based on growing evidence we propose that COVID-19 should be perceived as a new entity with a previously unknown infectious profile. It has its own characteristics and distinct pathophysiology and we need to be aware of this when treating people.
“That doesn’t mean we should abandon existing best-practice treatments that are based on our knowledge of other human coronaviruses, but an unbiased, gradual assembly of the key COVID-19 puzzle pieces for different patient cohorts—based on sex, age, ethnicity, pre-existing comorbidities—is what is needed to modify the existing treatment guidelines, subsequently providing the most adequate care to COVID-19 patients.”
Journal information: Marcin F Osuchowski et al, The COVID-19 puzzle: deciphering pathophysiology and phenotypes of a new disease entity, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1016/S2213-2600(21)00218-6
Experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made much more accurate predictions about COVID than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic, a study from the University of Cambridge has found.
Researchers from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication surveyed 140 UK experts and 2086 UK laypersons in April 2020 and asked them to make predictions about the impact of COVID by the end of 2020. Participants were also asked to assign confidence in their predictions by providing upper and lower bounds of where they were 75% sure that the true answer would fall—for example, a participant would say they were 75% sure that the total number of infections would be between 300 000 and 800 000.
While only 44% of predictions from the expert group fell within their own 75% confidence ranges, only 12% of predictions from the non-experts fell within their ranges, though more numerate individuals performed a little better. The results were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Experts perhaps didn’t predict as accurately as we hoped they might, but the fact that they were far more accurate than the non-expert group reminds us that they have expertise that’s worth listening to,” said lead author Dr Gabriel Recchia from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication,. “Predicting the course of a brand-new disease like COVID-19 just a few months after it had first been identified is incredibly difficult, but the important thing is for experts to be able to acknowledge uncertainty and adapt their predictions as more data become available.”
Expert opinion is important for those making decisions at any level from individual to policy. The quality of expert intuition can vary greatly depending on the field of expertise and the type of judgment required, so it is important to determine how good expert predictions really are, especially in where they could shape public opinion or government policy.
“People mean different things by ‘expert’: these are not necessarily people working on COVID-19 or developing the models to inform the response,” said Dr Recchia. “Many of the people approached to provide comment or make predictions have relevant expertise, but not necessarily the most relevant.” Dr Recchia noted that in the early stages of the pandemic, clinicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and other individuals seen as experts by the media and the general public, were often asked to give off-the-cuff answers to questions about how bad the pandemic might get. “We wanted to test how accurate some of these predictions from people with this kind of expertise were, and importantly, see how they compared to the public.”
Participants in the survey were asked to predict how many people living in their country would have died and would have been infected by the end of 2020; they were also asked to predict infection fatality rates both for their country and worldwide.
The expert group and the non-expert group both underestimated the total number of deaths and infections in the UK. The official UK death toll at 31 December was 75 346. The median prediction of the expert group was 30 000, while that of the the non-expert group was 25 000.
For COVID fatality rates, the median expert prediction was that 10 out of every 1000 people with the virus worldwide would die from it, and 9.5 out of 1000 people with the virus in the UK would die from it. The median non-expert response to the same questions was 50 out of 1000 and 40 out of 1000. The true infection fatality rate at the end of 2020—as best could be estimated—was nearer to 4.55 out of 1000 worldwide and 11.8 out of 1000 in the UK.
“There’s a temptation to look at any results that says experts are less accurate than we might hope and say we shouldn’t listen to them, but the fact that non-experts did so much worse shows that it remains important to listen to experts, as long as we keep in mind that what happens in the real world can surprise you,” said Dr Recchia.
The researchers cautioned that it is important to differentiate between research on evaluating the forecasts of ‘experts’—individuals involved in relevant fields, such as epidemiologists and statisticians—and research on evaluating specific epidemiological models, though the models may inform experts. Many COVID prediction models have proved accurate in the short term, but rapidly become less accurate for later predictions.
