Tag: covid

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Biden to Hit the Ground Running with COVID Response

On By ModernMedia

Mounting an effective response to COVID was one of presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s campaign promises, and now that he has won the US elections, he is seeking to implement this response as soon as possible.

This comes at a critical time, as the US has been struggling with record new cases, breaking 100 000 per day in the last few days, with sombre predictions of another 100 000 deaths by January, stoked by the advent of winter and people socialising for the festive season. Biden has begun assembling a science-focussed team to prepare to take on managing the COVID pandemic as soon as he takes office.

Numerous challenges will face Biden’s team when he assumes office. One of them is the extreme distrust that has emerged as a result of the politicisation of the virus. 

Angela Rasmussen, a virus researcher at Columbia University in New York, said: “The past year of misinformation, confusion and gaslighting from the White House has really left people without any trust that our government is capable of handling this. It’s going to be critical to begin communicating that, yes, this administration will be led by the science.” 

 Some believe that, unfortunately, that it is a case off too little, too late, and that attitudes cannot be so easily changed. Kris Mathews, the administrator of Decatur Health, a small hospital in rural Kansas, said, “I think the damage is done. People have made up their minds about how they react to it.”  

Biden has also promised to have the US rejoin the World Health Organization on the first day of his presidency. Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, said: “Everyone recognises that for a pandemic, you cannot have a country-by-country approach. You need a global approach.” She expressed optimism that the US under Biden would join the global Covax scheme led by the WHO to distribute the vaccine to the needy.

Source: Medical Xpress

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Impact of COVID Lockdown on Soweto Residents’ Mental Health

On By ModernMedia

A new study reported by Health-e has revealed the mental health toll that COVID and the lockdown to control it took on residents of Soweto, with 957 participants interviewed before the lockdown and then six weeks into the lockdown.

The interviews revealed that some 14% of those surveyed were at risk of depression, which was worsened by factors such as childhood trauma as well as their level of knowledge about COVID. Feeling unable to take precautions against the virus caused anxiety levels to skyrocket. 

“While participants believed that the pandemic did not affect their mental health or their ‘mind,’ the strong relationship between perceived risk and depressive symptoms raises the concern that they may not be aware of the potential threats to their mental health during Covid-19,” said Dr Andrew Wooyoung Kim, co-director of the study. “This discrepancy may be due to different ideas of mental health, including mental health stigma.”

Kim acknowledges that the challenging South African environment of poverty and poor services may also have had significant impacts.
“Our study re-emphasises the importance of prioritising and provisioning accessible mental health resources for resource-limited communities in Soweto and across South Africa,” Kim added. 

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Study Reconstructs Original SARS-CoV-2 “Progenitor” Genome

On By ModernMedia

Medical Xpress reports on a study which managed to make a reconstruction of the original SARS-CoV-2 genome that infected patient zero.

No genome could have possibly been sampled in the early days when the virus made the jump to humans while the world was still unaware of the disease; thus, it has to be reconstructed by working backwards through all the mutations recorded. This study was led by Sudhir Kumar, director of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine, Temple University, and sifted through 30 000 complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes, searching for what they called the “progenitor genome”.

Previous attempts to reach the same goal because the focus was to build an evolutionary tree, said Kumar. “This coronavirus evolves too slow, the number of genomes to analyze is too large, and the data quality of genomes is highly variable. I immediately saw parallels between the properties of these genetic data from coronavirus with the genetic data from the clonal spread of another nefarious disease, cancer,” Kumar said.

The research has already yielded intriguing insights; a protein that made the virus more infectious apparently appeared early on, before many of the other mutations that took place, but this protein was not in the progenitor genome.

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New COVID Lineages Found in SA

On By ModernMedia

To study the spread of COVID in South Africa, an interdisciplinary team called the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA) was formed with members from SA, the UK and Brazil. Analysing 1365 genomes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the researchers found 16 new COVID lineages which emerged in SA, which account for 42% of the country’s infections.

As could be expected, the bulk of introductions occurred before the advent of the lockdown and travel bans. Whether these new COVID lineages have any superior attributes relative to the original strains is as yet unknown, although the infectivity appears the same.

The study shows that, despite the lockdown, new strains emerged in localised outbreaks. Nosocomial outbreaks were also studied; in one case an outbreak in a hospital in KZN which went on to infect 16% of the population was brought under control, partly as a result of the investigation.

Source: News-Medical.Net

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Improved Treatment Results in 18% Fall in COVID Death Rates

On By ModernMedia

In a piece for The Conversation, Professor Monica Gandhi at the University of California, writes how, thanks to improved treatment as a results of experience gained, survival rates for COVID patients have dramatically risen.

In three New York hospitals, out of 1724 patients hospitalised for COVID in March, 430 died. In August, 134 hospitalised and five died. However, this may have been due to more vulnerable patients being infected. Therefore, to avoid bias, the researchers accounted for age of patients at hospitalisation, race, amount of oxygen support individuals needed on arrival and such risk factors as being overweight, smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, lung disease. Even so, they found that patients were three times as likely to survive when admitted in August as compared to March, which indicates that this is due to improved treatment resulting from research into and experience with the disease.

A similar study in the UK looked at COVID patient survival rates in high-dependency units (HDU) and ICU, and found a continuous improvement in survival rates of 12.7% per week in the HDU and 8.9% per week in ICU.

Prof Gandhi attributes this to a better understanding of the disease, and the regular use of remdesivir and dexamethasone as treatments.

Source: The Conversation

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Extreme “Super-spreader” Events Boost COVID Spread

On By ModernMedia

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a reproduction number of three, indicating that on average it will infect three other individuals over the course of the infection. However, a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that extreme “super-spreader” events, such as the one that happened at a White House event in September, seem to generate more infections than would otherwise be expected due to random distributions.

“Super-spreading events are likely more important than most of us had initially realized. Even though they are extreme events, they are probable and thus are likely occurring at a higher frequency than we thought. If we can control the super-spreading events, we have a much greater chance of getting this pandemic under control,” said James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering, and the senior author of this study. 

The researchers analysed a number of documented “super-spreader events” that have taken place over the COVID pandemic. When they ran statistical analyses on super-spreader events, they found that instead of the expected “bell curve” of normal distribution, they found a “fat tail” of extreme events.

Lead author, MIT postdoc Felix Wong said, “This means that the probability of extreme events decays more slowly than one would have expected. These really large super-spreading events, with between 10 and 100 people infected, are much more common than we had anticipated.”

Source: Medical Xpress

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Speech Recognition AI Detects COVID in Coughs

On By ModernMedia

An AI system originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to research speech patterns in people with Alzheimer’s was repurposed when the COVID pandemic hit to become an indicator for COVID in asymptomatic patients. 

“The sounds of talking and coughing are both influenced by the vocal cords and surrounding organs,” says research scientist Brian Subirana of MIT.
“This means that when you talk, part of your talking is like coughing, and vice versa. It also means that things we easily derive from fluent speech, AI can pick up simply from coughs, including things like the person’s gender, mother tongue, or even emotional state. There’s in fact sentiment embedded in how you cough.”

The system was based on a neural network that was trained on a thousand hours of human speech, then on a database on words spoken in different emotional states and finally a database of coughs. The result was a system that could detect a cough in an asymptomatic person with COVID with 97.1% accuracy. However, this is not a true test of COVID but an enhanced early indicator. The advantage of this technology is that it can be developed as an early warning system that can be incorporated into something as ubiquitous as a smartphone.

Source: Science Alert

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MRI Scans Reveal Post-COVID Extent of Lung Damage

On By ModernMedia

A study of non-hospitalised individuals who had recovered from COVID but still experienced breathing difficulties had revealed lung damage where other tests were unable to.

To investigate post-COVID lung damage, Prof Fergus Gleeson led a study involving 10 participants aged 19 to 69, of whom eight had been experiencing breathing difficulties three months after a COVID infection. They had not been hospitalised for their COVID, and conventional scans had not been able to detect any abnormalities with their lungs.

The patients’ lungs were imaged using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with xenon present in the lungs. Xenon, a noble gas, is non-toxic Xenon has a long history of use as a contrast agent, and is soluble with pulmonary tissue, allowing for investigation of specific lung characteristics that are connected to gas exchange and alveolar oxygenation, at the level of small airways where pulmonary function tests (PFTs) cannot provide information.

The scans revealed that there was indeed lung damage preventing alveolar oxygenation – and it was unexpectedly severe.

Prof Gleeson said, “I was expecting some form of lung damage, but not to the degree that we have seen.”

The findings help to explain the phenomenon of “long COVID”, where patients who have recovered from COVID continue to experience fatigue and breathing difficulties months after the original infection has ended.Based on the findings, Prof Gleeson will undertake a study with a further 100 participants based on the same criteria.

Source: BBC News 

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COVID DNA of White House “Superspreader Event” Analysed

On By ModernMedia

On September 26, numerous high-profile individuals, contracted COVID at a large official White House gathering. This White House “superspreader event” as it was known became something of a case study in how COVID can spread in large groups of people.

Although President Trump contracted the virus, it is not known if this was a result of attending that event. The event, which had over a dozen guests, resulted in 34 individuals including White House staff testing positive for COVID by October 7.

Whilst contact tracing is difficult with COVID, genome sequencing offers a chance for insights into its development and spread. The researchers analysed SARS-CoV-2 genomes from nasal swabs taken from the patients at the White House superspreader event, and analysed it, looking for mutations. They found two variants, WH-2 and WH-2. They determined that these viruses descended from those widely in circulation in Florida, New York, Texas, Connecticut, and Washington – as well as certain countries such as  New Zealand.

Source: News-Medical.Net

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No Lockdown May Worsen Economies

On By ModernMedia

In an article for The Conversation, Michael Smithson of the Australian National University argues that far from there being a toss-up between saving lives with a lockdown, and protecting the economy by keeping a country open, lockdown may in fact protect the economy.

Some arguments even leaned towards Indeed, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in June, “I think we’ve learned that if you shut down the economy, you’re going to create more damage.”

The choice of whether to implement lockdown has been a particularly difficult choice to make for South Africa, beset by deep inequality. Its lockdown caused its economy to shrink by 51% in the second quarter.

Economic and COVID data from 45 countries was sourced for analysis. The data has two outliers; namely China, which implemented a very effective early lockdown, and India, which implemented a strict lockdown that became very ineffective as time went by.

Consumer expenditure, an important indicator of economic activity, was negatively correlated with COVID cases, indicating that the economy fared better with attempts to suppress the virus (at least temporarily).

In European countries, GDP was positively correlated with COVID cases, indicating that economic activity itself drove up the rate of COVID cases. 

The article’s conclusions do have some limitations. The economic data were drawn from the second quarter, and COVID cases were taken as of June 30, but the pandemic hit different countries at different times.