Coronavirus News (107)

Medical team in Bangladesh suggests combination of Ivermectin and Doxycycline for COVID-19 treatment
Coronavirus: Brazil overtakes Spain and Italy as new cases grow Brazil has overtaken Spain and Italy to become the country with the fourth-largest number of confirmed coronavirus infections in the world. ....... Officials on Saturday reported 14,919 new cases in the past 24 hours, taking the total to 233,142. Only the US, Russia and the UK have higher numbers. ...... The death toll in Brazil over 24 hours was 816, bringing the total to 15,633 - the world's fifth-highest figure. ........

the real figure may be far higher due to a lack of testing.

....... The mayor of the country's most populous city, São Paulo, warned on Sunday that

the city's health system could collapse

. Bruno Covas said the public hospitals in the city reached 90% capacity for emergency beds, with demand still growing. ......... "Brazil is only testing people who end up in the hospital" ........ We don't have a real policy to manage the outbreak .......

the real number of infections was 15 times higher than the official figure.

....... Mr Bolsonaro continues to oppose lockdown measures. He has downplayed the virus as "a little flu" and has said the spread of Covid-19 is inevitable. ........ not enough Brazilians are staying at home to slow the spread of the virus ........ Mexico has recently seen a spike in new infections, while

Ecuador saw its health system collapse in April

. ........ The sharp rise in cases in Latin America has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to say the Americas are currently at the centre of the pandemic..... In March, the WHO had labelled Europe the "epicentre of the pandemic"

If 80% of Americans Wore Masks, COVID-19 Infections Would Plummet, New Study Says There’s compelling evidence that Japan, Hong Kong, and other East Asian locales are doing it right and we should really, truly mask up—fast. ........ The formula? Always social distance in public and, most importantly, wear a mask. ...... The day before yesterday, 21 people died of COVID-19 in Japan. In the United States, 2,129 died. ......... total U.S. deaths now at a staggering 76,032 and Japan’s fatalities at 577. Japan’s population is about 38% of the U.S., but even adjusting for population, the Japanese death rate is a mere 2% of America’s. .......... This comes despite Japan having no lockdown, still-active subways, and many businesses that have remained open—reportedly including karaoke bars, although Japanese citizens and industries are practicing social distancing where they can. Nor have the Japanese broadly embraced contact tracing, a practice by which health authorities identify someone who has been infected and then attempt to identify everyone that person might have interacted with—and potentially infected. So how does Japan do it? .........

nearly everyone there is wearing a mask ...... every one of us should be wearing a mask—whether surgical or homemade, scarf or bandana

........ a cultural difference between East Asia, where masks have been routinely worn for decades to fend off pollution and germs ........ how effective certain masks are at blocking the invisible micro-droplets of moisture that spray out of our mouths when we exhale or speak, or our noses when we sneeze, which scientists believe are significant vectors for spreading the coronavirus. ....... it works, along with social distancing, to flatten the curve of infections as we wait for treatments and vaccines to be developed—while also allowing people to go out and some businesses to reopen .........

masks are very, very important

........ “This is the goal,” De Kai maintained. “For 80 or 90% of the population to be wearing masks.” Anything less, he added, doesn’t work as well. “If you get down to 30 or 40%, you get almost no [beneficial] effect at all.” ........ “I started to go out just to buy food in mid-March,” recalled economist Guy-Philippe Goldstein. “I was the only one wearing a mask, and people were making fun of me. They aren’t now, although there still aren’t enough people in Paris wearing masks.” This may be one reason why only a few states in the U.S. currently require people to always wear masks when they are out in public, although many states require masks for certain workers, for entering businesses, and on public transportation. Many cities and counties, including Denver and Los Angeles County, require them too. Whether you’re in a blue state or a red one, you don’t want to become one of De Kai’s red dots.

Lockdown, Shutdown, Breakdown: India's COVID Policy Must Be Driven By Data, Not Fear If you can't solve the problem, you are not employing evidence. And India's reaction to the coronavirus is a classic illustration of this truth. .......... A lockdown cannot be imposed on a whim or gut feeling. Crucially, it should never be imposed to garner approval ratings. There has to be a science behind it; the decision must be evidence based ........ The lockdown in India, now all set to enter its fourth stage, is laughable. It was imposed from March 25. As per the WHO, there had been a total of 434 cases till that day, with a cumulative 9 deaths. Italy had 63,927 cases with 6077 deaths, and the US had 42,164 cases and 571 deaths. ........ It is now May 17 and India has seen the total number of cases rise to above 90,000 with 2872 deaths. Around 120 patients died yesterday. The lockdown has obviously not worked one bit. Its timing was too premature, draconian measures were imposed much before cases had begun to mount. No attempt was made by the government or the media to assure the public that all data on COVID-19 pointed to more than 80% people developing mild or no symptoms. The majority of infective people would simply shrug off the virus with absolutely no harm to themselves, especially if they were young (as most Indians are) or had no underlying disease. .............

more than 20,000 Indians die every day because of a variety of reasons.

........ Millions of people have been displaced, lakhs of businesses are shuttered, all schools closed, restaurants and hotels shut, and millions are without jobs or any means of sustenance. The poor have been hit like never before and the middle class too will soon begin to crumble. Crores of children are corralled with unimaginable psychological adverse effects, domestic and child abuse that largely go unreported must be substantially elevated. These matters are well known. ......... Most public health doctors worth their salt will endorse the fact that a lockdown if needed must coincide with the peak incidence of cases; it should never be imposed too early or too late. ........ The logic behind flattening the curve was to buy time to improve logistics in hospitals, get more beds and ventilators. And also to ramp up the ability to test for the virus and check for past infection (antibody tests). ........ a younger population cohort and much higher temperatures than Wuhan, Europe and the US. ........

a nation which attempts an unmanned landing on the moon does not have the scientific intellect to set up an antibody test over five long months. Worse, no one seems to care.

Even the medical fraternity, which should have been screaming for serological testing for themselves has drowned itself in deafening silence. ....... New York state too tested 3,000 people for antibodies to find that 14% had been infected; in fact 21% of New York City inhabitants were infected. The implication, again, was that almost 2.7 million people had got infected. The good news was that armed with this knowledge, governor Andrew Cuomo could publicly declare an infection fatality rate of 0.5%. ..........

Most doctors are so scared that they prefer staying not six but 12 feet away from a patient.

......... there will be far more deaths due to heart attacks, cancers and strokes in the next two to four years, than COVID-19 .......... This virus has no respect for caste, creed, religion or political affiliation. It demands that we shed our intellectual laziness and get to know the truth in order to tackle it. ........ almost 50% of deaths in Europe including Sweden have been in old age homes. ....... So terrified are we of the virus the authorities went to the extent of sealing Delhi from both NOIDA and Haryana. ......... In India, we have faltered at every stage of this epidemic. We never got PCR testing done on time, even today we do not have a validated serology test, we have absolutely no randomised data on any intervention attempted during this pandemic, an ill-timed lockdown was inflicted without any scientific evidence, we have no idea when was the peak of new cases, even today we do not know the virus genome, and crucially we have absolutely no clue of the infection rate.

We all wait with bated breath for a vaccine to materialise in the next 6 to 18 months, in the meantime we are the classic deer in the headlights.

It is imperative that we read up on this virus, attain some clarity while shedding our trepidation. ........... The obsequious babu in his zest for lockdowns is totally oblivious of the fact that there are hundreds of other serious ailments apart from COVID-19 demanding both attention and treatment. Hospitals will shy away from doing what they are trained to do because if you spot a case you will close it down. Please remember that getting infected by this virus is not at all a death warrant; most people (80-90%) get mild to moderate symptoms. The more cases the cases pick up, the greater the immunity the community is developing. ...........

I wonder how many hospitals have been sealed in New York City, London, Madrid, Paris, Manchester, or Berlin? Lots of them would have, if the Indian babus had their way.

Trump will lose in a landslide because of the economy, new election model predicts Unemployment is spiking at an unprecedented rate. Consumer spending is vanishing. And GDP is collapsing. History shows that dreadful economic trends like these spell doom for sitting presidents seeking reelection. ........

The coronavirus recession will cause Trump to suffer a "historic defeat" in November .... Trump will lose in a landslide, capturing just 35% of the popular vote

........ "The economy would still be in a worse state than at the depth of the Great Depression" ........ Trump will badly lose the electoral college by a margin of 328 to 210. ............ seven battleground states will flip to Democrats: Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina. ...... No one was predicting a 20% unemployment or a 40% collapse in GDP six months ago. Now, those are the consensus projections. ......... Strong turnout for Democrats could cause Trump to lose Florida, Texas, Arizona, Tennessee and Georgia

What is herd immunity and can it stop the coronavirus? Once enough people get Covid-19, it will stop spreading on its own. But the costs will be devastating. ............. There are basically three ways to stop the Covid-19 disease for good. One involves extraordinary restrictions on free movement and assembly, as well as aggressive testing, to interrupt its transmission entirely. That may be impossible now that the virus is in over 100 countries. The second is a vaccine that could protect everyone, but it still needs to be developed. ...... A third is potentially effective but horrible to consider: just wait until enough people get it. .......... If the virus keeps spreading, eventually so many people will have been infected and (if they survive) become immune that the outbreak will fizzle out on its own as the germ finds it harder and harder to find a susceptible host. This phenomenon is known as herd immunity. ........ given what they know about the virus, it could end up infecting about 60% of the world’s population, even within the year. ......... Boris Johnson indicated that country’s official strategy might be to put on a stiff upper lip and let the disease run its course. ......... so many people will become severely ill—and a sudden boom in sick people needing hospital or ICU care will overwhelm hospitals. ......... even if the pandemic is drawn out over time, it may still take herd immunity to bring it to an end .......... “Herd immunity is not our goal or policy. It’s a scientific concept.” ....... it is ghastly to contemplate the prospect of billions being infected by the coronavirus, which has an estimated fatality rate per infection somewhere around 1% ............. Vaccines create herd immunity too, either when given widely or sometimes when administered in a “ring” around a new case of a rare infection. That’s how diseases like smallpox were eradicated and why polio is close to being erased. Various vaccine efforts are under way for this coronavirus, but they may not be ready for more than a year. ......... what happened in 2017, when drug maker Sanofi quietly abandoned a Zika vaccine in development after funding dried up: there simply wasn’t much of a market any longer ........

For herd immunity to take hold, people must become resistant after they are infected.

.......... About 80,000 people have recovered from the coronavirus already, and it’s likely they are now resistant, although the degree of immunity remains unknown.

“I would be surprised, but not totally surprised, if people did not become immune”

......... The R0 for the coronavirus is between 2 and 2.5, scientists estimate (pdf), meaning each infected person passes it to about two other people, absent measures to contain the contagion. ........ “That is similar to pandemic flu of 1918, and it implies that the end of this epidemic is going to require nearly 50% of the population to be immune, either from a vaccine, which is not on the immediate horizon, or from natural infection” ....... Measles, one of the most easily transmitted diseases with an R0 over 12, requires about 90% of people to be resistant for unprotected people to get a free ride from the herd. That’s why new outbreaks can start when even small numbers of people opt out of the measles vaccine. ......... Whether it’s 50% or 60% or 80%, those figures imply

billions infected and millions killed

around the world, although the more slowly the pandemic unfolds, the greater the chance for new treatments or vaccines to help.

New Jersey just raised its threat level for white supremacists to 'high,' well above ISIS and al Qaeda