COVID-19 notes
Our World in
Data. Total COVID-19 tests per 1000 people. Data as of 8:00pm Sunday Apr 26
youtube, hosted by Bob Wachter, chair of UCSF Dept of Medicine: Update on
Covid-19: The Next Stage of the Pandemic, Virology & Diagnostics
Coronavirus’s
ability to mutate has been vastly underestimated, and mutations affect
deadliness of strains, Chinese study finds
We Still Don’t
Know How the Coronavirus Is Killing Us
How does
coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from
brain to toes
Covid-19 causes
sudden strokes in young adults, doctors say
Young and
middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying from strokes
Doctors sound alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated
or dead. Some didn’t even know they were infected.
US coronavirus
study warns sick children could overwhelm health system
·
Lower risk of fatality from Covid-19 among children
has led to a sense of complacency that does not add up, new research warns
·
‘Urgent’ need to prepare for influx of
paediatric cases with infants and very young most at risk
Paediatric services in the US could be overwhelmed by
thousands of sick infants and young children – an overlooked group which has a
higher risk of serious illness from Covid-19, the disease caused by the
new coronavirus, according to a new study. While children are at a lower risk
of fatality from Covid-19 compared to the elderly, the very young were most at
risk of becoming seriously ill and the sheer weight of population numbers in
the United States meant the need to be prepared for an influx of cases was
urgent, the study said
Permanently
damaged
After examining a small group of patients who recovered from Covid-19 6
weeks ago after only mild symptoms, the doctors reported that "The damage
to the lungs is irreversible"
Coronavirus:
Learning How to Dance. Part 1: A Dancing Masterclass,
or What We Can Learn from Countries Around the World
A month ago we sounded the
alarm with Coronavirus: Why You Must
Act Now. After that, we asked
countries to buy us time with Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance and looked in detail at the US situation
with Coronavirus: Out of Many,
One.
Coronavirus: The
Basic Dance Steps Everybody Can Follow. Part 2 of Coronavirus: Learning How to Dance
We Should Be
Adopting Stricter Measures, Not Loosening the Lockdown
People are growing increasingly impatient over the coronavirus lockdown,
and politicians are now debating whether to loosen measures. From a scientific
point of view this is a disaster. Measures should actually be tightened until
we know more about the virus.
The fact that we might have to live with this until 2022 isn’t
scaremongering -- it’s a realistic scenario. That’s what Harvard professor
Stephen Kissler and researchers working with him have just calculated
for the United States. .. Kissler’s curves depict the catastrophic scenario of
an everyday shutdown that would have to be imposed repeatedly if governments
dared to relax social distancing measures. Depending on the spread of the
disease, people might have to spend up to three-quarters of a year in isolation
to prevent overloading the healthcare system. .. We are only at the beginning
of the pandemic. And the virus has already forced the world to confront an
unbearable dilemma: Living under lockdown with all its social, economic and
psychological consequences versus the risk of allowing the disease to run free.
It would kill millions of people -- not only the frail, but also doctors,
nurses and young people. "How do we get out of this?" the people are
asking, expecting answers from politicians. "How do we get out of
this?" the politicians ask, expecting answers from scientists. Everyone
wants quick answers, because the sun is shining and the cherry trees are
blossoming and people are tired of the shutdown. Science will eventually
provide these answers, but not now. It will take time, a long time. Proper
science requires meticulousness, doubt and tirelessness. And sometimes it has
no choice but to deliver bad news like that in Kissler’s study: Defeating the
virus may take many months, perhaps even years of shutdown. But people don’t
like hearing bad news like this when the sun is shining and they are fed up
with the shutdown….
WHO warns that
few have developed antibodies to Covid-19
Only a tiny proportion of the global population – maybe as few as 2% or
3% – appear to have antibodies in the blood showing they have been infected
with Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization, a finding that bodes
ill for hopes that herd immunity will ease the exit from lockdown.
Getting a handle
on asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection
Flattening the
curve won’t lead to coronavirus turning point, study finds
·
Projections indicate South Korea and New
Zealand are among the best in the global crisis at balancing economics with
disease controls
·
China has been effective in suppressing the
epidemic quickly but the strategy comes at too high a cost, researchers say
Without More
Tests, America Can’t Reopen
And to make matters worse, we’re testing the wrong people.
Even as Donald Trump has delineated his plan to relax social distancing,
the United States remains very much in the dark about who has the coronavirus
and who does not. We have a shortage of COVID-19 tests, and we simultaneously
have the highest number of confirmed cases in the world. Consequently, not every
American who wants a test can get one. Not every health-care worker can get
one. Not even every patient entering a hospital can get one. Because of the
shortages, we are rationing tests, and medical facilities and public-health
officials are prioritizing the sickest patients for them. If the goal is to
restart the American economy, the United States isn’t performing anywhere near
enough tests. Worse still, we are testing the wrong people. To safely reopen
closed businesses and revive American social life, we need to perform many more
tests—and focus them on the people most likely to spread COVID-19, not sick
patients. COVID-19 testing has been an unmitigated failure in this country.
Antibody Test,
Seen as Key to Reopening Country, Does Not Yet Deliver
The tests, many made in China without F.D.A. approval, are often
inaccurate. Some doctors are misusing them. The rollout is nowhere close to the
demand.
IDSA COVID-19
Antibody Testing Primer. Infectious Diseases
Society of America.
“A ‘positive’ [antibody] test is exceptionally difficult to interpret
because the performance of these tests is not well known.”
SARS-CoV-2
Vaccines: Status Report. PDF.
The Current Pipeline for SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines
The development of vaccines for human use can take years, especially when
novel technologies are used that have not been extensively tested for safety or
scaled up for mass production. Because no coronavirus vaccines are on the
market and no large-scale manufacturing capacity for these vaccines exists as yet
(Table 1), we will need to build these processes and capacities. Doing this for
the first time can be tedious and time consuming (Figure 1). CEPI has awarded
funds to several highly innovative players in the field, and many of them will
likely succeed in eventually making a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. However, none of
these companies and institutions have an established pipeline to bring such a
vaccine to late-stage clinical trials that allow licensure by regulatory
agencies, and they do not currently have the capacity to produce the number of
doses needed.
Conclusion: For SARS-CoV-2, vaccines
might come too late to affect the first wave of this pandemic. However, they
might be useful if additional waves occur later or in a post-pandemic scenario
in which SARS-CoV-2 continues to circulate as a seasonal virus. In addition,
lessons learned from handling this outbreak will allow us to be better prepared
in the future. The viruses will keep coming.
Asymptomatic Transmission, the Achilles’ Heel of
Current Strategies to Control Covid-19
Johns Hopkins; School of Public Health: Contact-Tracing
Technology: A Key to Reopening
ACLU: Principles for
Technology-Assisted Contact-Tracing. White paper. PDF.
Test and Trace: Explaining Test and Trace: why it's effective, who's working on it,
and how you can help
Three Ways to
Make Coronavirus Drugs in a Hurry
With no time to make treatments from scratch, researchers search for
existing compounds that deflect harm
… A virus is an unusual beast. Essentially it is a cluster of genetic
material that integrates itself into a cell and takes over some of the cell’s
molecular machinery, using it to assemble an army of viral copies. Those clones
burst out of the cell, destroying it, and go on to infect nearby cells. Viruses
are hard to kill off completely because of their cellular integration—they hide
within their hosts. And they have explosive reproductive rates. Because total
eradication is so hard, antiviral drugs instead aim to limit replication to low
levels that cannot hurt the body.
Regular Related Fare:
Hussman: Containing the Crisis.
There are three important topics in this comment.
One addresses public health, extends the discussion of
SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) that I began on February 2, when the U.S. had only 5
cases, and the continuing need for crisis response.
One addresses financial market conditions, the implications of recent
Federal Reserve actions – partly appropriate, partly misguided, illegal, and
unlikely to survive challenge from Congress – and the appropriate investment
decision-tree in any event.
One addresses the U.S. economic situation, prospects for recovery,
and the structure of economic policies that would be most supportive of
families, businesses, and near-term resilience.
ECRI: The Three D’s
and High-Frequency Leading Indicators
In terms of depth, this recession is extraordinarily deep…. In terms of diffusion, this recession is
certainly severe…. But on the third “D,” duration, this recession could be
among the shortest on record.
Five threats to
US food supply chains
Coronavirus
pandemic 'will cause famine of biblical proportions'
Governments must act now to stop 265 million starving, warns World Food
Programme boss
Unemployment To
Soar As Small Business Firings Start
Americans
prioritize staying home and worry restrictions will lift too fast
Forget 100yr bonds!... Soros: The EU Should
Issue Perpetual Bonds
BofA: The End Of
The Lockdown Will Be The Catalyst That Ends The Stock Rally
Regular Fare:
David Graeber: The truth is
out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it
L. Randall Wray: The Myth of
“Helicopter Money”
The track record of macro
forecasts has been atrocious; don’t expect it to be better after covid-19.
Fiscal Monitor -
April 2020
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Why CO2 Isn’t
Falling More During a Global Lockdown
No Warming, No
War: How Militarism Fuels the Climate Crisis—and Vice Versa. Pdf
David Murrin calls himself a global
forecaster; seems to have some interesting insights; subscription seems
reasonably cheap; might be worth following. Here are his 2012 notes on Climate Change, including:
Big Thoughts:
Revolts and
revolutions: how history reveals the ways coronavirus could change our world
forever
From the Plague of Justinian to the Black Death, history shows epidemics
don't just change our lives. They can fundamentally change the way the world
works
TECHNO-TYRANNY:
How the US National Security State is Using Coronavirus to Fulfill an Orwellian
Vision.
Long Read:
A PLANETARY
PANDEMIC
This number of nlr opens with a set of texts on the covid-19 crisis. Coursing round the world, the virus plays the role of an etching acid
that reveals the lineaments—political, economic, social, cultural—of the uneven
landscape beneath. Less lethal than such zoonotic forerunners
as sars or mers, as Mike Davis spells out below, it is highly infectious,
ripping through our 7-billion-strong species in a matter of months. It is this speed that motivates the lockdowns of public activity which
have transformed the covid-19 outbreak into a socio-economic disaster.
Famously, the initial vectors of contagion were the networks of globalization,
cultural and economic: manufacturing supply chains, tourism,
international evangelical gatherings and overseas students scattered its
microbes from Wuhan to Qom and greater Milan; pilgrims and ski resorts helped
to disperse it. Proselytizing Muslims (the Tablighi Jamaat) and Christians (the
Seoul-based Shincheonji Church of Jesus), with their fellow-worshippers in
Mulhouse and Rio, were mega-spreaders. Students from Wuhan’s giant university
complex travelled back to their homes in South and Southeast Asia. As nlr goes to
press, the pandemic is making its way across the us, from nyc to Detroit and
New Orleans, and seeding itself through Latin America and Africa, where the
impact of co-infection with endemic deadly diseases like tb, malaria and hiv is
still unknown.
Yet contra these global networks, the political
agencies taking charge, one by one, are nation-states, summoned back from the
secondary status to which laissez-faire ideology had consigned them—and now
resuming, as if in war time, their foundational responsibility for public
safety. The virus has been a Rorschach test for ruling parties and
national-political cultures alike. In the US, a bellowing hypochondriac in the
White House, ambitious state governors honing their profiles, a bi-partisan
Congressional bail-out for big business and tougher sanctions on Iran. In the
uk, Churchillian sentiment plastering over critical shortages and medics’
deaths. In the EU, assorted neoliberal regimes squabbling over how to press
home their prior political agendas. Below, contributions from Mumbai, Surabaya
and São Paulo illuminate the particular character of the unfolding crises in
Modi’s India, Jokowi’s Indonesia and Bolsonaro’s Brazil; an Iranian scholar of
public health details her country’s struggles to combat the virus under
geopolitical lockdown; and Taggart Murphy reflects on the relevance of
deep-structural geo-cultural contrasts between East and West.
Across this landscape, covid-19 has laid bare the vertiginous social
divides—notoriously, New York’s: laden SUVs heading for the Hamptons, while
overwhelmed hospitals in Queens fill unmarked graves on Hart Island—even as
these are deepened by the economic fall-out of the lockdowns. In the rich world, it reveals the shallow nature of the post-2008
recoveries: the growth in low-paid service-sector jobs has been
catastrophically reversed, with 10 million jobless Americans scrambling
to register for benefits in the first two weeks of the shutdown, and estimates
of between 15 per cent (Goldman Sachs) and 30 per cent (St Louis Federal
Reserve) for the coming rise in unemployment and economic inactivity. The
negative-demand shock may cut firms’ revenues by 50–90 per cent, and whole
sectors—retail, hospitality, sport, live entertainment—have zero earnings. How much of the G20’s promised $8 trillion in loans and credit
guarantees percolates down to small businesses and laid-off workers remains to
be seen. The demand shock from the West hammers a world economy still struggling
to recover from the end of the commodities super-cycle and burdened by debt,
much of it denominated in strengthening dollars. Oil has sunk below $35 a
barrel; remittances and tourism revenues have been slashed. Welfare is minimal
across most of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia,
where lockdowns are enforced with lathis and sjamboks. With further waves of the virus expected over the next six to eighteen
months, global supply shocks have yet to kick in.
In
an intervention from the philosophers’ debate in Italy, Marco D’Eramo’s
contribution here discusses the consequences of the ‘states of exception’ now
imposed across 170 countries. The cultural response to the coronavirus—the
myriad personal and political reflections, of which we publish an outstanding
example in an extract from film-maker Ai Xiaoming’s ‘Wuhan Diary’, a
multi-media record from the epicentre of the pandemic—was born online,
entangled with the data harvests reaped from our laptops and phones by capital
and the state. The world after covid-19 seems set to be one of
heavily indebted, austerity-prone states, bailed-out corporations, hungry,
impoverished working classes and expanded personal-data surveillance.
Yet two things may have changed for the better. First: albeit in authoritarian
fashion, governments for the first time in generations have had to put public
health above profit-making; if that can happen once, it can happen again.
Second: for many, the crisis has provided a rare experience of thinking
globally, beyond the walls of our own cultures. It has become ordinary to
conceive our species as a whole, under external threat; but also to feel for
doctors and nurses in Italy or Iran, to have a sense of the distance from Wuhan
to Qom, to ask how they do things in Sweden or Korea. Hopefully, some of that
will last. …
Other Fare:
I, for one, will attest to this: Insomnia and
Vivid Dreams on the Rise With COVID-19 Anxiety
How COVID-19 Has
Impacted Media Consumption, by Generation
What Can Daniel
Defoe’s “Plague Year” Teach Us About Coronavirus?
A novel written in 1722 offers a surprisingly relevant blueprint to navigating
a 2020 pandemic
What the Great
Pandemic Novels Teach Us
Quotes of the Week:
From Chris Whalen: "Fannie and Freddie have a 0.25% reserve
against their portfolios which now have forbearance on 4.9% of their
loans. The math is not looking good
here."
Jimmy Dore: re: Pelosi, “When you’re so oblivious
& outta touch that even Trump lampoons you for it.”
The Real Reason
to Wear a Mask
Much of the confusion around masks stems from the conflation of two very
different uses.
Masks can be worn to protect the wearer from getting infected or masks
can be worn to protect others from being infected by the wearer. Protecting the
wearer is difficult: It requires medical-grade respirator masks, a proper fit,
and careful putting on and taking off. But masks can also be worn to prevent
transmission to others, and this is their most important use for society. If we
lower the likelihood of one person’s infecting another, the impact is
exponential, so even a small reduction in those odds results in a huge decrease
in deaths. Luckily, blocking transmission outward at the source is much easier.
It can be accomplished with something as simple as a cloth mask
Fun Ironic(?) Fare:
as of January 27th: The Countries
Best And Worst Prepared For An Epidemic. Forbes, not The Onion.
Tweets of the Week:
Trailer (2 minute) for the new horror movie coming this spring, Corona Man.
Pic of the Week:
the leaders of the countries with the best performing
#COVID19 pandemic response
