France revokes decree allowing hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatment
https://www.cbc.ca/n...tment-1.5586220 When Chinese officials in the city of Wuhan discovered a cluster of just six COVID-19 cases around two weeks ago—the first cases there in more than a month—they quickly set an ambitious plan to test the entire city of roughly 11 million and crush a potential second wave of infection. And they initially planned to try to do it in just 10 days.
Ten days out, they nearly met that goal. Wuhan Municipal Health Commission swabbed more than 9 million residents and tested more than 6.5 million of those swabs for coronavirus genetic material between May 15 and May 24, according to state media.
Laboratories in the city went from conducting 46,000 tests a day to as many as 1.47 million in the screening sprint, according to The New York Times. The Times notes that in the US, New York tested 1.7 million people since March 4, a nearly three-month time frame, according to The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project.
Wuhan officials pulled off the mass screening in a staggered neighborhood-by-neighborhood sweep. Then they sped up swab processing by running tests in batches. That is, they combined material from five to ten swabs and tested the pooled sample all at once. If any of the pooled swabs were positive for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, officials could go back to that handful of people and retest them. This type of batched testing works well to quickly go through a population when cases are rare.
So far, the testing campaign has identified 218 asymptomatic cases, Wuhan officials reported. Those cases are now in quarantine.
https://arstechnica....creen-in-wuhan/ A statement by the Foreign Ministry said the US Embassy posted advisories on its Twitter page on May 13 and May 25 that said “Dar es Salaam is not safe due to the presence of a large number of COVID-19 patients.”
The advisory also claimed that several hospitals in Dar es Salaam were “overwhelmed by patients.”
The Tanzanian Foreign Ministry said such claims were not true and were likely to distress and cause panic among Tanzanian citizens and foreign nationals, according to the report.
Tanzania has recorded 509 COVID-19 cases, including 21 deaths and 183 recoveries to date, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University of the US.
https://www.aa.com.t...warning/1855065 In the study, published on the bioRxiv pre-print server, the authors identified ciliated cells as the major target of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The bronchial epithelium acts as a protective barrier against allergens and pathogens. Cilia removes mucus and other particles from the respiratory tract. Their findings offer insight into how the virus causes disease.
Wilen and post-doctoral associate Mia Alfajaro, Ph.D., infected HBECs in an air-liquid interface with SARS-CoV-2. Over three days, they used single-cell RNA sequencing to identify signatures of infection dynamics such as the number of infected cells across cell types, and whether SARS-CoV-2 activated an immune response in infected cells. Van Dijk, who specializes in single-cell technologies, utilized advanced algorithms to develop working hypotheses.
"Machine learning allows us to generate hypotheses. It's a different way of doing science. We go in with as few hypotheses as possible. Measure everything we can measure, and the algorithms present the hypothesis to us," he said.
The researchers collaborated with Tamas Horvath, Ph.D., and Klara Szigeti-Buck to use electron microscopy to learn about the structural basis of the virus and target cells. These observations provide insights about host-virus interaction to measure SARS-CoV-2 cell tropism, or the ability of the virus to infect different cell types, as identified by the algorithms. After three days, thousands of cultured cells became infected. The authors analyzed data from the infected cells along with neighboring bystander cells. They observed ciliated cells were 83% of the infected cells. These cells were the first and primary source of infection throughout the study. The virus also targeted other epithelial cell types including basal and club cells. The goblet, neuroendocrine, tuft cells, and ionocytes were less likely to become infected.
https://medicalxpres...jor-covid-.htmlMOSCOW, May 26. /TASS/. Researchers from China's Lanzhou University have established that the areas with an average temperature of 5-15 degrees Celsius account for over half of the novel coronavirus cases across the globe, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.
Researches have studied correlation between environmental parameters and the global spread of coronavirus. Their work is based on 3.75 million coronavirus cases reported between January 21 and May 6 in 185 countries of the globe. As a result, they established that 60% of the COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the regions with moderate air temperatures between 5 and 15 degrees Celsius. The lead author of the study, Huang Zhongwei stressed that the researches cannot rely on the conjecture that the spread of coronavirus will stop with an increase in the temperature.
Besides, they found out that 73.8% of the infected persons lived in the regions with absolute humidity of three to ten grams per cubic meter. The experts note in their work that they are considering only natural factors influencing the spread of the virus, but other factors exist as well. The research was published in the Science of The Total Environment magazine.
https://tass.com/science/1160589 As Governor Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful healthcare industry group suddenly poured more than $1m into a Democratic committee backing his campaign.
Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for healthcare industry officials, according to legal experts.
Critics say Cuomo removed a key deterrent against nursing home and hospital corporations cutting corners in ways that jeopardize lives. As those critics now try to repeal the provision during this final week of Albany’s legislative session, they assert that data prove such immunity is correlating to higher nursing home death rates during the pandemic – both in New York and in other states enacting similar immunity policies.
long
https://www.theguard...-execs-immunitybut wait, there's more
Gov. Cuomo appointed dozens of generous donors to a board helping advise the state on reopening and lifting New York coronavirus restrictions, the Daily News found.
Thirty-seven Cuomo donors who’ve collectively given him nearly $1 million were put on the “New York Forward Reopening Advisory Board” created last month, according to a News analysis of campaign filings.
Nineteen advisory board members have donated at least $10,000 to Cuomo campaigns and all but two have given $1,000 or more.
The Cuomo donors account for 28% of all the advisory board’s 134 members – and 21 have shelled out $427,550 for the governor since January 2017 alone.
https://www.nydailyn...d2w4-story.htmlCOVID-19 Spreads To Brazil’s Offshore Oilfields
https://oilprice.com...-Oilfields.html MOSCOW, May 27. /TASS/. Consumers’ oil expenses will drop by $1 trillion in 2020 to $2.5 trillion as a result of the pandemic-related quarantine measures globally, the International Energy Agency (IEA) wrote in its report on energy investment on Wednesday.
After the Covid-19 crisis brought large swathes of the world economy to a standstill in a matter of months, the Agency now expects global investment to plummet by 20%, or almost $400 bln, compared with last year. Prior to the outbreak, its experts projected energy investment to rise by 2% in 2020, which could have become the largest investment growth since the 2014 crisis.
"A combination of falling demand, lower prices and a rise in cases of non-payment of bills means that energy revenues going to governments and industry are set to fall by well over $1 trillion in 2020," according to the report.
https://tass.com/economy/1160883 PARIS, France – The energy industry is set to suffer a record drop in investment due to the coronavirus fallout, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday, May 27, and while renewables are likely to fare better than oil, any swift economic recovery could create a global fuel crunch.
In its annual report on energy investments, the Paris-based IEA estimated the plunge will be of the order of one-fifth from 2019 levels, or almost $400 billion, as firms slash spending amid slumping demand for energy.
Shale oil producers that catapulted the United States to the world's top crude nation stand to suffer the worst decline, the IEA said.
"All the energy sectors – oil, gas, renewables – everything is affected, but the biggest impact is on shale oil," the agency's director Fatih Birol told Agence France-Presse in an interview.
"Total oil investments we expect to decline one-third this year whereas the shale industry will see a decline of about 50%."
However, spending in renewable power projects is expected to fall by only around 10% for the year, the report said.
https://www.rappler....ort-coronavirus Only about half of Americans say they would get a COVID-19 vaccine if the scientists working furiously to create one succeed, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
That's surprisingly low considering the being put into the global race for a vaccine against the coronavirus that's sparked a pandemic since first emerging from China late last year. But more people might eventually roll up their sleeves: The poll, released Wednesday, found 31% simply weren't sure if they'd get vaccinated. One-in-five said they'd refuse.
Health experts already worry about the whiplash if vaccine promises like President Trump's goal of a 300 million-dose stockpile by January fail. Only time and science will tell -- and the new poll shows the public is indeed skeptical.
https://www.cbsnews....icans-covid-19/Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir has been heralded as our best hope in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, the antiviral drug doesn’t seem of much help to patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. And while the company’s clever rollout has generated excitement among investors, politicians, and the public, a combination of generic drugs that appears to be more effective in fighting the coronavirus has flown under the radar.
*snip*
It is amid these feelings of scarcity and indebtedness that Gilead is setting the price for its antiviral medicine. The company, which has already arranged for distribution of remdesivir in 127 countries, is expected to begin selling it commercially as soon as June. And while a 10-day course of the drug, which was developed as a potential Ebola treatment with at least $79 million in U.S. government funding, costs only about $10 to produce, according to an estimate by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, its market price is expected to be several hundred times that amount.
Still, price gouging isn’t what has many scientists upset about remdesivir. It’s the fact that the coronavirus drug that has boosted hopes and sent Gilead’s stock price (and according to some analysts, the entire stock market) soaring doesn’t seem to do much for coronavirus patients.
“Remdesivir doesn’t work at all, as far as I can tell, or has only a minor effect,” said William Haseltine, a scientist who has spent decades studying viruses and helped lead the U.S. government response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “It is comparable to Tamiflu and maybe not even as good,” Haseltine added, referring to another antiviral drug that has been available by prescription for 20 years and is expected to be sold over the counter in the coming months.
https://theintercept...ivir-treatment/
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