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Highlights of this week’s pandemic
The following are highlights of the newsletter “Smart and Useful Science on COVID-19”. To get the daily newsletter numbers in your inbox, sign up here. Please, a monthly contribution to help this newsletter.
Women’s immune reaction to SARS-CoV-2 is more potent than men’s immune reaction to the virus, according to a study published on 26/08/20 in Nature and covered the same day by Apoorva Mandavilli in The New York Times. This location would possibly explain why men “are twice as likely to become seriously ill and die [of COVID-19] as women of the same age,” Mandavilli writes. The test also suggests that older men may want several injections of a coronavirus vaccine compared to perhaps young women, who may want a single vaccine, according to an immunologist cited in the article. He is at the Heinrich Pette Institute and the University Medical Center in Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany. The test leader, an immunologist at Yale University, is quoted in the article as saying, “Women who are older, even very old, as early as 90, women have a rather intelligent and decent immune reaction” to SARS-CoV-2.
On 26/08/2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted an emergency use authorization to Abbott Laboratories’ $5 portable nasal swab, which returns the effects in 15 minutes, Sheila Kaplan reports to the New York Times (26/08/20). The checkup detects viral fragments called antigens. These controls lack more infections than the slower and widely used controls that are based on a generation called polymer chain reaction (PCR). But the speed of antigen verification, three of which have already been approved by the FDA for emergency use, can be helpful in easing verification delays. Abbott says his new antigen control will take place in September, according to history.
Autopsies of 11 other people who died of COVID-19 revealed that their spleen and lymph nodes lacked sites called germ centers where B cells (immune cells) come together to “mature and refine their antibody reaction to the virus,” writes Jon Cohen of Science ( 25/8/20). Researchers compared the tissues of those who died of COVID-19 with the tissues of 6 other people who died from other causes, according to history. The discovery, which confirms the findings of a previous review in a smaller group, may provide data on the progression of severe COVID-19 cases, according to history. The studies “establish a profound lack of [antibody] reactions in the deceased population of COVID-19 patients,” says a researcher at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), co-author of the smallest and most cited exam in history. Missing germ centers in patients with severe COVID-19 may be simply connected to biochemical “cytokine storms” that occur in the harmful timing phase of the disease, HUST researcher said. Meanwhile, an immunologist at MGH, MIT and Harvard, co-author of the new study, published this month in cell magazine, says it might not be difficult to prevent SARS-CoV-2 with a vaccine. He is quoted as saying, “This is cake.”
The United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and the countries of the European Union have reserved all bulk doses of vaccines in progression to protect against SARS-CoV-2, reports Ewen Callaway of Nature (2four / 08/20). Some of these candidate vaccines may be approved in the 2020 or early 2021 maturity at the earliest, depending on the story. But only “one billion doses will be obtained until the fourth quarter of 2021,” according to a life sciences market research company, according to history. Another organization estimates that 2 to 4 billion doses will be obtained by the end of 2021, the article says. A most sensitive chart of the room shows the main pre-order points by vaccine manufacturer, country and number of doses. At the same time, a foreign effort to discharge doses of vaccines for others living in a total of 92 low- and middle-income people, as well as some richer countries, is “far from raising the $18 billion he says they will need to reach their dose goal,” Callaway reports. Below is a graphic illustrating the advance orders made through several Callaway briefs that “patents and high-level assets are not the ones that prevent an equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines … on the contrary, fair access and affordable costs require collaboration between governments and vaccine manufacturers,” says the director of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative in New York, which would jointly develop a COVID-19 vaccine.
In a 22/08/20 essay for The Washington Post, Elizabeth Svoboda writes that many others in the United States are insensitive to the dangers of SARS-CoV-2, which has led to a reversal of behavior, especially in congested areas. . “This habituation comes from a well-known precept in psychotherapy,” Svoboda writes. “The more we are exposed to a specific threat, the less intimidating it seems.” Some researchers proposed to return to a tighter distance, outdoor masking and house maintenance measures, the trial suggests. But we also want the government to “provide reminders about these orders, especially visual cues, so that others don’t draw their own misconceptions about what’s certain,” he wrote. In any case, we deserve to tame awareness of the diminishing effectiveness of our “instant judgments on the dangers of COVID-19” and make more cautious decisions, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman advises.
Discussions on ventilation in public fitness circles predate the existing pandemic. U.S. infection theories about the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 encouraged engineers in the early 20th century to design steam heating systems for buildings that could be effective in a bloody climate even with the open windows of the apartments, reports Patrick Sisson of Bloomberg CityLab. It’s true. The steam radiators were designed to be used with the windows open, allowing new air to flow, which “the idea of the fitness officers (correctly) […] would prevent him from airborne diseases,” Sisson writes. The work is based on a 1992 book, “The Lost Art of Steam Heating,” through heating systems researcher Dan Holohan. The radiators were designed, according to Holohan, in reaction to an order from the New York City Health Council that the windows deserve to remain open for winter ventilation. “Anyone who opened their windows in January, when their apartment is poorly ventilated, reproduces in a strange way what engineers expected to happen a century ago,” writes Sisson (5/8/20).
You like: “Jerry Seinfeld: So you think New York is” dead”(it’s not)” (24/08/20).
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