Good afternoon, this is the KBOO News Afternoon update for Tuesday, April 28th, 2020.
The World Health Organisation has issued a clarification after it tweeted about antibody tests and 'immunity passports, saying,' "There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.” The WHO took down the old tweet and instead said: "Earlier today we tweeted about a new WHO scientific brief on 'immunity passports'. The thread caused some concern & we would like to clarify: We expect that most people who are infected with #COVID19 will develop an antibody response that will provide some level of protection.”
The rate of death in the United States over the past months has exceeded the normal numbers by fifteen thousand in addition to those certified to be caused by COVID-19, so that the number of deaths from the disease is likelier 71,000 than 56,000, according to the Yale School of Public Health. The adjusted toll greatly exceeds the number of US combat deaths in the Vietnam War. Positive tests for the pandemic virus are at over half a million in the US, though testing is still restricted and sporadic, absent Federal coordination and distribution of swabs and reagents. The New York Times says "A group of experts convened by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics has called for five million tests a day by early June, ramping up to 20 million per day by late July." The global death toll for the first wave of the virus is at 212,000, with three million confirmed cases. Ninety-two persons are known to have died of the coronavirus in Oregon, and 764 have died in Washington State.
According to the South China Morning Post, The coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin, according to a new study by French scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The Post writes that genetic analysis showed that the dominant types of the viral strains in France belonged to a clade – or group with a common ancestor – that did not come from China or from Italy, the earliest hotspot in Europe. The research paper has not yet been subject to peer review. Its authors say “The French outbreak has been mainly seeded by one or several variants of this clade … we can infer that the virus was silently circulating in France in February.” France detected the virus in late January, before any other country in Europe. A few patients with a travel history that included China's Hubei province were sampled on January 24 and tested positive.
COVID-19 appears to linger in the air in crowded spaces or rooms that lack ventilation, according to a new Chinese study. Researchers, led by Ke Lan of Wuhan University, set up aerosol virus traps in and around two hospitals. The researchers found bits of the virus’s genetic material floating in the air of hospital toilets, in an indoor space housing large crowds, and in rooms where medical staff take off protective gear. The study did not try to determine whether the aerosolized virus would be active enough to cause infection. They found few aerosols in patient wards, supermarkets and residential buildings. Concentrations were also higher in two areas that had large crowds passing through, including an indoor space near one of the hospitals.
The Madrid newspaper ABC says a vaccine is being developed by Italian and British researchers that may be ready for use by this September. The CEO of the Italian company Advent-Irbm, located in Pomezia (Lazio), Italy,announced the project yesterday. The firm operates in the sector of molecular biotechnology and biomedical sciences, and is associated with the Jenner Institute of the University of Oxford. According to the Spanish paper, the Oxford researchers confirm that they are one step away from achieving a Covid-19 vaccine.Scientists at Advent-Irbm and the Jenner Institute are using technology that has already been successfully experimented with on other coronaviruses in the past. Specifically, the trials demonstrated the efficacy of a vaccine to combat MERS, a serious respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus closely related to Covid-19. That has allowed some 6,000 healthy volunteers to speed up trials and schedule a new coronavirus vaccine trial in May, hoping to demonstrate that the vaccine is safe and effective.
- KBOO