4/28/20 - smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19
SCIENCE:
1) Newsweek published yesterday afternoon a stunning story (4/27/20) by Fred Guterl, Naveed Jamali, and Tom O’Connor on the topic of how SARS-CoV-2 jumped from infecting animals to infecting humans. Yes, the virus originated in a wild animal population, and some researchers have ruled out a malicious release of a lab-created virus. But the new virus plausibly didn’t spread to humans from a market in China, the story states. Instead, the virus could have escaped accidentally (not been released intentionally) from an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan — a lab worker could get infected and "go home for the night, and unwittingly spread the virus to others,” the story states. Researchers at this lab do “gain-of-function” research — genetic engineering of new viruses to see if they could spread to humans. The research, funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development, so you know, us, is done in various countries these days as part of efforts to protect the public from virus strains that could evolve and cause outbreaks, not for weaponizing purposes, the story states. This theory comes from a 3/27/20 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report, the story states, but there is no evidence for the theory. The takeaway, Guterl wrote to me yesterday, is: “The circumstantial evidence is strong enough to warrant putting the lab’s programs and practices at the heart of the investigation. And it’s worth looking anew at whether scientists, in their efforts to protect the public from the threat of natural pathogens, overreached.” So, the lab should be investigated to see what happened, but that likely will never happen, Guterl says: https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503.
2) In several countries and cities, total death counts are higher this year or month-to-month in 2020 than they were on average in the previous five years, or in a comparable 30-day period, according to various reports. These “excess mortality" insights suggest, to the surprise of no watchers of COVID-19 data, that a large percentage of deaths due to the disease are going undocumented, with estimates ranging from 24 percent to 60 percent higher. Reports include an analysis in a 4/26/20 Financial Times story by John Burn-Murdoch, Valentina Romei, and Chris Giles: https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c. John Burn-Murdoch explains some of the Financial Times reporting in this “unrolled” thread from Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1254461123753054209.html. A similar story, reporting on an analysis by a Yale School of Public Health research team, came out 4/27/20 in The Washington Post, by Emma Brown, Andrew Ba Tran, Beth Reinhard, and Monica Ulmanu: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/covid-19-death-toll-undercounted/. Here’s a similar story by Jin Wu, Allison McCann, Josh Katz, and Elian Peltier for The New York Times (4/27/20): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html.
PUBLIC HEALTH:
3) Andy Slavitt, former Medicare, Medicaid & Affordable Care Act head for President Obama, writes at Medium that widespread distribution of high-quality, medical-grade, reusable masks, like N-95 respirators used in hospitals, could defeat the new coronavirus outbreak, even in the absence of good treatments or an effective vaccine (4/25/20): https://medium.com/@ASlavitt/the-three-most-likely-scenarios-to-defeat-the-coronavirus-5a63ac30aec8.
HEALTH CARE:
4) The use of surgical masks, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says are an “acceptable alternative” to N-95 masks given the current shortage, "is almost certainly fueling illness among front-line health workers, who likely make up about 11% of all known COVID-19 cases,” write Shefali Luthra and Christina Jewett for Kaiser Health News (4/28/20): https://khn.org/news/widely-used-surgical-masks-are-putting-health-care-workers-at-serious-risk/.
AT HOME:
5) Temporary meat shortages in the U.S. are possible as a result of the closures of meat processing plants due to SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks among workers, report H. Claire Brown and Jessica Fu for The Counter. Their 4/17/20 story features a map of all the U.S. meat plant closures. But the supply chain for meat is unlikely to break down in the “near term," their story states. Currently, nearly a billion pounds of meat is held in cold storage across the nation. Livestock farms are backlogged with overgrown animals. The hold-up is the meatpacker labor force, reduced by workers out due to COVID-19 and probably slowed by more distancing, the team reports. Meatpackers now must break supplies into portion sizes for general consumers, not for restaurants, school campuses, and food service. This could raise meat prices at grocery stores: https://thecounter.org/covid-19-shutters-meatpacking-plants-meat-shortages-smithfield-south-dakota/. Smaller butcher shops are picking up the slack for larger grocery stores, another story at The Counter suggests. To preserve social distancing, some butcher shops have converted to sidewalk pick-ups, sort of like drive-thru service, per the 4/10/20 story by Tod Auman and Sam Bloch: https://thecounter.org/covid-19-coronavirus-local-butcher-meat-supply-pennsylvania/. Meanwhile, many farms and processing plants that provide grain, produce, and dairy are bigger, with some dumping food or planning to. Some are “too big to pivot,” as The Counter tweeted 4/27/20 about this story, while others convert their operations to make prepared foods, grab-and-go boxes, meals for food banks, or to cooking higher-quality food, reports Lela Nargi for The Counter (4/27/20): https://thecounter.org/covid-19-produce-dumping-food-banks/. I derived a lot of above from this thread on Twitter that didn’t preserve links:
6) Some people have mistaken stay-at-home orders as prohibitions against outdoor exercise even for healthy people, writes Anna Medaris Miller for Business Insider (4/25/20). Poorly worded messages haven’t helped, the story states. As long as people outdoors keep a safe distance from others and wear a mask, the risk of spreading or contracting SARS-CoV-2 is highly unlikely, Miller reports. “Even if you come within 6 feet of someone else for a fleeting moment, your chances of spreading or contracting the virus are slim,” Miller writes: https://www.businessinsider.com/you-can-still-go-outside-while-quarantining-sheltering-in-place-2020-4.
7) Freelance journalist Katherine Harmon Courage wrote a piece for The Washington Post about how to manage working at home while also caring for a baby or toddler (4/28/20). Tips include bursts of focused, quality time with children, sensory-rich activities like splashing or pouring water, providing a safe play area, calibrating expectations, and empathetic gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions while also maintaining authority: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/04/28/working-home-with-baby-or-toddler-is-no-picnic-heres-how-make-it-more-tolerable/.
8) The Washington Post has compiled and published education guides for parents to use, addressing 10 categories, including reading, physical activity, music, and languages. No obvious science or math in there yet but the Post says the resource will be updated (4/28/20): https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/04/28/parents-guide-education-resources-coronavirus/.
9) If you enjoy the songs and singing of musical theater, I highly recommend immersing in this 4/26/20 high production-value, online concert, “Take me to the world: A Sondheim 90th birthday celebration”:
About two hours in, catch Meryl Streep, Audra McDonald, and Christine Baranski performing “The Ladies Who Lunch."
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RESOURCES PAGE: reported case-count page urls, practical information urls, open-access research hubs, story string/ideas for journalists: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IUV5Eivq2vj0-w9Eh1_pWKzAzlCtEerCFgY5kPCrC-k/edit?usp=sharing.
WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS POST, AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coronavirus-roundup-for-april-18-24/.
ARCHIVE BACK TO 3/11/20, WITH BONUS ITEMS: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19hMtSiQRbwah9cDRyfHiNj3mHVrhP8nS01CsqiIxsEI/edit?usp=sharing.
TAG ME: Please continue to send me good pieces about COVID-19 that you’ve seen, written, produced, or edited, and alert me when I make mistakes, forget links, or include broken links.
Love/In friendship, Robin