5/22/20 - smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19
PUBLIC HEALTH:
1) There’s been a shift in the SARS-CoV-2 transmission messages on a web page of the lead U.S. federal agency for public health, report Ben Guarino and Joel Achenbach for The Washington Post on 5/21/20. The updated U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s “How COVID-19 Spreads” page now states that touching contaminated objects or surfaces is "not a significant mode of transmission" for the new coronavirus. The main route of transmission is "respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks,” which can be inhaled or land in our mouths or noses when we are in “close contact with one another,” the page reads, “within about 6 feet.” Similarly, a virologist with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease quoted in the piece says the highest likelihood for infection is “direct contact” with an infected person, not “accepting a newspaper or a FedEx guy dropping off a box.” The CDC page, as before, recommends maintaining 6 feet of social distance, washing hands often with soap and water, and routinely cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05/21/virus-does-not-spread-easily-contaminated-surfaces-or-animals-revised-cdc-website-states/.
2) The disproportionate role of “superspreading events” (large public gatherings where one or two people can seed a lot of infections) is now a focus of some transmission coverage and discussions. Kai Kupferschmidt at Science shared on Twitter this morning (5/22/20) a new, unpublished research paper (which has not been reviewed by outside experts for flaws) by researchers with the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wash., Northeastern University and other institutions, indicating that superspreading events are the key to transmission and should be used to guide efforts to control the spread of the virus: https://covid.idmod.org/data/Stochasticity_heterogeneity_transmission_dynamics_SARS-CoV-2.pdf.
3) Along with focusing on treatments for serious cases of COVID-19, researchers should focus on developing drugs that prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and prevent the progression of mild cases of COVID-19 to severe cases, write pediatric and infectious diseases physician Richard Malley, at Harvard Medical School, and epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. “We believe that [experiments] of prophylactic and therapeutic drugs for asymptomatic and mild cases of Covid-19 have a greater chance of success than does administering drugs to critically ill patients — as well as greater long-term potential to benefit more people,” states the essay in The New York Times (5/22/20): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/opinion/coronavirus-treatment-mild-symptoms.html.
4) Freelance journalist Tara Haelle has written a helpful explainer about “herd immunity” for Medium’s Elemental (5/14/20). The piece explores the tensions, risks, or unknowns surrounding either of the two routes, direct infection and vaccination, to achieving this level of immunity in a population — the end-game for our current crisis. The main issue is that achieving herd immunity through infection will “require that millions of people get sick and die,” according to a Boston University epidemiologist quoted in the story: https://elemental.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-herd-immunity-70bf2bfa0287.
5) An engaging essay by Seema Yasmin, director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative, advocates for the use of contact tracing (identifying who has been in contact with a person newly identified as infected with the new coronavirus) and "disease detectives” (staffers with the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control) to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece in The New York Times (5/20/20) describes her work in 2011 in getting to the bottom of an infectious outbreak in a Neonatal intensive care unit in Arizona. Her main point is that politics and public health are often intertwined, not just during the current pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opinion/coronavirus-cdc-report.html.
ANTIBODY TESTING:
6) In an effort to ensure more trustworthy antibody-test results, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has removed 28 antibody tests from its list of those being offered under its emergency-use policy (5/21/20): https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-provides-promised-transparency-antibody-tests. Search for “removed” on this page to find the list: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-situations-medical-devices/faqs-testing-sars-cov-2. A little more information can be found in this brief report by Lisa Nainggolan on Medscape (5/21/20), which sparked this entry: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/930976.
7) An essay published 5/21/20 in Nature lists and explains “ten reasons why immunity passports are a bad idea.” Along with the oft-cited discrimination, privacy threats, and bias that such certificates could enable, problems include uncertainty about how long immunity to SARS-CoV-2 lasts, unreliable antibody test results, and questions about the capacity to conduct the required volume of tests to support immunity passports, even just for health care workers, the story states. By Natalie Kofler, of “the global initiative Editing Nature," and bioethicist Françoise Baylis of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Novia Scotia (5/21/20): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01451-0.
ENTERTAINMENT:
9) “A note from your university about its plans for next semester,” by Tiffany C. Li for McSweeney’s (5/21/20): https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-note-from-your-university-about-its-plans-for-next-semester.
10) “Spectacular imagery of the reentry, south of Australia earlier today, of a Russian Soyuz rocket stage from the launch of EKS 4,” tweets @Marco_Langbroek, linking to a tweet with the video from @abcmelbourne:
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