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Lalita Panicker

COVID-19 cases falling globally; the latest health stories from around the world

March 8, 2022 By Lalita Panicker Leave a Comment

Abstarct virus strain model of Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV with text on blue background. Virus Pandemic Protection Concept. New 2019 n-CoV cases concept. Image credit: nunataki / 123rf
Image credit: nunataki / 123rf

Global COVID cases and deaths have dropped, except in key hot spots.

Overall, cases declined 16% last week compared to the week before, reflecting a 4-week downward trend. Meanwhile, deaths dropped by 10%. Of the more than 10 million cases reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) last week, the countries that reported the most were Germany, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, and Brazil. Of the roughly 60,000 new deaths that were reported, the United States had the most, with more than 13,000 fatalities. The Western Pacific region was the only part of the world in which cases are climbing. The region is home to several of the current hot spots, which include Hong Kong, New Zealand, and South Korea. All are experiencing later Omicron surges. Hong Kong’s cases reached a new daily record, with 55,353 cases. Health officials have said they don’t expect COVID-19 to peak in Hong Kong until later this month. New Zealand today reported 24,106 cases, also a new daily record, as police removed an encampment of people protesting the country’s COVID-19 measures.

www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/03/global-covid-cases-deaths-drop-except-key-hot-spots

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And the nasty surprise this week is New Zealand. For much of the past two years, COVID-19 was a phantom presence in New Zealand, a plague experienced mostly through news reports from faraway lands. Now, suddenly, it has become a highly personal threat. New Zealand is being walloped by a major outbreak of the Omicron variant, with the virus spreading at what may be the fastest rate in the world. On Thursday, the country reported 23,194 new cases, a once unthinkable number in a small island-nation of about five million people where the record daily case count before the current wave was in the low hundreds. The explosion in cases has come as the government, under political pressure, loosened its strict regulations meant to prevent the spread of the virus, and as the highly transmissible Omicron reduced the effectiveness of the controls that remained.

www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/australia/new-zealand-covid-l

And following not too far behind is Scotland that has recorded 10,000 Covid-19 infections. Thirty-six Scots died at the weekend. Another 9,491 cases were reported.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/scotland-scottish-government-covid-b2027774.html

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However, there is an upside to the dreary pandemic tale. On Valentine’s Day, scientists in Brazil produced a special gift: The first COVID-19 vaccine doses produced entirely within the country. These used active pharmaceutical ingredients from Brazil, drew on a technology transfer agreement with AstraZeneca, and were produced in a new vaccine production facility run by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the Immunobiological Technology Institute (Instituto de Tecnologia em Imunobiológicos, or Bio-Manguinhos). The new lab expects to produce 120 million doses by the middle of 2022. This would allow for one dose each for over half of Brazil’s population.

www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2022/03/02/brazil-is-now-producing-its-own-covid-19-vaccine-doses/

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Meanwhile masks are coming off in many places as restrictions are eased without the WHO actually calling an end to the pandemic that it declared more than two years ago!

New York City has lifted school mask mandates and most indoor vaccination rules. Mayor Eric Adams announced Saturday that beginning next week, students in public schools will no longer have to wear masks.

Similar moves have been taking place in Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Oregon, Washington and New Jersey.

Also as of Monday, New Yorkers would not be required to show proof of vaccination to visit the city’s restaurants, gyms and other venues like movie theatres — a measure some health experts have said is being removed too quickly.

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France has announced that COVID passport rules will be lifted later this month. Prime Minister Jean Castex said regulations requiring people to show they had been vaccinated to access certain public venues will be relaxed from March 14, as infection numbers are dropping across the country. “The health situation is improving,” Castex told TF1 television on Thursday. The relaxation will come into force about a month before the presidential election. The first round of the French election takes place on April 10. The expected run-off between candidates takes place a fortnight after that. The man who oversaw the pandemic, President Emmanuel Macron is the favourite to win again.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-covid-vaccine-passport-end-date-b2027710.html

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Turkey relaxed its mask mandate on Wednesday and is also scrapping the use of codes assigned to citizens that allowed authorities to track those who have been in contact with infected people. While the mask can be off in public spaces with enough room to distance socially, in a news conference following a meeting of the country’s COVID-19 advisory council, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said people would be required to continue wearing masks in planes, buses, theatres, cinemas, hospitals and classrooms.

https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/turkey-relaxes-mask-mandate-amid-drop-covid-19-cases

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Greece lifted its outdoor mask requirement from Saturday, but “highly recommended” wearing masks outdoors when there is a lot of crowding.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/greece-lifts-mask-wearing-outdoors-covid-infections-recede-2022-03-02/

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China, where it all began, says it is still too early to consider easing its stringent coronavirus restrictions, with the highly infectious Omicron strain still capable of causing large numbers of deaths. Liang Wannian head of an expert group on COVID-19 said “coexisting” with the virus was still not an option. He said Omicron was still significantly more deadly than influenza and capable of putting great strain on the country’s medical resources.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/too-early-china-seek-coexistence-with-covid-govt-expert-2022-03-03/

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Baricitinib, an oral drug that dampens an overactive immune system and is commonly used by people with rheumatoid arthritis, reduced hospitalized COVID-19 patients’ risk of dying by 13%, investigators of the world’s largest trial of coronavirus treatments announced recently (www.science.org/content/article/arthritis-drug-y)

Patients in the study also took other drugs, such as the steroid dexamethasone, that act on the immune system and have already been shown to help against COVID-19. “Adding baricitinib on top of whatever else the doctors are currently prescribing … is beneficial,” says University of Oxford clinical scientist Martin Landray, one of the principal investigators of the United Kingdom’s Recovery trial.

Scientists and doctors welcomed the addition of the pill to the few treatments already shown to help treat severe COVID-19. “The pandemic is far from over, and we will likely have to contend with additional case surges in the future. It is heartening to have more mortality-reducing therapeutic options,” says Emory University virologist Boghuma Titanji, noting that baricitinib comes in generic versions that low- and middle-income countries can afford.

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A WHO panel on Wednesday backed the use of Merck & Co Inc’s COVID-19 antiviral pill for high-risk patients. The expert panel conditionally recommended the pill, molnupiravir, for patients with non-severe disease who are at high risk of hospitalization, such as the immunocompromised, the unvaccinated, older people and those with chronic diseases. The recommendation was based on new data from six clinical trials involving 4,796 patients.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/who-recommends-mercks-covid-pill-high-risk-patients-2022-03-02/

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Lalita Panicker is Consulting Editor, Views, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

COVID-19 sourced to a market in Wuhan? The latest health stories from around the world

February 28, 2022 By Lalita Panicker Leave a Comment

Test and sample virus crown covid virus 19. COVID-19 tests illustration. Image credit: ambrozinio / 123rf
Image credit: ambrozinio / 123rf

Scientists released a pair of extensive studies on Saturday that point to a market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Analysing data from a variety of sources, they concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus twice spilled over into people working or shopping there. They said they found no support for an alternative theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan (www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/26/science/covid-virus-wuhan-originsl)

“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both studies.

The two reports have not yet been published in a scientific journal that would require undergoing peer review.

Together, they represent a significant salvo in the debate over the beginnings of a pandemic that has killed nearly 6 million people globally and sickened more than 400 million. The question of whether the coronavirus outbreak began with a spill over from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way has given rise to pitched geopolitical battles and debates over how best to stop the next pandemic.

But some outside scientists who have been hesitant to endorse the market origin hypothesis said they remained unconvinced. Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said in an interview that there remained a glaring absence of direct evidence that animals at the market had themselves been infected with the coronavirus.

In their new study, Dr. Worobey and his colleagues present evidence that wild mammals that might have harboured the coronavirus were being sold in December 2019. But no wildlife was left at the market by the time Chinese researchers arrived in early 2020 to collect genetic samples.

The authors of the new study include researchers who previously published smaller reports that had pointed toward a similar conclusion, but were based on much less detail. Their earlier analysis suggested that the first known case of the coronavirus was a vendor at the Huanan market.

In a separate line of research, scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention carried out a new analysis of the genetic traces of coronaviruses collected at the market in January 2020. Previous studies have shown that the viruses sampled from early cases of Covid belonged to two main evolutionary branches. The Huanan market samples included both branches, the scientists reported in a study they posted online last weekend.

Dr. Worobey, who said he was not aware of the study until it was made public, said that their findings are consistent with the scenario he and his colleagues put forward for two origins at the market.

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was an early object of suspicion when Covid first swept across Wuhan. Towards late December 2019, a few people who worked at the market developed a mysterious form of pneumonia. On Dec. 30, public health officials told hospitals to report any new cases of pneumonia linked to the market.

It also became clear at the end of December that a new coronavirus was to blame for the mysterious pneumonia. Coronaviruses have a disturbing history in China: In 2002, another coronavirus sparked the SARS epidemic, which killed 774 people. Scientists later concluded that the virus originated in bats, spread to wild mammals, and then jumped to humans at markets where the mammals were sold.

Fearing a replay of SARS, Chinese officials ordered the Huanan market closed. Wuhan police shut it down on Jan. 1, 2020. Workers clad in hazmat suits washed and disinfected the stalls.

Chinese scientists said they found the virus in dozens of samples taken from surfaces and sewers in the market, but not in any swabs taken from animals in the market.

The link to the market seemed to weaken as the coronavirus spread. Meanwhile, questions arose about the research carried out at a lab in the city, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists studied coronaviruses.

For the new studies, Dr. Worobey and his colleagues estimated the latitude and longitude of 156 cases of Covid in Wuhan in December 2019. The highest density of cases centred around the market.

The researchers then mapped cases in January and February. They used data collected by Chinese researchers from Weibo, a social media app that created a channel for people with Covid to seek help. The 737 cases drawn from Weibo were concentrated away from the market, in other parts of central Wuhan with high populations of elderly residents.

The patterns pointed to the market as the origin of the outbreak, the studies found, with the coronavirus then spreading to the surrounding neighbourhoods before moving out farther across the city. The researchers ran tests that showed it was extremely unlikely that such a pattern could be produced merely by chance.

“It’s very strong statistical evidence that this is no coincidence,” Dr. Worobey said.

The researchers also presented evidence that in late 2019, vendors at the market were selling raccoon dogs and other mammals known to be potential hosts of coronaviruses. Genetic samples collected from floors, walls and other surfaces at the Huanan market in January 2020 reveal traces of SARS-CoV-2 in the southwest corner of the market, where the vendors were clustered.

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At least 5.2 million children globally have lost a parent, grandparent or family caretaker to Covid-19, a new study says. The study, published on 24 February in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, said this “heart-breaking hidden pandemic” is nearing the total number of Covid-19 deaths, which currently stands at about 5.9 million people, according to latest World Health Organization totals. While plummeting Covid-19 case counts across the US are leading to a lifting of mask mandates, data shows more people are dying of Covid-19 now than during most points of the pandemic. More than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths have been reported in the US each day for the past month as the Omicron variant remains a heightened concern.

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The drive to help African countries produce vaccines with messenger RNA (mRNA) technology got big boosts last week from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the company BioNTech (www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-african-vaccine-n)

The success of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made by the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration and Moderna led to intense global demand, but African countries have had little access because of limited supply and high prices. Campaigns by several governments and nongovernmental organizations failed to convince the companies to freely share their technologies with economically strapped countries. So last year WHO launched a hub in South Africa to produce mRNA vaccines independently. The agency, which hopes the hub licenses a product by 2024, last week announced plans to train scientists from South Africa, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia. BioNTech, which has been criticised for trying to undermine the WHO effort, separately announced that later this year it will train local scientists and send modular, shipping container–size vaccine factories to Ghana, Rwanda, and Senegal.

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In a setback to the global polio eradication campaign, a wild poliovirus has leapt from Pakistan to the African continent, where it has paralyzed a 3-year-old girl in Malawi(www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-african-n)

The case, announced on 17 February by the Malawi government, is the first wild polio case in the country since 1992. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last two countries where the wild virus is endemic, which means circulation there has never stopped. Occasionally, however, the virus spills over from these entrenched reservoirs. Africa’s last known case of wild polio occurred in 2016 in Nigeria’s Borno state. The continent is still battling big outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio, however, which occur in areas of low immunization when the live but attenuated virus in the oral polio vaccine regains its ability to paralyse and spread.

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As people across the world grapple with the prospect of living with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future, one question looms large: How soon before they need yet another shot?

Not for many months, and perhaps not for years, according to a flurry of new studies (www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/health/covid-vaccinel)

Three doses of a Covid vaccine — or even just two — are enough to protect most people from serious illness and death for a long time, the studies suggest.

“We’re starting to see now diminishing returns on the number of additional doses,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. Although people over 65 or at high risk of illness may benefit from a fourth vaccine dose, it may be unnecessary for most people, he added.

US Federal health officials have said they are not planning to recommend fourth doses anytime soon.

The Omicron variant can dodge antibodies produced after two doses of a Covid vaccine. But a third shot of the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or by Moderna prompts the body to make a much wider variety of antibodies, which would be difficult for any variant of the virus to evade, according to the most recent study, posted online last week.

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Lalita Panicker is Consulting Editor, Views, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

Queen Elizabeth tests positive for COVID-19; the latest health stories from around the world

February 22, 2022 By Lalita Panicker Leave a Comment

Coronavirus outbreak concept. Novel coronavirus disease called 2019-nCoV handwriting on blue paper. protective mask and surgical gloves on blue background Image credit: Epov / 123rf covid
Image credit: Epov / 123rf

Queen Elizabeth II has been infected with the coronavirus, Buckingham Palace said on Sunday, becoming one of the world’s most prominent figures to battle the virus and rattling the country she has led for seven decades.


The palace issued few details about the condition of the queen, who turns 96 in April.


“Buckingham Palace confirm that the queen has today tested positive for Covid,” the palace said in a statement. “Her Majesty is experiencing mild cold like symptoms but expects to continue light duties at Windsor over the coming week. She will continue to receive medical attention and will follow all the appropriate guidelines.”


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US National Public Radio describes the present as a confusing stage of the pandemic. And it’s not just confined to the US.
On Sunday, police continued to push back at protestors in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, finally clearing a portion of the city that had been blockaded for three weeks. Around 100 arrests were made on Friday and 47 more on Saturday. The demonstrations were started by lorry drivers upset at COVID-19 rules. The government has invoked never-before-used emergency powers to quash the protests. Police began arresting protesters in Ottawa on Friday in a crackdown against the truck convoy that has blockaded the Canadian capital’s downtown for nearly three weeks. The protesters were angry about COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates. This week Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, invoked a 34-year-old emergency law for the first time in order to quell the demonstrations.


Meanwhile, swinging radically in the opposite direction, as surges of COVID-19 cases driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant recede, parts of the US, Canada, and Europe are moving swiftly to lift constraints on a pandemic-fatigued public. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have abolished nearly all ¬COVID-19–related restrictions in recent weeks, and the United Kingdom announced it would do the same this month, dropping even the legal requirement that people quarantine after testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. In the US, despite persistently high numbers of COVID-19–related deaths and busy hospitals, 10 governors, many known for being cautious in their pandemic response, last week announced immediate or impending ends to their states’ indoor or school mask mandates.


Some of those moves came with assertions that it’s time to “live with the disease” and treat the coronavirus as endemic—a stable, enduring figure in the panoply of human pathogens, alongside cold viruses and influenza. That suggestion troubles many scientists, who warn it is eroding governments’ commitment to tracking and responding to the pandemic—which could leave countries flying blind and unprepared for any new variant.

And true to the pandemic’s form, a subvariant of Omicron known as BA.2 is spreading fast and may cause severe disease, research from Japan suggests. New lab experiments show BA.2 is capable of thwarting some of the key weapons we have against Covid-19, including being able to escape the immunity created by vaccines. It also appears to be resistant to some monoclonal antibody treatments currently being used to fight Omicron. BA.2 is highly mutated when compared with the original virus that emerged in Wuhan, China. It has been detected in 74 countries and 47 US states, and about 4% of Americans now have infections caused by BA.2, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC).


“Endemic delusion is probably what captures it the best,” says Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research who has been especially critical of recent moves by his home country of Denmark, which include an announcement that as of this month COVID-19 would no longer be categorized as a “socially critical disease” even though related death and hospitalization rates were still climbing there.

(www.science.org/content/article/it-time-live-covid-19-some-scientists-warn-endemic-delusion)


And it’s not just new variants but the older ones as well that could prove intractable. The COVID booster shots lose much of their potency after about four months, raising the possibility that some people— specifically those at high risk of complications or death — may need a fourth dose, data published on Friday by the US CDC suggest.


Still, many scientists acknowledge the challenges of steering public restrictions during the reign of the more infectious but generally less severe Omicron variant, when some of the metrics that previously guided policy have become less informative.
Denmark’s recent moves are a case in point. Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University and pandemic adviser to the Danish government, supports its decision to lift measures such as limits on nightlife hours, caps on attendance at indoor public events, and mandatory face masks or proof of vaccination for indoor venues. He argues the government could no longer justify the economic, social, and constitutional trade-offs of those restrictions amid promising signs, such as numbers of intensive care unit (ICU) patients that remain stable and below the health system’s capacity.

In the US, governors cited various metrics to justify recent decisions to lift or let expire indoor mask mandates. California Governor Gavin Newsom noted stable hospitalization rates and a 65% reduction in cases since Omicron’s peak in announcing the state’s mandate would end this week. But leaders also face political and economic pressures. States’ moves may be driven largely by the public’s impatience with restrictions, says epidemiologist Dustin Duncan of Columbia University.


Still, with the US logging more than 2,000 daily deaths last week, “We cannot say we are at a level that’s tolerable to live with this virus,” Emory University epidemiologist Jodie Guest says. Her team has been developing rough guidelines for when a true endemic stage of COVID-19 has been reached: daily case rates below 30 per 100,000, ICUs below 80% of capacity, vaccination rates of at least 75%, and fewer than 100 COVID-19 deaths a day nationwide.


Some governments are limiting efforts to find and report cases. Sweden, long an outlier among European countries for its laissez-faire approach to the pandemic, ended widespread testing at mobile centres as cases declined from their Omicron peak. The United Kingdom is reportedly weighing ending free public testing for the virus in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the Canadian province of Saskatchewan last week switched from providing daily to weekly reports of COVID-19 cases. And Tennessee last month joined several states already reporting case counts weekly.


In the growing number of “back to normal” messages, Christina Pagel, a health services researcher at University College London, sees leaders ignoring obvious next steps to protect public safety. Even researchers who aren’t speaking up to defend specific restrictions are urging governments to step up their COVID-19 fight, rather than scale it back. They want aggressive new pushes to reach the unvaccinated, distribute rapid tests, and make COVID-19 treatments much more accessible, for example. “Frankly, I don’t really think that 2 to 3 weeks more of a mask mandate is going to make much difference in the long run,” says KJ Seung, a health policy adviser at Partners In Health. “More alarming to me is that our public health system doesn’t seem to have any plan for dealing with the next surge.”
“I don’t particularly want to be in a future where I get COVID twice a year,” Pagel adds. Averting that future may mean adaptations such as technologies to improve indoor air quality and strong virus surveillance that can be ramped up at the first sign of another surge.


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For some, the idea of “living with the disease” may take on an entirely different connotation in the long run.
Dozens of papers have examined the lingering mental health effects of COVID-19, but many have measured conditions such as depression and brain fog only a few months after infection. Now, a giant new study shows people who contracted COVID-19 faced much higher risks of neuropsychiatric ailments one year later, including brain fog, depression, and substance use disorders.

(www.science.org/content/article/covid-19-patients-face-higher-risk-brain-fog-n)


The report, based on millions of people who used the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system early in the pandemic, is published in The BMJ journal of the British Medical Association.


“Most of us experienced some sort of mental distress during the pandemic, but this shows that people with COVID-19 had a much higher risk of mental health disorders than their contemporaries,” says senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St. Louis Health Care system. “It’s a wake-up call.”


From very early in the pandemic, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 can damage the heart and blood vessels while people are acutely ill. Patients developed clots, heart inflammation, arrhythmias, and heart failure.


Now, the first large study to assess cardiovascular outcomes one year after SARS-CoV-2 infection has demonstrated that the virus’ impact is often lasting. In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 one year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected.

(www.science.org/content/article/covid-19-takes-serious-toll-heart-y)


The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”


Others agree the results of the study, published in Nature Medicine on 7 February, are powerful. “In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity, says Larisa Tereshchenko, a cardiologist and biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic, who recently conducted a similar, much smaller analysis. She cautions that the new study will need to be replicated, and that it was retrospective, possibly introducing inaccuracies such as incorporating faulty diagnoses from patient records. “It looked back. We have to do prospective studies to calculate accurate estimates.” Nor do researchers know how the virus orchestrates this long-term damage. But they think the cardiovascular risks and the constellation of symptoms collectively known as Long Covid (which include brain fog, fatigue, weakness, and loss of smell) could have common roots.
“This is clearly evidence of long-term heart and vascular damage. Similar things could be happening in the brain and other organs resulting in symptoms characteristic of Long Covid, including brain fog,” says Ziyad Al-Aly.


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Lalita Panicker is Consulting Editor, Views, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

Canada continues its struggle with vaccine-mandate protests; the latest health stories from around the world

February 14, 2022 By Lalita Panicker Leave a Comment

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/world/americas/canada-trucker-protest.html

There’s been a breakthrough in Canada engulfed in anti-Covid vaccine mandates by irate truckers. Law enforcement officials said Sunday that they had reopened a major international bridge that protesters had been blockading for almost a week, raising hopes for industries that the unrest had slowed to a near-standstill.

As they announced that the Ambassador Bridge, which ties Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, had been reclaimed after a series of arrests in the morning, some hailed it as a victory for a government shaken by the intransigence of anti-vaccine mandate protests that have mushroomed since they began.

But in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, hundreds of truckers were entering their third week of occupation of the area around Parliament Hill, where they appeared to be emboldened by a growing sense of impunity.

Late Sunday, the mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, revealed back-channel negotiations were underway with the truckers’ leadership to remove their convoy from residential neighborhoods, among other measures. The mayor’s office released an emailed letter dated Saturday from one of the protest leaders, Tamara Lich, in which she said, “We will be working hard over the next 24 hours to get buy in from the truckers.”

Earlier, Canadian police in Windsor, Ontario, began making arrests on Sunday morning near the Ambassador Bridge, a vital border crossing to the United States and one of the most visible sites of an anti-government protest movement that has roiled Canada for weeks (www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/13/world/canada-protests-trudeau-news)

The operation began a few hours after a judge in Ontario authorised the use of force to remove them. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, had warned them to expect “an increasingly robust police intervention”.

The bridge, which spans the Detroit River, is the main avenue of moving goods between the United States and Canada. The nearly weeklong blockade has cost American automakers, in particular, millions of dollars.

The arrests were the first major police action since truckers and other Canadians protesting vaccine mandates laid siege to the area around Canada’s Parliament three weeks ago, inspiring copycat demonstrations across the country and beyond, and blockades of critical trade routes at the U.S.-Canada border.

But the police have done little to intervene where the movement began: Ottawa, Canada’s capital. On Saturday, the protest there swelled in size and energy, turning the downtown streets into a giant, illegal party as vastly outnumbered police officers stood by and watched. 

The Canadian protests inspired imitators elsewhere. In Paris, police fired tear-gas to disperse demonstrators against Covid restrictions. Protesters also occupied the streets of the capitals of heavily vaccinated Australia and New Zealand for another day. In both countries, vaccines are mandated for people working in certain professions, and proof of vaccination is required to enter certain premises.

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Over a year after coronavirus vaccines made their debut, more than half the world’s population has been fully vaccinated — a logistical feat without precedent in human history. But the global rollout remains uneven, with poor countries reporting much lower vaccination rates than rich countries. Public health experts have been warning that vaccine inequity is helping prolong the pandemic, as the focus of those seeking to speed up global vaccine coverage begins to shift from resolving a shortfall of supply to distributing doses and persuading people to get them. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/10/covid-half-world-fully-vaccinated-covax/

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Covid booster shots lose much of their potency after about four months, raising the possibility that some people — specifically those at high risk of complications or death — may need a fourth dose, data published on Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest.

Preliminary research from Israel and Britain has hinted that protection from booster doses declines within a few months, according to www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/11/world/covid-19-tests-cases-vaccine.

The data released on Friday 11 February offer the first real-world evidence of the mRNA shots’ waning power against moderate to severe illness in the United States.

The analysis did not include a breakdown by age, and the researchers could not distinguish between a booster shot or a third dose given to an immune-compromised person as part of the primary series.

“There may be the need for yet again another boost — in this case, a fourth-dose boost for an individual receiving the mRNA — that could be based on age, as well as underlying conditions,” Dr Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top Covid adviser, told reporters on Wednesday.

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Short Takes

Russian authorities on Thursday 10 February reported nearly 200,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases, in another record fuelled by the rapid spread of the Omicron variant amid a low vaccination rate and the absence of major restrictions for adults. The state coronavirus task force tallied 197,076 new infections over the past 24 hours, some 14,000 more than the day before and twice as many as two weeks ago. The task force also reported 701 deaths. While infections have soared, daily fatalities in recent weeks have remained steady between roughly 600 and 700. The highly contagious omicron variant accounts for 60% of current infections, according to Anna Popova, head of Russia’s public health agency Rospotrebnadzor.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-russia-europe-public-health-11b1fb00d1f4fe5de9e6c39d8d60d455

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Unions and scientists claim UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is moving ‘too far, too soon.’ Johnson has declared that all coronavirus rules including self-isolation are set to go from end of the month. Britain’s single largest union, Unison warned ‘Covid risks haven’t disappeared’ and the PM’s plans are ‘going too far, ​way too soon.’ A top epidemiologist warned relaxing curbs is a ‘political type of statement rather than a scientific one.’ YouGov poll shows 75% believe self-isolation requirement should be in place for at least the next few months.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10497445/Unions-scientists-claim-Boris-moving-far-soon-rules-set-gone-fortnight.html

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Sweden has halted wide-scale testing for COVID-19 even among people showing symptoms of an infection, putting an end to the mobile city-square tent sites, drive-in swab centres and home-delivered tests. The move puts the Scandinavian nation at odds with most of Europe, but some experts say it could become the norm as costly testing yields fewer benefits with the easily transmissible but milder Omicron variant.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-10/sweden-stops-mass-covid-19-testing/100820856

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Germany’s daily rise in the number of coronavirus infections is slowing, data from the Robert Koch Institute showed on Thursday, indicating that a fourth wave of the pandemic could flatten soon. Germany reported 247,862 new daily coronavirus cases on Thursday (10 February), up 5% from the same day last week.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germanys-covid-19-wave-flattens-regions-ease-curbs-2022-02-10/

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Africa is transitioning out of the pandemic phase of the COVID-19 outbreak and moving towards a situation where it will be managing the virus over the long-term, the head of the World Health Organization on the continent has said. “I believe that we are transitioning from the pandemic phase and we will now need to manage the presence of this virus in the long-term,” Dr Matshidiso Moeti told a media briefing on Thursday.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/10/africa-transitioning-out-of-pandemic-phase-of-covid-who

***

The EU is giving €125mn to support Covid-19 vaccine distribution in Africa after the international Covax programme said a shortage of syringes and medical equipment was slowing efforts to vaccinate the world’s poorest people. Countries across Africa have been plagued by vaccine shortages. Public health experts have warned that the uneven rollout of vaccines could lead to new coronavirus variants emerging in areas where fewer people have been vaccinated.

https://www.ft.com/content/f98c9081-76bb-47d7-8dd5-14b81690d1f7

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In a reversal, the US Food & Drug Administration has delayed a decision on Covid shots for young children.

The regulators said they would wait for complete data on the effectiveness of three doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before authorizing it for children 5 and younger. They had initially planned on making a determination on two doses for the age group.

Peter Marks, the head of the F.D.A.’s vaccine division, said it would take another two months of gathering and analysing evidence before a decision.

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Lalita Panicker is Consulting Editor, Views, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

“Human challenge” study grants insights into COVID treatments and variants; the latest health stories from around the world

February 8, 2022 By Lalita Panicker Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, researchers in the United Kingdom posted the results of a first-of-its-kind study in which healthy young volunteers were purposely infected with an early strain of the pandemic coronavirus (www.science.org/content/article/scientists-d)

As hoped, none of the participants got seriously ill, and scientists were able to closely track their symptoms and gain unique insight into how both SARS-CoV-2 levels and symptoms vary from start to finish during an infection.

The success of this initial “human challenge” study provides a strategy for testing COVID-19 treatments, vaccines, and viral variants going forward, the researchers say. The study may also help scientists understand why the pandemic coronavirus can breach the immune defences of some people but not others.

In the study, 34 healthy volunteers ages 18 to 29 were given nose drops with a small amount of the virus. Eighteen, or 53%, became infected, according to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. Most volunteers developed mild to moderate symptoms but none needed hospitalization or treatment, showing the study could be done safely, according to the investigators who ran it. The study also found that after the first 1 to 2 days of infection, rapid antigen tests reliably indicated the presence of virus.

The results, posted on a preprint server, have not yet been peer reviewed but are under review at a Nature journal.

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Last January, a team of researchers searching for the coronavirus in New York City’s wastewater spotted something strange in their samples. The viral fragments they found had a unique constellation of mutations that had never been reported before in human patients — a potential sign of a new, previously undetected variant (www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/health/coronavirus-wastewaterl)

For the past year, these oddball sequences, or what the scientists call “cryptic lineages,” have continued to pop up in the city’s wastewater.

There is no evidence that the lineages, which have been circulating for at least a year without overtaking Delta or Omicron, pose an elevated health risk to humans. But the researchers, whose findings were published in Nature Communications on Thursday, still have no idea where they came from.

The researchers themselves are torn about the lineages’ origins. Some lean toward the explanation that the virus is coming from people whose infections aren’t being captured by sequencing. But others suspect that the lineages may be coming from virus-infected animals, possibly the city’s enormous population of rats. 

The researchers have been sampling wastewater from 14 treatment plants in New York City since June 2020. In January of 2021, they began doing targeted sequencing of the samples, focusing on part of the gene for the virus’s all-important spike protein.

Although this approach provides a limited look at the viral genome, it allows researchers to extract a lot of data from wastewater, in which the virus is typically fragmented.

Viral fragments with novel patterns of mutations appeared repeatedly at a handful of treatment plants, the researchers found. (They could not disclose the specific plants or areas of the city, they said.)

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have found similar sequences in one California sewer shed. 

The lineages could be coming from people whose infections have escaped detection or whose virus has not been sequenced.

But the fact that they kept turning up at the same few wastewater plants makes this theory less likely, the researchers said, given that New Yorkers, and any variants they may be carrying, tend to move throughout the city without restriction.

The lineages have been circulating for long enough now that they should have appeared in at least one sample sequenced from an infected person, some scientists said.

In May and June of 2021, when the number of human Covid-19 cases in the city was low, the mysterious lineages made up a greater proportion of the viral RNA in wastewater, suggesting that they may have come from a nonhuman source.

The researchers initially considered a diverse array of potential hosts, from squirrels to skunks. To narrow down the possibilities, they went back to the wastewater, assuming that any animal that was shedding virus might be leaving its own genetic material behind, too.

Although a vast majority of the genetic material in the water came from humans, small amounts of RNA from dogs, cats and rats were also present, the scientists found.

Some researchers have been considering rats, which roam the city by the millions. The original version of the virus does not appear able to infect rodents, although some other variants, like Beta, can.

Since last summer, the scientists have been working with Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to look for signs of the virus in blood and faecal samples from local rats. So far, they’ve come up empty.

Scientists have repeatedly found that humans can pass the virus to animals, especially pets, zoo animals, farmed mink and others with which they are in frequent contact. That has raised concerns that the virus might establish itself in an animal reservoir, where it might mutate and get passed back to humans.

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Short Takes

 A new spinoff of the Omicron variant, called BA.2, has been found in at least 49 countries, including the United States — but medical professionals say there’s no need to worry because there is no evidence that it causes more severe illness than the original Omicron variant.

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Two makers of COVID-19 vaccines logged major milestones on 31 January. Moderna won full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its messenger RNA–based vaccine, 13 months after the agency granted the company an emergency use authorization (EUA). It is the country’s second fully authorized COVID-19 vaccine, after Pfizer’s, which won approval in August 2021 (www.science.org/content/article/news-glance-s)

****

And after a months-long delay caused by manufacturing issues, Novavax applied to FDA for an EUA for its protein-based vaccine. Last month, it won conditional marketing authorization in Europe, and the World Health Organization granted it an emergency use listing, opening up an avenue to buttress global vaccine supplies.

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Britain has granted a licence to researchers to study the therapeutic effects of cannabis on patients with long covid-19. It is not such a wild idea—a recent study suggested that cannabis compounds prevent the virus from entering healthy human cells. Drug Science, an independent scientific body running the test, says that long covid shares many symptoms with other post-viral conditions that seem to respond to cannabis, including exhaustion, pain, fluctuating blood pressure and a reduced ability to exercise.

Patients on the trial will be offered daily doses of an oil form of cannabis that contains 5% cannabidiol, also known as CBD, and only 0.2% tetrahydrocannabinol, the drug’s main psychoactive compound. Patients will log their responses and if this small-scale trial, involving just 30 people, is successful, a large-scale randomised controlled trial will follow. Only after a more rigorous second trial will it become clear whether it’s high time cannabis was prescribed to covid patients.

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India has placed a purchase order with Biological E for 50 million doses of COVID vaccine Corbevax each costing ₹145 ($1.94) excluding taxes, official sources said on Saturday (www.thehindu.com/news/centre-places-purchase-ordere)

The government hasn’t yet decided on which segment of beneficiaries this new vaccine would be administered.

However discussions are underway in technical groups and in the Health Ministry’s immunisation division about expanding the scope of the “precaution doses” (booster shots) which are currently being given to healthcare and frontline workers, and comorbid senior citizens. 

Late last year India had approved two new COVID vaccines, expanding its vaccination programme amid fears of a third wave fuelled by Omicron (www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57437944?).

The new vaccines – Serum Institute of India’s Covovax and Biological E’s Corbevax – were both authorised for “restricted use in an emergency situation”.

Corbevax from Indian pharma company Biological E was developed in collaboration with US-based Dynavax and Baylor College of Medicine. It is India’s first indigenously developed recombinant protein sub-unit vaccine. That is, it’s made up of the coronavirus’ “spike protein”, which the virus uses to latch on and enter human cells. When injected, this is expected to trigger an immune response in the body.

Covovax is a local version of the Novavax vaccine, and will be produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), which is also manufacturing the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, known locally as Covishield. The vaccine was more than 90% effective in a late-stage US-based clinical trial, according to the company.

India has already approved six other vaccines.

It’s currently using only three – Covishield, Covaxin by Indian firm Bharat Biotech and Russian-made Sputnik V – for its vaccination drive. Of these, Covishield accounts for over 90% of the doses given so far.

It also approved ZyCoV-D vaccine – the world’s first DNA vaccine against Covid – by Indian firm Cadilla, but it’s not available yet.

The federal government had also approved Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine, which was to be introduced in India through a supply agreement with Biological E; and it had authorised Indian pharma company Cipla to import the Moderna vaccine.

But it’s unclear when either of those will be available in India.

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Lalita Panicker is Consulting Editor Views, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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