Economist: Are governments following the science on covid-19?

According to a new survey, many scientists believe they are being ignored

A survey by Frontiers, a Swiss publisher of scientific journals, asked some 25,000 researchers in May and June whether lawmakers in their country had used scientific advice to inform their covid-19 strategy. The results offer some support for Weber’s thesis.

According to the survey, researchers in New Zealand are most satisfied with policymakers. More than three-quarters of respondents agreed that Jacinda Ardern’s government, which closed the country’s borders and imposed a strict lockdown in early March, has taken expert scientific advice into account. Little wonder, as New Zealand has eliminated the virus twice. Ms Ardern’s response has been popular with voters, too. On October 17th she won a landslide victory in the country’s general election. Researchers in China, where the virus originated in December, were similarly pleased. Germany, whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a chemist, also scored well.

The countries hit hardest by the pandemic have been those where policymakers have strayed furthest from scientific recommendations. In Brazil, for example, most researchers believe expert advice has been disregarded. In America, which appears at the bottom of the Frontiers ranking, Donald Trump has dismissed his public-health advisers as “idiots”, mocked face masks and suggested that the disease might be treated with injections of disinfectant. 

THE ECONOMIST

BBC: Covid: Mass testing in Liverpool sees 'remarkable decline' in cases

Coronavirus cases in Liverpool have been brought down "quite remarkably" following a rollout of mass testing, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said.

Cases in the city are down by more than two-thirds in the last few weeks, he told BBC Breakfast.

It comes as a new daily testing trial is set to start in the city.

Close contacts of people who test positive will be offered the chance to take daily tests for a week instead of going into isolation.

More than 200,000 people in in a population of just over half a million have been tested.

"They've found a load more people who were asymptomatic, didn't know that they had a problem, didn't know they have the virus," he said.

"The combination of the mass testing and the measures in Liverpool have brought the cases down really quite remarkably, much faster than I would have thought was possible."

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NYT: Evidence Builds That an Early Mutation Made the Pandemic Harder to Stop

As the coronavirus swept across the world, it picked up random alterations to its genetic sequence. Like meaningless typos in a script, most of those mutations made no difference in how the virus behaved.

But one mutation near the beginning of the pandemic did make a difference, multiple new findings suggest, helping the virus spread more easily from person to person and making the pandemic harder to stop.

The mutation, known as 614G, was first spotted in eastern China in January and then spread quickly throughout Europe and New York City. Within months, the variant took over much of the world, displacing other variants.

For months, scientists have been fiercely debating why. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued in May that the variant had probably evolved the ability to infect people more efficiently. Many were skeptical, arguing that the variant may have been simply lucky, appearing more often by chance in large epidemics, like Northern Italy’s, that seeded outbreaks elsewhere.

But a host of new research — including close genetic analysis of outbreaks and lab work with hamsters and human lung tissue — has supported the view that the mutated virus did in fact have a distinct advantage, infecting people more easily than the original variant detected in Wuhan, China.

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OECD: Sweden and the United Kingdom – required a greater number of days to bring down their Rt to below one from their respective peak level

 The objective of prevention interventions, including containment and mitigation strategies, is therefore to bring the value of Rt to below one, that is, when the number of infected persons will decrease over time. Figure 1.10 presents the number of days needed to bring the Rt from its highest value in each country to below one for at least four consecutive days. On average, it took 34 days for countries to bring this indicator to below one after the epidemic started spreading in the country. The country with the shortest period was Malta (11 days), with Sweden reporting the longest period (58 days).

Many of the countries that have been most severely hit by the COVID‐19 outbreak – such as Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom – required a greater number of days to bring down their Rt to below one from their respective peak levels. (Klicka för större bild)

States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks

Coronavirus cases are rising in almost every U.S. state. But the surge is worst now in places where leaders neglected to keep up forceful virus containment efforts or failed to implement basic measures like mask mandates in the first place, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the University of Oxford.

Using an index that tracks policy responses to the pandemic, these charts show the number of new virus cases and hospitalizations in each state relative to the state’s recent containment measures.

rContainment measuresMore ⟶

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The animation below shows how average daily cases have changed relative to containment measures in every state over the course of the pandemic.

Länk NYT

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Last Years, New Data Hint

How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.

Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.

The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date.

“That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.

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NYT: Navy Research Confirms Need for Strict Coronavirus Testing Protocols

 
Two new studies clarify how Covid-19 spreads among young adults and expose the limits of quarantine measures. Young, healthy people who contract the coronavirus are often asymptomatic, very rarely need hospital care and can transmit the virus to a roommate unwittingly even when following strict quarantine orders, according to two new studies from the U.S. Navy. The findings support the need for strong measures, like daily testing, that go beyond the temperature checks and symptom reporting now commonly deployed to prevent transmission in offices, dormitories and other group settings, the authors said.

“These findings all point to the need for ongoing testingstrategies,” said Dr. Andrew Letizia, a commander and infectious disease specialist at the Naval Medical Research Center, in Silver Spring, Md., and lead author of one of the studies. “We need to augment public health measures and reinforce them with regular testing” in such settings, he said.

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NYT: The Pandemic’s Future — and Ours

Christakis describes an intriguing precedent, though, with some circumstantial evidence to support it. The virus called OC43 is a human coronavirus that causes nothing more severe than the common cold. In fact, along with one other coronavirus, it accounts for as much as 30 percent of all colds. Christakis cites research suggesting that OC43 spilled into people, from cattle, around 1890, which happened to coincide with the beginning of a severe pandemic that was known as the “Russian flu,” because its first major outbreak occurred in St. Petersburg, in December 1889. This “flu” swept out of Russia, across Europe, to the United States and much of the rest of the world, as fast as trains and ships could carry it, killing about a million people. Was it truly influenza? No one knows, because the concept “virus” hadn’t yet been defined, because viruses couldn’t be seen through a light microscope and because no modern scientific team has yet found a frozen victim of that 1890 pandemic, awakened a virus and identified it by genome sequencing.

There are hints. The lethality of the 1890 bug was low among children and especially high among people over 70. In addition to causing respiratory illness, it sometimes attacked the gastrointestinal tract or produced blazing headaches and body aches, symptoms that Christakis calls less typical of influenza. He suggests that the 1890 event was a pandemic of OC43, a coronavirus passed to humans from some Russian cow. “After being among us for a century, this virus would have further evolved to Be a mild pathogen that just causes the common cold today.”

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Covid: What is a circuit-breaker?

Wales will go into lockdown for a two-week circuit-breaker from Friday, to try to stem rising coronavirus cases.

Everyone will be told to stay at home, while pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops will shut.

The government's science advisers have recommended a circuit-breaker in England, Northern Ireland is pressing ahead and Scotland is doing something similar.

A circuit-breaker is a tight set of restrictions - it could feel a lot like the original lockdown - but crucially it would be for a fixed period of time. 

It is designed to reverse the tide of the epidemic and bring the number of cases back down.

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THE SAGA ABOUT THE SWEDISH STRATEGY

 WILHELM KUGELBERG 

Sweden - the super spreader of the Nordics

 FINANCIAL TIMES

Sverige har nu gått om både USA och UK när det gäller nya coronafall.

 

Studier gjorda på munskydd

Det finns idag över 70 studier som vid en sammantagen bedömning ger övertygande vetenskapligt stöd för att användande av munskydd minskar samhällspridningen. På basis av denna nya kunskap har de stora internationella smittskyddsorganisationerna, som WHO, ECDC och CDC, ändrat sina rekommendationer, och de förespråkar nu alla ett allmänt bruk av munskydd – inom vården, äldrevården, i offentliga inomhusmiljöer, och där inte tillräckligt avstånd kan hållas utomhus. Över 170 länder i världen har i linje med dessa nya rön infört munskyddsrekommendationer eller munskyddskrav. Vi tar här upp några av de mest väsentliga. De flesta av dessa är redan publicerade i vetenskapliga tidskrifter eller i rapporter från folkhälsomyndigheter, några väntar på review. Resultaten finns på länken.

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Slovakia Says COVID Double-Testing Cut Number of Infections by More Than Half

Slovakia's coronavirus testing and quarantine scheme, running over the past two weekends, has helped cut the proportion of infections by more than half, Prime Minister Igor Matovic said on Monday.

The country of 5.5 million tested 3.6 million people, excluding small children and some senior citizens, over the first weekend in November, with those testing positive having to go into quarantine.

It repeated tests for just over 2 million over this past weekend when testing took place only in more affected areas, with the infection rate turning out to be much lower thanks to the earlier quarantine orders.

The scheme has been watched by other countries struggling with a spike in coronavirus cases.

Taking into account districts that were tested on both weekends, the infection rate dropped from 1.47% on the first weekend to 0.62% of those who took the test on the second weekend, Matovic told a news conference.

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Lancet: COVID-19 transmission—up in the air

On Oct 5, 2020, the CDC updated their COVID-19 webpage to say that there is growing evidence that COVID-19 infection can occur from airborne exposure to the virus under certain circumstances. Cases of transmission from people more than 2 m apart have occurred but in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation, and typically with extended exposure to an infected person of more than 30 min. The CDC have been clear to point out that most infections are spread through close contact and that airborne transmission is not the primary route of transmission.

Whether droplet or airborne transmission is the main route, the risk of infection is known to be much lower outside where ventilation is better. As winter approaches in the northern hemisphere, the opportunity to socialise and exercise outdoors becomes more challenging and concerns are growing over the increased risk of transmission of COVID-19. Public health guidance now needs to advise people how to navigate risk in indoor settings and wearing facemasks is becoming mandatory in many countries for travelling on public transport, indoor shopping, and gatherings. Facemasks and shields offer protection from larger droplets but their effectiveness against airborne transmission is less certain. Advice on spending time indoors should also focus on improved ventilation and avoiding crowded spaces.

Länk LANCET

WHO: Criteria for releasing COVID-19 patients from isolation

Criteria for discharging patients from isolation (i.e., discontinuing transmission-based precautions) without requiring retesting[1]: 

• For symptomatic patients: 10 days after symptom onset, plus at least 3 additional days without symptoms (including without fever [2] and without respiratory symptoms)[3]
• For asymptomatic cases[4]: 10 days after positive test for SARS-CoV-2

For example, if a patient had symptoms for two days, then the patient could be released from isolation after 10 days + 3 = 13 days from date of symptom onset; for a patient with symptoms for 14 days, the patient can be discharged (14 days + 3 days =) 17 days after date of symptom onset; for a patient with symptoms for 30 days, the patient can be discharged (30+3=) 33 days after symptom onset).

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Om du testats positiv för covid-19

Om du har tagit ett test som visar att du har covid-19 bör du vara hemma i minst sju dygn räknat från den dag du fick symtom. Om du av någon anledning blivit provtagen trots att du inte har symtom räknas sju dygn från den dag du tog ditt test. Du behöver dessutom ha varit feberfri och mått bra i minst två dygn. Om du har kvarvarande lindriga symtom som lätt hosta och snuva eller lukt- och smakbortfall men i övrigt känner dig helt frisk, kan du återgå till arbete, skola, förskola och annan aktivitet om det gått minst 7 dygn sedan insjuknandet.

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Learning Inequality During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Investigating mechanisms, we find that most of the effect reflects the cumulative impact of knowledge learned rather than transitory influences on the day of testing. The average learning loss is equivalent to a fifth of a school year, nearly exactly the same period that schools remained closed. These results imply that students made little or no progress whilst learning from home, and suggest much larger losses in countries less prepared for remote learning.

Länk SocArXiv