The coronavirus variant first found in the British region of Kent is a concern because it is mutating and so could undermine the protection given by vaccines against developing COVID-19, the head of the UK’s genetic surveillance programme said. What’s concerning about this is that the 1.1.7 variant that weContinue Reading
STAT News writes about the recent drop in new cases in the United States and the changes in the virus that could cause rapid growth again. What could also be happening, said infectious disease expert Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research Institute, is that the variants, which share some mutations, areContinue Reading
Australia’s hotel quarantine system has been an extremely effective first line of defence against Covid-19. Even the most effective COVID control can have problems… So far, more than 211,000 people have gone through this quarantine. It’s a costly but effective method that is used in only a few other nationsContinue Reading
Axios has created a map of COVID-19 deaths relative to population size. In the seven states hit hardest by the pandemic, more than 1 in every 500 residents have died from the coronavirus.Continue Reading
An international team of scientists led by the World Health Organization said Tuesday that the coronavirus “most likely” originated in animals before spreading to humans and dismissed a theory that the disease had been leaked by a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. In terms of understanding what happenedContinue Reading
The Atlantic reports on why hitting the threshold might actually be impossible. But vaccines can still help end the pandemic. While COVID-19 vaccines are very good—even unexpectedly good—at preventing disease, they are still unlikely to be good enough against transmission of the virus, which is key to herd immunity. On the whole, weContinue Reading
As millions of Americans struggle to recover from covid and millions more scramble for the protection offered by vaccines, U.S. health officials may be overlooking an unsettling subgroup of survivors: those who get infected more than once. Identifying how common reinfection is among people who contracted covid — as wellContinue Reading
Mathematical analysis suggests that preventing large gatherings could significantly reduce Covid-19 infection rates. There have been many documented cases of Covid-19 “super-spreading” events, in which one person infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects many other people. But how much of a role do these events play in the overall spread of theContinue Reading
Texas is the first U.S. state to hit 1 million coronavirus cases, nearly double that of New York. NBC reports Texas confirmed 1,000,589 cases of Covid-19 on Friday night, eclipsing California for the highest number of cases. Texas passed California, which has 968,000 cases as of Friday, last month; California is the mostContinue Reading
In Montana’s conservative Flathead County, prosecutors and local leaders were turning a blind eye to businesses that flouted state mask and social distancing mandates, even as the area’s COVID infections climbed to their highest levels. Montana is one of the last states to face the possibility of requiring mask use.Continue Reading
