Some possible good news... however the drop in viral load is most likely due to people wearing masks, lockdown measures, and social distancing. Coronavirus weakening? Viral loads carried by patients on the decline, along with death rate https://www.studyfinds.org/coronavirus-viral-load-declining/ While some health experts warn of a possible second wave in the coronavirus pandemic, a new study is pointing to signs that COVID-19’s severity may be fading. Researchers at Wayne State University say viral loads from patients are continuing to decrease as the pandemic progresses. This is also showing a connection to a lowering death rate. Dr. Said El Zein and his team analyzed viral loads of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, coming from patient nasal swabs over two months. From April 4 to June 5, a downward trend in the amount of virus detected in patients at Detroit Medical Center was discovered. To estimate the viral loads coming from nasopharyngeal swabs, study authors use a cycle threshold (Ct) value that comes from the tests on these samples. A higher Ct means a sample has less SARS-CoV-2 in it. Their scale rates a high viral load as a Ct of 25 and under, intermediate loads as a Ct between 26-36, and low viral loads as a Ct over 37. Lower viral loads lead to better outcomes for COVID patients During the week of April 4, just under half (49%) of COVID-19 patients had an intermediate viral load (VL). Low and high VL counts both came in at 25.5 percent of the patient samples. By the fifth week of the study however, 70 percent of positive COVID-19 swabs fall into the low VL category. El Zein adds that this drop in viral production coincides with a decrease in patient deaths. Researchers say 45 percent of patients in the high VL group died from the virus. This number falls to 32 percent for COVID-19 patients with intermediate loads and 14 percent for the low VL group. “During the April-June 2020 period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initial SARS-CoV-2 load steadily declined among hospitalized patients with a corresponding decrease in the percent of deaths over time,” the Wayne State team says in a media release. “Though confounding variables have not been evaluated, this suggests an association between initial viral load and mortality.” Face masks, social distancing still the keys Dr. El Zein admits the team doesn’t know the exact reason why viral loads are dropping over time, but suggests the pandemic’s severity is fading since a global crisis was officially declared on March 11. Part of this, he adds, may be due to the public’s actions to curb the spread. “Rapid implementation of social distancing measures, lockdown and widespread use of facemasks may have contributed to a decrease in the exposure to the virus.” The findings were presented at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases’ Conference on Coronavirus Disease.
Interesting... 80% of initially asymptomatic cases develop Covid-19 symptoms later: Study https://www.thehindubusinessline.co...d-19-symptoms-later-study/article32701878.ece According to a new study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, true asymptomatic cases of the novel coronavirus comprise a minority of infections. The researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and colleagues, maintained that the world is yet to know the full spectrum of the coronavirus and how it gets transmitted. Authors mentioned in their study that some Covid-19 positive people may experience severe infections that can even lead to viral pneumonia, respiratory distress syndrome, and death. While others demonstrate no symptoms at all and remain completely asymptomatic or have nonspecific symptoms. The researchers conducted the study to better understand the proportion of asymptomatic people with SARS-CoV-2 who never show any symptoms and the proportion of people who are asymptomatic at the time of diagnosis but develop symptoms later. For the study, the researchers reviewed the literature of 79 studies that reported empirical data on 6,616 people, 1,287 of whom were defined as asymptomatic. Findings The researchers estimated that 20 per cent of infections remained asymptomatic during follow-up. The limitation of the study was that it could not ascertain the cases of false negatives among asymptomatic cases. The researchers noted that accurate estimations of both cases are important to better understand the distribution of the virus Researchers revealed that around 80 per cent of asymptomatic cases eventually develop the symptoms of the virus. This means that presymptomatic transmission may significantly contribute to overall SARS CoV-2 epidemics. Diana Buitrago-Garcia at the University of Bern said in a statement cited in PLOS: “The findings of this systematic review of publications early in the pandemic suggests that most SARS-CoV-2 infections are not asymptomatic throughout the course of infection.” “The contribution of presymptomatic and asymptomatic infections to overall SARS-CoV-2 transmission means that combination prevention measures, with enhanced hand and respiratory hygiene, testing and tracing, and isolation strategies and social distancing, will continue to be needed,” Buitrago-Garcia added.
https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-says-very-concerning-florida-140029188.html Fauci says it's 'very concerning' that Florida is re-opening bars and restaurants Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, on Monday called Florida's full reopening of bars and restaurants "very concerning," fearing it will spark more coronavirus outbreaks. The warning from Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, comes three days after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that his state was going into Phase 3 of reopening, lifting all restrictions on restaurants and bars. "Well that is very concerning to me, I mean, we have always said that, myself and Dr. Deborah Birx, who is the coordinator of the task force, that that is something we really need to be careful about," Fauci told ABC's "Good Morning America, "because when you’re dealing with community spread, and you have the kind of congregate setting where people get together, particularly without masks, you’re really asking for trouble. Now’s the time actually to double down a bit, and I don’t mean close."
When Trump goes shopping for a new doctor/"expert" on faux news. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/28/health/redfield-atlas-coronavirus-data-comments/index.html Source: CDC director concerned Atlas is sharing misleading information with Trump (CNN)US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield is concerned that White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Scott Atlas is providing President Trump with misleading information about Covid-19, a federal official told CNN. NBC News reported Monday that Redfield was overheard during a phone call in public on a commercial airline to say, "Everything he says is false." NBC News, which heard the comment, said Redfield acknowledged after the flight from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., that he was speaking about Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force in August. NBC said that Redfield, in a conversation with a colleague that took place on Friday, suggested Atlas is providing Trump with misleading data about the efficacy of masks, young people's susceptibility to the coronavirus and herd immunity. In a statement to CNN, a CDC spokesman did not deny the conversation took place: "NBC News is reporting one side of a private phone conversation by CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield that was overheard on a plane from Atlanta Hartsfield airport. Dr. Redfield was having a private discussion regarding a number of points he has made publicly about Covid-19."
Huge Study of Coronavirus Cases in India Offers Some Surprises to Scientists The rate of death went down in patients over 65. Researchers also found that children of all ages became infected and spread the virus to others. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/health/covid-india-children.html With 1.3 billion people jostling for space, India has always been a hospitable environment for infectious diseases of every kind. And the coronavirus has proved to be no exception: The country now has more than six million cases, second only to the United States. An ambitious study of nearly 85,000 of those cases and nearly 600,000 of their contacts, published Wednesday in the journal Science, offers important insights not just for India, but for other low- and middle-income countries. Among the surprises: The median hospital stay before death from Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, was five days in India, compared with two weeks in the United States, possibly because of limited access to quality care. And the trend in increasing deaths with age seemed to drop off after age 65 — perhaps because Indians who live past that age tend to be relatively wealthy and have access to good health care. The contact tracing study also found that children of all ages can become infected with the coronavirus and spread it to others — offering compelling evidence on one of the most divisive questions about the virus. And the report confirmed, as other studies have, that a small number of people are responsible for seeding a vast majority of new infections. An overwhelming majority of coronavirus cases globally have occurred in resource-poor countries, noted Joseph Lewnard, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. But most of the data has come from high-income countries. “It still surprises me that it took until this point for a lot of data to come out of a low- or middle-income country about the epidemiology of Covid,” he said. In particular, he added, few studies anywhere have done contact tracing at the scale of the study. “I think it’s some of the most important data we collect in an epidemic in order to decide what kinds of interactions are safe, and what kinds are not,” he said. And yet, “data like this has not really been published very much.” Though its overall total of cases is huge, the per capita number of cases reported daily in India — and in many other low-income countries, including in Africa — is lower than in Spain, France or even the United States. And its number of deaths has not yet topped 100,000 — which has surprised some scientists. India “is a place where you would expect a disease like this to roar through, at least in the older populations,” said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease expert at the Medical University of South Carolina. “They haven’t seen that as much as you would expect.” India recorded its first case of Covid-19 on Jan. 30 in an Indian citizen evacuated from China. The government began screening travelers from China and other countries on Feb. 7 and extended these efforts to travelers by sea and land on March 15. The country shut down on March 25 but reopened two months later, despite soaring rates of infection. The study focused on two southern Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, which together have a population of about 128 million, and represent two of the five Indian states with the most cases. They also have among the most sophisticated health care systems in the country. Contact tracers reached more than three million contacts of the 435,539 cases in these two states, although this still did not represent the full set of contacts. The researchers analyzed data for the 575,071 contacts for whom test information was available. “I think what they were able to do is actually really remarkable, to be quite honest,” said Dr. Kuppalli, who has spent time in Tamil Nadu doing public health work. Contact tracing has proved difficult enough to do in the United States, she said. “I can’t imagine what it would be in a place like India, where it’s such a more crowded, crowded area.” The contact tracing data revealed that the people infected first — known as index cases — were more likely to be male and older than their contacts. That may be because men are more likely to be out in situations where they might be infected, more likely to become symptomatic and get tested if they do become infected, or perhaps more likely to respond to contact tracers’ calls for information, Dr. Lewnard said. He and his colleagues also looked at infections in contacts by age and sex, and found that infected people tend to spread the virus to those of similar ages. That’s not surprising because people generally tend to mix with their own age groups, Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York, said: “That’s a fairly robust result.” For example, more than 5,300 school-aged children in the study had infected 2,508 contacts but were more likely to spread the virus to other children of a similar age. Because the researchers were not able to get information for all of the contacts, they could not assess the children’s ability to transmit relative to adults. But the finding has relevance in the school debate, as some people have argued that children spread the virus to a negligible degree, if at all. “The claims that children have no role in the infection process are certainly not correct,” Dr. Lewnard said. “There’s, granted, not an enormous number of kids in the contact tracing data, but those who are in it are certainly transmitting.” Over all, the researchers found, 71 percent of the people in the study did not seem to have transmitted the virus to anyone else; instead, just 5 percent of people accounted for 80 percent of the infections detected by contact tracing. This is different from the idea of “super spreader” events in which a single person infected hundreds of people at a crowded gathering, Dr. Lewnard said. The researchers noticed a key difference in those who did become sick and were hospitalized: They died on average within five days of being hospitalized, compared with two to eight weeks in other countries. The patients in India may deteriorate faster because of other underlying conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure or poor overall health, Dr. Lewnard said. Access to health care may also play a role, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, who has advised the Indian government on its health care infrastructure before the pandemic. Although India has some excellent hospitals, most hospitals in the country are ill-equipped, have few beds and fewer doctors, Dr. Jha said. Most people in India also do not have health insurance that would allow them care from private hospitals. “There are going to be these large financial barriers that make people wait until they get very, very sick,” Dr. Jha said. Conditions may be similarly dire in other resource-poor nations. The amount of time patients may spend in the hospital is a “key planning parameter” for governments preparing for outbreaks, Dr. Lewnard said, and longer hospital stays can create bottlenecks during a surge. Among those who died, the researchers found an overall case-fatality rate of 2 percent. The rate rose sharply with age, as it did elsewhere. But unlike in other countries, after age 65, the deaths sloped downward again. “It leads to a younger death distribution over all in the population than you would project,” Dr. Lewnard said. The difference was not fully accounted for by the distribution of ages in the population. At 69 years, the life expectancy in India is 10 years lower than in the United States. The Indians who survive into old age may be more likely to survive the disease because of better health and access to health care, he and others said. A majority of Indians have a hardscrabble existence, earning a living as farmers, factory workers or day laborers, Dr. Jha said. “Those jobs are physically very, very demanding, and they have high fatality rates,” he added. “They are just much less likely to make it into their late 70s or 80s compared to people who are white-collar workers.” Dr. Jha said he appreciated the study over all, but cautioned against extrapolating its findings too far. He is from the state of Bihar, among the most rural and poor states in India, whereas Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, the two states in the study, are among the best equipped to deal with an outbreak, he said. “It is really important to understand this is not the experience of Bihar, this is not the experience of D.R.C.,” he said, referring to the Democratic Republic of Congo. “This is a much rosier picture than what you are likely to see in those places.” But other experts were impressed with the scale and scope of the study. “India has been the nexus of the most cases recorded for the last three, four weeks,” Dr. Shaman said. “To see it in the Indian milieu is very important,” he said. “We can’t just study it in a few countries and then walk away.”
let's waste 300M of tax payer dollars on a thinly veiled reelection campaign https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/29/hhs-ad-blitz-sputters-as-celebrities-back-away-423274 HHS ad blitz sputters as celebrities back away The $300 million, taxpayer-funded campaign to tout the administration’s response to Covid-19 falls behind schedule amid widespread criticism. Tolmor — who was paying Caputo to handle his public relations before Caputo joined the health department in April, according to Caputo’s HHS ethics form — has overseen collecting the footage and preparing the PSAs. Two people involved in the process said that Tolmor and his small team at DD&T have been overwhelmed by the task, with staff coming on and leaving the project in a revolving door. Meanwhile, Madeleine Hubbard, Caputo's assistant and a 2020 graduate from the University of Illinois, has also taken a hands-on role in shaping the multi-million-dollar public health campaign, according to three people with knowledge of the effort. Hubbard — whose resume lists no prior experience in public health communications or video production — previously served as University of Illinois's campus president for conservative organization Turning Point USA, and she also interned for Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) before joining the health department in June. Hubbard did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Weber, the HHS spokesperson, insisted that the 22-year-old Hubbard's role is focused on logistics.