Low uptake fuelled by fears over safety of vaccine and spread of misinformation
India’s Covid-19 vaccine drive has been hampered by turnout as low as 22% in some states, as fears over the safety of the vaccine and the spread of misinformation has fuelled widespread hesitancy.
On Saturday, India launched the world’s largest vaccination programme as it began the massive task of vaccinating its 1.3 billion citizens against coronavirus.
Continue reading...Tiny aerosols of the virus emitted when speaking linger in air for longer than larger droplets from a cough
Speaking to a friend when infected with the coronavirus could be as dangerous as coughing near them thanks to lingering particles, research has suggested.
Covid can be spread through a number of routes, including virus-containing droplets emitted when an infected person breaths, speaks or coughs – a factor experts said could help to explain why Covid seems to spread more easily in indoor settings.
Continue reading...Surge in infections dampens optimism over country’s advanced immunisation programme
Israel’s coronavirus tsar has warned that a single dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine may be providing less protection than originally hoped, as the country reported a record 10,000 new Covid infections on Monday.
In remarks reported by Army Radio, Nachman Ash said a single dose appeared “less effective than we had thought”, and also lower than Pfizer had suggested.
Continue reading...Minister who publicly drank syrup touted as coronavirus cure tests positive
A self-styled Sri Lankan holy man’s supposed miracle potion to prevent Covid-19 has turned sour after a minister who publicly drank it was taken to hospital with the virus.
Thousands defied public gathering restrictions to swamp a village in central Sri Lanka last month to get the syrup made by Dhammika Bandara.
Continue reading...The emergence of more infectious variants of Sars-CoV-2 has raised questions about just how long our vaccines will remain effective for. Although there is little evidence that the current vaccines won’t work against the new variants, as the virus continues to mutate scientists are preparing themselves for having to make changes to the vaccines in response. Speaking to Dr Katrina Pollock, science correspondent Linda Geddes asks how we can tweak the vaccines against new variants, and how likely it is we’ll end up in a game of cat and mouse with the virus
Continue reading...Readmission rate for Covid patients 3.5 times greater, and death rate seven times higher, than for other hospital patients
Nearly a third of people who were discharged from hospitals in England after being treated for Covid-19 were readmitted within five months – and almost one in eight died, a study suggests.
The research, which is still to be peer-reviewed, also found a higher risk of problems developing in a range of organs after hospital discharge in those younger than 70 and ethnic minority individuals.
Continue reading...A decade after an outbreak of Q fever killed 95 people in the Netherlands, scientists fear the emergence of a new disease
In early 2008, Jeannette van de Ven began to see a slightly higher rate of miscarriages among the goats on her dairy farm in the south of the Netherlands.
“We sent the samples to the veterinary authority. Nine out of 10 results showed no explanation. Only maybe toxoplasmosis from cats. We had no cats,” she says.
Van de Ven, who keeps a herd of around 1,700 dairy goats in Noord-Brabant, a province densely populated with goat farms, kept sending samples. Finally, in May 2008 an outbreak of the respiratory infection Q fever was confirmed. It infects livestock including goats, sheep and cattle, and is found in placenta, amniotic fluid, urine, faeces and milk.
The disease turned into a nightmare for the Netherlands after thousands of people also became infected during the outbreak, which lasted from 2007 to 2010. The Dutch government culled more than 50,000 dairy goats on 55 farms in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.
About half of the humans infected ended up developing complications, such as heart failure, and 95 people died.
India launches bid to vaccinate 300m people amid fears over efficacy of domestically produced vaccine
Emerging from Holy Family hospital in New Delhi, Ram Verma, a sanitation worker, breathed a deep sigh of relief. As one of the first in India to receive a coronavirus vaccine on Saturday – marking the start of the world’s largest vaccination programmes – he had been feeling a little jittery.
“I must admit I was nervous,” said Verma, who had received his Covaxin jab in a centre set up in the hospital car park. “A lot of us were. I thought I might faint or have side-effects. After all, it is something totally new. But I’m fine. There is nothing to worry about.”
Continue reading...Your internal monologue shapes mental wellbeing, says psychologist Ethan Kross. He has the tools to improve your mind’s backchat
As Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist. Ten years ago, Kross found himself sitting up late at night with a baseball bat in his hand, waiting for an imaginary assailant he was convinced was about to break into his house – a figure conjured by his frantic mind after he received a threatening letter from a stranger who’d seen him on TV. Kross, whose area of research is the science of introspection, knew that he was overreacting; that he had fallen victim to what he calls “chatter”. But telling himself this did no good at all. At the peak of his anxiety, his negative thoughts running wildly on a loop, he found himself, somewhat comically, Googling “bodyguards for academics”.
Kross runs the wonderfully named Emotion and Self Control Lab at Michigan University, an institution he founded and where he has devoted the greater part of his career to studying the silent conversations people have with themselves: internal dialogues that powerfully influence how they live their lives. Why, he and his colleagues want to know, do some people benefit from turning inwards to understand their feelings, while others are apt to fall apart when they engage in precisely the same behaviour? Are there right and wrong ways to communicate with yourself, and if so, are there techniques that might usefully be employed by those with inner voices that are just a little too loud?
Continue reading...Analysis: some say lateral flow tests could help cut outbreaks, but others argue they offer false reassurance
The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has put mass testing for coronavirus at the heart of his strategy to reopen schools after the lockdown. It is a controversial strategy that has divided scientists. Some believe mass testing can help reduce outbreaks at schools, while others argue it could make matters worse by giving teachers and pupils false reassurance.
Mass testing relies on lateral flow tests, or LFTs, which contain antibodies that bind to the virus. When a nasal swab is tested in an LFT, any virus present in the sample sticks to the antibodies and produces a dark band, a bit like a pregnancy test’s indicator. LFTs are not as accurate as the standard NHS lab-based PCR tests, but they are cheap and produce results fast – within 30 minutes.
Continue reading...Over the course of the pandemic, scientists have been monitoring emerging genetic changes to Sars-Cov-2. Mutations occur naturally as the virus replicates but if they confer an advantage – like being more transmissible – that variant of the virus may go on to proliferate. This was the case with the ‘UK’ or B117 variant, which is about 50% more contagious and is rapidly spreading around the country. So how does genetic surveillance of the virus work? And what do we know about the new variants? Ian Sample speaks to Dr Jeffrey Barrett, the director of the Covid-19 genomics initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, to find out
Continue reading...You asked us about the fast-spreading coronavirus variant, here are the answers
How do scientists know the new UK variant is 70% more transmissible, and how certain are they of this figure?
Our gift to the world: the UK variant of Sars-CoV-2. There are sufficient data to quote 70% greater infectivity, but how was this figure ascertained?” D Moon, Brighton
Continue reading...Analysis shows 12.4 million people infected since start of pandemic, against 2.4 million detected by test and trace
One in five people in England may have had coronavirus, new modelling suggests, equivalent to 12.4 million people, rising to almost one in two in some areas.
It means that across the country as a whole the true number of people infected to date may be five times higher than the total number of known cases according to the government’s dashboard.
Continue reading...The face of South Africa’s Covid science on why Africa has been hit less hard than Europe, the new variant in the region, and the danger of vaccine nationalism
The epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim could be considered South Africa’s Anthony Fauci. As co-chair of the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19, he is the government’s top adviser on the pandemic and has become the country’s face of Covid-19 science. He also sits on the Africa Task Force for Novel Coronavirus, overseeing the continent’s response to the global crisis.
Karim, who directs the Durban-based Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa and is a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, has long advocated for science and speaking truth to power. For three decades, along with his wife and scientific collaborator, Quarraisha Abdool Karim, he has been at the forefront of the fight against South Africa’s substantial HIV and tuberculosis epidemics and in the early 2000s was one of the scientists who spoke out against the government’s Aids denialism.
Continue reading...25 years ago, a mutation was discovered that makes some people susceptible to the disease, and now it has transformed treatment
Ten years ago, Tony Herbert developed a lump on the right side of his chest. The clump of tissue grew and became painful and he was tested for breast cancer. The result was positive.
“I had surgery and chemotherapy and that worked,” he said last week. But how had Herbert managed to develop a condition that is so rare in men? Only about 400 cases of male breast cancer are diagnosed every year in the UK compared with around 55,000 in women. A genetic test revealed the answer. Herbert had inherited a pathogenic version of a gene called BRCA2 and this mutation had triggered his condition.
Continue reading...The government has ordered sufficient doses to inoculate the entire population of the UK against Covid-19 but we are in for a long haul
When will the Covid-19 vaccine begin to have an effect on the nation?
The government has pledged to offer vaccines to 15 million people – the over-70s, healthcare workers and those required to shield by mid-February, and millions more by spring. This should slowly bring the virus under control although it will take many weeks before we can be sure the vaccine is having an effect. Numbers of daily cases of Covid-19 may drop but that decline could simply be due to impact of current lockdown measures. Only when hospital admissions start to reduce significantly will we be sure the vaccine is having an impact. Then there could be be a slackening of lockdown measures. Few scientists believe that will happen before Easter, however.
Continue reading...Minister says extra check on travellers introduced as ‘we simply cannot take chances’
Fears that Covid vaccines will not work against the new South African strain of the virus have prompted the introduction of testing for new arrivals into England and Scotland from abroad, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has said.
Outlining the new testing regime for England and Scotland, he told Sky News: “This is an extra check and we’re doing this now because there are these variants that we’re very keen to keep out of the country, like the South African variant, for example.
Continue reading...Respondents to global survey report 205 symptoms across 10 organ systems after infection
Many people suffering from “long Covid” are still unable to work at full capacity six months after infection, a large-scale survey of confirmed and suspected patients has found.
While Covid-19 was initially understood to be a largely respiratory illness from which most people would recover within two or three weeks, as the pandemic wore on increasing numbers reported experiencing symptoms for months on end.
Continue reading...An 82-year-old retired maintenance manager has become the first person in the world outside clinical trials to receive the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca.
Brian Pinker, a dialysis patient, received the jab at 7.30am on Monday from Sam Foster, a nurse at Churchill hospital, part of the Oxford University hospitals NHS foundation trust.
The country should not be held up as a shining example in its response to the pandemic, writes Dr Hilary Francis, who points to the failure to provide accurate data and firing of health workers
John Perry (Letters, 31 December) suggests that we should learn from the Nicaraguan government’s management of Covid. He doesn’t mention that 700 Nicaraguan health professionals wrote an open letter begging the government to acknowledge the extent of the crisis, or that at least 10 health workers have been fired for criticising the government response. In the absence of accurate government data, an independent citizen observatory has been established, which attempts to keep track of the rate of infection. They estimate 11,935 cases in the period to 23 December, nearly double the official number.
On 21 December, Nicaragua’s national assembly passed a law that gives President Daniel Ortega the right to unilaterally declare that citizens are “traitors to the homeland” and ban them from running for office. The new legislation ensures that elections, scheduled for November 2021, will not be free and fair. There are no lessons to be learned from Ortega’s policies, but Nicaragua’s descent into dictatorship demands much closer attention.
Dr Hilary Francis
Northumbria University