Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Some trials of lateral flow test from US firm Innova found it was much less accurate than the government said it was
The lateral flow test bought by the UK government for mass testing in Liverpool, and potentially the whole country, could miss up to half of those who have Covid-19, according to experts.
The government has great expectations of the Innova test, having signed two contracts with the California-based company behind it. Innova told the Guardian it was now shipping more than one million tests a day to the UK.
Greece reported 3,316 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, its highest daily tally since its first infection surfaced in February, according to health authorities data.
The latest jump in infections brings the total number of cases in the country to 66,637.
Donald Trump’s adviser Corey Lewandowski has become the latest member of the outgoing president’s staff to test positive for coronavirus.
Lewandowski recently traveled to Pennsylvania to assist Trump’s efforts to contest the state’s election results. He said today he believes he was infected in Philadelphia and is not experiencing any symptoms.
The scientist behind the first Covid-19 vaccine to clear interim clinical trials says he is confident his product can “bash the virus over the head” and put an end to the pandemic that has held the world hostage in 2020.
The German company BioNTech and the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced via a press release on Monday that their jointly developed vaccine candidate had outperformed expectations in the crucial phase 3 trials, proving 90% effective in stopping people from falling ill.
Dr Anthony Fauci says unprecedented 'polarisation' has intensified an anti-science feeling in the US and led people to threaten violence against him.
While the top infectious diseases expert commands respect among much of the public, he has received personal death threats as a result of his high-profile statements about the coronavirus pandemic.
The health expert Prof David Heymann, who joined Fauci in a Chatham House webinar, said science had become highly politicised to the point that a mask wearer was seen as a Democrat and a non-mask wearer as a Republican
Didier Raoult stands accused of touting drug as a coronavirus treatment without evidence
A French professor who touts the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment – without evidence, scientists say – will appear before a disciplinary panel charged with ethics breaches, an order of doctors has said.
Marseille-based Didier Raoult stands accused by his peers of spreading false information about the benefits of the drug. His promotion of hydroxychloroquine was taken up by the US and Brazilian presidents, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, who trumpeted its unproven benefits in a way critics say put people’s lives at risk.
Mongolia has reported its first domestic transmissions of the coronavirus, from a truck driver who infected his wife and two other relatives after three weeks of quarantine, according to the AfP news agency.
The landlocked country bordering Russia and China has so far reported just 376 virus cases - all imported - and enforced strict arrival controls that have prompted protests by Mongolians stranded abroad.
Dr David Nabarro, one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) special envoys on Covid-19, urged people to be “careful” when students in the UK return to university after Christmas to prevent a spike in Covid-19 cases.
Asked about students returning to UK universities in January, and if there was an argument for keeping students at home for longer, Dr Nabarro told Sky News:
We did see that there was quite a big increase in cases in Europe in October and November. We think that was to do with movements that took place in September, including students coming to university.
So if there’s going to be a big return in January, all I’m going to say is, everybody be careful. Because that’s when the virus can really move around quickly.
Texas on Wednesday became the first US state with more than 1 million confirmed Covid-19 cases, and California closed in on that mark as a surge of coronavirus infections engulfs the country from coast to coast, AP reports.
The country’s second-most populous state, Teas has recorded 1.01 million coronavirus cases and over 19,000 deaths since the outbreak began in early March, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. California, the most populous state, has logged more than 991,000 cases.
The Swedish prime minister has said his government will present a law proposal that would ban nationwide the sale of alcohol after 10pm in bars, restaurants and night clubs from 20 November in an effort to curb the spread of Covid-19.
Stefan Lofven said that “we are facing a situation that risks becoming pitch-black” and added that Sweden “currently is risking a situation like the one we had last spring”.
Like many people living in or around Totnes in Devon, David, who is in his 70s, has his own theories about coronavirus and its origins. Sitting in the armchair of his house, he says the pandemic is a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government and a nefarious effort to crush freedom. He scrolls through Facebook, which he recently signed up to, to show many with similar beliefs.
David came to many of these ideas recently. When the pandemic hit, he started looking for answers. “I’m friends with a few people who are active in researching what is going on. I quickly made contact with others putting posts on the internet.”
Washington state scientists found about 500 live specimens in various stages of development inside the basketball-sized nest
When scientists in Washington state destroyed the first nest of so-called murder hornets found in the US, they discovered about 500 live specimens in various stages of development, officials said Tuesday.
Among them were nearly 200 queens that had the potential to start their own nests, said Sven-Erik Spichiger, an entomologist leading the fight to kill the hornets.
Two vast football-pitch-sized facilities equipped with hundreds of large freezers in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Puurs, Belgium, will be the centres of the huge effort to ship the coronavirus vaccine, developed by US drug giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech, around the world.
Governments are scrambling to prepare for the rollout of the vaccine, which must be stored at -70C (-94F), after the announcement from the two companies that it was more than 90% effective and had no serious side-effects. The news sparked hopes of a return to normal life and a stock market rally, but now minds are turning to the practicalities of getting the vaccine quickly to populations across the world, in particular to the vulnerable people who need it most.
Hopes that the end of the coronavirus pandemic has become nearer have soared after the news that a coronavirus vaccine was found to be 90% effective in global trials.
Although there is definite reason to be optimistic, experts have cautioned that the data from the trials conducted by Pfizer and BioNTech are not final, and there remain plenty of unknowns.
Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit has received the green light to carry out late stage trials for its vaccine in Mexico, the country’s foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard has said.
He said the US vaccine developer Novavax Inc earlier this month also presented health authorities with a request to conduct phase 3 testing in Mexico.
Four judicial investigations have been opened in France into the authorities’ response to the Covid epidemic, the Paris prosecutor’s department has said. The prosecutor opened a preliminary inquiry in June to determine whether any criminal offences might have been committed.
Key PLO figure and advocate for two-state solution dies aged 65
Saeb Erekat, the veteran Palestinian peace negotiator and one of the most high-profile figures in its leadership since the early 1990s, has died after contracting coronavirus.
Erekat, a lawmaker from Jericho in the occupied West Bank, was a senior adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and also worked for Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat. He served as the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Nearly one in five people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder such as anxiety, depression or insomnia within three months of testing positive for the virus, according to a study that suggestsaction is needed to mitigate the mental health toll of the pandemic.
The analysis – conducted by researchers from the University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre – also found that people with a pre-existing mental health diagnosis were 65% more likely to be diagnosed with Covid-19 than those without, even accounting for known risk factors such as age, sex, race, and underlying physical conditions.
Hopes are soaring that a Covid vaccine is within reach, following news that an interim analysis has shown Pfizer/BioNTech’s candidate was 90% effective in protecting people from transmission of the virus in global trials.
The vaccine performed much better than most experts had hoped for, according to the companies’ analysis, and brings into view a potential end to a pandemic that has killed more than a million people, battered economies and upended daily life worldwide.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands are set to open a ‘travel bubble’ between the two countries, with NZ prime minister Jacinda Ardern confirming officials from her government would visit the South Pacific archipelago later this week.
“While I don’t wish to put any time-frames on a potential travel bubble, it is my aim and hope that this can resume as soon as is safely possible, and this on-the-ground visit by officials to the Cook Islands is the next step in that process.
US President-elect Joe Biden’s healthcare advisers have held talks with drugmaker executives on the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program to accelerate development of a possible Covid-19 treatment, a Biden spokesman said on Sunday.
Reuters reports that under the Trump administration, Operation Warp Speed has struck deals with several drugmakers in an effort to help speed up the search for effective treatments for the disease amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
The US Covid-19 death toll stands at over 237,000, with more than 9.9 million cases now reported in the country since the outbreak began, according to a Reuters tally.
“As we previously said in September, because President-Elect Joe Biden is absolutely committed to helping develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine as soon as possible, campaign medical advisers have received briefings from companies working to produce vaccines in order to be informed about the process,” Biden’s spokesman Andrew Bates said in an emailed statement.
Biden’s advisers met with companies that have Covid-19 vaccines or therapies in late-stage clinical trials in September and October, Bloomberg News had reported earlier. The report added that the meeting was aimed at gathering information about the development, manufacturing and distribution of shots to ward off the novel coronavirus and therapies to treat the sick.
Biden has vowed to “listen to the science”, with his coronavirus plan calling for scaling up testing and contact tracing and promising to appoint a “supply commander” to oversee supply lines of critical equipment.
Scientists in the UK are working to secure samples of a mutant form of coronavirus that arose in Danish mink farms and spread into humans, prompting ministers to ban non-UK citizens arriving from Denmark.
Danish health authorities raised the alarm over the mutant virus last week and announced a cull of the nation’s 17 million mink as the Statens Serum Institut (SSI) in Copenhagen warned of potentially “serious consequences” for vaccines if it was allowed to spread internationally.
Would you harm yourself just to get at someone else? Spite is in us all, but there are unexpected benefits to it
On a memorable episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the curmudgeonly protagonist Larry David is angered by the lukewarm lattes at his local café so he opens a “spite” café. It is an identical coffee shop and right next door, but everything is cheaper. He runs it at a personal financial loss, but is driven by the thought of putting his neighbour out of business. It is magnificently mean-spirited, petty, spiteful – and humorous.
A murkier question is can spite be good? It seems counterintuitive to put an optimistic spin on behaviour that, by definition, involves hurting others while incurring harm to yourself. But a new book by Simon McCarthy-Jones explores its benefits. “Spite came from the darkness… It seeks to harm the other and to bring about changes in dominance. Yet it can help us into the light,” writes McCarthy-Jones, an associate professor in clinical psychology and neuropsychology at Trinity College in Dublin. “Spite is a sword of Damocles dangling over our interactions. It has made society fairer and more co-operative.”
England is back in lockdown. It happened not a moment too soon. As of 2 November almost three-quarters of a million new cases have been officially counted since 21 September, when the government’s scientific advisory committee Sage advised lockdown. On that day, Britain had only had about 360,000 cases since Covid arrived. Now the figure is three times that. So many more cases mean it will take longer, and possibly require tougher social restrictions, to get numbers down by imposing lockdown than it would have in September, says James Naismith, head of the Rosalind Franklin Institute in Oxford.
Naismith calculates that we will have 500 deaths per day in two to three weeks because of the cases that occurred over the past week, compared with an average of 144 in the week ending 2 November. But it could be far worse. If we had done nothing for another two weeks, hesays, we’d be looking at 1,000 deaths a day by Christmas – and more, if hospitals fill up and not everyone can get optimal treatment.
The UK’s first mass Covid testing trial in Liverpool risks being “an expensive mess that does more harm than good”, health experts said as it got under way on Friday.
My colleagues in the UK, Josh Halliday and Sarah Boseley, report that six new testing centres opened their doors to Liverpudlians at midday on Friday as part of the government’s Operation Moonshot drive to eventually test up to 10 million people a day.
The potential for harmful diversion of resources and public money is vast. Also of concern are the potential vested interests of commercial companies supplying new and as yet inadequately evaluated tests.