public health – Newswire Report

Why Some States Are Resisting Social Distancing Measures

April 5, 2020April 5, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, COVID-19, Paywall Exclude, public health, states, WIRED Free Access

Alabama hospitals were more than 630 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the state, more than 100 of whom were hospitalized, and dozens of patients on ventilators. Read all of our coronavirus coverage here. Her own lieutenant governor disagreed. The day before, Will Ainsworth “One thing that this outbreak reminds us of is that infectious diseases observe no borders—and that's true if they’re international borders, state borders, or county lines for that matter,” said Ben Lopman, a professor of epidemiology and environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “At…

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The US Army Corps of Engineers Deploys Against Coronavirus

March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 NewsEditorArmy, coronavirus, COVID-19, logistics, public health

The Jacob K. Javits Center occupies over 22 million square feet on the west side of New York City, a block or so down from where the Lincoln Tunnel splashes into the Hudson River. This week, it had been scheduled to host the World Floral Expo until coronavirus fears scuttled those and most other non-essential plans. Instead, thanks to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the convention center is being transformed into four field hospitals with a thousand total beds. And that’s only the beginning. Since its founding in…

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How ProMED Crowdsourced the Arrival of Covid-19 and SARS

March 24, 2020March 24, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, COVID-19, diseases, epidemiology, public health

It was about 8:30 pm on December 30, and Marjorie Pollack, a physician and epidemiologist, was working in her home office in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Her email pinged. In her inbox was a note from a frequent and reliable contributor to ProMED, an email list of disease alerts for which Pollack serves as deputy editor. The contributor, who speaks and reads Chinese, wanted her to know about a new post that was getting some attention on Weibo, a within-China social media network. The post said that a few hours earlier,…

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Chloroquine May Fight Covid-19and Silicon Valleys Into It

March 20, 2020March 20, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, COVID-19, diseases, medicine, public health

The chatter about a promising drug to fight Covid-19 started, as chatter often does (but science does not), on Twitter. A blockchain investor named James Todaro Google doc he’d cowritten, explaining the idea. What Is the Coronavirus? Plus: How can I avoid catching it? Is Covid-19 more deadly than the flu? Our in-house Know-It-Alls answer your questions. nearly a dozen drugs to treat coronavirus are in clinical trials in China, just one—remdesivir, an antiviral that was in trials against Ebola and the coronavirus MERS—is in linked to Todaro’s Google document;…

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A Disease Tracker Backed by Gates and Zuckerberg Tackles Covid-19

March 11, 2020March 11, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, COVID-19, outbreak, public health, whole-genome sequencing

Jessica Manning had no experience with coronaviruses. The infectious disease researcher had lived and worked in Cambodia off and on since 2013, studying the mosquitoes of the Mekong Delta and how their saliva helps spread disease in humans. But in January, the country flagged its first Covid-19 patient, and the lab that delivered the diagnosis wanted to send samples from the patient and his family to Manning for further testing. Manning works at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Laboratory of Malaria and Vector Research in Phnom Penh,…

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Wuhan Coronavirus ‘Super-Spreaders’ Could Be Wildcards

February 2, 2020February 2, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, epidemics, public health, viruses

Stopping the spread of a rapidly emerging disease takes masterful medical detective work, including tracing the people who have been infected and figuring out their web of contacts, steps that are vital to understanding how it’s being transmitted. US public health officials are following those trails to quickly detect new cases of the Wuhan coronavirus, including the report on Thursday of a sixth US infection—the husband of a woman who became ill after traveling from China back home to Chicago—which was followed by a seventh, in California, on Friday. Yet…

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Scientists Predict Wuhan’s Outbreak Will Get Much Worse

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 NewsEditorChina, outbreak, public health, viruses

As more data on the new coronavirus circulating in China emerges, it’s becoming clear that whatever the country is experiencing now—dozens of deaths, hundreds of people hospitalized, cities of millions quarantined—is just the tip of the outbreak. On Friday, a team of researchers based in the UK and US up to 729. Using case data scraped from official reports, a team led by Jonathan Read at Lancaster University plotted a temporal map of the coronavirus’s spread, starting on January 1, when local authorities closed the meat-and-animal market where the virus…

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An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 NewsEditorartificial intelligence, Data, epidemiology, public health, viruses

On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31. Related Stories Snakes?! The Slippery Truth of a…