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AVAC's weekly COVID News Brief provides a curated perspective on what COVID news is worth your time.
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"The inequities that were overlooked in this pandemic will ignite the next one—but they don’t have to. Improving ventilation in workplaces, schools, and other public buildings would prevent deaths from COVID and other airborne viruses, including flu. Paid sick leave would allow workers to protect their colleagues without risking their livelihood. Equitable access to antivirals and other treatments could help immunocompromised people who can’t be protected through vaccination. Universal health care would help the poorest people, who still bear the greatest risk of infection. A universe of options lies between the caricatured extremes of lockdowns and inaction, and will save lives when new variants or viruses inevitably arise."
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Cumulative Confirmed COVID-19 Deaths per Million People
March 14, 2022
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Last week the world marked the milestone of six million confirmed COVID deaths. We know that the six million is an undercount of the true toll of the virus. Nature (UK) reports, “The number of people who have died because of the COVID-19 pandemic could be roughly three times higher than official figures suggest, according to a new analysis. ... The Lancet [study] says that the true number of lives lost to the pandemic by 31 December 2021 was close to 18 million…. The difference is down to significant undercounts in official statistics, owing to delayed and incomplete reporting and a lack of data in dozens of countries.”
It's difficult to grasp six million dead in such a short period of time from this virus, let alone 18 million. The US—one of the hardest hit countries—is fast approaching one million documented deaths. Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic (US), “The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination…. Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent.” Yong writes, “On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as ‘incalculable.’ Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?
Yong also notes the racial inequities of COVID in the US and posits those inequities contribute to the normalizing of so many deaths. “Generations of racist policies widened the mortality gap between Black and white Americans to canyon size: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, calculated that white mortality during COVID was still substantially lower than Black mortality in the pre-pandemic years. In that light, the normalizing of COVID deaths is unsurprising. ‘When deaths happen to people who are already not valued in a million other ways, it’s easier to not value their lives in this additional way,’ Wrigley-Field told me.”
If You Are in a Hurry
- Read AP’s profile of WHO Africa’s Dr. Matshidiso Moeti.
- Read a commentary in Nature from Taiwan’s former vice President and epidemiologist, Chen Chien-jen on what researchers need to make better public health decisions.
- Read The Atlantic on how the pandemic “has defied our attempts to snap it into a satisfying story framework.”
- Read CIDRAP on a JAMA study that warns the pandemic could contribute to the global burden of dementia.
- Read Reuters on concerns about the pandemic’s impact on children’s education globally.
- Read NBC News on a rise in cases in many European countries, ABC News on rising rates in China and Bloomberg on wastewater testing in the US that likely shows a coming rise in cases.
- Read A commentary in The Conversation that warns access to treatments may follow the same road as access to vaccines.
China Enacts Massive Lockdowns
Even as COVID cases are declining in many countries, China is seeing the largest uptick in cases since 2020. ABC News (US) reports, “China is facing its worst COVID crisis since early 2020, when the world first witnessed an entire population locked down to contain the coronavirus in Wuhan and its surrounding province. Two years on, it's now sending tens of millions of people into lockdown in the entire northeastern province of Jilin, where 24 million people live, and the southern cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan, with 17.5 million and 10 million, respectively…. China, the last major country to relentlessly pursue a COVID-zero policy, reported 1,437 cases across dozens of cities on Monday. That’s a fourfold jump in a week.”
Reuters, (UK) reports, “Hong Kong is rushing to build facilities for COVID-19 patients…. As a surge in COVID-19 cases overwhelms Hong Kong's healthcare facilities, authorities have deployed mainland medical and construction workers, as well as building materials, to speed up efforts to contain an outbreak of the virus.”
COVID Cases Rising in Europe
NBC News (US) reports, “Nearly half of all European countries have recorded increases in new COVID-19 cases in the past week…. Among the countries with the biggest recent surges are Finland, where new cases jumped by 84 percent in its weekly case total, to nearly 62,500 weekly cases; Switzerland, whose weekly total rose by 45 percent, to 182,190; and the United Kingdom, which had a 31 percent increase, to a weekly total of 414,480 new cases. Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy have also recorded double-digit percentage increases in their weekly tallies…. Europe's rise in infections is likely to be a result of the spread of the omicron subvariant known as BA.2, paired with waning immunity and the relaxation of mitigation policies.”
Fortune (US) reports, “Germany’s coronavirus infection rate hit a record for the third straight day on Monday, with the renewed surge prompting the country’s top health official to issue a grim warning…. The outbreak shows signs of worsening and causing ‘many deaths,’ Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said Sunday in a tweet. He urged vaccine holdouts to urgently get their COVID shots. The rising infection numbers are due in part to the spread of the even more infectious BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron strain, which now accounts for about half the COVID cases in Germany…”
Wastewater Testing Shows Cases Likely Rising in Parts of the US
Bloomberg (US) reports, “A wastewater network that monitors for COVID-19 trends is warning that cases are once again rising in many parts of the US, according to an analysis of [CDC data]. More than a third of the CDC’s wastewater sample sites across the US showed rising COVID-19 trends in the period ending March 1 to March 10, though reported cases have stayed near a recent low.”
Reuters (UK) reports, “The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) on Wednesday said COVID-19 cases fell by 26 percent across the Americas last week while deaths from the virus dropped by nearly 19 percent, but cautioned that some effective measures to curb infections should be maintained…. ‘We all want the pandemic to be over, but optimism alone cannot control the virus. It is too soon to lower our guard,’ PAHO director Carissa Etienne said.”
WHO Supports Boosters
AP(US) reports, “An expert group convened by the World Health Organization said [last week] it ‘strongly supports urgent and broad access’ to booster doses amid the global spread of omicron, in a reversal of the U.N. agency’s insistence last year that boosters weren’t necessary and contributed to vaccine inequity.
Axios (US) reports, “A fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine will be necessary in order to maintain manageable levels of hospitalizations and mild infections, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla [said]…’So what we are trying to do, and we're working very diligently right now, it is to make not only a vaccine that will protect against all variants, including Omicron, but also something that can protect for at least a year.’”
Dr. Matshidiso Moeti
AP (US) profiles Dr. Matshidiso Moeti director of WHO Africa: “From 2020, the start of her second term, Moeti has faced her toughest professional and personal challenge: helping Africa respond to the coronavirus pandemic as the continent trails the rest of the world in testing and vaccination efforts. She has become one of the world’s most compelling voices urging better consideration of Africa’s people—especially women, who’ve in many ways been hit hardest by COVID. Her identity as an African woman has been both a strength and an obstacle on a continent where much of society is still dominated by patriarchal systems…. In Africa, women have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic—with lower vaccine rates, economic turmoil, rising pregnancies, other healthcare issues, increases in domestic and gender-based violence—and Moeti has made addressing that inequality a cornerstone of her work.”
Taiwan’s Pandemic Vice-President
In a Nature (UK) Viewpoint from Taiwan’s former Vice-President and epidemiologist, Chen Chien-jen argues, “Successful policy and preparedness require more diverse evidence than researchers often encounter.” Chien-Jen has moved between academia and government for several years and he argues, “Each time I return to academia, my government experience leads me to pay more attention to the earlier parts of the disease process: more prevention, swifter detection and less time to treatment. In particular, that means rapid, practical diagnostics and vaccines. And that requires consideration of the socio-economic and political components of public-health programmes. For treatments to be effective, patients must receive them, which depends on where they are offered, what patients have to pay and what makes them inconvenient and uncomfortable.”
Viral Evolution
National Geographic (US) reports, “Scientists and physicians continue to be amazed by how quickly the virus evolves, what it does to the human body, and how it moves through species…. [In two years] this coronavirus has presented scientists with a bevy of surprises: Many experts are still amazed by how quickly the virus evolves, what it does to the human body, and how it moves in and out of other species. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly evolved into a string of variants that have hindered a return to pre-pandemic normality. Even with the virus’s genetic blueprint in hand and the ability to decode the genomes of new variants within hours, virologists and healthcare professionals struggle to predict how its mutations will alter the virus’s transmissibility and severity.”
NPR’s Goats and Soda blog (US) reports on new research that found “stunning” rates of SARS-CoV-2 in American and Canadian deer. “These new findings—which follow an earlier study about the coronavirus in the white-tailed deer population—are raising renewed concerns over the unpredictability of spillover events and the potential risks posed to humans. Here are a few questions being asked about the deer spillovers…. The findings of this deer study are significant—that after finding its way into a different species like this, where it gathered additional mutations, a new variant of the coronavirus could spill back into people, where it has the potential to create more trouble.”
Slow Uptake of Novavax Dims Hopes It Could Change Skeptics’ Minds
Reuters (UK) reports, “Demand for the COVID-19 vaccine produced by US biotech firm Novavax has been underwhelming in the European Union's main countries in the early rollout, so far undermining hopes that it could convince vaccine sceptics to get a shot…. The Novavax vaccine, the latest to receive the EU regulators' approval under the trade name of Nuvaxovid, was expected to persuade some sceptics because it is based on a more conventional technology than the other four vaccines authorised so far in the EU.”
Access to Treatments Looks a Lot Like Access to Vaccines
A commentary in The Conversation (US) by two Australian researchers notes, “access to vaccines is still extremely uneven across the world. And now similar problems are emerging with inequitable access to COVID-19 treatments. Meanwhile, negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 health products and technologies, underway for almost 18 months, are still in a state of paralysis. And there is a risk that any agreement reached at the WTO might only apply to vaccines, leaving treatments unavailable or unaffordable for around half the global population.” The authors note Merck and Pfizer’s agreements with the Medicines Patent Pool “both exclude middle-income countries such as Thailand, China, and Mexico—countries where the prices for the patented products risks putting them out of reach.”
Reuters (UK) reports, “Africa's top public health agency has agreed a memorandum of understanding with Pfizer to bring supplies of the pharmaceutical firm's Paxlovid antiviral COVID-19 pills to the continent, its director said on Thursday…. Nkengasong said African countries should be using a combination of public health measures, vaccines, testing and the Pfizer and Merck treatments in their efforts to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic this year. ‘These molecules have a very unique role to play in a campaign to fight against this terrible pandemic,’ he said.”
Narrative Fatigue
The Atlantic (US) looks at how the pandemic “has defied our attempts to snap it into a satisfying story framework…the coronavirus’s volatile arc has thwarted a basic human impulse to storify reality—instinctively, people tend to try to make sense of events in the world and in their lives by mapping them onto a narrative. If we struggle to do that, researchers who study the psychology of narratives told me, a number of unpleasant consequences might result: stress, anxiety, depression, a sense of fatalism, and, as one expert put it, 'feeling kind of crummy.'”
Cognitive Impairment in Older COVID Patients
CIDRAP (US) reports on a JAMA (US) study: Cognitive impairment was more common among COVID-19 patients 60 years and older—particularly those with severe illness—released from hospitals in Wuhan, China, than among their uninfected peers, according to a 1-year follow-up study…. The study authors noted that impaired cognition is common in the months after COVID-19 infection, especially among older patients. "It is worth noting that 21 percent of individuals with severe cases in this cohort experienced progressive cognitive decline, suggesting that COVID-19 may cause long-lasting damage to cognition," they wrote. ‘These findings imply that the pandemic may substantially contribute to the world dementia burden in the future.’"
COVID and Children
The Washington Post (US) reports, “School districts that required masks this fall saw significantly fewer coronavirus cases than those where masks were optional, according to a large study of Arkansas schools” conducted by the CDC. “Masks remain an important part of a multicomponent approach to preventing COVID-19 in K-12 settings, especially in communities with high COVID-19 community levels,’ concluded the study…”
CIDRAP (US) reports, “Children and adolescents diagnosed as having asthma are at similar risk for COVID-19 infection as those without asthma, according to a study today in Pediatrics that controlled for factors tied to SARS-CoV-2 testing…. ‘Despite the continued general precaution regarding asthma and COVID-19, we found no evidence that asthma predisposes children to SARS-CoV-2 infection or severe illness from COVID-19,’ the researchers wrote. ‘Importantly, we identified marked disparities in SARS-CoV-2 testing based on sociodemographic factors, highlighting the need for improved access to SARS-CoV-2 testing and care among certain vulnerable pediatric populations.’"
Nature (UK) reports, “Children infected with SARS-CoV-2 are less likely than adults to produce antibodies against the virus, despite having similar symptoms and levels of virus in their bodies, according to a small study in Australia. Researchers say the findings add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that children have a more robust initial immune response to COVID-19 and can clear the infection quickly, compared with adults. But because antibodies are likely to be important for guarding against reinfection, the findings raise questions about how well protected children might be against future infections.”
Reuters (UK) reports, “India will start administering COVID-19 vaccinations to 12- to 14-year-olds from March 16, the country's health ministry said on Monday, as schools reopen across the country with standard restrictions amid a significant fall in cases.”
Reuters (UK) looks at the impact of the pandemic on children’s education globally. "‘We're running the risk of a lost generation,’ UN education expert Robert Jenkins told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. ‘It's a now-or-never moment to turn things around.’ Without urgent action, many countries could end up without the skilled workers they need for their future development, said Jenkins, head of education at UN children's agency UNICEF…. Children in low- and middle-income nations have been disproportionately affected as their schools tended to shut for longer and they were less able to access remote learning, UNICEF said…. Many children have quit to earn money. Globally, 9 million risk being pushed into child labour by the end of 2022 because of the pandemic…”
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