More than a third of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in Italy. (Alberto Lingria/Reuters)
The covert cases unwittingly infecting others
- Research teams are racing to understand a crucial epidemiological puzzle — what is the proportion of infected people who have mild or no symptoms and might be unknowingly passing the virus on to others. Some of the first detailed estimates of these covert cases suggest that they could represent some 60% of all infections, implying the need for strong social-distancing measures. This is different from the groups who are trying to understand the number of unreported cases — those that are missed because authorities aren’t doing enough testing, or ‘preclinical cases’ in which people are incubating the virus but not yet showing symptoms. (Nature | 5 min read)
- Two dozen geneticists discovered last week that they had been possibly exposed to COVID-19 when they saw a tweet from one of their colleagues in the hospital. It’s a striking example of failures in the United States, where authorities are failing to widely test people and notify their contacts — a cornerstone of outbreak response. (Nature | 7 min read)
- France will set up a €50-million (US$54-million) emergency fund to tackle COVID-19 and invest an extra €1 billion (US$1.1 billion) in research to prepare the country for future epidemics over the next decade. (Reuters | 2 min read)
- Nationalism and scientific cooperation are in a tug-of-war over the fate of a future vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. Propaganda, pride and the prospect of treating your own citizens first sit on one side. On the other, unprecedented scientific collaboration — even among pharmaceutical companies that are ordinarily fierce competitors — and the desire to get the vaccine to where it can make the most difference epidemiologically. (The New York Times | 9 min read)
- If you want to hear what software squillionaire and vaccine-funding philanthropist Bill Gates thinks about it all, he (and two of his foundation's scientific advisors) did an ‘ask me anything’ session on Reddit yesterday. No Earth-shattering insights, but a nice round-up of the current state of things (especially in the United States) from someone who has the ears of all the major players. (Reddit | 6 min read)
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