A new paper in The Economic Journal indicates that a large-scale government subsidy aimed at encouraging people to eat out in restaurants in the wake of the first 2020 COVID-19 wave in the United Kingdom accelerated a second COVID19 wave. The COVID19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus hurt economies around the world. The hospitality sector was...
Health
Africa Tries to End Vaccine Inequity by Replicating Its Own
In a pair of Cape Town warehouses converted into a maze of airlocked sterile rooms, young scientists are assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and most of the world’s poorest people. The energy in the gleaming labs matches the urgency of their...
Scientists Search for Cause of Mysterious Covid-Related Inflammation in Children
Like most other kids with covid, Dante and Michael DeMaino seemed to have no serious symptoms. Infected in mid-February, both lost their senses of taste and smell. Dante, 9, had a low-grade fever for a day or so. Michael, 13, had a “tickle in his throat,” said their mother, Michele DeMaino, of Danvers, Massachusetts. At...
Women Left Behind: Gender Gap Emerges in Africa’s Vaccines
The health outreach workers who drove past Lama Mballow’s village with a megaphone handed out T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “I GOT MY COVID-19 VACCINE!” By then, the women in Sare Gibel already had heard the rumors on social media: The vaccines could make your blood stop or cause you to miscarry. Women who took...
Donation Experiment: Covid-19 Only Slightly Displaces Other Concerns
The Covid-19 pandemic and its solution has only partially displaced other social and political concerns – and not persistently, despite the pandemic’s high and constant media presence. This is shown by an international team of researchers led by the economist Esther Blanco from the University of Innsbruck. The results were recently published in the journal...
Sharp Flu Rebound Expected After Lifting of Covid Distancing Measures
New research warns that the United States could experience a severe influenza outbreak after public health measures like face masks and social distancing are lifted. These measures have protected people from COVID-19 and influenza—incidence of influenza declined 60 percent during the first ten weeks following the implementation of the measures—but is also leading to greater...
The Hidden U.S. Covid-19 Pandemic: Orphaned Children – More Than 140,000 U.S. Children Lost a Primary or Secondary Caregiver Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic
One U.S. child loses a parent or caregiver for every four COVID-19 deaths, a new modeling study published today in Pediatrics reveals. The findings illustrate orphanhood as a hidden and ongoing secondary tragedy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and emphasizes that identifying and caring for these children throughout their development is a necessary and urgent part of...
How Theranos’ Faulty Blood Tests Got to Market – and What That Shows About Gaps in FDA Regulation
One of the most high-profile trials of the year is underway to decide whether Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes defrauded patients and investors. Her blood testing startup, once valued at almost US$10 billion, was based on a seemingly revolutionary premise. Company executives promised investors, and later business partners and patients, that their technology could run hundreds...
Low-Cost Ventilator Set to Help People in Low-Income Countries
The ventilators, which are required by patients in intensive care units (ICU) who are seriously ill with respiratory diseases like COVID-19, flu, and tuberculosis, are both simpler and cheaper to make than currently available ventilators. Now, the creators of the designs hope that their promising technology, initially developed for emergency short-term ventilators in response to the...
Direct-To-Consumer Skin Cancer Detection Apps Are Failing to Detect Life-Threatening Cancers, New Study Finds
A new study has found that a direct-to-consumer machine learning model for detecting skin cancers incorrectly classified rare and aggressive cancers as low-risk. The breakthrough findings presented at today’s 30th EADV Congress suggest that making apps based on such models available directly to the public without transparency on performance metrics for rare but potentially life-threatening skin...