Some 1,840 fowl were killed by the H5N6 virus in Sichuan, China said yesterday 4,500 chickens had died of the H5N1 bug in Hunan, officials reported on Feb. 1 Four cases of bird flu outbreaks were also recorded in Xinjiang in January alone The news comes as Beijing drains all its medical resources to fight coronavirus [...]
A dramatic jump in Italy’s COVID-19 cases and deaths today made it the second worst-hit country behind China, as the country announced a massive lockdown affecting 16 million, and in the United States, the number of new cases steadily rose with at least four more states reporting their first cases. In other developments, plans are [...]
Atop federal health official said Monday that the evolving coronavirus outbreak could persist in the United States into next year, while stressing that public health interventions could still reduce the spread of the virus and cases of illness and death. “As the trajectory of the outbreak continues, many people in the U.S. will at some point, either [...]
Italy today expanded its COVID-19 lockdown to include the whole country, affecting about 60 million people, as the World Health Organization (WHO) today said the threat of a pandemic from the COVID-19 virus is very real, signaling a tone of increased urgency. Italy’s announcement marks the first time a whole country has been placed on [...]
COVID-19 can be spread before it causes symptoms, when it produces symptoms like those of the common cold, and as many as 12 days after recovery, according to a virologic analysis of nine infected patients published today on the preprint server medRxiv. Also, in a study published in today’s Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers at Johns Hopkins found a median incubation [...]
As COVID-19 cases continue to climb, a CDC official said today at a press conference that most Americans will be exposed to the novel coronavirus this year or next. “We do not expect most people will get a serious illness,” said Nancy Messonnier, MD, the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) [...]
A study examining the clinical and molecular epidemiology of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE) in US hospital patients indicates there is greater diversity in CRE than previously thought, a finding that could have implications for how hospitals treat and control the pathogens. The study, published late last week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, looked at clinical and whole-genome sequencing data [...]
Eric Toner, MD | March 13, 2020 My colleagues and I just submitted to medRxiv a paper on what a Wuhan-like epidemic would do to US ICUs. https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.03.09.20033241v1 The bottom line is that demand would far exceed capacity, and some people in need of critical care would not be able to get it. But it is not [...]
In a stark and urgent COVID-19 risk assessment update today, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said that, in a few weeks or even days, other countries in the region may face huge surges that mirror those of China and Italy. It advised countries to quickly shift to mitigation strategies to protect vulnerable people [...]
A basic reproduction number, R0, of about 2 was estimated for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Wuhan, China, early in the outbreak. However, this value only captures the average dynamics of transmission; a crucial question for control is whether specific situations and settings might be driving the outbreak. The secondary attack rate [...]
