Since the discovery of the virus that causes COVID-19, the daily news cycle has been overcome with updates on how the pathogen spreads, what does the breakdown to the body and what solutions may finally bring an end to the pandemic.
But staying up-to-date on all the latest news about coronavirus can be a challenge. To keep you informed, we at Live Science have compiled a short list of standout news stories of the week – these are the ones that really caught our attention.
New quest
This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of an cheap quest for COVID-19 which can deliver results in less than three hours.
The test, called SalivaDirect, was developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and offers several advantages over nasal swab tests. First, the saliva sample can be collected in each sterilized container, as opposed to tests of the nasal swab that require a special swab inserted deep into the nose. Second, Yale expects labs to offer the test for only $ 10 per speech test. And in fact, Yale does not intend to commercialize the test and will instead release lab instructions to perform the test itself, using only commercially available components.
Plasma Therapy Renewal
Federal officials announced that the FDA will not authorize the use of blood plasma to treat COVID-19 patients until more treatment data can be obtained.
So-called convalescent plasma therapy uses the liquid part of the blood that is drawn from people who have recovered from COVID-19. While coronavirus patients may receive the treatment in the context of a clinical trial, the FDA will not authorize plasma for wider use until more “gold standard” tests have been completed. The trials need to be randomized and controlled, which means that patients receive randomized plasma or a standard treatment, as a comparison point.
These tears are challenging to organize during a pandemic, due to the limited supply of eligible plasma and differences in COVID-19 prevalence in different regions.
COVID-19 pandemic could be more deadly than 1918 flu
A new study suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic could be potentially more deadly then the flu pandemic of 1918.
The 1918 flu pandemic is remembered as the deadliest pandemic in recent history, after claiming at least 50 million lives worldwide. To compare the 1918 outbreak with the current pandemic, researchers examined data from New York City.
She began by analyzing the causes of all causes in New York City between October and November 1918, the culmination of the flu pandemic, and comparing them to all-cause death in the same months in years prior to the pandemic. . They then calculated deaths with all causes during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, between March and May, and compared those with rates in recent years.
They found that mortality from all causes was 2.8 times higher in the flu of 1918 than in the same months in previous years, while mortality from all causes was 4.15 times higher in the outbreak of COVID-19 than in the last years. That said, the authors note that the relative increase in deaths in 2020 appears to be greater as we begin with a lower mortality rate for baseline. Overall, the overall cause of death in the fall of 1918 was higher than the spring of 2020.
“All we know is that in this small loop of time we were looking at, there are certainly enough similarities that it just can’t be fixed,” the lead researcher said.
Originally published on Live Science.
