The beginning of the week is a good time to catch up – the numbers, the science, the trends, and the rare good news (if any) related to the coronavirus disease.
90446: This is the number of Covid-19 cases recorded in India on Saturday, according to the HT panel. No country has exceeded 80,000 cases a day. India is likely to make fewer cases on Sunday; the numbers decline over the weekend in most parts of the world. India also surpassed Brazil on Sunday to become the second country with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, after the United States. And towards the end of last week, it surpassed Mexico to become the third highest number of deaths from Covid-19. How high is that number 90,446? According to worldometers.info, it is higher than the total number of cases seen by countries at 35th place and lower on their list. As testing increases, India could see a further increase in cases. Purely in terms of the trajectory of the pandemic, India is unique, but it is not the kind of distinction the country can be proud of.
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The mink: a previous installment of this column (Despacho 49 on May 8) observed the animals of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now one more can be added to the list: the mink, a relative of the otter and ferret that is widely bred throughout Europe for its fur. There have been outbreaks on mink farms in the Netherlands, Spain, and in Utah in the U.S. According to a study published on the bioRxiv preprint server, and conducted by researchers at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, genomic studies showed that the Farm workers transmitted the coronavirus disease to minks, which then passed them on to other workers. The Netherlands has already advanced a planned closure of mink farms scheduled for 2024 until March next year. And it was about time too: for years, activists have tried to get governments around the world to do just this. Research from the Netherlands should be peer-reviewed, but it deserves a much closer look: it suggests that the Sars-CoV-2 virus can jump from humans to animals (anthropozoonotic) and then from animals to humans (zoonotic).
Tennis, anyone ?: Anyone but poor Kristina Mladenovic. Days after losing a game that she should have won at the US Open and spoke of the “nightmare” she was living in and the “abominable way” in which players were treated: Mladenovic was isolated because she was exposed to a infected player inside. the biobubble: she and her partner, the top seeds in the women’s draw, were disqualified on Saturday. This was after the county where the players’ hotel is located said its rules do not allow you to play in the tournament. The experience with so-called bio-bubbles in sport has been mostly positive. They seem to have worked in cricket in England and the Caribbean, the Premier League and also the NBA; but the US Open is clearly having all kinds of problems with theirs. It will be interesting to see how the Indian Premier League bio-bubble works. As HT’s sports department wrote in a recent article: “What makes IPL different from some of the other bio-bubbles is its extent.” The report noted how autonomous the cricket series biobubbles have been in England, the Caribbean Premier League and the NBA. In contrast, she said, “the IPL has eight teams that camp at different hotels in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and travel every day to practice.”
The Vaccine: The Mathematical Chances a Covid-19 Vaccine Will Be Developed Soon (Another topic covered in an earlier installment of this column, Dispatch 111 in July 22) grew stronger until August. As of early September, according to a Nature report, there were 321 vaccine candidates, 32 of them in clinical trials. In April, there were only 115 candidate vaccines. But the best news regarding vaccines came in a Friday Wall Street Journal report that said some leading vaccine manufacturers were preparing a public pledge that would reaffirm their commitment to follow due process of clinical trials and “not seek the right way. government approval “until convinced that the vaccines were safe and effective. The companies named in the article include Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna, and the promise comes against the backdrop of vaccine development becoming increasingly political, raising fears that governments may rush vaccines. before they are ready, just as Russia has done with Sputnik V.
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