How COVID-19 kills
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COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus SARS-Cov-2, has infected over 4 million people in 212 countries, of whom at least 272,000 have died. The ongoing economic and social impact of the pandemic is staggering, but despite a daily flood of news on the disease, few laypeople know that paradoxically, COVID-19 mostly kills through an overreaction of the immune system, whose function is precisely to fight infections.
In France, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 at about 4.4% in May, modeling suggests
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By 11 May, when lockdown restrictions were eased in France, about 4.4% of the French population had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, a new modeling study suggests. These estimates are well short of what would be required for herd immunity, say the authors. Understanding the level of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will be key to avoiding a rebound in the epidemic as populations around the world ease lockdowns.
The challenges of developing a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine
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The goal of a vaccine is to trigger a response that safely protects against an infection and/or the burden of disease. While this is true for all vaccines, the steps leading to a safe and effective product can be different for each infection. In the case of COVID-19, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have found that vaccine design can
New triple antiviral drug combination shows early promise for treating COVID-19 in phase 2 randomized trial
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A two-week course of antiviral therapy with interferon beta-1b plus lopinavir-ritonavir and ribavirin, started within 7 days of showing COVID-19 symptoms, is safe and more effective at reducing the duration of viral shedding than lopinavir-ritonavir alone in patients with mild to moderate illness, according to the first randomised trial of this triple combination therapy involving 127 adults (aged 18 and older) from six public hospitals in Hong Kong.
Vitamin D linked to low virus death rate
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A new study has found an association between low average levels of vitamin D and high numbers of COVID-19 cases and mortality rates across 20 European countries.
The research, led by Dr Lee Smith of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and Mr Petre Cristian Ilie, lead urologist of Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn NHS Foundation Trust, is published in the journal Aging Clinical and Experimental Research.
Repurposing existing drugs for COVID-19 offers a more rapid alternative to a vaccine
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Repurposing existing medicines focused on known drug targets is likely to offer a more rapid hope of tackling COVID-19 than developing and manufacturing a vaccine, argue an international team of scientists in the British Journal of Pharmacology today.
Since the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in late 2019, more than 3.5 million people are known to have been infected, leading to over 240,000 deaths worldwide from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Development of an inactivated vaccine candidate for SARS-CoV-2
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In mice, rats, and nonhuman primates, a newly developed SARS-CoV-2 virus vaccine candidate induced antibodies that neutralized several different SARS-CoV-2 strains. Critically, it did so without leading to a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which previous reports have raised as a concern.
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