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People with blood type A may be more vulnerable to coronavirus, China study finds
o Research in Wuhan and Shenzhen indicates patients with the blood group had higher rate of infection and tended to get more severe symptoms
o Those with type O ‘had a significantly lower risk for the infectious disease’ compared to others
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African countries shut doors against Europe, America to combat coronavirus
Africa has so far recorded relatively few coronavirus cases compared to the rest of the world, but governments across the continent are taking no chances as they race to stop the spread of the virus on their shores.
Sudan has sealed off all sea ports, land crossings and airports, a spokesman for Sudan's Transitional Sovereign Council, Mohamed Al-Faki Suleiman, said in a press statement Monday.
The Council has declared a state of medical emergency and formed a committee that will prevent the spread of coronavirus into the country.
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European solidarity doesn’t exist, only China can help us: Serbia goes full emergency over coronavirus
Caught off guard by the EU’s ban on medical exports, Serbia found help in China as it struggled to prepare for the Covid-19 outbreak, the Serbian president said, adding that it has become clear that European solidarity is a myth.
Serbia is the latest country to impose severe restrictions on travel and public gatherings in response to the global epidemic. As President Aleksandar Vucic declared a national emergency on Sunday, he had some scalding remarks for the EU.
The crisis has proven that European solidarity, only exists “on paper,” Vucic said, citing the ban on the export of medical equipment and supplies imposed by EU members to non-EU countries in response to the outbreak.
“Only China can help us in this situation,” the Serbian leader added, saying he recently wrote a letter to China’s Xi Jinping “asking him for help and calling him a brother.”
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UK warns flu shot recipients to isolate
People who get the winter flu jab are firmly advised to shield themselves from the coronavirus by isolating for 12 weeks, the deputy chief medical officer for England warns.
Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, told BBC Breakfast this morning: "I don't want to go into enormous detail into every single risk group but we are saying it is the people who are offered flu vaccines, other than children, who fit into that risk category, people for whom the advice is very strong about social distancing."
The flu vaccine is available on the NHS every winter and is routinely given to adults over 65, people with medical conditions and pregnant women, to prevent serious complications from flu like pneumonia.
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A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.
Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.
This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.
Although successful surveillance systems have long existed for influenza, the disease is confirmed by a laboratory in a tiny minority of cases. In the U.S., for example, so far this season 1,073,976 specimens have been tested and 222,552 (20.7%) have tested positive for influenza. In the same period, the estimated number of influenza-like illnesses is between 36,000,000 and 51,000,000, with an estimated 22,000 to 55,000 flu deaths.
Note the uncertainty about influenza-like illness deaths: a 2.5-fold range, corresponding to tens of thousands of deaths. Every year, some of these deaths are due to influenza and some to other viruses, like common-cold coronaviruses.
In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory viruses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza viruses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory virus was found in 47%. In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.
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