Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 16May 2021
The news posted last week for the coronavirus 2019-nCoV (aka SARS-CoV-2), which produces COVID-19 disease, has been surveyed and some important articles are summarized here. The articles are more or less organized with general virus news and anecdotes first, then stories from around the US, followed by an increased number of items from other countries around the globe. Economic news related to COVID-19 is found here.
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Summary:
Covid seemed to pretty much drop out of the news this week. Usually, I can pick up a lot of virus stories just from news sites most read or recent news lists; this week I had to go looking for them. Part of the reason was that the fuel pipeline shutdown dominated the headlines, but the underlying reason is that new cases in the US and globally, are falling rapidly, even in India - No one wants to cover a story that bl
We published a post on work at the University of California, San Francisco, to identify existing drugs that looked like they had the potential to treat Covid, as in at a minimum reduce the severity of disease (We Found and Tested 47 Old Drugs That Might Treat the Coronavirus: Results Show Promising Leads and a Whole New Way to Fight COVID-19). But that was before the vaccine effort was far enough along to look like it was likely to bear fruit.
As we’ve pointed out, the West has gone all in with the vaccine magic bullet approach, when that’s not a great public health idea, unless the goal is the low bar of keeping hospitals from collapsing. It’s unlikely that any vaccine that combats a respiratory virus will achieve the level of sterilizing immunity.