Read on Twitter
How are you all holding up? Shall I tweet out a second set of papers? Or are you too stressed to pay attention?
1. This Lancet Global Health Paper is from a while ago, but really sobering. Estimates that 1.7 billion, or 22% of the world, has at least one underlying condition for Covid risk and 349 mil or 4% are at high risk and would be hospitalized if infected https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32553130/
2. Really interesting preprint that found that seroprevalence in the slums of Mumbai was a whopping 54% compared with 16% in non-slums. But without the deaths you'd expect with that kind of prevalence https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.27.20182741v1
I referred to these data in this piece about herd immunity. Which I wrote barely 2 mos ago, but feels now like 8 or 9 mos ago https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/health/coronavirus-herd-immunity.html
3. Super interesting paper in Cell suggesting a major immune shift between mild infection vs moderate/severe and that moderate disease is the most amenable to therapy https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31444-6
4. More on auto-antibodies in Covid! This time to various kinds of carbohydrates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.15.341479v1
5. Paper in Blood showing that blocking a specific protein could stop the damaging inflammation in Covid and forestall autoimmunity
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/136/18/2080/463611/Direct-activation-of-the-alternative-complement
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/136/18/2080/463611/Direct-activation-of-the-alternative-complement
6. Report from the React-1 study in the UK. The results aren't that surprising, but I am just blown away by the scale of the effort. Data and swab results from 160K people age 5 and up and that's just from Round 6!
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/institute-of-global-health-innovation/REACT1_r6_interim_preprint.pdf
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/institute-of-global-health-innovation/REACT1_r6_interim_preprint.pdf
7. Household transmission is a huge and increasing problem (as is gathering between households) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6944e1.htm?s_cid=mm6944e1_x
8. This one refutes the lovely but misguided idea that childhood vaccines provide some protection against Covid by enhancing the immune response (one of the theories for why kids do better than adults with this virus). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33112930/
