Latest coronavirus: WHO says Europe has become the epicenter of the pandemic. Updates on a respiratory disease that has infected tens of thousands and killed several thousand.
Why is the coronavirus called a zombie?
United States President Donald Trump has called the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency. This allows the administration to apply enhanced security measures to combat the disease, including access to up to $50 billion in federal funds to fight the epidemic. Trump said up to half a million tests would be ready by early next week.
Earlier in the day, the President also announced plans to accelerate testing in the United States, including funding the development of rapid tests and appointing a new federal coordinator to oversee those efforts.
According to the New York Times, a very large number of people are infected with the virus and at least 23% have died. The virus has now been detected in 47 states and the District of Columbia.
March 13 10:10 pm — Harvard University orders research labs to close
Harvard University's research labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts have been ordered to prepare to shut down research operations amid the growing coronavirus outbreak. Harvard is one of the first major research universities to announce that it will phase out lab research. Dozens of universities around the world have already moved teaching activities online or have been closed to combat the spread of the virus.
However, laboratories conducting direct research on the coronavirus will be able to continue their activities, a Harvard Medical School employee told Nature.
Can the coronavirus turn a person into a zombie?
All labs must begin implementing a plan to end all lab research by March 18, an email from the deans to students and staff of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine on March 13 said. The suspension is expected to last at least 6 to 8 weeks, the email said. Laboratories that work with live animals will be able to assign staff to care for key animals, but microbial labs have been ordered to "freeze everything," says Tanya Jagdish, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
According to the emails, exceptions will also be made for core experiments, which "would result in significant financial and data loss if production ceases."
Jagdish says that the announcement took all the enemies in his lab by surprise. “We didn’t expect the labs to close at all.” The laboratories where Jagdish works have already taken measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic. These included shift shifts and more stringent cleaning protocols, in addition to additional cleaning that was in place at the departmental and university levels. Until the lab resumes, he said, researchers are devoting their time to submitting proposals, writing dissertations, and other remote work.
On March 10, Harvard ruled that meetings of more than 25 people are held remotely, but recent guidelines say all meetings and courses are doing so regardless of size. Jagdish says that in addition to holding lab meetings via video chat, people are discussing the possibility of having daily or weekly remote social hours. "It helps to know that we're all in this together."
Could the coronavirus turn into a zombie apocalypse?
In Italy, which has the biggest outbreak in Europe, 2,651 new cases have been reported in the last day.
More than 132,000 cases of COVID-19 have now been reported in 123 countries and territories, according to the WHO.
11 March 16:35 GMT - Coronavirus pandemic outbreak, WHO says
After weeks of resisting mounting pressure from scientists, politicians and others, the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, has decided to describe the coronavirus epidemic as a pandemic.
Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?
Many scientists have been calling for a change of language for several weeks after major outbreaks were detected in Italy, South Korea. At the time, some researchers suggested that countries would soon move from efforts that include as many new cases as possible to social distancing measures such as school closures that are not based on knowing who is infected with the virus and who is not.
The virus has now been detected in more than 100 countries. It infected about 120,000 people, more than 4,000 of them died. Several countries have closed schools in an attempt to stem the virus, Italy has entered an unprecedented nationwide lockdown.
Researchers have been working rapidly since the outbreak was discovered in January to characterize the virus, figure out why it's so contagious, figure out where it came from and help diagnose infections.
11 March 12:30 GMT - Transgenic animals for coronavirus research are in high demand
Laboratories are scrambling to get their hands on transgenic animals that can be used to study the coronavirus and to test drugs and vaccines. It seems that normal mice are resistant to infection with this coronavirus, so researchers are conducting studies in rodents that produce the human version of the ACE2 protein. The virus uses to enter cells.
Studies Estimate Incubation Time, Infectious Period of SARS-CoV-2
On average, the disease takes five days after infection, and patients shed most of the coronavirus particles in the early stages of the disease, according to two new reports.
Media apocalypse
A journalist's eing in 2019 meant working under the gun. More than a thousand journalists lost their jobs in January as layoffs hit Gannett, BuzzFeed, AOL and HuffPost. In February, 250 employees were fired; New York Media laid off 32 employees in March; in April, G/O Media released 25 people. The New-Orleans Times-Picayune laid off its entire staff, 161 employees, in May after the paper was sold to a competitor; in August, the Pacific Standard was closed after a decade of publication.
No company or news sector was spared. NBCUniversal laid off 70 employees in two rounds of layoffs in August and September. Spin Media Group cut 29 jobs in September and January; Cox Media Group, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced plans to lay off 87 people in September. Sports Illustrated laid off more than 40 employees in October. In November, the Toronto Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation completed a total of 108 layoffs.
This story may well be outdated by the time it was published. In mid-November, GateHouse Media closed a $1.1 billion takeover of USA Today publisher Garnett's. Both publishers quietly quit — in January, Garnett's reportedly fired 400 journalists across the country following a round of voluntary buyouts, and GateHouse fired reporters in May and August. In early December, after the merger, Garnett is laying off at least 215 employees at USA Today and nearly 40 other publications, according to Florida Times-Union journalist Andrew Pantazi, who kept the spreadsheet.
Eleven Pride Media employees were let go in December, including Out Editor-in-Chief Philip Picardi, leaving only five full-time employees for the magazine. And The Atlantic sold CityLab to Bloomberg Media, leaving only a handful of employees to keep their jobs, and only after an interview with Bloomberg. In some cases, these layoffs are made very quietly: At Bustle Digital Group, nearly three dozen layoffs were planned ahead of time and then staggered for months to avoid media attention.
2019 crystallized what media people had long known to be true: while digital media technology is drying up after the venture capital funding boom of the 2010s, and the nation’s regional newspapers are being swallowed up by corporate consolidation and hedge fund vultures, there is very little stability can be found anywhere.
All told, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, 3,385 journalists have lost their jobs in the past 12 months. (Business Insider estimates that more than 7,800 jobs have been lost this year, which has been tracked through company employee statements and interviews and interviews, news reports, and may include only reporters and editors at these companies.CJR's methodology only includes layoffs, reviewed by their editors, and will be updated.)
But having a number to point to at the end of the year can still seem pointless — the story of 2019 is that no one was spared. This year layoffs affected large media conglomerates, small newspapers and weeklies. They hit politicians, sports writers, bloggers, daily news, financial writers, and fashion writers. You were just as vulnerable to the noise of industry if you were in an old magazine giant as you were in a small city newspaper. If 2019 signaled a change, it was the realization that not only was the ship sinking, but there were no lifeboats.
What will people do if disaster comes
Patients have tested positive for SARS-coronavirus-2 genetic material after apparently recovering from exposure to the virus and being discharged from the hospital, according to media reports and a study published in JAMA last month. This phenomenon has raised concerns that people may continue to infect others even after their illness has cleared. But a preprint published in medRxiv yesterday (March 9) suggests that patients with mild symptoms lose viable viral particles within 10 days or less of disease onset.
“This is a very important contribution to understanding both the natural history of Covid-19 clinical disease and the societal implications of the spread of the virus,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, in a commentary on STAT. Osterholm did not participate in the study.
The work was carried out on nine patients in Germany. The authors found a high load of infectious viral particles in samples from the throat and lungs of the patient at the onset of the disease, reaching a peak four days after the onset of symptoms. But while viral RNA could still be observed in samples after symptoms had resolved, after eight days of symptom onset, no infectious particles were found in patients with mild symptoms. No infectious particles were found in the stool, blood or urine.
“Based on the present results, early discharge followed by home isolation may be chosen for patients who have symptoms for more than 10 days with less than 100,000 copies of viral RNA per ml of sputum,” the authors write in their report. The results have not been peer-reviewed.
In another study published today in Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed news reports and press releases mentioning dates of exposure and onset of symptoms in patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. Among the 181 found by the authors, the average time between exposure and the manifestation of symptoms was 5 days, and 97% of the infected did so within 11 days after exposure.
Conclusion “It is very encouraging that by 14 days, although they may not be 100%, it will be close,” Graham Cooke, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London, tells The Guardian. Cook warns that people who have been exposed should not assume they are in a lucid state unless they develop symptoms after five days. “This is a completely wrong interpretation,” he says. “After five days, half of the people will still not show symptoms.”