The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine did not help prevent people who had been exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease, according to the results of an eagerly awaited study that was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. From a report: Despite a lack of evidence, many people began taking the medicine to try to prevent infection early in the Covid-19 pandemic, following anecdotal reports it could be effective and claims by President Trump and conservative commentators. Trump, too, said he took hydroxychloroquine to prevent infection. But the new study, the first double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine, found otherwise. "I think in the setting of post-exposure prophylaxis, it doesn't seem to work," said Sarah Lofgren, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who is a co-author of the study. Other studies of hydroxychloroquine are ongoing. Also Wednesday, the World Health Organization said it is resuming a clinical trial testing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment after pausing it over safety concerns.

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known U.S. healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals. Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided the database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies. Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American counties. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. Late on Tuesday, the Lancet released an "expression of concern" about its published study. The New England Journal of Medicine has also issued a similar notice. According to an independent audit by authors not affiliated with Surgisphere, the article includes a list of "concerns that have been raised about the reliability of the database." Some of the main points include: Surgisphere's employees have little or no data or scientific background; While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest growing hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence; and The firm's chief executive, Sapan Desai, has been named in three medical malpractice suits.

Jon Hamilton, reporting for NPR: Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared. The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person's blood rather than the virus itself. The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous. "The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

That's in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person's body. And the revised estimates support an early prediction by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force. In an editorial published in late March in The New England Journal of Medicine, Fauci and colleagues wrote that the case fatality rate for COVID-19 "may be considerably less than 1%." But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says. "That is many times more deadly than seasonal influenza," she says. The new evidence is coming from places such as Indiana, which completed the first phase of a massive testing effort early in May. Further reading: Antibody Tests and Accuracy Issues Leave Some Americans With More Questions Than Answers.

Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him "like a bus" in March. From a report:"This is the revenge of the viruses," said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "I've made their lives difficult. Now they're trying to get me." Dr. Piot, 71 years old, is a legend in the battles against Ebola and AIDS. But Covid-19 almost killed him. "A week ago, I couldn't have done this interview," he said, speaking recently by Skype from his London dining room, a painting of calla lilies behind him. "I was still short of breath after 10 minutes." Looking back, ruefully, on being brought down by a virus after a life as a virus-hunter, Dr. Piot said he had misjudged his prey and had become the hunted.

"I underestimated this one -- how fast it would spread. My mistake was to think it was like SARS, which was pretty limited in scope. Or that it was like influenza. But it's neither." In 1976, as a graduate student in virology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Piot was part of the international team that investigated a mysterious viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. To avoid stigmatizing the town, team members named the virus "Ebola" after a nearby river. Later, in the 1980s, he was one of the scientists who proved that the wasting disease known as "slim" in Africa was caused by the same virus that was killing young gay men elsewhere. From 1991 to 1994, he was president of the International AIDS Society, and then the first director of U.N.AIDS, the United Nations' anti-H.I.V. program.

New research from Imperial College London suggests the coronavirus "may still be spreading at epidemic rates" in 24 different states in America, reports the Washington Post: Some states have had little viral spread or "crushed the curve" to a great degree and have some wiggle room to reopen their economies without generating a new epidemic-level surge in cases. Others are nowhere near containing the virus. The model, which has not been peer reviewed, shows that in the majority of states, a second wave looms if people abandon efforts to mitigate the viral spread. "There's evidence that the U.S. is not under control, as an entire country," said Samir Bhatt, a senior lecturer in geostatistics at Imperial College....

The Imperial College researchers found in 24 states, the model shows a reproduction number over 1 [suggesting the virus is not waning]. Texas tops the list, followed by Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Missouri, Delaware, South Carolina, Massachusetts, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Maryland....

This has become a geographically complex pandemic, one that will evolve, especially as people increase their movements in coming weeks. Laws and health regulations vary from state to state, county to county and city to city. There are communities where wearing facial coverings is culturally the norm, while in other places it is rejected on grounds of personal liberty or as refutation of the consensus view of the hazards posed by the virus... Experts in Tennessee are also concerned about people from other states beginning to flock to Nashville and Memphis on summer vacations.

If a surge happens, said David Aronoff, director of the Vanderbilt University infectious disease division, "the tricky part will be putting the toothpaste back in the tube" by shutting down again.
In addition to "behavioural precautions," the researchers recommend rapid testing and contact tracing. But If there's no change in the relationship between mobility and transmission, their report states bluntly that "We predict that deaths over the next two-month period will exceed current cumulative deaths by greater than two-fold...

"We predict that increased mobility following relaxation of social distancing will lead to resurgence of transmission, keeping all else constant."

"The drug US President Donald Trump said he was taking to ward off Covid-19 actually increases the risk of patients with the disease dying from it," reports the BBC, citing a new study published Friday in the Lancet.

"The study said there were no benefits to treating patients with the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine..." Hydroxychloroquine is safe for malaria, and conditions like lupus or arthritis, but no clinical trials have recommended the use of hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus. The Lancet study involved 96,000 coronavirus patients, nearly 15,000 of whom were given hydroxychloroquine — or a related form chloroquine — either alone or with an antibiotic.

The study found that the patients were more likely to die in hospital and develop heart rhythm complications than other Covid patients in a comparison group. The death rates of the treated groups were: hydroxychloroquine 18%; chloroquine 16.4%; control group 9%. Those treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in combination with antibiotics had an even higher death rate.

The researchers warned that hydroxychloroquine should not be used outside of clinical trials.
The BBC also reports that a separate trial involving over 40,000 healthcare workers around the world is now testing whether hydroxychloroquine could prevent infection.

UPDATE (6/4/2020): The study's three authors retracted their study on June 4th, "because independent peer reviewers could not access the data used for the analysis," reports The Hill. "The source of the data was Surgisphere Corporation, which told peer reviewers it would not transfer the full dataset used for the study because it would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements."

However, the same day the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a new double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial which found hydroxychloroquine didn't help prevent people exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease. One of the study's co-authors said that as a preventative agent, "It doesn't seem to work."

A research team from Duke University has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly shut down pain. "It's located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety," reports ScienceDaily. From the report: The researchers found that general anesthesia also activates a specific subset of inhibitory neurons in the central amygdala, which they have called the CeAga neurons (CeA stands for central amygdala; ga indicates activation by general anesthesia). Mice have a relatively larger central amygdala than humans, but [senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N. Broad Distinguished Professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine] said she had no reason to think we have a different system for controlling pain. Using technologies that Wang's lab has pioneered to track the paths of activated neurons in mice, the team found the CeAga was connected to many different areas of the brain, "which was a surprise," Wang said.

By giving mice a mild pain stimulus, the researchers could map all of the pain-activated brain regions. They discovered that at least 16 brain centers known to process the sensory or emotional aspects of pain were receiving inhibitory input from the CeAga. Using a technology called optogenetics, which uses light to activate a small population of cells in the brain, the researchers found they could turn off the self-caring behaviors a mouse exhibits when it feels uncomfortable by activating the CeAga neurons. Paw-licking or face-wiping behaviors were "completely abolished" the moment the light was switched on to activate the anti-pain center.

When the scientists dampened the activity of these CeAga neurons, the mice responded as if a temporary insult had become intense or painful again. They also found that low-dose ketamine, an anesthetic drug that allows sensation but blocks pain, activated the CeAga center and wouldn't work without it. Now the researchers are going to look for drugs that can activate only these cells to suppress pain as potential future pain killers, Wang said. The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Bob Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has had a front-row seat to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Wachter's job, at least in part, is to keep the department's 3,000 or so faculty, trainees and staff current on developments in research, education and clinical care. But most days he sets aside at least two hours to keep another group informed: his Twitter followers. Dr. Wachter, 62 years old, is part of a growing group of scientists and public-health officials who are increasingly active and drawing large audiences on social media. They say they feel a moral obligation to provide credible information online and steer the conversation away from dubious claims, such as those in "Plandemic," a video espousing Covid-19 conspiracy theories that drew millions of views last week. [...]

Dr. Wachter typically writes his tweets in threads, long strings of posts on a single topic or idea; on Wednesday, he posted about masks. [...] To compose his tweets, Dr. Wachter keeps a document open throughout the day, where he drops in material he believes could be relevant to his followers. He starts writing posts between 4 and 6 p.m.; his wife, a journalist, often proofreads them, he says. His tweets post between 7 and 8 p.m. The doctors feel like they "have an obligation to put out information that is as correct as it can be," says Dr. Wachter. This is important during amidst a pandemic, especially after a new paper in the journal Nature this week found that antivaccination views are drowning out the more mainstream voices online, "partly due to the ways antivaccination advocates interact with some users of social media platforms," reports the WSJ.

"As a result, researchers predict, antivaccination views 'will dominate in a decade.'"

A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug "do not fare better than those not receiving the drug," reports Time: Dr. Neil Schluger, chief of the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at Columbia, and his team studied more than 1,300 patients admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Irving Medical Center for COVID-19. Some received hydroxychloroquine on an off-label basis, a practice that allows doctors to prescribe a drug that has been approved for one disease to treat another — in this case, COVID-19. About 60% of the patients received hydroxychloroquine for about five days.

They did not show any lower rate of needing ventilators or a lower risk of dying during the study period compared to people not getting the drug.

"We don't think at this point, given the totality of evidence, that it is reasonable to routinely give this drug to patients," says Schluger. "We don't see the rationale for doing that." While the study did not randomly assign people to receive the drug or placebo and compare their outcomes, the large number of patients involved suggests the findings are solid. Based on the results, Schluger says doctors at his hospital have already changed their advice about using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. "Our guidance early on had suggested giving hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients, and we updated that guidance to remove that suggestion," he says.
In another study conducted at U.S. veterans hospitals where severely ill patients were given hydroxychloroquine, "the drug was found to be of no use against the disease and potentially harmful when given in high doses," reports the Chicago Tribune.

They also report that to firmly establish whether the drug has any effect, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now funding a randomized, controlled trial at six medical institutions of hundreds of people who've tested positive for Covid-19.

"Over at ScienceDirect, they report on a French 'retrospective' study of just over 1,000 patients across all age groups with very good results," writes long-time Slashdot reader kenh. The analysis found that administration of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin (AZ) before COVID-19 complications occur "is safe and associated with very low fatality rate in patients." From the report: Background: In France, the combination hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZ) is used in the treatment of COVID-19.

Methods: We retrospectively report on 1061 SARS-CoV-2 positive tested patients treated with HCQ (200 mg three times daily for ten days) + AZ (500 mg on day 1 followed by 250 mg daily for the next four days) for at least three days. Outcomes were death, clinical worsening (transfer to ICU, and more than 10 day hospitalization) and viral shedding persistence (more than 10 days).

Results: A total of 1061 patients were included in this analysis (46.4% male, mean age 43.6 years -- range 14-95 years). Good clinical outcome and virological cure were obtained in 973 patients within 10 days (91.7%). Prolonged viral carriage was observed in 47 patients (4.4%) and was associated to a higher viral load at diagnosis (pA poor clinical outcome (PClinO) was observed for 46 patients (4.3%) and 8 died (0.75%) (74-95 years old). All deaths resulted from respiratory failure and not from cardiac toxicity. Five patients are still hospitalized (98.7% of patients cured so far). PClinO was associated with older age (OR 1.11), severity at admission (OR 10.05) and low HCQ serum concentration. PClinO was independently associated with the use of selective beta-blocking agents and angiotensin II receptor blockers (p less than .05). A total of 2.3% of patients reported mild adverse events (gastrointestinal or skin symptoms, headache, insomnia and transient blurred vision). On the contrary, a separate study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found the two primary outcomes for COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were death and the need for mechanical ventilation.

"The study analyzed only 368 patients but represented the largest look at the outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine -- with or without azithromycin, a common antibiotic -- anywhere in the world," The Hill reported more than two weeks ago.

UPDATE (5/9/2020): A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug don't do any better than those not receiving the drug.

"A new, Linux-like platform could transform the way medicine is developed — and energize the race against COVID-19," reports Fast Company, while arguing that the old drug discovery system "was built to benefit shareholders, not patients."

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: Drug development in the U.S. has traditionally been cloistered and profit-motivated, which means that it has sometimes failed to tackle pressing needs. But an initiative called the Open Source Pharma Foundation hopes to apply some of the lessons of open-source software to the creation of new drugs — including ones that could help fight COVID-19.
From the article: The response to COVID-19 has been more open-source than any drug effort in modern memory. On January 11, less than two weeks after the virus was reported to the World Health Organization, Chinese researchers published a draft of the virus's genetic sequence. The information enabled scientists across the globe to begin developing tests, treatments, and vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies searched their archives for drugs that might be repurposed as treatments for COVID-19 and formed consortiums to combine resources and expedite the process. These efforts have yielded some 90 vaccine candidates, seven of which are in Phase I trials and three of which are advancing to Phase II. There are nearly 1,000 clinical trials listed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to COVID-19.

The gathering of resources and grassroots sharing of information aimed at combating the coronavirus has put open-source methods of drug development front and center. "It's our moment," said Bernard Munos, a former corporate strategist at pharma company Eli Lilly... Munos has been arguing for an open-source approach to developing drugs since 2006. "A lot is at stake because if it's successful, the open-source model can be replicated to address other challenges in biomedical research."
So now the Open Source Pharma Foundation hopes to offer "a platform where scientists and researchers can freely access technological tools for researching disease, share their discoveries, launch investigations into molecules or potential drugs, and find entities to turn that research into medicine..." according to the article.

"If the platform succeeds, it would allow drugs to succeed on their merit and need, rather than their ability to be profitable."

"Data from connected scale users suggests Americans, on average, are not gaining weight during lockdowns," writes long-time Slashdot reader pfhlick.

The Washington Post reports: Withings, the maker of popular Internet-connected scales and other body-measurement devices, studied what happened to the weight of some 450,000 of its American users between March 22 — when New York ordered people home — and April 18. Despite concerns about gaining a "quarantine 15," the average user gained 0.21 pounds during that month... Over the same March-April period in 2019, Withings said its American users gained slightly less weight — 0.19 pounds on average — though fewer people had the scales last year...

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University — who wasn't involved with the Withings analysis — said he found the results a bit disappointing. "With the shutdown of the restaurants, I thought the numbers would have gotten better," he said. Home-cooked meals tend to be healthier than dining out.
Withings' numbers varied slightly for other countires. But citing a professor of medicine at Stanford, the article notes that average weight gains may be misleading, since some people "may be hitting their groove during stay-at-home orders by embracing cooking and taking up jogging. But others could be using food to cope with stress and gaining large amounts of weight." In fact, 37% of the scale owners gained more than a pound. (Which, if my math is correct, suggests that the other 63% had to lose at least .13 pounds.)

The article also notes that for buyers of Withings' scales, "contributing aggregate data is a condition included in its terms of service; its customers don't get the option to opt out if they want to use Withings products."

New Slashdot submitter Joe2020 shares a report from the BBC: Firefighters in Corsica, France, are aiming to teach canines how to sniff out coronavirus, as they can other conditions. It's hoped that detection dogs could be used to identify people with the virus at public places like airports. Their trial is one of several experiments being undertaken in countries including the UK and the USA. "Each individual dog can screen up to 250 people per hour," James Logan, head of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told The Washington Post. "We are simultaneously working on a model to scale it up so it can be deployed in other countries at ports of entry, including airports." The dogs are trained using urine and saliva samples collected from patients who tested positive and negative for the disease.

"We don't know that this will be the odor of the virus, per se, or the response to the virus, or a combination," Cynthia Otto, director of the Working Dog Center at Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine, told the publication. "The dogs don't care what the odor is ... What they learn is that there's something different about this sample than there is about that sample."

A government-run study of Gilead's remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. From a report: Gilead made the announcement in a statement Wednesday, stating: "We understand that the trial has met its primary endpoint." The company said that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is conducting the study, will provide data at an upcoming briefing. The finding -- although difficult to fully characterize without any data for the study -- would represent the first treatment shown to improve outcomes in patients infected with the virus that put the global economy in a standstill and killed at least 218,000 people worldwide.

During an appearance alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said the data are a "very important proof of concept" and that there was reason for optimism, but cautioned the data were not a "knockout." Over the past few weeks, there have been conflicting reports about the potential benefit of remdesivir, a drug that was previously tried in Ebola. As previously reported by STAT, an early peek at Gilead's study in severe Covid-19 patients, based on data from a trial at a Chicago hospital, suggested patients were doing better than expected on remdesivir. Days later, a summary of results from a study in China showed that patients on the drug did not improve more than those in a control group.

The UK's coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance. From a report: The NHS says it has a way to make the software work "sufficiently well" on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen. That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries. Experts from GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre have aided the effort. NCSC indicated that its involvement has been limited to an advisory role. "Engineers have met several core challenges for the app to meet public health needs and support detection of contact events sufficiently well, including when the app is in the background, without excessively affecting battery life," said a spokeswoman for NHSX, the health service's digital innovation unit.

Long-time Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: "Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else," writes NPR, citing "10 leading scientists who collect samples of viruses from animals in the wild, study virus genomes and understand how lab accidents can happen."
NPR reports: "All of the evidence points to this not being a laboratory accident," says Jonna Mazet, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis and director of a global project to watch for emerging viruses called PREDICT. Rather, the experts interviewed by NPR all believe that the virus was transmitted between animals and humans in nature, as has happened in previous outbreaks — from Ebola to the Marburg virus — and with other known coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS...

Lowering the odds further still, when researchers begin to work in the lab to see what they've collected, the samples they handle aren't actually infectious. Mazet says they are "inactivated," a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself while preserving its genetic material for study... These protocols are used by scientists all over the world, including in China. Mazet says that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where much of the suspicion has been focused, has been trained by U.S. scientists as part of the PREDICT program. Scientists working there follow the rules, Mazet says.

Mazet says researchers at the Wuhan institute were so good, they actually helped to shape the protocols. "They were not only completing all of those trainings, but they were also weighing in and helping us to make those trainings very strong from a safety perspective," she says.
U.S. intelligence officials have now also joined additional scientists saying there's zero evidence that the virus escaped from a lab. And NPR also interviewed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, who points out that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."

"We have a bat virus in my neighborhood in New York killing people. Let's get real about this."

America and India "have run an internationally recognized joint vaccine development program for more than three decades," writes long-time Slashdot reader retroworks. And today the BBC reported the two countries are now working together on vaccines against the new coronavirus: India is among the largest manufacturer of generic drugs and vaccines in the world. It is home to half a dozen major vaccine makers and a host of smaller ones, making doses against polio, meningitis, pneumonia, rotavirus, BCG, measles, mumps and rubella, among other diseases. Now half a dozen Indian firms are developing vaccines against the virus that causes Covid-19.

One of them is Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine maker by number of doses produced and sold globally... Now the firm has stitched up collaboration with Codagenix, an American biotech company, to develop a "live attenuated" vaccine, among the more than 80 reportedly in development all over the world... "We are planning a set of animal trials [on mice and primates] of this vaccine in April. By September, we should be able to begin human trials," Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer of Serum Institute of India, told me over the phone. Mr Poonawalla's firm has also partnered to mass produce a vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and backed by the UK government...

"It's pretty clear the world is going to need hundreds of millions of doses, ideally by the end of this year, to end this pandemic, to lead us out of lockdown," Prof Adrian Hill, who runs the Jenner Institute at Oxford, told the BBC's Health and Science correspondent James Gallagher. This is where Indian vaccine makers have a head start over others. Mr Poonawalla's firm alone has an extra capacity of 400 to 500 million doses. "We have lots of capacity as we have invested in it," he says.

There's more. Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech had announced a partnership with the University of Wisconsin Madison and US-based firm FluGen to make almost 300 million doses of a vaccine for global distribution. Zydus Cadilla is working on two vaccines, while Biological E, Indian Immunologicals, and Mynvax are developing a vaccine each. Another four or five home-grown vaccines are in early stages of development.
In the article the World Health Organization's chief scientist also applauds "the entrepreneurs and pharmaceutical companies who invested in quality manufacturing and in processes that made it possible to produce in bulk.

"The owners of these companies have also had the goal of doing good for the world, while also running a successful business and this model is a win-win for all."

"What Australia and New Zealand have already accomplished is a remarkable cause for hope," reports the New York Times, in an inspiring article shared by Slashdot reader tflf (also republished here and here): The results are undeniable: Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve. Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,670 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world. New Zealand's own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million...

It all started with scientists. In Australia, as soon as China released the genetic code for the coronavirus in early January, pathologists in public health laboratories started sharing plans for tests. In every state and territory, they jumped ahead of politicians. "It meant we could have a test up and running quickly that was reasonably comparable everywhere," Dr. Collignon said. The government then opened the budgetary floodgates to support suffering workersâ¦

Both nations are now reporting just a handful of new infections each day, down from hundreds in March, and they are converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations.

America's generally pro-Trump media site Fox News felt compelled to report today that "Some poison control centers reported a spike in calls following President Trump's suggestion that injecting disinfectant might help people infected with coronavirus." The comment alarmed medical professionals around the world. The president subsequently claimed on Friday that he was being "sacrastic," although at the press conference he was soberly addressing health experts on the coronavirus task force, urging them to launch a study.

Lysol parent company Reckitt Benckiser issued a statement Friday reminding people that "under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)." In Maryland, the Emergency Management Agency received over 100 calls inquiring about the president's suggestion, forcing the service to issue an alert to remind citizens that "under no circumstances should any disinfectant product be administered into the body through injection, ingestion or any other route." Washington State's Emergency Management Division similarly issued a public statement to remind people to not "drink bleach" or "inject disinfectant."

More concerning, though, is the number of people who actually went ahead with the suggestion. In New York City, the Daily News reported that the Poison Control Center saw 30 cases of "exposure to Lysol, bleach and other cleaners in 18 hours after Trump's suggestion" that cleaning products might be used to treat coronavirus. NYC Poison Control saw only 13 such cases in a similar period last year.

Anna Sanders, who wrote the Daily News article, reported that no one died or was hospitalized as a result.
"After raising the idea of putting disinfectant inside people's bodies, Trump cautioned Thursday that he's not a medical expert," reports one New York-based news site.

" 'Maybe you can. Maybe you can't. I'm not a doctor. I'm, like, a person who has a good you-know-what,' Trump said, pointing to his head."

"Confirmed coronavirus cases world-wide Friday exceeded 2.7 million, with more than 190,000 dead," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing data from Johns Hopkins University.

While America has just 4.3% of the world's population, "The U.S. accounted for nearly a third of the cases, exceeding 869,000, and more than a quarter of the deaths, at 49,963." [Note: This comparison might be skewed by the number of countries underreporting their cases or deaths.]

The Miami Herald reports: The coronavirus has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States, just four days after passing 40,000 U.S. deaths on Sunday, Johns Hopkins University reports. The total as of early Friday afternoon was more than 50,370, up about 400 deaths since Thursday night, the data shows...

More than 25,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 22,000 in Spain... Most of the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York City: 16,388, the university says.
Two weeks ago America had just 20% of the world's confirmed fatalities.