The Wall Street Journal: “A Lab Leak in China Most Likely Origin of Covid Pandemic, Energy Department says”

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence”, according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

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U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

Michael R. Gordon & Warren P. Strobel

This article sparked another round of fierce Twitter arguments over the possible origins of COVID, with many quick to point fingers at journalists and scientists for suppressing discussion of this issue. I remain astounded at the American fixation with talking things to death and inability to handle uncertainty, which is the real issue here. In truth, there is no new evidence to discuss; the intelligence agencies involved declined to share any details about how they arrived at these assessments – not to mention their ‘low confidence’ in these conclusions, which further invalidates the statements.

World Health Organization: “14.9 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021”

Excess mortality is calculated as the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic based on data from earlier years.

Excess mortality includes deaths associated with COVID-19 directly (due to the disease) or indirectly (due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society). Deaths linked indirectly to COVID-19 are attributable to other health conditions for which people were unable to access prevention and treatment because health systems were overburdened by the pandemic. The estimated number of excess deaths can be influenced also by deaths averted during the pandemic due to lower risks of certain events, like motor-vehicle accidents or occupational injuries.

Most of the excess deaths (84%) are concentrated in South-East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Some 68% of excess deaths are concentrated in just 10 countries globally. Middle-income countries account for 81% of the 14.9 million excess deaths (53% in lower-middle-income countries and 28% in upper-middle-income countries) over the 24-month period, with high-income and low-income countries each accounting for 15% and 4%, respectively.

The estimates for a 24-month period (2020 and 2021) include a breakdown of excess mortality by age and sex. They confirm that the global death toll was higher for men than for women (57% male, 43% female) and higher among older adults. The absolute count of the excess deaths is affected by the population size. The number of excess deaths per 100,000 gives a more objective picture of the pandemic than reported COVID-19 mortality data.

Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Mortality Assessment

Tracking excess mortality as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is an important tool for assessing various health measures and their effectiveness. This study however arrives at some questionable conclusions and has been discussed critically on Twitter.

Coronavirus in Romania: skydiving without a parachute

While the attention of the public and authorities has been thoroughly captured by the Russian invasion of Ukraine over the past weeks, and despite massive efforts to diminish the issue in public eyes, the two-year-old pandemic is far from being a thing of the past. As I feared in my previous article, case numbers have skyrocketed here in Romania throughout January, reaching an official daily high over 40,000 on February 1^st, a new record. Like other Omicron waves around the world, the sharp increase was followed by a quick retreat, with new cases declining at a rate of about 35% each week. Currently, in the second week of March, the case numbers hover above 3,000 daily on average.

Mortality has also progressed on a trajectory similar to other Omicron waves: deaths have increased after the typical two-week delay, but at a much lower rate than cases – on average 35% per week compared to almost 90% for cases. The number of daily deaths surpassed 200 on two occasions in the second half of February, considerably lower than the mortality of the autumn Delta wave, which reached as high as 600 a day. Deaths are also currently in decline, although, again, at a lower rate than cases, around 20% per week. Our experience seems to support conclusions from other countries that the Omicron mutation causes less severe disease, at least in populations with sufficient prior immunity, either through infection or vaccinations. But during this wave, medical personnel also had access to new antiviral medication for severe COVID cases, so this might have also contributed to keeping the death rate lower than before.

Protocol: “Blame cheap music for Joe Rogan being on Spotify”

Left unsaid during the leaked town hall was another aspect of this relationship: Spotify is in bed with Joe Rogan because streaming music is too damn cheap.

Music services have long struggled to pay those huge royalty checks their contracts with the music rights holders are calling for. Some have even argued that the deck is fundamentally stacked against the streaming media industry, and that music subscription services can never be profitable.

• Spotify has indeed lost billions of dollars over the years, a streak that continued in 2021: For the full year, the company booked net losses of $38.8 million on $11 billion in revenue, according to its latest earnings report released yesterday.

Janko Roettgers

I have been trying to abstain from commenting on this Joe Rogan dispute because people were throwing around the most ridiculous and biased arguments they could find. For the record, I don’t listen either to Joe Rogan’s podcast or to Neil Young’s music, but I am a Spotify premium subscriber, and have no intention to change that. This article discusses the business reasons for the situation; I would go a bit further and say that the underlying issue is the increasing lack of competition on this market.

The Economist: “America’s elected coroners are too often a public-health liability”

Death investigation in America falls into two broad categories. Medical-examiner systems are run by unelected technocrats, physicians who probe deaths and draft certificates. Coroner systems are led by elected officials, who may or may not be medical doctors. Both are supported by forensic pathologists, specialists in autopsies.

About 60% of Americans live under medical-examiner systems, according to Jeffrey Jentzen, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of a history of death investigation. Coroners dominated during the early years of the republic, but were prone to corruption. Undertakers, law-enforcement officials and insurance agents all stood to gain by taking on a second job as a coroner. Issuing death certificates provided many potential avenues for profit, from determining insurance payouts to covering up evidence of a crime.

A push to replace coroners with medical examiners gained traction in the early 20th century, before losing momentum. Coroners attract little attention—about 80% ran unopposed in the latest electoral cycle. But polarisation has created more competition. When Bobbi Jo O’Neal ran for coroner in South Carolina’s Charleston County in 2020, after two decades as a nurse conducting death investigations, she faced a less qualified opponent. Yet as a Republican in an increasingly liberal area, she barely scraped through.

The Economist

One strange aspect of American society that I have only recently became aware of is the pervasiveness of elections in many areas of public life: state attorneys general, state judges (a notorious example was the judge presiding over Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial), and apparently coroners. In most other countries these positions would simply be filled through aptitudes tests, based on qualifications and experience.

Medium: “A year in, how has Biden done on pandemic response?”

This tone was struck early, even before Biden assumed office. First, the transition team distanced itself from one of its scientific advisors who, in a New York Times op-ed, called for a national shutdown of four to six weeks. Later, after internal debate, Biden’s transition team decided not to warn the public against attending social gatherings during the 2020 holiday season, even as few were vaccinated and hospital beds were quickly filling. When Biden assumed office in January, he warned the public that, There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months. For his top pandemic policy advisor, Biden appointed Jeffrey Zients, a wealthy campaign donor with a background in private equity and management consulting, not public health. Zients has been known as the “ambassador to the business community” under the Obama administration.

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Who remained unvaccinated by late 2021? While the media often highlights the notable partisan divide in vaccination rates, it’s also notable that half of unvaccinated adults didn’t vote for Trump — many did not vote at all. The unvaccinated are largely low-income, uninsured, pregnant, incarcerated, and children (including those under 5, for whom vaccination has not been authorized). While vaccination rates are high for people ages 65 and up, those in their late 70s and older have lower vaccination rates than younger seniors, suggesting a lack of autonomy (i.e. needing to rely on others to access health care) may play a role. And while racial gaps in vaccination rates have narrowed considerably, huge inequalities in covid death rates remain. By my own calculations, age-adjusted covid mortality rates in the US between August 1, 2021 and December 4, 2021 were 30% higher for Black and Latino people, 100% higher for American Indians/Alaska Natives, and 340% higher for Pacific Islanders compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Finally, the Biden administration has exaggerated the proportion of hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the unvaccinated. For instance, Fauci claimed in July, 2021 that only 1% of covid deaths were among vaccinated people, but CDC’s data for the previous week showed the actual figure was 17%. By December, 2021 when Zients assured vaccinated Americans that they had “done the right thing” and “will get through this”, the share of vaccinated deaths had increased to 28%. Vaccines continue to provide powerful risk reduction for severe illness, but they are not a panacea. Amid high viral transmission levels, more than a thousand vaccinated people will continue to die each week (particularly those who are older, immunocompromised, or otherwise high-risk). But framing vaccination as a way to opt out of the pandemic, and understanding the unvaccinated to be political enemies, has helped absolve the administration of its responsibilities.

Justin Feldman

By January 20th, 2021, Biden’s inauguration day, the US had reported more than 410.000 Covid deaths, with a daily average of about 3100. One year later, the death toll more than doubled to over 860.000 (not even accounting for the likely higher figures because of poorly reported death causes) on a daily average of 2100 – in a nutshell, all you need to know about the Biden’s administration pandemic response.

The New York Times: “Epstein-Barr Virus may play Role in Multiple Sclerosis Development”

In their study, published Thursday in Science, the group examined data from 10 million people on active duty in the United States Armed Forces over two decades. The strength of their study, said its principal investigator, Dr. Alberto Ascherio, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is that they were able to follow people for years and ask whether infections with Epstein-Barr preceded multiple sclerosis.

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At the same time, the virus in question, Epstein-Barr, is common, infecting nearly everyone in the population at some point. Although few are aware that they were infected, some develop mononucleosis. The virus remains in the body for life.

Because so few who are infected with the virus get multiple sclerosis, it cannot be the sole cause of the disease. Other risk factors have been identified, including some, like low levels of vitamin D and smoking, that were seen previously by the Harvard group using the same data set. There also are genetic factors — 900 abnormal genes have been identified in patients with multiple sclerosis, said Dr. Anthony J. Reder, a multiple sclerosis expert at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new study. Gender also plays a role; most patients are women.

But, Dr. Ascherio said, no risk factor stands out like Epstein-Barr infections.

Gina Kolata

Another example of an endemic virus likely triggering debilitating diseases over the long term – just as some HPV strains are responsible for nearly all cervical cancer cases. One has to wonder what sort of medical complications current coronavirus infections will cause 5 to 10 years from now. Already studies point to conditions varying from increased risk of diabetes in children, to neurological symptoms similar to those who’ve undergone treatment for cancer following even a mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, to worsening mobility and physical function in people older than 50, to increased vascular damage resulting in blood clots and strokes. How so many latched onto this narrative that the current Omicron variant is somehow ‘mild’ and it’s OK that everyone will get infected is truly irresponsible.

The Washington Post: “Djokovic is another whiny sports superstar with an exaggerated sense of entitlement”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Djokovic was looking to game the system at the risk of putting people’s lives in danger. What makes this spectacle even more distasteful is the way that Djokovic’s supporters insist on casting him as the victim. His father, Srdjan Djokovic, claims that his overprivileged, overpaid son, who is staying at a Melbourne hotel used to house refugees and asylum seekers, is the “Spartacus of the new world” — a “symbol” of “poor and oppressed countries and peoples”.

How absurd. If Djokovic is Spartacus, then I’m Rod Laver. In truth, Djokovic is another whiny sports superstar with screwy ideas and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.

I hope that Australia deports him — and that he will not be allowed to enter the United States to play the U.S. Open unless he presents proof of vaccination. Just because sports stars are showered with rewards unknown to ordinary mortals doesn’t mean that they should be allowed to evade the (sensible) covid rules imposed on everyone else.

Max Boot

Speaking of accountability, I too am glad that this peculiar tennis-meets-coronavirus drama concluded with Djoković having his visa revoked and deported out of Australia. Exemptions from general rules for the rich and famous are never justified. In this situation it would be all the more unfair to the people who respected heavy travel restrictions for the past two years, some of them separated from family and friends for extensive periods.

Coronavirus in Romania: brace for the Big, Bad O.

As expected in my last update, infections soared in Romania over the month of October, reaching as high as around 19.000 a day in the middle of the month, and a total of almost 415.000 for the entire month. Following a similar pattern with other Delta waves around the globe, new cases started decreasing afterwards almost as fast as they were rising before, despite few extra restrictions – you may attribute this pattern to some inherent property of Delta or to the complicated transmission dynamics in a networked population. Personally, I continue to think that school closures contributed significantly to reducing transmission.

The decline continued until the week between Christmas and New Year, when cases started rising again, almost explosively: we went from a weekly average of 650 before Christmas to 1.220 after, an almost 90% increase, and this week the trend accelerated, surpassing 6.000 cases yesterday. This could be an effect of winter holidays, combining less testing with more social mingling, but I fear that it’s in fact the start of our Omicron wave. At this growth rate, we may well reach and surpass the previous record by the end of January – or sooner… Officially, the number of confirmed Omicron infections in Romania remains low, with 91 cases confirmed on January 5th (for a total of 183 so far), but worryingly over half of these 91 cases (51) are in vaccinated people.

CSPI Center: “The effect of population structure on transmission”

As we have seen, in order to study the spread of infectious diseases, epidemiologists use models that make various simplifying assumptions. In particular, they typically assume a homogeneous mixing population, which means that contacts between people are totally random, so everyone is equally likely to infect everyone else if they are infected. However, this assumption is totally unrealistic, because in the real world transmission occurs in a highly structured population and contacts are not random. If you are infected, the probability that you are going to infect most people in the population is effectively zero, because you’ll never have any contact with them. Of course, there are many people you will never have any contact with, but whom you could nevertheless indirectly infect by starting a chain of infections that goes through them, but for most people the probability that this will happen is infinitesimal, whereas it’s much higher for people you interact with often because they are your colleagues, friends, members of your family, etc. and people who frequently interact with them. In reality, the virus doesn’t spread in a homogeneous mixing population, but in a highly structured one where each individual has different patterns of interactions with different people. How the virus spreads depends on who interacts with whom, how often they interact and what type of interaction they have, since those facts determine what chains of infections can exist and how likely each of them is depending on where the virus starts from in the population.

Thus, while standard epidemiological models represent the population as a collection of particles that interact randomly with each other, it’s better seen as a complex network where nodes are individuals and edges represent potential interactions between them that could result in transmission. Each edge in the network has a weight that indicates how easily transmission can occur along that edge if one of the individuals it connects happens to be infectious, which is determined by the frequency and nature of the contacts between them. Epidemiologists of infectious diseases have produced a voluminous literature on models that assume a virus spreads on these kinds of networks, so it’s not as if they didn’t know that real epidemics don’t spread in a homogeneous mixing population and hadn’t studied how population structure can affect transmission, but this literature had essentially no effect on applied work during the pandemic, perhaps because the kind of data that would be necessary to model real epidemics in that way is almost never available. Yet I think that population structure could hold the key to the mystery I have identified above, namely that the effective reproduction number often undergoes large fluctuations that, as far as we can tell, can’t be explained by changes in people’s behavior. Indeed, what I’m proposing is that we can solve this mystery by postulating that the network on which the epidemic spreads has what in network science is called “community structure”, which means that it can be divided into subnetworks whose nodes are internally densely connected while the subnetworks are only loosely connected to each other.

Philippe Lemoine

Interesting study about a conundrum that has puzzled many since the start of the pandemic, yet few have offered plausible solutions: why does transmission fluctuate so much even in the absence of clear measures or changes in human behavior? There are multiple examples for this, and the author mentions some of the more known, such as Florida and the Indian Delta wave, which subsided almost as abruptly as it started. The recent surge in Romania has also ended relatively fast, despite scarce measures from the authorities – as before, I mostly attribute these swings to schools openings, and the current reduction in cases comes after schools were closed again all over the country.

The Guardian: “Inside the airline industry’s meltdown”

The airline industry’s metabolism is ordinarily slow – planes ordered years in advance, routes plotted and pilots trained with measured care. During the pandemic, though, decisions had to be made with uncommon speed. Late in March, for instance, a KLM flight somewhere above Novosibirsk, bearing towards Shanghai, was told that every incoming flight crew now had to quarantine for 14 days in a Chinese state hospital. This rule was so new that it hadn’t existed when the plane left Amsterdam; circumstances had changed mid flight. Executives scrambled to get an approved exemption from Dutch and Chinese authorities so that the crew could stay aboard the plane in Shanghai and bring it home 18 hours later.

The same month, Elbers retired three Boeing 747s – huge, fuel-guzzling craft that were on the verge of being put out to pasture anyway. Mere weeks later, they had to be hastily pulled out of storage and pressed into service to ferry medical equipment and PPE from China to the Netherlands. There were complicated repatriation flights to be flown. Two thousand Dutch travellers had to be retrieved from Australia. The first repatriation flight to Sydney had to leave with 48 hours’ notice, but it had been 20 years since KLM had flown there – so long that the routes and permits had to be plotted afresh and reloaded into flight computers.

Samanth Subramanian

Interesting insight into some of the lesser known aspects of the airline industry, and how it was brutally disrupted by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic early last year. Unfortunately for the people in this business – and for those of us who enjoy traveling and can’t wait to get on a plane to a new destination – the future appears increasingly turbulent. The new omicron variant of the virus has prompted new travel restrictions, echoing the measures put in place at the beginning of the pandemic, though on a much smaller scale. And the migrant crisis at the EU border with Belarus has been partly defused by stopping incoming passengers from the Middle East. Another incident from earlier this year, also involving Belarus, which forced a Ryanair flight to land in order to capture a dissident, points to the increasing uncertainty and risks when boarding a flight caused by rising international tensions.

The Guardian: “The WHO v coronavirus: why it can’t handle the pandemic”

There is a simple reason for this. For all the responsibility vested in the WHO, it has little power. Unlike international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the WHO, which is a specialised body of the UN, has no ability to bind or sanction its members. Its annual operating budget, about $2bn in 2019, is smaller than that of many university hospitals, and split among a dizzying array of public health and research projects. The WHO is less like a military general or elected leader with a strong mandate, and more like an underpaid sports coach wary of “losing the dressing room”, who can only get their way by charming, grovelling, cajoling and occasionally pleading with the players to do as they say.

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The WHO’s response to Sars was considered a huge success. Fewer than 1,000 people worldwide died of the disease, despite it reaching a total of 26 countries. The pandemic was defeated not with vaccines or medicines, but with NPIs, or “non-pharmaceutical interventions” in WHO parlance: travel warnings, tracking, testing and isolating cases, and a huge information-gathering operation across multiple countries, all made possible by the WHO’s willingness to wield authority that it had, in a sense, created simply by speaking it into existence. Brundtland did things the WHO had no authority doing. She just did them, said Fidler. She sort of used Sars as a way to test drive some very radical changes.

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Despite mounting frustrations – in mid-January, China also refused the WHO’s request to send a team of scientific observers to Hubei province, the centre of the outbreak – Tedros has never come close to doing what Brundtland did and calling China out. Instead, on 28 January, he had a closed-door meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, and two days later, he praised Chinese efforts to contain the disease, declaring that China is setting a new standard for outbreak control. That same day, 30 January, the WHO declared a Pheic, and began issuing prescriptions to countries around the world. On 8 February, China finally allowed WHO observers into the country. For Tedros’s supporters, this was vindication of his strategy of keeping China onside. For his critics, it was too little, too late.

Stephen Buranyi

This article was published during the early days of the pandemic, but the information and conclusions remain valid. The comparison with the earlier SARS pandemic and other similar emergencies was particularly informative: as I remarked before, a key factor for success is the willingness to act quickly and decisively, before the situation spirals out of control. Dr. Brundtland displayed that initiative and leadership during the SARS outbreak; current WHO chief Tedros Adhanom not so much… His initial deference to China may have signaled to other countries that it’s fine to disregard the WHO – after all, it has no concrete power to impose them. And if the WHO can’t – or won’t – criticize China for its role in letting the virus loose, it can’t expect other countries to fall in line with its recommendations.

The Atlantic: “We’re Already Barreling toward the Next Pandemic”

America failed to test sufficiently throughout the pandemic even though rigorous tests have long been available. Antiviral drugs played a bit part because they typically provide incremental benefits over basic medical care, and can be overly expensive even when they work. And vaccines were already produced far faster than experts had estimated and were more effective than they had hoped; accelerating that process won’t help if people can’t or won’t get vaccinated, and especially if they equate faster development with nefarious corner-cutting, as many Americans did this year. Every adult in the U.S. has been eligible for vaccines since mid-April; in that time, more Americans have died of COVID-19 per capita than people in Germany, Canada, Rwanda, Vietnam, or more than 130 other countries did in the pre-vaccine era.

We’re so focused on these high-tech solutions because they appear to be what a high-income country would do, Alexandra Phelan, an expert on international law and global health policy at Georgetown University, told me. And indeed, the Biden administration has gone all in on vaccines, trading them off against other countermeasures, such as masks and testing, and blaming “the unvaccinated” for America’s ongoing pandemic predicament. The promise of biomedical panaceas is deeply ingrained in the U.S. psyche, but COVID should have shown that medical magic bullets lose their power when deployed in a profoundly unequal society. There are other ways of thinking about preparedness. And there are reasons those ways were lost.

In 1849, after investigating a devastating outbreak of typhus in what is now Poland, the physician Rudolf Virchow wrote, The answer to the question as to how to prevent outbreaks … is quite simple: education, together with its daughters, freedom and welfare. Virchow was one of many 19th-century thinkers who correctly understood that epidemics were tied to poverty, overcrowding, squalor, and hazardous working conditions—conditions that inattentive civil servants and aristocrats had done nothing to address. These social problems influenced which communities got sick and which stayed healthy. Diseases exploit society’s cracks, and so medicine is a social science, Virchow famously said. Similar insights dawned across the Atlantic, where American physicians and politicians tackled the problem of urban cholera by fixing poor sanitation and dilapidated housing. But as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, this social understanding of disease was ousted by a new paradigm.

Ed Yong

While this article is ostensibly about the United States, some of the remarks apply equally well to my own country – especially the crucial role of education…

Nature: “Why many countries failed at COVID contact-tracing — but some got it right”

The WHO’s benchmark for a successful COVID-19 contact-tracing operation is to trace and quarantine 80% of close contacts within 3 days of a case being confirmed — a goal few countries achieve.

But even that’s not quick enough, says Christophe Fraser, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, UK. Transmission is too rapid and the virus can spread before symptoms emerge, he points out. Modelling by Fraser and his team suggests that even if all cases isolate and all contacts are found and quarantined within three days, the epidemic will continue to grow. He says that in a single day, 70% of cases need to isolate and 70% of contacts need to be traced and quarantined for the outbreak to slow (defined as each infected person passing the virus to fewer than one other, on average)⁶.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, overstretched contact-tracers in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom faced the extra burden of antiquated health-care systems. In Australia, as well as in US states such as Hawaii and Washington, health departments are often notified of new cases by fax or phone. It’s somewhat embarrassing, says Plescia, but we never invested in the systems to allow them to do it differently. Entering names and other details into a database from faxed notifications causes big delays, he says, so that the window during which contact-tracing might make a difference vanishes.

Dyani Lewis

Interesting analysis that goes through several reasons for the low effectiveness of contact tracing in many countries. Paradoxically, while the lack of modern digital technology can hinder contact tracing efforts, advanced technological solutions, such as the decentralized contact tracing protocol introduced early in the pandemic by Apple and Google, have also failed to live up to expectations. Low adoption aside, a decentralized system relies on individual initiative by entering positive test results in the app and isolating – a high ask for many people, as we have all discovered – but even worse it withholds data from health authorities, who cannot make proper projections and estimations of the extent of infection.

Coronavirus in Romania: tsunami warning

After a quiet summer, in early autumn the coronavirus has returned to Romania with a vengeance. In the first half of July, the case numbers had dropped under 50 daily, and the total for the entire month was just shy of 2400, the lowest case number since the beginning in March 2020. For a good portion of July, Romania was recording daily deaths caused by coronavirus in the lower single digits, and the monthly total was slightly under 500.

Since then, the situation has changed drastically. Beginning with the second week of July, cases have climbed at a remarkably steady pace, on average 57% each week – except for last week, when the percent increase from the previous week was even higher, almost 90% – bringing us back to a daily count of 7000 cases. Compared to the earlier stages of the pandemic, this growth rate is unprecedented, likely attributable to the more contagious Delta variant, coupled with the lack of restrictions over the summer and the low vaccination rate. Between people returning from holidays, from countries like Greece with higher infections rates, recent large festivals with high attendance, and children returning to school in person last week, the outlook for the next months (even weeks!) is grim.

BBC Future: “The other virus that worries Asia”

These include the Nipah virus. Fruit bats are its natural host. It’s a major concern because there’s no treatment… and a high mortality rate [is] caused by this virus, says Wacharapluesadee. The death rate for Nipah ranges from 40% up to 75%, depending on where the outbreak occurs.

She isn’t alone in her worry. Each year, the World Health Organization (WHO) reviews the large list of pathogens that could cause a public health emergency to decide how to prioritise their research and development funds. They focus on those that pose the greatest risk to human health, those that have epidemic potential, and those for which there are no vaccines.

Nipah virus is in their top 10. And, with a number of outbreaks having happened in Asia already, it is likely we haven’t seen the last of it.

There are several reasons the Nipah virus is so sinister. The disease’s long incubation period (reportedly as long as 45 days, in one case) means there is ample opportunity for an infected host, unaware they are even ill, to spread it. It can infect a wide range of animals, making the possibility of it spreading more likely. And it can be caught either through direct contact or by consuming contaminated food.

Someone with Nipah virus may experience respiratory symptoms including a cough, sore throat, aches and fatigue, and encephalitis, a swelling of the brain which can cause seizures and death. Safe to say, it’s a disease that the WHO would like to prevent from spreading.

Harriet Constable

The Nipah virus has killed a 12-year-old boy earlier this month in India, putting the state into high alert. Compared to the coronavirus fueling the ongoing pandemic, Nipah is far more dangerous, as it is deadlier, has a wider range of transmission pathways, and a long incubation period. The only thing preventing a devastating outbreak seems to be the low human-to-human transmission rate, which reduces the risk of a pandemic event – but viruses can mutate rapidly und unpredictably, so the emergence of a more infectious variant is certainly possible. In the absence of treatment, it would be prudent to have a vaccine ready just in case – the mRNA technology should be able to deliver one relatively quickly. Personally, I would vaccinate against this virus without a second thought…

The New York Times: “If You never met your Co-Workers in Person, did You even work there?”

The coronavirus pandemic, now more than 17 months in, has created a new quirk in the work force: a growing number of people who have started jobs and left them without having once met their colleagues in person. For many of these largely white-collar office workers, personal interactions were limited to video calls for the entirety of their employment.

Never having to be in the same conference room or cubicle as a co-worker may sound like a dream to some people. But the phenomenon of job hoppers who have not physically met their colleagues illustrates how emotional and personal attachments to jobs may be fraying. That has contributed to an easy-come, easy-go attitude toward workplaces and created uncertainty among employers over how to retain people they barely know.

Kellen Browning & Erin Griffith

During the past year, I have had several similar experiences as I changed jobs a couple of times. The companies I have worked at since the start of the pandemic have all tried to compensate the lack of daily in-person interactions with regular virtual meetings with coworkers, but with limited success. Personally, I find it difficult to interact freely on a set schedule – also, most of the time, these calls were mixing job-related topics with small talk, not a terrific way to promote a relaxed atmosphere. Another factor may be that, even in the office, people developed closer ties to some of their coworkers, but not with others, depending on specific affinities and interests – putting a group together in a ‘social call’ does not automatically mean that each member feels equally free to chat and share personal stuff with all the rest of the team.

Science: “New SARS-CoV-2 variants have changed the pandemic. What will the virus do next?”

A popular notion holds that viruses tend to evolve over time to become less dangerous, allowing the host to live longer and spread the virus more widely. But that idea is too simplistic, Holmes says. The evolution of virulence has proven to be quicksand for evolutionary biologists, he says. It’s not a simple thing.

Two of the best studied examples of viral evolution are myxoma virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus, which were released in Australia in 1960 and 1996, respectively, to decimate populations of European rabbits that were destroying croplands and wreaking ecological havoc. Myxoma virus initially killed more than 99% of infected rabbits, but then less pathogenic strains evolved, likely because the virus was killing many animals before they had a chance to pass it on. (Rabbits also evolved to be less susceptible.) Rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus, by contrast, got more deadly over time, probably because the virus is spread by blow flies feeding on rabbit carcasses, and quicker death accelerated its spread.

Other factors loosen the constraints on deadliness. For example, a virus variant that can outgrow other variants within a host can end up dominating even if it makes the host sicker and reduces the likelihood of transmission. And an assumption about human respiratory diseases may not always hold: that a milder virus—one that doesn’t make you crawl into bed, say—might allow an infected person to spread the virus further. In SARS-CoV-2, most transmission happens early on, when the virus is replicating in the upper airways, whereas serious disease, if it develops, comes later, when the virus infects the lower airways. As a result, a variant that makes the host sicker might spread just as fast as before.

Kai Kupferschmidt

As with many other uncertainties surrounding this pandemic, the simplest answer to this question is “we just don’t know yet”. Evolution does not follow a predictable path, and even if it did, there are too many variables to consider, from local restrictions, to vaccinations levels, to complex interactions between the virus and the human immune system in vaccinated or unvaccinated people. As much as we all want this crisis to be over, the best approach remains proceeding with extra caution, vaccinating people and keeping restrictions in place to reduce transmission, because the only way to reduce viral mutation is to have as few infections as possible.

Coronavirus in Romania: an end in sight?

In the two months since my last update, the situation in Romania has improved significantly. Week after week, cases have declined at a steady pace of 20–30%, down to only 100–200 daily, a level not seen since late May and early June of last year. The number of tests has remained relatively stable, so we can be reasonably certain these case numbers reflect reality. In parallel, the number of patients in ICU is considerably lower as well, confirming this trend: it declined under 900 on May 9^th for the first time in six months, and is now already under 300. Authorities have lifted several restrictions on May 15^th, starting with the curfew in large cities and mask mandates in open spaces, but masks are still required inside stores, public transportation, and crowded places like bus stations.

As expected, the reported deaths have continued to increase in the first half of April, reaching a record of 237 on April 20^th, and then steadily declined at a rate of around 20% each week. On the other hand, the new increases in June, topping 200 daily deaths again on 8^th and 9^th, is only a reporting artifact. Looking into the detailed daily accounts reveals that many of these deaths occurred in previous months and are just now being added to the official statistic for COVID-related deaths. As an example, on June 8^th the official death count was 277, but 256 took place in prior months, going back to June 2020, so the actual death toll for the day was 21. This follows the discovery of inconsistencies between deaths reported by individual hospitals and central government, so I guess this is the solution chosen by authorities to update the number of deceased because of the pandemic. It is a rather odd way of correcting statistics, as it skews both the old reports and the current ones for June and makes it difficult to correlate current mortality with the case numbers.

The Guardian: “The endless hunt for the perfect flu vaccine”

One way to better protect older people is to vaccinate an entirely different demographic: schoolchildren. This notion was elegantly demonstrated in a natural experiment in Japan. From 1962 to 1987 most Japanese schoolchildren were vaccinated against influenza; at one point the vaccine was mandatory for a solid decade. The vaccination rate grew to around 85%, but the mandatory vaccination programme was discontinued in 1994. Over the next several years, there was an increase in the number of deaths in elderly people during the flu seasons. In the US, where there had been no change in the vaccination policy, deaths of elderly people over the same flu seasons remained unchanged. Vaccinating one part of the population, in other words, benefits another.

Jeremy Brown

This topic has lost much of its urgency with a far deadlier virus causing worldwide havoc, but some of the findings can prove insightful for dealing with this pandemic. The debate around school closures was fierce in many countries. Many claimed that young children do not spread the virus, based on the fact that they rarely develop symptoms; some countries even failed to test children to obscure results that would contradict those assumptions. This has been disproven whenever actual studies were performed, and a parallel with influenza further reinforces this often neglected point: protecting children from infection indirectly protects their families and social contacts, including old relatives who are most vulnerable to both influenza and COVID-19.