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OK, bringing this really bizarre chapter to a close, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19. The FDA has now concluded that “it is no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations of HCQ and CQ may be...

Mainly have fun.

New study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scince of the USA. Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19 Renyi Zhang, Yixin Li, Annie L. Zhang, Yuan Wang, and Mario J. Molina Significance We have elucidated the transmission pathways of...

Here is an answer to Metaxa's question. A few vaccines have reached the point where various clinical trials have started. The technologies for developing vaccines are constantly advancing, and SARS-CoV-2 seems to offer lots of ways to approach vaccine development (or neutralizing...

A great place to get a list of Covid-19 clinical trials for about everything, drugs, vaccines, etc.. is https://Covid-trials.org I counted 66 different trials for vaccines worldwide at different stages. It includes some trials of BCG which is not specifically a Covid-19 vaccine. A bunch of...

Not as yet, probably not ever. Edit added. I wrote too soon. Two preprints from different groups independently say that people with type A have worse illness than people with type O. Hard to know why, it is a statistical association. To be honest, this kind of hardcore genomics is not my...

By the way, this may be overly alarmist, but for me a scary part is that we don't know what long term consequences of people who have had relatively mild cases may emerge later. Covid-19 hasn't been around long enough to really know what happens to recovered people 1, 2, 5 years down the road...

The WHO lady was responding to a question, said something quite dumb, maybe because she has little experience handling a press conference (?). And it set off a tsunami. The annoying thing is, it took me all of about three minutes of searching to find papers that show the current consensus --...

Here is a peer-reviewed article on this Takkyu. Annals of Internal Medicine Prevalence of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection A Narrative Review Daniel P. Oran, AMEric J. Topol, MD Abstract Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread rapidly throughout the world...

A misleading statement according to many epidemiologists and infectious disease experts asked to comment on this statement, as well as a few peer-reviewed studies. But the person from the WHO did say it. Presymptomatic is not necessarily the same as asymptomatic, and this statement was not...

This came out today. Another drug that might actually work in severely ill Covid-19 patients. This result us VERY preliminary but it certainly justifies a decent clinical trial, which they indicate is being organized. This study was not a true clinical trial per se, it was an off-label...

Dr. Evil is right, there are things not known about the immune response to SARS-COv-2. The reason to be optimistic, however, is that researchers have identified things called CD4+ memory T-cells in patients who have had Covid-19 (and also earlier in SARS patients), which would usually suggest...

Randomized double-blind placebo controlled clinical trial on whether hydroxychloroquine (HQ) prevents people from getting Covid-19 was published in New England Journal of Medicine. Subjects were asymptomatic but had been exposed to someone with Covid-19 HQ doesn't have any discernible effect...

To be honest, I'm not sure where to get good local information.The John's Hopkins site does have state by state data. I know for a fact authorities in some places (like Florida) are intentionally suppressing that information on their own websites. Of course it depends too on how much testing...

Here is an article in one of the most prestigious scientific journals on why you should wear masks indoors (when not at home). It is written for non-specialists. I VERY strongly recommend reading this, it is not too long...

It's very fancy.

The randomized clinical trial on remdesevir was published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. This had been announced earlier but here are the peer- reviewed results. It's not a gigantic effect. These results were data blinded earlier than the end of the study reporting...

Its cool.

My thoughts too Takyu. But we will see results from other vaccine trials before long. As I noted above, vaccine trials take awhile. I am also a bit nervous about using viral vectors to deliver a vaccine because it is more likely to yield an adverse reaction. I suspect (but obviously don't...

Takyu, you are correct. I had to go look all this up myself. Apparently the standards for describing adverse reactions in clinical trials is universal. A Grade 3 adverse reaction fever is very severe, but according to the definitions for clinical trials, not considered life threatening. In...