Global Biodefense – 20 February 2020

The Diamond Princess cruise ship has been host to the largest number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases outside China, with at least 621.  Public health and bioethics experts caution that such strict quarantines aren’t the best way to contain viruses like the novel COVID-19, and that letting people self-monitor their symptoms at home is a more […]

America’s defense against epidemics is divided among 2,684 state, local, and tribal public-health departments. The federal government’s quarantine powers at U.S. borders are extensive. Travel ban on noncitizens who have been anywhere in China recently have been enacted, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services announced quarantine measures for returning citizens not long after […]

The second-biggest Ebola outbreak in history, which has upended life in eastern Congo’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces since August 2018, infecting nearly 3,500 people and killing about 2,250, is down to its last chain of transmission. Despite ongoing violence that has hampered the response from its outset, and that has spiked again recently, new […]

If Tedros wants WHO to stay informed about what’s happening in China and influence how the country handles the epidemic, he cannot afford to antagonize the notoriously touchy Chinese government—even though it is clear the country has been less than fully transparent about the outbreak’s early stages, and perhaps still is. Critics say that stance […]

The US has a biodefense strategy—it just isn’t following it. In 2018, the Trump administration released a National Biodefense Strategy which was supposed to help coordinate government-wide efforts like detecting and responding to diseases. Asha George, a biosecurity expert and member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, says the implementation […]

A randomized, controlled trial is the gold standard of clinical research. But pulling one together for Covid-19 is complicated by the realities of working in hospital systems overwhelmed by the sheer size of the outbreak. One of the biggest issues is ensuring the same standard of care in every place where the drug is being […]

Recent news reports have included speculation that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is ‘mutating’ and ‘evolving’ amid increasing concern that the outbreak could present an even more significant threat than it does already. At present there is no evidence to think that this is the case. Don’t be scared of mutation. Mutations happen all the time at […]

Virologist Matthew Frieman at the University of Maryland School of Medicine is just one of the scientists cleared to receive samples of the virus derived from the first U.S. case of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), a 35-year-old man in Snohomish County, Wash., who recovered. Others have ordered the virus and are waiting. Frieman plans to test […]

In its newly published infection prevention and control recommendations for COVID-19, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends the use of N95 respirators in a healthcare setting with the suspected novel coronavirus, but the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended surgical masks for general patient care and respirators for aerosol-generating procedures only. […]

“COVID-19. I’ll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine. COVID-19.” That’s how Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO),  introduced the agency’s official name  for the new disease that’s paralyzing China  The christening yesterday, at one of WHO’s outbreak press conferences in Geneva.1 COVID-19 is a name for the disease, not for the […]