Question  What is the prevalence of myocarditis in competitive athletes after COVID-19 infection, and how would different approaches to screening affect detection?Findings  In this cohort study of 1597 US competitive collegiate athletes undergoing comprehensive cardiovascular testing, the prevalence of clinical myocarditis based on a symptom-based screening strategy was only 0.31%. Screening with cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging increased the prevalence of clinical and subclinical myocarditis by a factor of 7.4 to 2.3%.Meaning  These cardiac magnetic resonance imaging findings provide important data on the prevalence of clinical and subclinical myocarditis in college athletes recovering from symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 infections.

As part of the revised Covid 19 vaccine policy, the Government late on Tuesday issued an order capping the prices for administration of three approved Covid vaccines in private hospitals across India.  The maximum price that can be charged per dose by private vaccine centres is Rs 780 for Covishield, Rs 1,410 for Covaxin and Rs 1,145 for Sputnik V.

In the modern history of catastrophic infectious diseases in Brazil, children often suffer the most in terms of deaths and disability. When dengue epidemics emerged in Brazil in 2007 and 2008, children accounted for more than half of the fatalities. When pregnant women became infected with the Zika virus during an epidemic that began in 2015, more than 1,600 newborn Brazilian infants were born with devastating microcephaly birth defects, far more than in any other nation. Respiratory viruses continue to disproportionately affect Brazil’s children, while hookworms and other intestinal parasites stunt childhood growth and development, especially in poor rural areas.

Scientists are asking a lot of questions about Covid-19 booster shots, but they don’t yet have many answers. Here’s what they know so far.

Data shows increased danger for those on the frontline in the pandemic, with misinformation, scarce vaccines and fragile health systems blamed ‘They stormed the ICU and beat the doctor’: health workers under attack

Comparing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic between countries or across time is difficult because the reported numbers of cases and deaths can be strongly affected by testing capacity and reporting policy. Excess mortality, defined as the increase in all-cause mortality relative to the expected mortality, is widely considered as a more objective indicator of the COVID-19 death toll. However, there has been no global, frequently-updated repository of the all-cause mortality data across countries. To fill this gap, we have collected weekly, monthly, or quarterly all-cause mortality data from 94 countries and territories, openly available as the regularly-updated World Mortality Dataset. We used this dataset to compute the excess mortality in each country during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that in several worst-affected countries (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico) the excess mortality was above 50% of the expected annual mortality. At the same time, in several other countries (Australia, New Zealand) mortality during the pandemic was below the usual level, presumably due to social distancing measures decreasing the non-COVID infectious mortality. Furthermore, we found that while many countries have been reporting the COVID-19 deaths very accurately, some countries have been substantially underreporting their COVID-19 deaths (e.g. Nicaragua, Russia, Uzbekistan), sometimes by two orders of magnitude (Tajikistan). Our results highlight the importance of open and rapid all-cause mortality reporting for pandemic monitoring.

Interpersonal touch and affective touch play a crucial role in social interactions and have a positive influence on mental health. The social distancing regulations related to the COVID-19 pandemic have reduced the ability to engage in interpersonal touch. This could cause touch deprivation, and it might alter the way in which affective touch is perceived. To investigate this, we conducted an online survey with 2348 participants, which contained questions regarding the COVID-19 regulations, touch deprivation and the perceived pleasantness of affective and non-affective touch. Results showed that participants reported feelings of touch deprivation. This significantly increased with the duration and severity of the COVID-19 regulations. Participants who experienced more touch deprivation rated videos of affective and non-affective touch as more pleasant. Current results provide insight in the impact of sudden and prolonged COVID-19 regulations and show that increasing the duration and severity of these regulations is associated with a higher desire for touch, which leads to increased perceived pleasantness of touch.

As with vaccines and drugs, the pandemic has shown how access to this life-saving resource is deeply unequal Dr Charlotte Summers is a lecturer in intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge

Last month, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said vaccinated people could resume gathering indoors unmasked, many saw it as the most hopeful sign so far of the nation’s reopening.But Pamela Addison felt blindsided. She got on a Zoom call with other women whose husbands had died of covid-19. To many, it felt too soon to stop wearing masks. And the CDC announcement felt like a punch in the stomach.Support our journalism. Subscribe today.arrow-right“I think it makes our grief deeper,” said Addison, 37, a teacher in Waldwick, N.J. Her 44-year-old husband Martin, a speech pathologist at a hospital, died of the coronavirus in April 2020, leaving behind two children, who are now 3 and 1. “As people move forward who haven’t been impacted, I kind of feel like they forget and don’t care about the people whose lives were. You kind of don’t feel cared about.”

The effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination in preventing new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections in the general community is still unclear. Here, we used the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey—a large community-based survey of individuals living in randomly selected private households across the United Kingdom—to assess the effectiveness of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech) and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (Oxford–AstraZeneca; ChAdOx1) vaccines against any new SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive tests, split according to self-reported symptoms, cycle threshold value (<30 versus ≥30; as a surrogate for viral load) and gene positivity pattern (compatible with B.1.1.7 or not). Using 1,945,071 real-time PCR results from nose and throat swabs taken from 383,812 participants between 1 December 2020 and 8 May 2021, we found that vaccination with the ChAdOx1 or BNT162b2 vaccines already reduced SARS-CoV-2 infections ≥21 d after the first dose (61% (95% confidence interval (CI) = 54–68%) versus 66% (95% CI = 60–71%), respectively), with greater reductions observed after a second dose (79% (95% CI = 65–88%) versus 80% (95% CI = 73–85%), respectively). The largest reductions were observed for symptomatic infections and/or infections with a higher viral burden. Overall, COVID-19 vaccination reduced the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections, with the largest benefit received after two vaccinations and against symptomatic and high viral burden infections, and with no evidence of a difference between the BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 vaccines. Download PDF

Meet the influencers making millions by dealing doubt about coronavirus vaccines.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the world's population to sudden challenges that elicited strong emotional reactions. Although investigations of responses to tragic one-off events exist, studies on the evolution of collective emotions during a pandemic are missing. We analyzed the digital traces of emotional expressions in tweets during five weeks after the start of outbreaks in 18 countries and six different languages. We observed an early strong upsurge of anxiety-related terms in all countries, which was stronger in countries with stronger increases in cases. Sadness terms rose and anger terms decreased around two weeks later, as social distancing measures were implemented. Positive emotions remained relatively stable. All emotions changed together with an increase in the stringency of measures during certain weeks of the outbreak. Our results show some of the most enduring changes in emotional expression observed in long periods of social media data. Words that frequently occurred in tweets suggest a shift in topics of conversation across all emotions, from political ones in 2019, to pandemic related issues during the outbreak, including everyday life changes, other people, and health. This kind of time-sensitive analyses of large-scale samples of emotional expression have the potential to inform mental health support and risk communication.

IT SEEMS that every time we think we are turning the tide in the coronavirus pandemic, another new variant emerges. The latest threat is the B.1.617.2 variant that is playing a large role in the terrible outbreak in India and is spreading in many other nations. The big question is, will existing vaccines work well enough to prevent major new outbreaks?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the USA was already struggling with racial and economic disparities pertaining to affordable and safe housing for its population. There were large areas within cities with reduced access to health care, neighbourhoods with older housing that were many decades old, low-income minority families living in close quarters, and a growing homeless population. The pandemic brought with it sweeping job loss with resulting loss of income and health insurance for many people, particularly low-income, immigrant, and minority families, with concerns of eviction in groups of people already facing structural racism and poverty. Largely comprised of essential workers, a combination of occupational hazards, residential overcrowding, and increased domestic caregiving responsibilities have played major roles in increased incidence rates (and mortality) of COVID-19. Housing insecurity has been a crucial social determinant of health during this pandemic and offers pertinent lessons for place-based discrimination for millions of Americans.When evaluating the origins of housing discrimination and residential segregation, historical redlining comes to mind. A striking example of de jure segregation, the federally funded Home Owners' Loan Corporation produced maps in the 1930s that put forth a colour-coded schema to subdivide American neighbourhoods into a risk-based ranking for mortgage approvals. Such racially explicit policies diverted investment away from minority neighbourhoods and resulted in residents that were Black, low-income, or immigrant being constrained to hazardous neighbourhoods.

Since the pandemic began, healthcare workers have been venerated for treating patients with Covid-19, but they have also been attacked for doing their job.Five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients, some of whom asked to be kept anonymous, recount their experiences.

Once a poster child for blocking coronavirus, Taiwan failed to fully prepare a pandemic response or vaccination rollout

Physical and mental health are determined by an interplay between nature, i.e. genetics, and nurture, which encompasses experiences and exposures that can be short or long-lasting. Depressive episodes, for example, are partly the result of an interaction between stressful life-events and a genetic predisposition to depression The COVID-19 pandemic represents a unique situation in which whole communities were suddenly and simultaneously exposed to both the virus and the societal changes required to combat the virus. We studied 27,537 population-based biobank participants for whom we have genetic data and extensive longitudinal data collected via 19 questionnaires over 10 months, starting in March 2020. This allowed us to explore the interaction between genetics and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ wellbeing over time. We observe that genetics affected many aspects of well-being, but also that its impact on several phenotypes changed over time. Over the course of the pandemic, we observed that the genetic predisposition to life satisfaction had an increasing influence on perceived quality of life. These results suggest that people’s genetic constitution manifested more prominently over time, potentially due to social isolation driven by strict COVID-19 containment measures. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the contribution of genetic variation to complex phenotypes is dynamic rather than static.

As the mental health crisis deepens with the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increasing need for understanding individuals’ emotional experiences. We have built a large-scale Korean text corpus with five self-labeled psychological ground-truths: empathy, loneliness, stress, personality, and emotions. We collected 19,025 documents of daily emotional experiences from 3,805 Korean residents from October to December 2020. We collected 42,128 sentences with different levels of theory-of-mind. Each sentence was annotated by trained psychology students and reviewed by experts. Participants varied in their ages from the early 20s to late 80s and had various social and economic statuses. The pandemic impacted the majority of daily lives, and participants often reported negative emotional experiences. We found the most frequent topics: responses to confirmed cases, health concerns of family members, anger towards people without masks, stress-relief strategies, change of the lifestyle, and preventive practices. We then trained the Word2Vec model to observe specific words that match each topic from the topic model. The current dataset will serve as benchmark data for large-scale and computational methods for identifying mental health levels based on text. This dataset is expected to be used and transformed in many creative ways to mitigate COVID-19-related mental health problems.

The SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 Variant of Concern (VOC), first detected in India, is now dominant in the UK, having rapidly1Public Health EnglandSARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England, Technical briefing 13.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/990177/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_13_England.pdfDate: May 27, 2021Date accessed: June 2, 2021Google Scholar displaced the B.1.1.7 strain2Rambaut A Loman N Pybus O et al.Preliminary genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage in the UK defined by a novel set of spike mutations.https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisation-of-an-emergent-sars-cov-2-lineage-in-the-uk-defined-by-a-novel-set-of-spike-mutations/563Date: Feb 4, 2021Date accessed: June 2, 2021Google Scholar that emerged in the UK with the second COVID-19 wave in late 2020. The efficacy of currently licensed COVID-19 vaccines against B.1.617.2 is unknown; although it possesses 12 mutations in its spike protein relative to the wildtype SARS-CoV-2 first detected in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019, B.1.617.2 lacks mutations at amino acid positions 501 or 484 in its ACE2 receptor-binding domain, commonly associated with VOCs (appendix p 2) or escape from neutralising antibodies (NAbs).

Despite a number of successful approaches in predicting the spatiotemporal patterns of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and quantifying the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions starting from data about the initial outbreak location, we lack an intrinsic understanding as outbreak locations shift and evolve. Here, we fill this gap by developing a country distance approach to capture the pandemic’s propagation backbone tree from a complex airline network with multiple and evolving outbreak locations. We apply this approach, which is analogous to the effective resistance in series and parallel circuits, to examine countries’ closeness regarding disease spreading and evaluate the effectiveness of travel restrictions on delaying infections. In particular, we find that 63.2% of travel restrictions implemented as of 1 June 2020 are ineffective. The remaining percentage postponed the disease arrival time by 18.56 days per geographical area and resulted in a total reduction of 13,186,045 infected cases. Our approach enables us to design optimized and coordinated travel restrictions to extend the delay in arrival time and further reduce more infected cases while preserving air travel.

Bloomberg’s tracker shows which states are making the mostweek-by-week progress in closing their racial vaccination gaps.

Attempt to hold a worker criminally liable for the spread of Covid resulted in Josefina Brito-Fernandez losing her license to work, fearing deportation

Tui says half of its passengers booked to visit Portugal in June are still planning to travel

An estimated 1 million people in private households in the UK say they had long covid in the four weeks to 2 May, according to the latest survey from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The UK has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for use in children aged 12 to 15.

Genomic analysis draws a link between a devastating second COVID wave in Brazil and increased travel and contact.

Disease outbreaks in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) have been a large driver of morbidity and mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. This susceptibility to outbreaks in LTCFs is likely to be multifactorial, including frailty of residents, structural and environmental characteristics of buildings (eg, shared spaces, ventilation, and outdoor access), staffing policies and models, and the value society places on older people and LTCFs.1Andrew M Searle SD McElhaney JE et al.COVID-19, frailty and long-term care: Implications for policy and practice.J Infect Dev Ctries. 2020; 14: 428-432Crossref PubMed Scopus (7) Google Scholar Understanding of the true burden of COVID-19 in LTCFs has been limited by gaps in measurement and reporting. The impact of COVID-19 has evolved during subsequent pandemic waves, but estimates suggest that internationally more than 40% of deaths have occurred among residents of LTCFs,2International Long-Term Care Policy Networkhttps://ltccovid.org/international-reports-on-covid-19-and-long-term-care/Date accessed: April 27, 2021Google Scholar with many national and local estimates indicating a much higher death toll. Additionally, LTCF staff have been greatly affected as frontline workers.3White EM Wetle TF Reddy A Baier RR Front-line nursing home staff experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic.J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2021; 22: 199-203Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Google Scholar,  4Sarabia-Cobo C Pérez V de Lorena P et al.Experiences of geriatric nurses in nursing home settings across four countries in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.J Adv Nurs. 2021; 77: 869-878Crossref PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar Patterns of vulnerability to SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission within LTCF environments are thus crucial to addressing the pandemic at both clinical and policy levels. In The Lancet Healthy Longevity, Maria Krutikov and colleagues5Krutikov M Palmer T Tut G et al.Incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection according to baseline antibody status in staff and residents of 100 long-term care facilities (VIVALDI): a prospective cohort study.Lancet Healthy Longev. 2021; 2: e362-e370Summary Full Text Full Text PDF Google Scholar studied the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection according to baseline antibody status in staff and residents in 100 LTCFs in England. Their findings make an important contribution to ongoing efforts to understand SARS-CoV-2 immunity and correlates of protection.

Monetary and legal incentives have been proposed to promote COVID-19 vaccination uptake. To evaluate the suitability of incentives, an experiment with German participants examined the effects of payments (varied within subjects: 0 to 10,000 EUR) and freedoms (varied between subjects: vaccination leading vs. not leading to the same benefits as a negative test result) on the vaccination intentions of previously unvaccinated individuals (n = 782). While no effect could be found for freedoms, the share of participants willing to be vaccinated increased with the payment amount. However, a significant change required large rewards of 3,250 EUR or more. While monetary incentives could increase vaccination uptake by a few percentage points, the high costs of implementation challenge the efficiency of the measure and call for alternatives. As experimental data suggest that considering vaccination as safe, necessary, and prosocial increases an individual’s likelihood of wanting to get vaccinated without payment, educational campaigns should emphasize these features when promoting vaccination against COVID-19.

This week we look at whyWestern public health went all-in on their campaign against masks before the abrupt change of course.

Psychological research has offered valuable insights into how to combat misinformation. The studies conducted to date, however, have three limitations. First, pre-emptive (“prebunking”) and retroactive (“debunking”) interventions have mostly been examined in parallel, and thus it is unclear which of these two predominant approaches is more effective. Second, there has been a focus on misinformation that is explicitly false, but misinformation that uses literally true information to mislead is common in the real world. Finally, studies have relied mainly on questionnaire measures of reasoning, neglecting behavioural impacts of misinformation and interventions. To offer incremental progress towards addressing these three issues, we conducted an experiment (N = 735) involving misinformation on fair trade. We contrasted the effectiveness of prebunking versus debunking and the impacts of implied versus explicit misinformation, and incorporated novel measures assessing consumer behaviours (i.e., willingness-to-pay; information seeking; online misinformation promotion) in addition to standard questionnaire measures. In general, we found debunking to be more effective than prebunking, although both were able to reduce misinformation reliance. We also found that individuals tended to rely more on explicit than implied misinformation both with and without interventions.

Watch party lectures combine asynchronous and synchronous teaching approaches: lecturers record short videos of the directly instructed content, for one-hour lectures, lecturers aim to record 2-3 short videos for a maximum of 40-45 minutes. These pre-recorded videos are uploaded on the virtual learning environment (VLE). However, the crucial element of watch party lectures is the scheduled, synchronous time during which these pre-recordings are watched together via screen sharing. Watch party lectures allow for meaningful interactions between lecturer and students while watching the videos. Students use the chat box to ask questions and the lecturer addresses them immediately, e.g., by providing links to additional resources. Watch party lectures were welcomed by students and lecturers alike and we strongly recommend integrating both asynchronous and synchronous elements in the future, regardless of the modality or format of teaching delivery.

Confirmed Detection of B.1.617.2 and B.1.1.7 in South Africa by NGS-SA This report was sent to our Health Minister @DrZweliMkhize yesterday. In this Twitter thread, we highlight the details and repercussion of the discovery to South Africa

The @PHE_uk Variant Technical Briefing 10 now published Confirms B.1.617.2 upgraded to a VOC due to transmissibility concerns (at least as infectious as B.1.1.7) and steep rises in case numbers

The COVID-19 pandemic led to numerous governments deciding to close schools for several weeks in spring 2020. Empirical evidence on the impact of COVID-19-related school closures on academic achievement is only just emerging in the literature. The present work aimed to provide a first systematic overview of evidence-based studies on general and differential effects of COVID-19-related school closures in spring 2020 on student achievement in K–12. The findings indicate a considerably negative effect of school closures on student achievement specifically in younger students and students from families with low socioeconomic status. At the same time, certain measures can be identified that might mitigate these negative effects. The findings are discussed in the context of their possible consequences for future national educational policies when facing future school closures.

We need a public health culture change informed by lessons from COVID

Home Office figures show that between 6 January and the end of April, 521,700 UK nationals and 1,070,200 non-UK nationals arrived.

Because of the outbreak of COVID-19, most countries have implemented measures aimed at reducing the number of infected people. However, these measures only work if they are generally accepted by the public. We conducted a two-wave longitudinal survey in Switzerland (n = 1,223) to study the factors that would influence perceived risks and the acceptance of the measures. Our findings showed that people with individualistic worldviews, high general interpersonal trust, low social trust, a low level of perceived risks, and the conviction that risks other than health risks were neglected had less acceptance of the implemented measures compared with people who held the opposite views on the mentioned variables. The number of infected people declined between survey waves 1 and 2. This desired effect not only reduced people’s perceived risks but also decreased their social trust and increased the conviction that other risks were neglected. Finally, the acceptance of the measures declined. Our data also support the idea that reduced risk perceptions and a decline in social trust are important drivers for the reduction in the acceptance of the measures in survey wave 2. Our results suggest that as soon as the measures attain success or the public is tired of the implemented restrictions, public acceptance declines, and it seems difficult to prolong the measures as may be desirable from an epidemiological standpoint. The importance of worldviews and trust for public acceptance of the measures further suggests the necessity of a political discussion about the implemented measures.

Medics concerned about the effects on public health of environmental degradation marched on the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva on Saturday, demanding health authorities make climate change and biodiversity loss their top priorities.

What was claimed All Japanese citizens who have received their Covid-19 vaccine are not permitted to give blood. Our verdict This is not true. Japanese Red Cross guidelines state anyone who has received a vaccine must only wait 48 hours before they can give blood.

In-person schooling has proved contentious and difficult to study throughout the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. Data from a massive online survey in the United States indicate an increased risk of COVID-19–related outcomes among respondents living with a child attending school in person. School-based mitigation measures are associated with significant reductions in risk, particularly daily symptoms screens, teacher masking, and closure of extracurricular activities. A positive association between in-person schooling and COVID-19 outcomes persists at low levels of mitigation, but when seven or more mitigation measures are reported, a significant relationship is no longer observed. Among teachers, working outside the home was associated with an increase in COVID-19–related outcomes, but this association is similar to that observed in other occupations (e.g., health care or office work). Although in-person schooling is associated with household COVID-19 risk, this risk can likely be controlled with properly implemented school-based mitigation measures.

Even before COVID-19 vaccines were available, different interest levels in vaccination across the US were noted.1 Populations with less interest in vaccination were quickly considered vaccine hesitant, and public health campaigns have primarily, and understandably, focused on reaching persons anxious about vaccine safety, vaccine-related adverse effects, or both. But while vaccine anxiety is an important hurdle to overcome, the assumption that all segments of the population with low interest in vaccination are hesitant is a misconception. The COVID-19 vaccine is arguably the most important new product of 2021, but until recently, vaccine promotion efforts have not addressed the full implications of marketing a single product to a large, heterogeneous population.2 From a marketing perspective, disinterest in vaccination from some segments of the population is unsurprising and reflects typical innovation-adoption patterns in which half of the market is usually slow to make a choice. This appears to be a description of the sizeable segment of the population that has not participated in public vaccination campaigns. News reports now recognize the challenges of vaccinating an entire population, but the sophistication of the current collective vaccine-promotion strategies have evolved more slowly and focus on alleviating vaccine anxieties related to efficacy and safety.2 However, for much of the estimated 39% of the US population currently not vaccinated or reportedly not planning to receive the vaccine as soon as possible,3 vaccine apathy rather than true hesitancy may be an important major concern, and addressing apathy necessitates an entirely different communication approach than addressing hesitancy.

The UK population has the highest confidence in covid-19 vaccines and its health authorities, while Japan and South Korea have the lowest, a survey of 15 countries shows.

Despite opposition from some regions, the ‘traffic light’ measures – including early closing hours and capacity limits for bars and restaurants – will be obligatory across the country

PHE data indicates dominant variant ‘more likely to cause serious illness’ as Grant Shapps warns of threat to reopening on 21 June

Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens is frustrated — the man heading up one of Canada’s most famous border towns could be getting many more of his citizens vaccinated if the federal government would get out of the way.

You would think a time when we needed to be able to “follow the science” would have been systematic evidence’s shining hour. Yet we’ve seen questions asked like “Will Covid-19 be evidence-based medicine’s nemesis?” and is it “the new nihilism?” Some are arguing the approach needs re-defining. From the pre-existing systematic review base that often guided early decisions about travel restrictions, masks, and school closure, to systematic and living systematic reviews on the run – what’s gone wrong? What’s gone right? And what now?

One of the better things to come out of the pandemic has been a flourishing of medical research, and much of this depends on access to patient data, often derived from general practice electronic records. Some of this research has been enabled by the 2002 Control of Patient Information Regulations, which allow for emergency processing of data—regardless of patient identifiability—to control the spread of an infectious disease.1

Moderna becomes second manufacturer to announce successful trial results in adolescents

As the United States continues our efforts to get every eligible American vaccinated and fight COVID-19 here at home, we also recognize that ending this pandemic means ending it everywhere. As long as this pandemic is raging anywhere in the world, the American people will still be vulnerable. And the United States is committed to bringing the same urgency to international vaccination efforts that we have demonstrated at home.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was detected in China during the 2019–2020 seasonal influenza epidemic. Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and behavioral changes to mitigate COVID-19 could have affected transmission dynamics of influenza and other respiratory diseases. By comparing 2019–2020 seasonal influenza activity through March 29, 2020 with the 2011–2019 seasons, we found that COVID-19 outbreaks and related NPIs may have reduced influenza in Southern and Northern China and the United States by 79.2% (lower and upper bounds: 48.8%–87.2%), 79.4% (44.9%–87.4%) and 67.2% (11.5%–80.5%). Decreases in influenza virus infection were also associated with the timing of NPIs. Without COVID-19 NPIs, influenza activity in China and the United States would likely have remained high during the 2019–2020 season. Our findings provide evidence that NPIs can partially mitigate seasonal and, potentially, pandemic influenza.

Secretary of State Antony BlinkenAntony BlinkenBiden bars US investment in Chinese companies linked to surveillance What US policymakers can glean from Iceland's clean energy evolution The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Citizens' Climate Lobby - Deal or no deal? Biden, Capito continue infrastructure talks MORE said that the U.S. will soon announce the process for how it will distribute 80 million coronavirus vaccine doses across the world.

Data on India's Covid-19 vaccination drive shows fewer women have taken vaccine shots in comparison to men.

A man from Wollert, a suburb in Melbourne’s north, breezed into Melbourne from South Australian hotel quarantine, stopped at a 7-11, had a curry, shopped in Epping, took a train, and at some point, had a passing encounter with a stranger. Perhaps he coughed or spoke, or was simply breathing, but that was enough for a waft of aerosol to transmit COVID-19 to Melbourne’s missing link.

The lawsuit could test whether employers can require vaccinations as the country navigates out of a pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 people in the U.S.

ObjectiveThe vaccination of skilled nursing facility (SNF) staff is a critical component in the battle against COVID-19. Together, residents and staff constitute the single most vulnerable population in the pandemic. The health of these workers is completely entangled with the health of those they care for. Vaccination of SNF staff is key to increasing uptake of the vaccine, reducing health disparities, and reopening SNFs to visitors. Yet, as the vaccine rollout begins, some SNF staff are declining to be vaccinated. The purpose of this article is to describe reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy reported by staff of skilled nursing facilities and understand factors that could potentially reduce hesitancy.DesignFive virtual focus groups were conducted with staff of SNFs as part of a larger project to improve vaccine uptake.Setting and ParticipantsFocus groups with 58 staff members were conducted virtually using Zoom.MeasuresFocus groups sought to elicit concerns, perspectives, and experiences related to COVID-19 testing and vaccination.ResultsOur findings indicate that some SNF staff are hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Reasons for this hesitancy include beliefs that the vaccine has been developed too fast and without sufficient testing; personal fears about pre-existing medical conditions, and more general distrust of the government.Conclusions and ImplicationsSNF staff indicate that seeing people like themselves receive the vaccination is more important than seeing public figures. We discuss the vaccination effort as a social enterprise and the need to develop long-term care provider-academic-community partnerships in response to COVID-19 and in expectation of future pandemics.

Background: Presently a median of 37.5% of the U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) workforce has been vaccinated for COVID-19. It is essential to understand vaccine hesitancy among SNF workers to inform vaccine campaigns going forward. Objective: To describe the concerns raised among healthcare workers and staff from SNFs during town hall meetings. Design: Sixty-three SNFs from four corporations were invited to send Opinion Leaders, outspoken staff from nursing, nurse aid, dietary, housekeeping or recreational therapy, to attend a 1-h virtual town hall meeting. Meetings used a similar format where the moderator solicited concerns that the attendees themselves had or had heard from others in the facility about the COVID-19 vaccine. Physicians and moderators used personal stories to address concerns and reaffirmed positive emotions. Setting: Twenty-six video town hall meetings with SNF staff. Participants: Healthcare workers and staff, with physicians serving as content experts. Measurement: Questions and comments about the COVID-19 vaccines noted by physicians. Results: One hundred and ninety three staff from 50 facilities participated in 26 meetings between December 30, 2020 and January 15, 2021. Most staff reported getting information about the vaccine from friends or social media. Concerns about how rapidly the vaccines were developed and side effects, including infertility or pregnancy related concerns, were frequently raised. There were no differences in concerns raised by discipline. Questions about returning to prior activities after being vaccinated were common and offered the opportunity to build on positive emotions to reduce vaccine hesitancy. Conclusions: Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine was widespread among SNF staff. Sharing positive emotions and stories may be more effective than sharing data when attempting to reduce vaccine hesitancy in SNF staff.

Leading mathematician drew up detailed explanation for Downing Street of problems with ‘brutal’ policy

Britain is in talks with Oxford and AstraZeneca (AZN.L) for additional doses of their COVID-19 vaccine that has been changed to better target the “beta” coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa, health minister Matt Hancock said on Wednesday.

Washington, D.C. — Yesterday evening, U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01), along with Reps. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) and Lance Gooden (TX-05), introduced H.R. 3660, the “Digital Health Pass Prevention Act (DHPPA)” of 2021. This bill, if passed, will prevent the federal government from funding and enforcing any program that uses digital health passes, which are used to verify an individual’s COVID-19 vaccination status unrelated to official health care records.

The UK Government will convene the world’s first Global Vaccine Confidence Summit in an effort to drive vaccine uptake in the fight against the Covid.

COVID-19 continues to present challenges worldwide. In an attempt to tackle the disease, SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been rapidly developed and vaccination programmes are being rolled out. Guidance from both the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology and the British Society for Rheumatology recommend that patients on immunosuppressive treatment should receive a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.1European Alliance of Associations for RheumatologyEULAR viewpoints on SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in patients with RMDs.https://www.eular.org/eular_sars_cov_2_vaccination_rmd_patients.cfmDate: December, 2020Date accessed: March 20, 2021Google Scholar Emerging data highlight the need for specialist advice to improve the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases; evidence suggests that vaccine uptake in these patients can be improved by more than 20% with physician recommendation, and it is increasingly recognised that timely specialist input is required.2Priori R Pellegrino G Colafrancesco S et al.SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hesitancy among patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases: a message for rheumatologists.Ann Rheum Dis. 2021; (published online Feb 23.)https://doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2021-220059Crossref Google Scholar,  3Boekel L Hooijberg F van Kempen ZLE et al.Perspective of patients with autoimmune diseases on COVID-19 vaccination.Lancet Rheumatol. 2021; 3: e241-e243Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar,  4Felten R Dubois M Ugarte-Gil MF et al.Vaccination against COVID-19: expectations and concerns of patients with autoimmune and rheumatic diseases.Lancet Rheumatol. 2021; 3: e243-e245Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar Low confidence in vaccine safety has been the main factor that has hindered vaccine uptake in patients with rheumatic disease.5Campochiaro C Trignani G Tomelleri A Cascinu S Dagna L Potential acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine in rheumatological patients: a monocentric comparative survey.Ann Rheum Dis. 2021; (published online Jan 28.)http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-219811Crossref PubMed Scopus (3) Google Scholar Previous work has shown the utility of mobile SMS for the rapid distribution of urgent health-care communications.6Bateman J Mulherin D Hirsch G Venkatachalam S Sheeran T Rapid distribution of information by SMS-embedded video link to patients during a pandemic.Lancet Rheumatol. 2020; 2: e315-e316Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (8) Google Scholar As such, we developed a multimedia video message focused on vaccine education that was distributed by mobile SMS messaging, a successful and well established method of communication in our rheumatology follow-up cohort of more than 10 000 patients.

The rich world suffered relatively badly, but most of the dying has been elsewhere

A detailed analysis suggests that COVID deaths and other pandemic-related mortality may have been significantly undercounted in the rural South and West

France will start offering Covid-19 vaccines to everyone between 12 and 18 on June 15, President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday.

President Joe Biden speaks during the Democratic National Committee’s “Back on Track” drive-in car rally to celebrate the president’s 100th day in office at the Infinite Energy Center in Duluth, Ga., April 29, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

WHO today validated the Sinovac-CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, giving countries, funders, procuring agencies and communities the assurance that it meets international standards for safety, efficacy and manufacturing. The vaccine is produced by the Beijing-based pharmaceutical company Sinovac.

Local officials have worked to overcome Black fears rooted in the notorious Tuskegee study but Trump-supporting rural areas are another matter

UK planning at the start of the pandemic involved allowing the majority of the population to become infected with covid between April and September 2020, causing five thousand deaths a day and ending with enough cumulative infections for herd immunity, as shown on both the whiteboard photos from 10 Downing St, contemporary tweets from MPs, and the subsequently released SAGE papers:

BEIJING — Fifteen more COVID-19 cases have been reported in the southern Chinese province of Guangzhou, with a report saying the coronavirus variant in the latest outbreak is more transmissible than in previous clusters in the country.

Allegations that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab make it harder for nations to collaborate on ending the pandemic — and fuel online bullying, some scientists say.

Adolescence is a critical period for social development, which COVID-19 has dramatically altered. Quarantined youths had limited in-person interactions with peers. The present study used an intensive longitudinal design to investigate changes in interpersonal dynamics and mental health during COVID-19. Specifically, we investigated whether the associations between different social contexts – i.e., “spillover” – changed during COVID-19, and whether changes in social interactions during COVID-19 was associated with changes in depressive symptoms. Approximately one year prior to the onset of COVID-19, 139 youths reported depressive symptoms and daily interactions with parents, siblings, and friends, every day for 21 days via online questionnaires. Shortly after schools closed due to COVID-19, 115 of these youths completed a similar 28-day diary. Analyses included 112 youths (62 girls, 73% Caucasian; Mage=11.77, range 8-15 in Wave 1) who completed at least 13 diary days in each data wave. Our results show that younger adolescents experienced significant decreases in negative and positive interactions with friends, whereas older adolescents showed significant decreases in negative interactions with friends and significant increases in positive interactions with siblings. As predicted, within-day spillover of positive interactions and person-level association of negative interactions increased within the family during COVID-19, whereas within-day spillover of positive interactions between family and friends decreased. We also found a dramatic increase in depressive symptoms. More negative interactions and fewer positive interactions with family members were associated with changes in depressive symptoms. Our study sheds light on how youths’ social development may be impacted by COVID-19.

Objective Although cross-sectional studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of adolescents, the effect of the pandemic on adolescents with pre-pandemic symptoms is unclear. We therefore tested the hypothesis that adolescents had increased emotional and behavioral problems during the lockdowns imposed during the pandemic. Method This study included three measurements in a prospective cohort of 1022 adolescents who were oversampled based on their high risk of developing psychopathology. Before the pandemic, we assessed depressive, anxiety, stress, oppositional defiant problems, psychotic experiences and suicidality, using the Youth Self-Report; 445 and 333 of these 1022 adolescents subsequently completed the online questionnaire in the first lockdown (in April 2020) and in the second lockdown (in January 2021), respectively. Multilevel random intercept regression models were used to determine the change in psychiatric symptoms, including an interaction term to assess whether these changes differed based on the severity of symptoms prior to the pandemic. Results Throughout the pandemic, the majority of adolescents reported having emotional and behavioral symptoms that were within the normal range. Moreover, the mean symptom scores for all six outcomes decreased significantly among adolescents with high clinical severity prior to the pandemic. Conclusion In contrast to our original hypothesis, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may not necessarily be detrimental, at least among a specific subgroup of adolescents with preexisting mental health problems. Moreover, our finding that most adolescents did not report experiencing clinically relevant symptoms during the pandemic reflects their resilience during the pandemic.

Cooperation is essential to overcome global pandemics and other health crises, as many preventative measures require people to bear a personal cost to benefit other people or society as a whole. Wearing a face mask, for example, protects other people more than it protects oneself. In this essay, we discuss several mechanisms that are known to promote cooperation in economic games and real-world scenarios, with a special focus on message-based interventions that might be helpful to promote social distancing, mask wearing, physical hygiene, vaccine uptake, and information seeking. Lessons learned and future research ideas are offered.

REPORTS of pet cats and dogs catching covid-19 from their owners are mounting. They come as no surprise to virologist Gary Whittaker. For the past year, he has surveyed cats brought to a veterinary hospital around the corner from New York Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side, which was ground zero for covid-19 in the US last spring. His unpublished findings suggest that around 15 to 20 per cent of pet cats in the area have antibodies for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. “Cats are easily exposed,” says Whittaker. Yet most of them are doing fine, as are infected dogs. “What’s puzzling is that cats are dealing with it pretty well, but they can’t cope with their own coronavirus.”

Given that videoconferencing serves as a crucial means for remote teaching, the current study investigated higher education students’ (non)use of webcams and engagement in synchronous online courses. Three phases were studied: (1) A state of engagement; (2) antecedents that influence it; and (3) consequences of engagement. In particular, the aim of the study was to describe the status quo of students’ situation-specific engagement and to analyze potential factors contributing to it, namely, course characteristics, behavior of others, and individuals’ perceptions. Furthermore, the extent to which verbal and visual engagement influence each other was investigated. The cross-sectional online survey encompassed 4,143 students from all fields of studies of a comprehensive university. Results indicated that visual and verbal engagement were only slightly related to each other. Structural equation modelling revealed different direct and indirect influences on either visual or verbal engagement in synchronous online higher education courses. Due to the novelty of the research scope, results of this study provide a foundation for further investigation.

In three experiments based on 977 participants, we investigated whether people would show belief bias by letting their prior beliefs on politically charged topics unduly influence their reasoning when updating beliefs based on evidence. Participants saw data from fictional studies and made judgments of how strongly COVID-19 mitigation measures influenced the number of COVID-19 cases (political problems) or a medicine influenced number of headaches (neutral problems). We predicted that liberals would overestimate and conservatives would underestimate causal strength on political problems relative to neutral problems. In Experiments 1 and 2, liberals showed this overestimation bias. Surprisingly, college-student conservatives in Experiment 2 showed the same overestimation as liberals. These findings made sense because all three groups who overestimated the strength of mitigation measures held prior beliefs that strongly favored use of these measures. In Experiment 3, conservatives’ judgments of the strength of mitigation measures after seeing evidence increased as their degree of prior support for these measures increased. Furthermore, conservatives who strongly opposed the use of mitigation measures underestimated causal strength in the political problems. These results suggest that belief bias is driven more by specific beliefs relevant to the reasoning context than to general attitudinal factors like political ideology.

Given the need for a rapid and supposed critical response from behavioural sciences during times of crisis, this study aimed to track the development of COVID-19 psychology-related preprints. We tracked the first 211 COVID related preprints on the repository PsyArXiv. Specifically, we tracked who was submitting preprints, what the preprints were investigating, and whether the preprints lead to publications and their impact (measured by Google Scholar citations). We then followed up with the preprints about a year later to determine the number of preprints that lead to publication and the number of citations they received. The results showed that males from western countries submitted most preprints. Fifty-one per cent of preprints used a survey design, and the most common topic for covid-19 related preprints was mental health. Eighty-three per cent of preprints did not meet credible open science measures. 54% of the sampled preprints had been published in peer-reviewed journals, with a median time between preprint upload and publication of 105 days. Metascience preprints were more likely to be published, and preprints with reviews had lower citation rates. Overall, the results demonstrate that some of the structural problems in research are still in play despite global efforts to mobilise research efforts during the pandemic.

Effectively motivating social distancing—keeping a physical distance from others —has become a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country preregistered experiment (n=25,718 in 89 countries) tested hypotheses derived from self-determination theory concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of different motivational messages encouraging social distancing. Participants were randomly assigned to three conditions: an autonomy-supportive message promoting reflective choices, a controlling message that was restrictive and shaming, or no message. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses: the controlling message increased defiance relative to the autonomy-supportive message and increased controlled motivation (which itself correlated with more defiance and less long-term behavioural intentions to engage in social distancing) relative to no message, but messages did not influence behavioural intentions. Despite small experimental effects on defiance and motivation (rs= .07 and .10), this work highlights the potential harm of controlling public health messages and potential benefits of autonomy-supportive ones.

Internet memes are phenomena that rapidly gain popularity on the Internet which construct intercultural discourse. Using visual rhetoric, the Internet memes convey a set of symbols and ideals that express socio-political structure represented on the Internet. The story of memes is crucial in understanding the digital culture along with revealing the identity of an Internet subculture, as well as in analyzing the impacts of this cultural artifact. This study analyzes the nature and functions of internet memes and its contribution to formulate a new cultural discourse. The findings have been instrumented to illustrate how memes operate as rhetoric to explore the intercultural communication and identity construction prevalent in representative cyber-culture. It has specially been targeted to inquire the inter-textual nature of memes which are created and disseminated by the Bangladeshi Facebook prosumers. In addition, the study makes a comparison of theoretical approaches to the study of memes, including visual rhetoric approach which combines elements of the semiotic and discursive approaches to study the persuasive constituents of visual texts. These methods help deconstruct a sign or a text and decode possible hidden meanings through discourse analysis in terms of written texts and through semiotic analysis in terms of images. The presence of both an image (sign) and a caption (text) in an internet meme requires such a combined approach for reflective output.

With COVID rates dropping and vaccinations on the rise, the United States and other places are removing some requirements for face coverings. Are they moving too fast?

Local public health teams in areas with high case numbers of the B.1.617.2 variant first detected in India are boosting efforts to vaccinate their populations and targeting younger adults to try to limit the spread of infection.

In the wake of COVID, a pandemic treaty could be a way to agree on data access before the next emergency strikes.

The systematic review aimed to determine whether the YouTube recommender system facilitates pathways to problematic content such as extremist or radicalising material. The review assessed the eligibility of 1187 studies and excluded studies using the PRISMA process for systematic reviews, leaving a final sample of 23 studies. Overall, 14 studies implicated the YouTube recommender system in facilitating problematic content pathways, 7 produced mixed results, and two did not implicate the recommender system in facilitating pathways to problematic content. Thus, the review's findings indicate that the YouTube recommender system could lead users to problematic content via the recommender system. The review indicates a need for corrections to the recommender system to shift users away from problematic content.

The practice of shared book reading is a nurturing support for early language, literacy and socio-emotional development within young children’s typical care. However, the closures of childcare and centers for family activities in the Spring of 2020 due to COVID-19 brought many sudden changes to care and the everyday lives of families with young children. In order to explore the impact of COVID-19 on shared reading, we surveyed parents of children between ages 2 and 5 (n = 85) about their children’s frequency of shared reading engagement in February and October, 2020 as well as the frequency of screen-mediated reading, the number of readers their children read with, and book preferences at both time points. Parents were also asked about changes in their children’s regular care and whether and how they had tried new kinds of (virtual) literacy activities during their increased time at home. Preliminary findings showed that there were no significant changes in frequency of shared reading from February to October, but there was a significant increase in frequency of screen-mediated reading, especially among families who lost outside-the-home childcare. There was also a significant decrease in the number of adults regularly reading with the children. Caregivers described adapting to virtual options for storytime. Ultimately, while families were still able to provide consistent amounts of shared reading with their children throughout COVID-19, the nature of that shared reading was changed. Future research will investigate whether these changes may have an impact on children’s typical learning from shared reading.

Here, I present the Assamese version of the COVID Stress Scale (Taylor et al., 2020).

From March 11 to April 26, 2020, the Italian government imposed a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, a quarantine that resulted in significant restrictions on the movement and social contacts of the population, with a view to limiting the pandemic outbreak. The quarantine forced people to experience distorted social distance in two contrasting ways. For some people, it resulted in social distancing and isolation, for example by separating noncohabiting couples into different dwellings. For others, however, quarantine increased and imposed social closeness, forcing couples and families into constant, daily, and prolonged cohabitation. The aim of this study was to investigate the sexual health and behaviors of Italian adults during the lockdown period using a multimethod research. An open- and a closed-ended e-questionnaire were administered immediately after the end of the lockdown. A total of 465 Italian adults completed the digital questionnaire (female = 78.7%). Participants recognized their lived sexual experience with generally positive characteristics (related to openness, unproblematic relationship with the body, and awareness and self-reflection about one’s sexuality), while negative thoughts such as worry and pain were quite scarce. Participants with a disability (5.6%) showed a marked inversion compared to the mean of respondents, recognizing themselves mainly in negative thoughts related to low self-esteem, inadequacy, and feelings of suffering, yet reporting a higher than mean level of arousal. In the qualitative analysis, the TF-IDF index was measured to extract the salient words employed by respondents to answer the five open-ended questions; this revealed a generally depressed emotional experience associated with the experience of lockdown, both in terms of desire, which seemed to be shifted more to the level of imagination and fantasies, and the actual possibility of experiencing sexual activity as usual. Nevertheless, the participants emphasized an opening to new possibilities in terms of expressing sexuality, accompanied by a rediscovery of the value of tenderness and affectivity as well as a clearer awareness of their sexual life, needs, and desires.

Here, I present the Nepali version of the COVID Stress Scale (Taylor et al., 2020).

A population fatality rate of ~0.5%.

Edouard Mathieu@redouadThe government of Peru just announced a huge reevaluation of the cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths in the country, from 69,000 to 180,000. This is by far the largest mortality correction in the pandemic until now.

England is set to remove all legal limits on social contact from 21 June and allow nightclubs to reopen, although masks may still be required in some public spaces and the test and trace system will continue.However, the emergence of the B.1.617.2 variant, first detected in India, has led to concerns that further easing may need to be delayed. As cases of this variant spread across the country, The BMJ looks at what we know.

Some lucky vaxxed people in this state will win one of 10 custom-made rifles and shotguns in a Father’s Day drawing.

The COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech appears to put young men at elevated risk of developing a heart muscle inflammation called myocarditis, researchers in Israel say. In a report submitted today to the Israeli Ministry of Health, they conclude that between one in 3000 and one in 6000 men ages 16 to 24 who received the vaccine developed the rare condition.

Predictions from the second week of the UK Covid-19 Crowd Forecasting Challenge are in. https://crowdforecastr.org/2021/06/01/week-two/… On average, participants predicted cases to rise further over the next four weeks and deemed even a large increase to be plausible. 1/

The pandemic has been a huge challenge for people with lung disease – Dr Nick Hopkinson outlines what needs to change to provide them with the required support.

The UK government could face legal proceedings unless it releases data on the spread of the Delta variant (B.1.617.2, first identified in India) of SARS-CoV-2 in England’s schools, which it has been accused of suppressing.

The Blame Efficiency Hypothesis applies insights from evolutionary psychology to resolve the apparent conflict between rationalist and intuitionist perspectives on moral judgment. First, people reserve moral condemnation for actors and actions that are likely to be deterred by moral condemnation. This includes intended and controllable actions (consistent with rationalist perspectives that highlight how considerations of intentionality and causal control influence blame judgments) because blame cannot deter intentions that never existed in the first place, nor can it alter unalterable actions. And this includes actors who care about their moral reputations (i.e., cognitively competent and mentally healthy humans), because moral condemnation cannot deter those with no regard for their moral reputations. Second, moral judgment is subject to error management principles. Failing to condemn a morally responsible harmdoer signals exploitability, and so it would be more costly to erroneously not blame a harmdoer who could have been deterred by blame than to erroneously blame a harmdoer who could not have been deterred by blame (called The Don Corleone Principle). In contrast, no obvious cost asymmetry exists for overestimations or underestimations of moral responsibility for helpful or neutral actions. Therefore, in ambiguous cases, people should err on the side of assuming harmdoers are morally responsible (consistent with intuitionist perspectives which highlight how punitive desires influence judgments of intentionality and moral responsibility). Blaming efficiently means that people attribute moral responsibility to those who appear capable of controlling their behavior in future situations and to those who appear controllable—likely to change their behavior in response to harsh moral judgment, with a small bias toward ascribing responsibility in ambiguous cases of harm to minimize the costly error of under-blaming.

Questions around the shot mount as it faces scrutiny from Europe’s medicines watchdog.

"Covid-19 Vaccine - The musical" è la variante inglese del nuovo musical di Lorenzo Baglioni su vaccini e immunità di gregge; nel comitato scientifico i docenti Insubria Antonietta Mira e Daniele Cassani, presidente della Rism School.

The Twitter account undermines other vaccines and promotes Sputnik V, benefiting from a deceptively inflated follower count

Predictive models of immune protection from COVID-19 are urgently needed to identify correlates of protection to assist in the future deployment of vaccines. To address this, we analyzed the relationship between in vitro neutralization levels and the observed protection from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection using data from seven current vaccines and from convalescent cohorts. We estimated the neutralization level for 50% protection against detectable SARS-CoV-2 infection to be 20.2% of the mean convalescent level (95% confidence interval (CI) = 14.4–28.4%). The estimated neutralization level required for 50% protection from severe infection was significantly lower (3% of the mean convalescent level; 95% CI = 0.7–13%, P = 0.0004). Modeling of the decay of the neutralization titer over the first 250 d after immunization predicts that a significant loss in protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection will occur, although protection from severe disease should be largely retained. Neutralization titers against some SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern are reduced compared with the vaccine strain, and our model predicts the relationship between neutralization and efficacy against viral variants. Here, we show that neutralization level is highly predictive of immune protection, and provide an evidence-based model of SARS-CoV-2 immune protection that will assist in developing vaccine strategies to control the future trajectory of the pandemic.

The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 globally continues to impact humanity on a global scale with rising morbidity and mortality. Despite the development of multiple effective vaccines, new vaccines continue to be required to supply ongoing demand. We report Day 42 interim safety and immunogenicity data from a Phase 2, randomized, placebo-controlled trial in Adults aged 18+ immunized with a virus-like particle vaccine candidate produced in plants displaying SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein (CoVLP) adjuvanted with AS03 (NCT04636697). This report focuses on presenting safety, tolerability and immunogenicity, as measured by neutralizing antibody (NAb) and cell mediated immunity (IFN-γ and IL-4 ELISpot) responses, in Adults aged 18-64 (Adults) and Older Adults aged 65+ (Older Adults). CoVLP adjuvanted with AS03 was well-tolerated and adverse events (AE) were primarily mild or moderate and of transient duration. AEs in Older Adults were more limited than those observed in the Adult population. CoVLP with AS03 induced a significant humoral immune response in both age cohorts. CoVLP with AS03 induced a greater humoral response in Adults than Older Adults after a single dose but this effect was overcome with a second dose when both age cohorts responded with NAb titers that were ∼10-fold higher than those in a panel of sera from patients recovering from COVID-19. A single dose of CoVLP with AS03 induced a significant IFN-γ response in both age cohorts; a second dose significantly boosted IFN-γ and IL-4 responses in both age cohorts. Adults generated a stronger IFN-γ and IL-4 cellular response than did Older Adults after one or two doses of AS03-adjuvanted CoVLP. Safety and immunogenicity from Adults with comorbidities as well as final safety and immunogenicity responses after 12 months will be reported upon availability.

I test the possibility that people who provide higher estimates of negative consequences of Covid-19 (e.g., hospitalizations, deaths, and threats to children) will be more likely to support the ‘new normal’; continuation of restrictions for an undefined period of time starting with wide-spread access to vaccines and completed vaccinations of vulnerable people. Results based on N = 1,233 from April, 2021 suggested that people over-estimate Covid-19 risks, and those over-estimates were consistently related to stronger support for continuing restrictions. This relationship emerged in four different samples, using core and supplementary risk estimations, and persisted after controlling for Covid-19 denialism, political ideology, and personal concern of contracting Covid-19. People were also more likely to support continuing restrictions if they believed there is scientific consensus on Covid-19 matters, even on issues where there is none (e.g., wearing masks while driving alone). The study concludes with a discussion of the ethical implications of letting both over- and under-estimation of Covid-19 go uncorrected. Just as it is important to combat misinformation that leads people to disregard health mandates, it is crucial to examine the real possibility that people’s support for continuing risk mitigation practices may also not be based on accurate information.

Loneliness can develop as a result of the identity transitions accompanying older adulthood, including the onset of health conditions and loss of social connections. The current study examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected these identity change processes among older adults thereby impacting their experience of loneliness. In this longitudinal qualitative study, we use a theoretically-guided thematic analysis, applying insights from the Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC). Interviews were conducted before the pandemic, after the first UK national lockdown, and during the third national lockdown (N=9, Mage=78.7). The themes identified were: threatened social contact; being categorised as a vulnerable older adult; restricted ability to gain and maintain identities; undermined reciprocal social support; and wellbeing hindered by loneliness related fears. Implications discussed include how the pandemic recovery effort will require facilitating positive ageing identities to counteract the vulnerabilities introduced by the pandemic.

Governments around the world have made use of militaristic metaphors at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to draw attention to the dangers of the virus. But do militaristic metaphors indeed affect individuals’ threat perceptions and support for restrictive COVID-19 policies? Using a fictitious newspaper design, COVID-19 policies were described with similarly negatively valanced metaphors but different in militaristic connotation (e.g., “war” vs. “struggle”). Overall, data of 3 framing experiments (N = 1,114) in Germany and the United States indicate limited evidence on the effectiveness of the tested militaristic metaphors. In the U.S. context, the non-militaristic concept of struggle was consistently more strongly associated with the desired outcomes than militaristic metaphors. In study 2 and 3, we also tested whether a narrative compared to factual style of reporting additionally influenced the framing effect. A congruency effect of narrative reporting style and the use of warfare metaphors was found in the German but not in the U.S. sample. Results of post-experimental norming studies (N = 437) in both countries revealed that the metaphor of war is associated with higher responsibility ascriptions to the government, whereas the concept of struggle triggers individual responsibility in the pandemic. The results are discussed in light of the usefulness and appropriateness of militaristic metaphors in medical contexts.

People older than 80 who waited 11 to 12 weeks for their second jab had higher peak antibody levels than did those who waited only three weeks

SINDS ENKELE weken klinkt er ferme kritiek op het wetenschappelijk niveau van de activiteiten die de organisatie Fieldlab Evenementen uitvoert onder de noemer van ‘onderzoek’. Het gaat hier om een serie grootschalige evenementen. Van festivals en sportwedstrijden tot clubnachten en congressen, waaronder het Eurovisie Songfestival in Rotterdam (ca. 3.500 bezoekers), het Startschotgala in Oost Gelre (ca. 10.000 bezoekers) en het festival BackToLive Walibi in Biddinghuizen (ca. 9.000 bezoekers).

From Sri Lanka to Nepal, scientists with limited resources are working feverishly to discover which variants are driving outbreaks.

(CNN)Taiwan has imposed new restrictions including limits on gatherings in its capital as it battles its biggest coronavirus outbreak since the start of the pandemic last year.

The international scheme to ensure equal access to Covid-19 vaccines is 140 million doses short because of India's continuing Covid crisis. The Serum Institute of India (SII), the largest single supplier to the Covax scheme, has made none of its planned shipments since exports were suspended in March. The UN children's agency Unicef buys and distributes vaccines for Covax. It is urging leaders of G7 nations and EU states to share their doses.They are due to meet in the UK next month. How India's vaccine drive went horribly wrongExtra $45bn needed for Covax plan to vaccinate poorTracking vaccine progress around the worldUnicef says data it has commissioned suggests that together this group of countries could donate around 153 million doses, while still meeting their commitments to vaccinate their own populations.

The value of rapid antigen testing of people (with or without COVID-19 symptoms) to reduce transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been discussed extensively (1–5) but remains a topic of policy debates (6, 7). Lateral flow devices (LFDs) to test for SARS-CoV-2 antigen are inexpensive, provide results in minutes, and are highly specific (2–4), and although less sensitive than reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests to detect viral RNA, they detect most cases with high viral load (2, 3, 8), which are likely the most infectious (8, 9). Successful mass testing relies on public trust, the social and organizational factors that support uptake, contact tracing, and adherence to quarantine. On page 635 of this issue, Pavelka et al. (10) report the substantial reduction in transmission that population-wide rapid antigen testing had, in combination with other measures, in Slovakia.Slovakia ran mass testing interventions from the last week of October to the second week of November 2020, with 65% of the target populations taking rapid antigen tests. Testing started in the four counties with the highest rates of infection, continued with national mass testing, then was followed up with more testing in high-prevalence areas. Nasopharyngeal swabs for the LFDs were taken by clinical staff, not self-administered. Sample quality and test accuracy are higher with tests taken by health professionals (3). Although the specific impact of Slovakia's mass testing could not be disentangled from the contribution of other concurrent control measures (including closure of secondary schools and restrictions on hospitality and indoor leisure activities), statistical modelling by Pavelka et al. estimated a 70% reduction in the prevalence of COVID-19 cases compared with unmitigated growth.The UK piloted mass testing in Liverpool in November 2020 after the city experienced the highest COVID-19 prevalence in the country. Slovakia applied more pressure on its citizens to get tested than did Liverpool, by requiring anyone not participating in mass testing to quarantine. The Liverpool testing uptake was consequently lower than Slovakia's, involving 25% of the population in 4 weeks. Liverpool's public health service valued the testing as an additional control measure, but impacts were limited by lack of support for those in socioeconomically deprived areas facing income loss from quarantine after a positive test (2): Test positivity rates were highest and testing uptake lowest in the most deprived areas (2, 11). Similar socioeconomic barriers were reported for test uptake among care home staff (12). This highlights the importance of addressing public perceptions of testing and support for low-income workers to quarantine when implementing mass testing.

This page provides information and resources to help public health departments and laboratories investigate and report COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough cases. Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected. COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control. However, no vaccines are 100% effective at preventing illness in vaccinated people. There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19. More than 130 million people in the United States have been fully vaccinated as of May 24, 2021. Like with other vaccines, vaccine breakthrough cases will occur, even though the vaccines are working as expected. Asymptomatic infections among vaccinated people will also occur. There is some evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe for those who are vaccinated and still get sick. Current data suggest that COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the United States offer protection against most SARS-CoV-2 variants currently circulating in the United States. However, variants will cause some vaccine breakthrough cases.

News & Notes > An easy access dashboard now provides links to scientific discussion and evaluation of bioRxiv preprints.An easy access dashboard now provides links to scientific discussion and evaluation of bioRxiv preprints.bioRxiv  |  2021-05-14Part of our mission at bioRxiv is to alert readers to reviews and discussion of preprints and support the different ways readers provide feedback to authors on their work. These include tweets, comments on preprints and community- or journal-organized peer reviews. bioRxiv improves discoverability of such efforts by linking to peer reviews, community discussions and mentions of the preprint in social and traditional media. By aggregating this information in a new dashboard, we are now making these even easier for readers to find and access.

Cummings’ evidence portrays a system that is not fit for purpose and goes some way to explaining why the UK’s performance on covid-19 was so poor

Black people make up more than 80 percent of coronavirus cases reported in the District in recent days, compared with 46 percent late last year, a disparity that D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) highlighted in a call with Ward 8 community leaders Tuesday.

Three-quarters of people between 18-29 say vaccination should be required to return to campus or work, according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling, and 37% would refuse to come back unless those conditions are in place.

On 5 May, Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a 10-minute monologue casting doubt on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines on his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. He announced that almost 4000 people had died after getting COVID-19 vaccines, and added that those data “comes from VAERS,”—the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a U.S. government program that collects reports of side effects possibly caused by vaccines. It was a misleading statement. The reporting of a death to VAERS indicates nothing about what caused it, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) subsequent investigations have found no indication that deaths were caused by COVID-19 vaccines, save in a small subset with an extremely rare clotting disorder linked to one vaccine. But the TV segment pulled VAERS, a 31-year-old early warning system widely relied on by scientists, even deeper into the culture wars over vaccination. After the broadcast, a new phalanx of antivaccine activists began plumbing VAERS for data to scare the public about vaccination, says Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning nonprofit that is monitoring anti–COVID-19 vaccine activity on social media. “We have been tracking these attacks since February and this one resonated in a different way after Tucker hit it,” Carusone says.

The role of shared identity in predicting both ingroup helping behaviour and adherence to protective norms during COVID-19 has been extensively theorized, but remains largely under-investigated. We build upon previous Social Identity research into community resilience by testing the role of pre-existing local community (or ‘neighbourhood’) identity as a predictor of these outcomes, via the mediator of perceived social support. Community residents in the UK completed a longitudinal online survey four months before lockdown (T1; N = 253), one month before lockdown (T2; N = 217), and two months into lockdown (T3; N = 149). The cross-lagged panel analysis shows that T1 community identification predicts T3 giving and receiving of pandemic-related support, and that these effects occur via the perception of community support at the second time point (while the alternative pathway from T1 support via T2 identification is non-significant). Moreover, we show that T1 community identification also directly predicts lockdown adherence at T3. Our findings point to the pivotal role played by community identity in effective behavioural responses to the pandemic, and the need to support and foster community development to facilitate local community resilience as the crisis continues to unfold.

The recent outbreak of an infectious novel coronavirus disease 2019 (nCoV-19) is significantly influencing the lifestyle of everyone all over the world. A pandemic that has not only claimed countless lives of people across the globe but also has struck the plain and tranquil psychological landscape of the world citizens. COVID-19’s hit on the landscape has resulted in a ripple effect witnessed across the minds of people across the globe. In this paper, we aim to study this ripple effect in terms of the variations caused by the psychological stress of individuals. Stress is the basic gateway to most of the other psychological disorders, as a result, a comprehensive psycholinguist and psychoacoustic study are conducted. This analysis is conducted for students and migrant workers for their distinctive online and offline behavioral activity. Finally, neurobiological insights regarding the implication and necessity of such studies are provided in the field of psychology and neuroscience.

The pandemic of COVID19 illuminated the presence of our society’s cognition in a low-ceiling, inhabitable room, with almost little to no illumination of truth. Such a low-ceiling doesn’t only restrict the freedom of our cognition but also inhibits its healthy growth. Subsequently, our society feels a pushing sense, which is often exaggerated by the dark periods of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. Hence, it becomes essential to rethink the interior designs of our cognition – How can we look at these periods of misinformation from a different lens? Can we use them to our advantage to make our room looks spacious enough for the growth of our cognition? Despite the limitations imposed to the ceiling length by our existing cognitive biases, there exist multiple, unconventional interdisciplinary approaches from the fields of epistemology, phenomenology, evolutionary psychology, and finally, the mathematics that we, as researchers, can leverage to broaden our understanding of the existing “misinfodemic” that presents as a ripple effect of COVID19 on our society’s cognition. The aim of this paper shall be the same – to present a noble discourse regarding the “dark period of misinformation” – why misinformation is NOT a pandemic but a widely-used misnomer, how the source of truthful information acts as a source of misinformation, why misinformation is needed for the development of a better cognitive heuristic framework for our society, and finally, why such unconventional approaches fail to see the light of research. While the existing approaches to deal with misinformation spiral around machine-learning models competing with each other for better detection accuracy, this paper will take the reader right to the epicenter of “misinfodemic” using a variety of routes. Towards the end, the author provides how the mentioned approaches not only widen our understanding regarding the universal phenomenon of misinformation but also can be leveraged and scaled for irrational human behaviors like suicide, partisanship, and even student gun violence in the USA.

The bloom of COVID19 has resulted in the explosion of ripple pollens which have severely affected the world community in the terms of their multi-axial impact. These pollens, despite being indistinguishable, have a varied set of characteristics in terms of their origin and contribution towards the overall declining homeostasis of human beings. The most prominent of these pollens are misinformation. Various studies have been conducted, performed, and stochastically replicated to build ML-based models to accurately detect misinformation and its variates on the common modalities of spread. However, the recent independent analysis conducted on the prior studies reveals how the current fact-checking systems fail and fall flat in fulfilling any practical demands that the misinfodemic of COVID19 brought for us. While the scientific community broadly accepts the pandemic-like resemblance of the rampant misinformation spread, we must also make sure that our response to the same is multi-faceted, interdisciplinary, and doesn't stand restricted. As crucial it is to chart the features of misinformation spread, it is also important to understand why it spreads in the first place? Our paper deals with the latter question through a game-theory-based approach. We implement a game with two social media users or players who aim at increasing their outreach on their social media handles whilst spreading misinformation knowingly. We take five independent parameters from 100 Twitter handles that have shared misinformation during the period of COVID19. Twitter was chosen as it is a prominent social media platform accredited to the major modality for misinformation spread. The outreach increment on the user’s Twitter handles was measured using various features provided by Twitter- number of comments, number of retweets, and number of likes. Later, using a computational neuroscientific approach, we map each of these features with the type of neural system they trigger in a person’s brain. This helps in understanding how misinformation whilst being used as an intentional decoy to increase outreach on social media, also, affects the human social cognition system eliciting pseudo-responses that weren’t intended otherwise leading to realizing possible neuroscientific correlation as to how spreading misinformation on social media intentionally/unintentionally becomes a strategic maneuver to increased reach and possibly a false sense of accomplishment.

Rivalry between China and other countries could diminish global scientific collaboration — just when it is most needed.

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