On 2025-07-03 15:36:38, user Iraq Body Count wrote:

We commend the authors of the Gaza Mortality Survey (GMS), and in particular their Palestinian survey colleagues, for producing the first rigorous estimate of violent deaths in Gaza since 7 October 2023 which is completely independent of deaths documented and collated by Gaza’s Ministry of Health (GMoH). Also significant is that it contains the first data-driven attempt to estimate non-violent deaths, which has so far been lacking from any other source.

Also welcome is that, while the GMoH’s numbers are notably lower than those in GMS, its authors recognise that “By naming individual victims one by one, the GMoH endows each person with a measure of human dignity.”

In their concluding section titled “The Future”, the authors go on to state that “Undercounting of violent deaths by the GMoH is likely to persist.” However the level of this undercount cannot be consistently derived from a single snapshot survey, for the simple reason that the GMoH documentation is continually being backfilled, as we have discussed extensively elsewhere: https://iraqbodycount.substack.com/p/gazas-internal-list-of-the-killed .

The number the authors provide for the “comparable” period to GMS is one which the GMoH put out in early January 2025: 45,650. However in the GMoH’s list published March 2025, which the authors refer to elsewhere, this number had grown to 48,440. Latest GMoH data (15 June 2025) show that they have further increased their number of verified violent deaths for the period to 49,048 individuals.

In addition to the deaths listed by GMoH, another 4122 identified dead were known to them by 10 April 2025 but had yet to be verified for addition to their list. (See: https://iraqbodycount.substack.com/p/gazas-victim-details-and-victim-deniers ) On past evidence, most if not all of these names will eventually be included too.

In fact, had the GMS been conducted a year earlier (January 2024) the gap between its estimates and deaths listed by GMoH would have been markedly wider, as the GMoH has increased its numbers for that early period from an initial 14,121 to 26,987 (an increase of 91%). As the backfilling has progressed, the shortfalls have become appreciably smaller. A notable and predictable pattern has been that the higher the intensity of killing, the more has needed to be completed later. At any rate, these efforts by the GMoH have been constant (not to say noble and brave) and are likely to continue to reduce the difference between competently estimated and actually-recorded casualties.

So any figure given for the level of difference between a survey and the GMoH is temporary, provisional, and dependent on the date at which the GMoH data was accessed.

This exemplifies some of the difficulties in comparing a snapshot view such as is obtained by a survey with an ongoing casualty recording effort conducted on a daily basis. Any such comparison needs to be done with appropriate caveats which, if not included, might have the unintended effect of setting in stone a particular estimate of official “undercounting”, thus undermining essential casualty documentation efforts, particularly where such efforts are already being impeded by the most awful circumstances on the ground.

Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, Iraq Body Count, London, UK<br /> 3 July 2025

On 2025-07-05 14:12:08, user Kamila Premji wrote:

This article was published in BMJ Open in December 2023: Premji K, Green ME, Glazier RH, et al. Characteristics of patients attached to near-retirement family physicians: a population-based serial cross-sectional study in Ontario, Canada. BMJ Open 2023;13:e074120. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2023-074120, https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/12/e074120

On 2025-07-06 08:41:23, user xu-sheng zhang wrote:

Dear medRxiv staff

I just want to inform you that our article has been [published in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe 2025; https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.lanepe.2025. 101364<br /> with a title: "Cost-effectiveness of vaccination strategies to control future mpox outbreaks in England: a modelling study". could you please help signpost to it.<br /> Best wishes<br /> Xu-Sheng Zhang

On 2025-07-08 12:22:49, user Md Rakibul Hasan wrote:

The article have recently been published in a journal, please see the following link

Hasan, M. R., Sultana, N., Panthi, S., Hasan, M., Jahan, S., & Hasanat, M. A. (2025). Fasting Plasma Glucose as a Primary Screening Test for the Diagnosis of Gestational Diabetes mellitus: Fasting Plasma Glucose and Gestational Diabetes mellitus. Journal of the Medical College for Women & Hospital, 21(1), 43–51. https://doi.org/10.3329/jmcwh.v21i1.80952

On 2025-07-09 23:46:46, user Pui-Yan Kwok wrote:

This paper is now published in Nature Communications (on Jul 9, 2025): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61644-x

On 2025-07-13 08:45:42, user Ben Auxier wrote:

In their pre-print Brackin et al. [1] present data suggesting nosocomial infections (that is, infections arising from the clinical environment) of patients infected with A. fumigatus. This is a surprising finding, given the near universal abundance of this fungus. As I detail below, there is no evidence of transmission chains within a hospital. Rather, the analyses presented fall victim to the statistics of detecting matches within populations of differing sizes, related to what is commonly referred to as “the birthday paradox”. The main data in this paper consists of whole genome sequencing data from 182 isolates from 15 patients (>2 samples from each patient), 101 isolates from patient’s homes, and 102 isolates from a medical centre that all patients visited. From these data, three comparisons are made between a) case samples and general environmental samples, b) case samples and their own home and c) case samples and the reference clinic.

The authors find that there are links for a), consistent with reports over the last several decades that A. fumigatus populations are highly recombinant, but includes widely dispersed clones [2–5]. More interestingly, they find no links for b) but abundant links in c), which would be consistent with hospital spread. However, while the sample sizes in b) and c) are equivalent, the comparisons are not. Across the 8 cases (average of 11.3 isolates per case) where the housing was also sampled, an average of 12.6 isolates per house (101 total) were used for whole genome sequencing. This leads to ~1000 comparisons being made, due to substructure in the data. Notably, since some patients have long-term infections of one genotype, this number is an overestimate due to within-patient correlations. Then, all 182 patient isolates (more than the 8 patients sampled) are compared against all 102 isolates from the medical centre, producing over 18,000 comparisons. Thus, using a null hypothesis of no difference between patient-hospital and patient-home data, since there are ~20X more patient-hospital comparisons (and 20% of patient samples match a hospital sample), a naïve expectation would be 1% of patient-home comparisons to be clonally related, likely detectable in the ~1000 comparisons.

Unfortunately, their analysis falls into the “birthday paradox”. Briefly stated, this paradox reflects the fact that while the chance that you share a birthday with someone else is 1/365, the chance that two people share a birthday within a classroom of 30 students is not 8% (30/365), but instead a surprisingly high 70%. This is because in the classroom situation you not only have a larger group, but also many more combinations. The chance of sharing a birthday can be considered as the chance of sampling two identical genotypes from a population of clones. Thus, while roughly equal numbers of isolates from homes and the reference center were used for genome sequencing, this difference in structure means that comparisons with patient isolates are unequal. However, the birthday paradox shows that this math is not intuitive and the chance of finding matches increases non-linearly. So, while perhaps 10 matches should have been expected between patients and their homes, which would already be a tenuous link, the expected number is effectively zero due to the smaller sample size.

The actual sites of infection for A. fumigatus is important to discern. The cryptic nature of initial infections makes this a challenging task, requiring creative experimental or observational studies. However, I would argue simply identifying clonal matches provides insufficient evidence..

References:<br /> 1. Brackin, A. P. et al. Genomic epidemiology links azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus hospital bioaerosols to chronic respiratory aspergillosis. 2025.07.04.25330042 Preprint at https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.04.25330042 (2025).

1. Chazalet, V. et al. Molecular Typing of Environmental and Patient Isolates of Aspergillus fumigatus from Various Hospital Settings. Journal of Clinical Microbiology 36, 1494–1500 (1998).

2. Rhodes, J. et al. Population genomics confirms acquisition of drug-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus infection by humans from the environment. Nat Microbiol 7, 663–674 (2022).

3. Shelton, J. M. G. et al. Landscape-scale exposure to multiazole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus bioaerosols. 2022.11.07.515445 Preprint at https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.07.515445 (2022).

4. Snelders, E. et al. Widely dispersed clonal expansion of multi-fungicide-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus limits genomic epidemiology prospects. mBio 16, e03652-24 (2025).

On 2025-07-14 12:23:02, user Massimiliano Mazza wrote:

Yes, the paper has been recently published here:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2024.1488860/full

On 2025-07-29 19:07:27, user Ehud Zeltzer wrote:

This project has been published in JAMA Neurology and can be found at https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2025.2218

On 2025-08-09 06:03:10, user Shani wrote:

It's a nice pre print ????, and very insightful can't wait for it to be published soon <br /> thank you corresponding author for this.

On 2025-08-10 13:57:05, user zerihun woldesenbet meja wrote:

A timely and impactful study on HIV care in Ethiopia. The research team highlights the key risk factors for second-line ART failure, urging better adherence and continuity strategies. I hope this study fills a critical data gap and guides targeted interventions to improve patient outcomes.

On 2025-08-26 09:25:30, user Constant VINATIER wrote:

Feedbacks about your preprint : https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.07.31.25332504

About registration: <br /> We could not find any information about the pre-registration of your study in the pre-print. Pre-registration involves documenting the hypotheses, methods, and/or analyses of a scientific study prior to its conduct (10.1073/pnas.1708274114; 10.1038/s41562-021-01269-4). If your study was pre-registered, we strongly encourage you to include the registration number in the pre-print, ideally in the abstract make this important information easy to retrieve, as this practice enhances transparency and reproducibility. If the study was not pre-registered, this should be acknowledged as a limitation. For future studies, we recommend pre-registering on an appropriate repository.<br /> About Protocol Sharing: <br /> We did not find the protocol for your study. If you have one, we encourage you to share it as supplementary material or deposit it in a publicly available repository such as the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io ) or Zenodo ( https://zenodo.org/) "https://zenodo.org/)") . You can then include a statement in the Methods section indicating that your protocol is openly available (e.g., 'The protocol for this study is available at (link)/ in the supplementary'). Sharing your protocol will help readers better understand your study and enable them to reproduce it if they wish to test it.<br /> About the Statistical Analysis Plan Sharing: <br /> We did not find the Statistical Analysis Plan (SAP) for your study. If you have one, we encourage you to share it as supplementary material or deposit it in a repository such as the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io ). You can then include a statement in the Methods section indicating that your protocol is openly available (e.g., 'The SAP for this study is available at (link)/ in the supplementary'). Sharing your SAP will help readers better understand your study and enable them to reproduce it if they wish to test it.<br /> About Deviations and/or changes<br /> We could not find any information about potential deviations or changes to the protocol in your pre-print. Since such deviations are common, if this applies to your study, we strongly encourage you to include a subsection titled Changes to the Initial Protocol in the Methods' section and discuss these changes as a potential limitation of your results. If any deviations occurred during your study, please specify them in this new subsection.<br /> About Data sharing / FAIR Data<br /> We found insufficient information about your data sharing approach. Data should be findable, i.e. data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier (for instance there is a DOI assigned to the dataset, or data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource). Data should also be accessible, i.e. data are retrievable by their identifier and can be accessed following an open, free, and universally implementable protocol. The protocol allows for an authentication and authorization procedure, where necessary. As your data contains sensitive data, we suggest to make it Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse ( https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) "https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/)") by providing some details on this procedure.<br /> About Code sharing<br /> We could not find any information about your (statistical) code. Sharing code is important for enhancing transparency and reproducibility, especially since it does not contain sensitive information. We encourage you to openly share it on a code sharing platform (Github, Codepen, CodShare, etc.) and include the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in the Methods section. If you want more information about Code sharing https://fair-software.nl/ .<br /> Comments :<br /> Dear authors,<br /> You did not publicly share your data but adequately justified why (confidentiality of data from patient records) and clearly explained the procedure for obtaining it, thank you. But is it possible to openly share the code ?

On 2025-09-16 11:36:42, user Ayan Dey wrote:

Hello this article is now published. Please see BMJ Mental health for the final version. https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/28/1/e301663

On 2025-10-07 13:23:10, user Evolutionary Health Group wrote:

We at the Evolutionary Health Group ( https://evoheal.github.io/) "https://evoheal.github.io/)") really enjoyed this paper.

Here are our highlights:

The study examines the effect of cigarette taxes on smoking behaviors (participation, cessation, and intensity) and whether these effects differ by polygenic indices and timing of exposure to cigarette taxes.

The authors find that cigarette tax exposure during adolescence is a determinant of lifetime smoking status (cigarette tax is a deterrent of smoking participation), and the effect of cigarette taxes during adolescence is significantly higher for individuals with a higher genetic predisposition for smoking. The authors also find that ordinary least squares models underestimate the detrimental effects of smoking on chronic disease.

Future studies can explore other genetic ancestries and within-family GWAS.

Highlights the importance of youth-targeted tobacco taxes, taking into account the risk of initiating smoking.

On 2025-10-15 20:48:18, user jpirruccello wrote:

The updated version of this manuscript has been published; please see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40175013/

On 2025-10-18 14:47:45, user Evolutionary Health Group wrote:

We at the Evolutionary Health Group ( https://evoheal.github.io/) "https://evoheal.github.io/)") really enjoyed this paper.

Here are our highlights:

The authors used metagenomic studies from the PARSIFAL study to determine if there is a difference in ARG/species abundance between 1) children who live on farms and 2) attend a Steiner school and geographically-matched reference groups.

High-abundance taxa were similar across all groups. Most differences were observed within low-abundance and often individualized taxa

GLM between ARG load and other study variables found that BMI, length of time having been breastfed, and age had significant negative relationships with ARG load, regardless of lifestyle

On 2025-10-21 22:10:03, user Carlos A. Fermín-Martínez wrote:

The published version of this work is now available at: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgaf225/8110154

On 2025-11-14 11:47:45, user Helen Ward wrote:

This has now been peer reviewed and published in Health Expectations link below https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hex.70428

On 2025-11-20 17:36:10, user Ceejay wrote:

This study is very interesting.

There are various exercise regimes popularly described in recent years for Long Covid sufferers, two often mentioned are 1. Graded Exercise Therapy and 2. Exercise Pacing. The former is characterised by a manageable but significant exercise level which is steadily increased, the latter is a strict regime of minimal exercise and only slowly increasing this as the person is able. A key difference between these methods is probably that Pacing is designed at such a low level of exertion that it avoids provoking PEM (Post-Exertional Malaise, starting a few days after the exercise), whereas Graded Exercise Therapy may provoke PEM and if properly monitored the exercise level should be reduced. Some opinion in favour of Pacing even states that GET is contra-indicated in LC. Part of the problem here is a lack of clarity in describing the two different exercise regimes.

It would therefore help to know more about the exact exercise regimes you applied (lines 146 to 149):

* List all exercises, and whether each was strength or cardiovascular exercise.

* What were the criteria for starting exercise, and for incrementing or decrementing exercise (lines 149 to 153) during the 32 months.

* Was PEM monitored for?

* Would the schedules adopted fit into either of the two popular descriptions (GET vs Pacing) or could this even be dynamically changeable according to progress?

* What was the typical level, duration and frequency of the maximum exercise undertaken by month 32 or at the asymptomatic point.

* Do you have data on the periods to achievement of asymptomatic status (or end of trial)? Fig 3 provides no data at periods between 6 and 32 months.

* Figure 3 suggests that by month 32, 45.5% of participants were still not asymptomatic, so can this statistic infer anything about the suitability or advisable emphasis of the exercise program?

* Can the data from your study enable arbitration between GET and Pacing? e.g. could the prognostic point of 21 days inform the ongoing exercise program?

Thank you.

On 2020-04-03 17:03:45, user just maybe wrote:

There are SIR models available that are more thorough.<br /> E.g. (Researchgate)

Batista, Milan. (2020). Forecasting of final COVID-19 epidemic size (20/04/03).

On 2020-04-07 03:18:15, user Tomas Hull wrote:

Even if 2 strains of coV-2 exist, one more lethal than the other, the confirmation is far away. <br /> Why not look at the similarities between the populations of Italy, Spain, France, China? Antibiotic resistance is well documented. Smoking, comorbidities and their treatments, lead to upregulation of ACE2 receptors and therefore could account for lethality of the same virus strain and the supposed statistical anomalies...

On 2020-06-23 19:40:15, user Roman Shein wrote:

In an interview Hendrik Streeck claimed the specificity to be 99%. How? In March, when all mayhem just started to envelop! How were these test verified?<br /> At the same time, the very same Hendrik Streeck has co-authored a paper (published), that the antibody tests are rubbish, not fit to diagnose Covid. The specificity is around 88%. I admit the paper concerns antibody test usage at much earlier stage of the disease, but nevertheless his own assessment seems to contradict the claim about 99%.

• The data from other sources suggests the specificity to be in the region of 85-90%. Due to this it seems reasonable to suggest that out every 15 people in "w antibodies", lets say, 12 (88% specificity, indeed) were, in fact, the false positives. In this case, what is left, 15-12=3% of population w the real immunity, not 15%! By comparison, the official infection rate was stated to be 3%...

On 2020-06-25 15:24:39, user Nojan Aliahmad wrote:

great work with very good control. The impact of unregulated cytokines and inflammatory compounds (such as CRP) on COVID-19 is a very important discussion. Future clinical trials can show how effective will be vitamin D supplements in reducing these unregulated compounds.<br /> Dexamethasone is the first drug showing success in reducing the mortality rate of COVID-19 in clinical trials. It also works on the principal of reducing unregulated cytokine.

On 2020-06-26 09:28:20, user Dena E. Utne wrote:

Al this study shows is that there wasn't a lot of Covid-19 around when they did the study. There wasn't enough Covid-19 around at the time of the study to make claims about the safety of gyms. It is disappointing to see the BBC summarizing the conclusions of this article, when the conclusions are not supported by the actual science. I don't think this article will or should pass peer review.

On 2020-06-29 16:14:10, user xanthoptica wrote:

Zero SARS-CoV2 infections in control group, one SARS-CoV2 infection in treatment group acquired before treatment (gym attendance - unclear if individual was prevented from going to gym based on positive test). Essentially zero statistical power. This study only tested whether there was enough coronavirus around Oslo to cause transmission at the gym in any conditions...and there was not.

On 2020-06-26 16:22:15, user disqus_XufFG9Zovr wrote:

Has this been adjusted for time?

Do the masks just slow the spread and delay herd immunity?

Is the total death in the community less over all time for mask wearers or is it just a technique to flatten the curve?

Mortality per day is not an adequate goal. Total death must be considered as well.

On 2020-07-03 14:59:40, user Uncle Long Hair wrote:

A similar statistical analysis received many formal requests to be retracted "based on easily falsifiable claims and methodological design flaws":

https://metrics.stanford.ed...

There are many relevant variables, not only masks but population density, age of population, other precautions that were taken, etc. Correlation is not causation. Most studies have struggled to show statistically significant benefit to wearing masks.

On 2020-07-03 03:58:20, user Pedro wrote:

Considering that many doctors prescribe ivermectin as strongyloidiasis prophylaxis before the administration of high doses of corticosteroids, and that the use of dexamethasone has been shown to be effective in reducing mortality in patients with Covid-19 in RECOVERY Trial, was there any difference in the use of corticosteroids between the groups in this study?

On 2025-02-23 14:32:17, user Shin jie Yong wrote:

"Recently, a subset of non-classical<br /> monocytes has been shown to harbor S protein in patients with PVS [18]" - reference #18 cited Patterson et al. (2020), which might be an error since this study examined long covid participants only. My apologies if I'm mistaken, however.

On 2025-02-24 06:06:47, user Daniel Corcos wrote:

This work is a good start to appreciate the existence and organic nature of a post-vaccination syndrome. What worries me is the low number of control subjects. A much larger number of control subjects would allow adjustments to be made, particularly regarding the number of vaccine doses received.

On 2020-07-07 16:15:43, user Michael Hombach wrote:

Very interesting data!<br /> Pearson’s r quantifies the extend of the linear relation between two variables. Both variables are assumed to be continuous. Heavy-tailed distributions of the data, e.g. many values at the lower or upper end, might highly influence both Pearson’s r estimate. In addition, Pearson's correlation is not sufficiently robust against outliers.<br /> Spearman’s rank correlation ? is appropriate for both continuous as well as discrete ordinal variables. In contrast to Pearson’s r it does not assess the linear relation but the monotonic relation between two variables, based on the rank of the absolute values. Spearman’s ? is therefore better suited for heavy-tailed distributions than Pearson’s r. <br /> The paper includes already a proper calculation of agreement rates between the serological assays to the NT titre measurement values. The authors additionally use Pearson’s r to conclude about the performance of the assays. The paper and the conclusion would highly benefit from additionally presenting Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient since NT dilution rows depict non-continuous data that are heavy-tailed at the upper end. A final conclusion and discussion should be initialized based on both the agreement rates and the correlation of the assays based on Spearman’s rho. E.g. applying Spearman’s correlation to the presented line listing data based on R-package ‘spearman.CI’ (literature: de Carvalho, M. and Marques, F. J. (2012). Jackknife Euclidean likelihood-based inference for Spearman’s rho. North American Actuarial Journal, 16, 487–492.) we found rhos of 0.6714, 0.6768, 0.5854, 0.7583, 0.8131 for EI S1 IgA, EI S1 IgG, DiaSorin S1/S2 IgG, Abbott N IgG, and Roche N Ab, respectively.

On 2020-07-11 18:20:51, user Joan Saldana wrote:

Dear authors, since your average force of infection term lambda includes N in its denominator, I don't see why expressions (2) and (3) of R0 also include N. Suppose \rho=0 (exposed are not infectious) and x=1 for everybody. In this standard case, the infection term in (1) is beta·S·I/N and, then, R0=beta/gamma. From (2) and (3), however, it follows that in this case R0=(beta/N)/gamma, which is not correct. Am I missing something from the model? On the other hand, the values of R0 in the figures are reasonable, so perhaps this is typo. Thank you!

On 2020-07-12 18:43:47, user Mario Moisés Alvarez wrote:

Please share with us your opinion on this contribution. We really want to raise awareness on the importance of massive testing particularly in densely populated cities. <br /> Very Best. Stay safe.

On 2020-07-13 09:10:17, user OxImmuno Literature Initiative wrote:

https://www.immunology.ox.a...

On 2020-07-14 13:01:28, user Hedda von Rosa wrote:

Was selenium considered and if so what was the rationale for not including in the protocol?

On 2019-07-17 16:54:37, user Guyguy wrote:

EVOLUTION OF THE EBOLA EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

The epidemiological situation of the Ebola Virus Disease dated July 15, 2019:<br /> Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 2,512, 2,418 confirmed and 94 probable. In total, there were 1,676 deaths (1,582 confirmed and 94 probable) and 703 people healed.<br /> 423 suspected cases under investigation;<br /> 11 new confirmed cases, including 5 in Beni, 2 in Mandima, 1 in Mabalako, 1 in Vuhovi, 1 in Katwa and 1 in Komanda;<br /> 8 new confirmed cases deaths:<br /> 3 community deaths, 2 in Beni and 1 in Mandima;<br /> 5 deaths at Ebola Treatment Center, including 4 in Beni and 1 in Goma;<br /> 3 people cured out of Ebola Treatment Center including 2 in Butembo and 1 in Katwa.

136 Contaminated health workers

The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 136 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths.

163,533 Vaccinated persons

The only vaccine to be used in this outbreak is the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck, following approval by the Ethics Committee in its decision of 19 May 2018.

75,321,895 Controlled people

NEWS

Follow-up of the situation of the pastor's contacts who traveled to Goma

On Monday, July 15, 2019, 37 high-risk contacts and 40 Goma confirmed case contacts were vaccinated at the Afia Himbi health center where the patient had been isolated before being transferred to the Ebola Treatment Center. In total, 97 contacts in the broad sense have already been listed to date. Vaccination will continue until all identified contacts have been vaccinated.<br /> Among the contacts identified were two women from the pastor's family traveling with him. After the pastor's transfer to CTE, they hid in Goma and some people thought they fled to Bukavu in South Kivu province. Fortunately, the two women were found in Goma on Tuesday and will be vaccinated.

On 2019-08-03 19:22:31, user GuyguyKabundi Tshima wrote:

Dear all, here is the daily bulletin on the evolution of the response to the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak of 01 August 2019. The field information verification process has been more painful because of the sensitivity of the events on the ground. .<br /> Please be indulgent for the delay.

EVOLUTION OF THE EBOLA EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI

Thursday, August 01, 2019

Epidemiological Status of Ebola Virus Disease as of 31 July 2019

Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 2,713, of which 2,619 confirmed and 94 probable. In total, there were 1,823 deaths (1,729 confirmed and 94 probable) and 782 people healed.<br /> 423 suspected cases under investigation;<br /> 13 new confirmed cases, including 5 in Beni, 2 in Mabalako, 2 in Mandima, 1 in Nyiragongo (Goma), 1 in Vuhovi, 1 in Katwa and 1 in Mutwanga;<br /> 10 new confirmed cases deaths:<br /> 2 community deaths, including 1 in Beni and 1 in Mandima;<br /> 7 Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) deaths, including 3 in Beni, 2 in Mabalako, 1 in Komanda and 1 in Goma;<br /> 1 death at the ETC of Beni;<br /> 6 people cured out of ETC, including 5 in Beni and 1 in Katwa;<br /> One health worker, living and vaccinated, is among the new confirmed cases in Beni. The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 149 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths.

NEWS

As a reminder, the recommendations of the Ministry of Health are as follows:<br /> Follow basic hygiene practices, including regular hand washing with soap and water or ashes;<br /> If an acquaintance from an epidemic area comes to visit you and is ill, do not touch her and call the North Kivu civil protection hotline directly;<br /> If you are identified as an Ebola patient contact, agree to be vaccinated and followed for 21 days;<br /> If a person dies because of Ebola, follow the rules for safe and dignified burials. It is simply a funeral method that respects funerary customs and traditions while protecting the family and community from Ebola contamination.<br /> For all health professionals, observe the hygiene measures in the health centers and declare any patient with symptoms of Ebola (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, anorexia, bleeding).<br /> If all citizens respect the sanitary measures recommended by the Ministry of Health, it is possible to ensure that this case of Ebola detected in Goma is only a sporadic case that does not cause a new outbreak.

Follow-up of the situation of contacts of the second case confirmed Ebola of Goma<br /> 151 contacts have been reported around the 2nd confirmed case of EVD in Goma since 22 July 2019. Among these contacts, 118 have already been vaccinated, including 70 at high risk (CHR) and 48 contact contacts (CC);<br /> The girl and the woman of this case of Goma constitute to date the 3rd and 4th positive cases of EVD recorded in Goma;<br /> The sister of this same case, who fled to the province of South Kivu, was found in Biara in the health zone of Muti Muresa. 40 contacts have already been vaccinated around this contact this Thursday, August 1, 2019, including 9 high-risk contacts and 31 contacts.

A traditional healer among the confirmed cases of Mabalako<br /> This is a 25 year old man, living and vaccinated on July 20, 2019 (geographical vaccination). He practiced self-medication on July 24-29, 2019 with a gradual worsening of symptoms.

It was taken to the CTE after validation on July 30, 2019 after the alert launched by a Community Relay (ReCo). It was confirmed MVE on July 31, 2019. 22 contact persons are listed around this case, whose investigations are ongoing.<br /> The confirmed case of Lubero on the run<br /> The confirmed case of July 25, 2019 in Lubero Health Zone (ZS), who fled into the community, is reported to be in Lukanga in the Masereka SZ, 17 km from Lubero. A team went there on Thursday, August 1st, 2019 for its transfer to CTE.

80,481,013<br /> Controlled people<br /> 98 entry points (PoE) and operational sanitary control points (PoC).

149<br /> Contaminated health workers<br /> 1 health workers, living and vaccinated, are among the new confirmed cases of Beni.<br /> The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 149 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases) including 41 deaths.

Source: The press team of the Ministry of Health.

On 2019-09-30 05:15:29, user Guyguy wrote:

EVOLUTION OF THE EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI AS AT SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

The epidemiological situation of the Ebola Virus Disease dated September 22, 2019

Monday, September 23, 2019

Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 3,168, of which 3,057 are confirmed and 111 are probable. In total, there were 2.118 deaths (2007 confirmed and 111 probable) and 975 people healed. <br /> • 343 suspected cases under investigation; <br /> • 4 new confirmed cases, including: <br /> • 1 in North Kivu in Butembo; <br /> • 3 in Ituri, including 2 in Mandima and 1 in Mambasa. <br /> • 3 new confirmed deaths, including: <br /> • 2 community deaths, including 1 in North Kivu in Butembo and 1 in Ituri in Mambasa; <br /> • 1 confirmed death in Ituri in Mandima. <br /> • No health worker is among the new confirmed cases. The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 160 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths.

NEWS

Beginning of trainers training in Goma on good clinical practices related to the second Ebola vaccine <br /> • The Ebola Virus Disease Response Information Management Coordinator, representing the Technical Secretariat, Mathias Mossoko, launched on Monday in Goma the training of trainers which runs from 23 to 28 September 2019 on the good clinical practices (PCBs) related to the second Ebola vaccine. <br /> • This training benefits from the expertise of CVD's Malians on the transmission of notions about good clinical practice. It aims to provide participants with the standards applicable to the design, conduct, monitoring and stopping of studies, to teach them the activities of audit, analysis, reporting and documentation with the guarantee that these studies 'rely on sound scientific and ethical principles. It is also intended to introduce participants to the correct documentation of the clinical properties of the vaccine tested or evaluated. <br /> • The Response Information Management Coordinator called the attendance participants to demonstrate better actors for the implementation of good practice in this second vaccine. <br /> • For its part, the chairman of the Immunization Committee, Stéphane Hans, said that this five-day training announces the forthcoming launch of the second vaccine that will come at any time in the targeted health zones. "We welcome this supplementary vaccine very positively compared to the first vaccine. This second vaccine has the advantage of preventing all strains of the Ebola virus. It is therefore positive for the population that will receive it, "he said while inviting all communities targeted by this vaccination to take ownership of this activity, once launched. <br /> • The training on good clinical practice will revolve around several presentations on different topics, among others, the Ebola virus disease, the responsibilities of the INRB for the QA system, study vaccines (storage, management, chain cold and accounting), inclusion and follow-up of pregnant women, community involvement and informed consent, etc. <br /> • This training was organized for the different actors involved in this project, including doctors, epidemiologists, clinicians and pharmacists. A total of 25 people from Kinshasa, including the INRB, UNIKIN, CUK and specialized programs and North Kivu, including the Provincial Health Inspectorate (IPS), the Provincial Division of Health Centers (DPS) and Health Zone Coordinating Offices (BCZS) are participating in this meeting. <br /> As a reminder, the recommendations of the MULTISECTORAL COMMITTEE ON THE RESPONSE TO THE EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE are as follows: * <br /> 1. Follow basic hygiene practices, including regular hand washing with soap and water or ashes; <br /> 2. If an acquaintance from an epidemic area comes to visit you and is ill, do not touch her and call the North Kivu Civil Protection toll-free number; <br /> 3. If you are identified as a contact of an Ebola patient, agree to be vaccinated and followed for 21 days; <br /> 4. If a person dies because of Ebola, follow the instructions for safe and dignified burials. It is simply a funeral method that respects funerary customs and traditions while protecting the family and community from Ebola contamination. <br /> 5. For all health professionals, observe the hygiene measures in the health centers and declare any person with symptoms of Ebola (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, anorexia, bleeding). <br /> If all citizens respect these health measures recommended by the Secretariat, it is possible to quickly end this 10th epidemic.

VACCINATION <br /> Opening of an expanded vaccination ring around two confirmed cases from 19-21 Sept 2019 in the Madidi health area in Mambasa, Ituri. Another satellite ring was opened at the Kitatumba General Referral Hospital in the Butembo Health Zone in North Kivu around the case notified on 22 09 2019. This case started the disease in the health area of Kasindi in Mutwanga, North Kivu. <br /> • The Expanded Program of Vaccines has received 4320 doses of vaccine at the national level; <br /> • Since vaccination began on August 8, 2018, 226,722 people have been vaccinated; <br /> • The only vaccine to be used in this outbreak is the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck, following approval by the Ethics Committee in its decision of 20 May 2018.

MONITORING AT ENTRY POINTS <br /> • High-risk contact was intercepted at Kangote PoC in Butembo, North Kivu. This is a 28-year-old unvaccinated woman on the 14th day (D14) follow-up who was listed around a confirmed case in the Katwa Health Zone. During her interception, this woman presented some signs related to the #Ebola Virus Disease. She was sent to the Butembo CTE for treatment. <br /> • Kituku PoC providers in Goma, North Kivu, were assaulted by about 20 onlookers called "Maibobo" who were avenging one of their drowned during the night of 20 to 21 September 2019. These providers feel insecure and ask to be supported by officers of the National Police (PNC) or FARDC. <br /> • Since the beginning of the epidemic, the total number of travelers checked (temperature measurement) at the sanitary control points up to 22 September 2019 is 96,998,860; <br /> • To date, a total of 111 entry points (PoE) and sanitary control points (PoCs) have been set up in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri to protect the country's major cities and prevent the spread of the epidemic in neighboring countries.

LEXICON <br /> • A community death is any death that occurs outside a Ebola Treatment Center. <br /> • A probable case is a death for which it was not possible to obtain biological samples for confirmation in the laboratory but where the investigations revealed an epidemiological link with a confirmed or probable case.

On 2019-10-04 22:38:03, user GuyguyKabundi Tshima wrote:

EVOLUTION OF THE EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI AS AT 03 OCTOBER 2019

Friday, October 04, 2019

Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 3,201, of which 3,087 are confirmed and 114 are probable. In total, there were 2.139 deaths (2025 confirmed and 114 probable) and 999 people cured.<br /> 451 suspected cases under investigation;<br /> 3 new confirmed cases, including:<br /> 1 in North Kivu in Beni;<br /> 2 in Ituri, including 1 in Mambasa and 1 in Mandima;<br /> 2 new confirmed deaths in North Kivu, including 1 in Beni and 1 in Mabalako;<br /> 4 people healed from the CTE in North Kivu in Beni;<br /> No health workers are among the newly confirmed cases. The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 161 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths.<br /> Day 18 without response activities in the Lwemba Health Area in Mandima, Ituri.

LEXICON<br /> • A community death is any death that occurs outside a Ebola Treatment Center.<br /> • A probable case is a death for which it was not possible to obtain biological samples for confirmation in the laboratory but where the investigations revealed an epidemiological link with a confirmed or probable case.

NEWS<br /> The 10th Ebola Virus Disease epidemic in the DRC reaches its 1000th cure<br /> - The thousandth cured of the Ebola Virus Disease came out Friday of the Mangina CTE in Mabalako in North Kivu Province;<br /> - Indeed, this 1000th cured is part of four healed Friday of this CTE. It is about a woman, quarantine gone, case contact of her nephew with the Air of Health of Lwemba with Mandima in Ituri. As soon as she felt the fever, she went to the Health Center, where she was detected as a suspected case and transferred directly to the CTE. She was confirmed and followed her treatment until recovery. She advises the population to go quickly to the Health Center and not fear the CTE to cure Ebola Virus Disease;<br /> - Among these four cures, there is also a health provider. This is an ambulance hygienist, the 1001 st healed, who was contaminated during the unloading of his personal protective equipment (PPE). He recommended a lot of protection and precautions to all hygienists when removing PPE. And in case of possible contamination, do not panic, but rather go quickly to the Health Center for appropriate treatment;<br /> - For the Ebola Epidemic Epidemic Response Coordinator, Dr. Faustin Bile Saka, these healers will be the ambassadors for the response in their respective communities and testify that when we arrive early we have the chance to come out healed like them. He handed out the certificates of release to the cured, with the various partners of the response, WHO and IMC to the 1000, 1001, 1002 and 1003 th cures of the Ebola Virus Disease in the DRC;<br /> - As a miracle, the 10th epidemic of the Ebola Virus Disease began around the end of July 2018 and declared in early August 2019 in Mangina and it is still in Mangina, where came the 1000th cured.

VACCINATION

• Since vaccination began on August 8, 2018, 232,725 people have been vaccinated;
• The only vaccine to be used in this outbreak is the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck, following approval by the Ethics Committee in its decision of 20 May 2018.

MONITORING AT ENTRY POINTS

• Since the beginning of the epidemic, the total number of travelers checked (temperature measurement ) at the sanitary control points is 102,092,950 ;
• To date, a total of 111 entry points (PoE) and sanitary control points (PoCs) have been set up in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri to protect the country's major cities and prevent the spread of the epidemic in neighboring countries.

As a reminder, the recommendations of the MULTISECTORAL COMMITTEE OF THE RESPONSE TO EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE are as follows:

1. Follow basic hygiene practices, including regular hand washing with soap and water or ashes;
2. If an acquaintance from an epidemic area comes to visit you and is ill, do not touch her and call the North Kivu Civil Protection toll-free number;
3. If you are identified as a contact of an Ebola patient, agree to be vaccinated and followed for 21 days;
4. If a person dies because of Ebola, follow the instructions for safe and dignified burials. It is simply a funeral method that respects funerary customs and traditions while protecting the family and community from Ebola contamination.
5. For all health professionals, observe the hygiene measures in the health centers and declare any person with symptoms of # Ebola (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, anorexia, bleeding).<br /> If all citizens respect these health measures recommended by the Secretariat, it is possible to quickly end this 10th epidemic.

On 2019-10-07 13:54:02, user GuyguyKabundi Tshima wrote:

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SITUATION

EVOLUTION OF THE EBOLA EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI OCTOBER 05, 2019<br /> Sunday, October 06, 2019<br /> Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 3,204, of which 3,090 are confirmed and 114 are probable. In total, there were 2,142 deaths (2028 confirmed and 114 probable) and 1004 people healed.<br /> 414 suspected cases under investigation;<br /> No new cases confirmed;<br /> 1 new confirmed death at CTE in Ituri in Komanda;<br /> No one healed out of ETCs;<br /> No health workers are among the newly confirmed cases. The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 161 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths.<br /> Day 19 without response activities in the Lwemba Health Area in Mandima, Ituri, where the dialogue continues in the community.

NEWS

Reconciliation between displaced people from Lwemba to Biakato and communities left in Lwemba in Mandima in Ituri

The Lwemba communities that moved to Biakato in Mandima in Ituri reconciled on Sunday 06 October 2019 with the communities that had remained in Lwemba in the presence of the response team led by the Deputy General Coordinator, Dr. Justus Nsio Mbeta, head of the Cheffery and Mandima MCZ, coordinator of Mangina's sub-coordination of the response, as well as some partners from the Ministry of Health, including WHO, MSF, UNICEF and United Nations ;<br /> - From this meeting, follows the following recommendations: setting up a community committee to support the response, the local recruitment of sensitizers in the monitoring of community-based surveillance, decontamination and the workforce in the community. burning houses. The Ministry of Health has promised the next supply of drugs to Lwemba;<br /> - The Deputy General Coordinator for the Ebola Virus Epidemic Response, representing the Ministry of Health and the Technical Secretariat of the CMRE, Dr. Justus Nsio Mbeta, took this opportunity to recall the regulatory role of the Ministry of Health and the role of each partner involved in the response;<br /> - For the community victim of the fire, they ask for the guarantee of their security, the emergency humanitarian aid, the compensation of their destroyed property and the reconstruction of their burned houses, the commitment or the hiring of all victims in the various services at all levels, the immediate arrest of all the alleged perpetrators of these uncivil acts and the care of the children affected;<br /> - These fires occurred following the death of a nurse from Lwemba, confirmed with Ebola Virus Disease. His death sparked the uprising of the population to burn down the houses and other property of all the unknowns of Lwemba. This remains the cause, even, the cessation of the activities of the response in this Health Area for more than 15 days;<br /> - The leaders of the Lwemba community also asked for the construction of the houses for the displaced, the organization of an intercommunal dialogue session by the Administrator of the territory or his delegate and the rehabilitation of the road leading to Lwemba ;<br /> - In the response, WHO is responsible for epidemiological surveillance, communication and prevention against infection (IPC) and immunization, UNICEF is in charge of communication, psychosocial care and PCI, MSF and ALIMA take care of the treatment of patients in Ebola treatment center and PCI and psychosocial support within CTE, WFP brings food products to contacts, IOM deals with Entry and Control Points (water supply, soap and chlorine);<br /> - As for the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB), Dr. Nsio stated that he is in charge of the diagnosis and gives MSF and ALIMA the medicines to treat patients with CTE.<br /> - The World Health Organization has pledged to rebuild burned houses, to provide community surveillance (community watch) and investigations of all suspected cases, as well as to build a transit center in LWEMBA, while UNICEF has pledged to improve communication and awareness through the use of space, to support ICH, decontamination and psychosocial, to provide water sources and to build latrines in 5 priority schools;<br /> - On the other hand, Médecins Sans Frontières intends to help the community of Lwemba to resume primary health care, to organize triage in the Health Zones present in the village and to break the PCI, as well as to train sensitizers;<br /> - At the end of this Lwemba meeting, all partners, including WHO, UNICEF and MSF, met around the Deputy General Coordinator at the Biakato Reference Health Center to review the joint and shared planning of activities in Lwemba.

VACCINATION

• Since vaccination began on August 8, 2018, 234,108 people have been vaccinated;
• The only vaccine to be used in this outbreak is the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck, following approval by the Ethics Committee in its decision of 20 May 2018.

MONITORING AT ENTRY POINTS

• Three high-risk contacts were intercepted on Saturday 05 October 2019 at Maboya Checkpoint (PoC) in Butembo. They are all from the same family and came from the Kabasha Health Area to Kalunguta for Bunyuka in Vuhovi;
• They are all contacts of a confirmed case, died of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) of September 30, 2019 in Kabasha;
• The first contact is an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl who presented fever at 38 ° C. She was taken to the CTE of Butembo for the care after validation of the alert was validated;
• The 2nd contact is a 24 year old man vaccinated and asymptomatic. He is the biological father of the first contact;
• 3rd contact, first contact grandmother, 54 years old, unvaccinated and asymptomatic;
• Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of travelers checked (temperature measurement ) at the sanitary control points is 102,840,774 ;
• To date, a total of 111 entry points (PoE) and sanitary control points (PoCs) have been set up in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri to protect the country's major cities and prevent the spread of the epidemic in neighboring countries.

As a reminder, the recommendations of the MULTISECTORAL COMMITTEE OF THE RESPONSE TO EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE are as follows:

1. Follow basic hygiene practices, including regular hand washing with soap and water or ashes;
2. If an acquaintance from an epidemic area comes to visit you and is ill, do not touch her and call the North Kivu Civil Protection toll-free number;
3. If you are identified as a contact of an Ebola patient, agree to be vaccinated and followed for 21 days;
4. If a person dies because of Ebola, follow the instructions for safe and dignified burials. It is simply a funeral method that respects funerary customs and traditions while protecting the family and community from Ebola contamination.
5. For all health professionals, observe the hygiene measures in the health centers and declare any person with symptoms of # Ebola (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, anorexia, bleeding).<br /> If all citizens respect these sanitary measures recommended by the Secretariat, it is possible to quickly end this 10th epidemic.

On 2019-10-16 13:01:03, user GuyguyKabundi Tshima wrote:

EVOLUTION OF THE EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI AS AT OCTOBER 13, 2019<br /> Monday, October 14, 2019<br /> Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 3,220, of which 3,106 confirmed and 114 probable. In total, there were 2,150 deaths (2036 confirmed and 114 probable) and 1033 people healed.<br /> 383 suspected cases under investigation;<br /> 2 new confirmed cases at CTE in Ituri in Mandima;<br /> No new confirmed deaths have been recorded;<br /> 1 person healed out of CTE in Ituri in Mambasa;<br /> No health workers are among the newly confirmed cases. The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 161 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths.

NEWS

Governors of North Kivu and Ituri Raise Awareness on Ebola Virus Disease in Biakato, Ituri<br /> - The Technical Secretariat of the Multisectoral Ebola Epidemic Response Committee (CMRE) in collaboration with the Governor of North Kivu, Carly Nzanzu and Ituri, Jean Bamanisa, organized this Monday October 14, 2019 an awareness raising day on Ebola Virus Disease in Biakato, Ituri;<br /> - This tripartite awareness-raising aimed to share the experience of North Kivu on Ebola Virus Disease and to show that the movement of people between the two provinces can encourage further spread of this epidemic in the region, as much as the last four cases recorded in North Kivu (in Beni and Kalunguta) came from Biakato;<br /> - The governor of North Kivu has indeed responded favorably to the invitation of the Technical Secretariat of the CMRE because he wants to reinforce the surveillance in his province and refuses to see his province plunge into the epidemic;<br /> - To achieve their objectives the two governors were accompanied each by a strong delegation, where one finds the presidents of their provincial assemblies and some influential deputies of their respective countries;<br /> - In addition, the Ebola Virus Epidemic Response Coordination Team, which has been in the Mambasa Health Zone in Ituri for the past week, has been monitoring Bavalakaniki Control Points and Mabakese in this health zone.

VACCINATION

• Since vaccination began on 8 August 2018, 237,956 people have been vaccinated;
• The only vaccine to be used in this outbreak is the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck, following approval by the Ethics Committee in its decision of 20 May 2018.

MONITORING AT ENTRY POINTS

• Since the beginning of the epidemic, the total number of checked travelers (temperature rise) at the sanitary control points is 105,840,505 ;
• To date, a total of 111 entry points (PoE) and sanitary control points (PoCs) have been set up in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri to protect the major cities of the country. countries and prevent the spread of the epidemic in neighboring countries.

As a reminder, the recommendations of the MULTISECTORAL COMMITTEE OF THE RESPONSE TO EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE are as follows:

1. Follow basic hygiene practices, including regular hand washing with soap and water or ashes;
2. If an acquaintance from an epidemic area comes to visit you and is ill, do not touch her and call the North Kivu Civil Protection toll-free number;
3. If you are identified as a contact of an Ebola patient, agree to be vaccinated and followed for 21 days;
4. If a person dies because of Ebola, follow the instructions for safe and dignified burials. It is simply a funeral method that respects funerary customs and traditions while protecting the family and community from Ebola contamination.
5. For all health professionals, observe the hygiene measures in the health centers and declare any person with symptoms of # Ebola (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, anorexia, bleeding).<br /> If all citizens respect these health measures recommended by the Secretariat, it is possible to quickly end this 10th epidemic.

On 2019-11-19 17:15:54, user Guyguy wrote:

EPIDEMIOLOGICAL SITUATION OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE EPIDEMIC IN THE PROVINCES OF NORTH KIVU AND ITURI IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO AT NOVEMBER 17, 2019

Monday, November 18, 2019

• Since the beginning of the epidemic, the cumulative number of cases is 3,296, of which 3,178 are confirmed and 118 are probable. In total, there were 2,196 deaths (2,078 confirmed and 118 probable) and 1,070 people healed.<br /> • 407 suspected cases under investigation;<br /> • 4 new confirmed cases in North Kivu, including 2 in Mabalako, 1 in Beni and 1 in Oicha;<br /> • 1 new death of confirmed cases, including:<br /> o 1 new community death in North Kivu in Oicha;<br /> o No new deaths among confirmed cases in CTEs;<br /> • No cured person has emerged from CTEs;<br /> • No health worker is among the new confirmed cases. The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 163 (5% of all confirmed / probable cases), including 41 deaths;

NEWS

NOTHING TO REPORT

VACCINATION

• 147 people were vaccinated, until Saturday, November 16, 2019, with the 2nd Ad26.ZEBOV / MVA-BN-Filo vaccine (Johnson & Johnson) in the two health zones of Karisimbi in Goma;

• Since the start of vaccination on August 8, 2018 with the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine, 253,545 people have been vaccinated;

• Approved October 22, 2019 by the Ethics Committee of the School of Public Health of the University of Kinshasa and October 23, 2019 by the National Ethics Committee, the second vaccine, called Ad26.ZEBOV / MVA-BN -Filo, is produced by Janssen Pharmaceuticals for Johnson & Johnson;

• This new vaccine is in addition to the first, the rVSV-ZEBOV, vaccine used until then (since August 08, 2018) in this epidemic manufactured by the pharmaceutical group Merck, after approval of the Ethics Committee on May 20, 2018. has recently been approved.

MONITORING AT ENTRY POINTS

• New positive case among Mukulya Checkpoint alerts in Beni, North Kivu. It is a lifeless body of a 35-year-old man from Oicha for burial at Kabasha in Butembo;<br /> • Since the beginning of the epidemic, the total number of travelers checked (temperature rise) at the sanitary control points is 117,987,763 ;

• To date, a total of 112 entry points (PoE) and sanitary control points (PoCs) have been set up in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri to protect the country's major cities and prevent the spread of the epidemic in neighboring countries.

As a reminder, the recommendations of the MULTISECTORAL COMMITTEE OF THE RESPONSE TO EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE are as follows:

1. Follow basic hygiene practices, including regular hand washing with soap and water or ashes;
2. If an acquaintance from an epidemic area comes to visit you and is ill, do not touch her and call the North Kivu Civil Protection toll-free number;
3. If you are identified as a contact of an Ebola patient, agree to be vaccinated and followed for 21 days;
4. If a person dies because of Ebola, follow the instructions for safe and dignified burials. It is simply a funeral method that respects funerary customs and traditions while protecting the family and community from Ebola contamination.
5. For all health professionals, observe the hygiene measures in the health centers and declare any person with symptoms of Ebola (fever, diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue, anorexia, bleeding).<br /> If all citizens respect these health measures recommended by the Secretariat, it is possible to quickly end this 10th epidemic.

On 2019-10-28 19:46:45, user Mark Yarbrough wrote:

Does anybody have any code examples of how to extract data in the proper structure from the MIMICIII data, (I have official access), into PheWAS for r? I/We are working on our practicum and focusing on type - 2 diabetes - we also want to try clustering on such data using K-mediods for mixed-type features in many columns - with ICD9 codes one-hot encoded.

On 2020-01-25 10:47:13, user stucash wrote:

I am not sure if this is due to the "preprint" nature of paper, but a few points that look a bit suspicious:<br /> 1. The actual data set used to conduct the estimation was not disclosed in paper;<br /> 2. The research method for estimation was also not disclosed in paper<br /> 3. Reasoning for the employed assumptions and not others? Reasoning for the employed transmission model and not others? Apparently this should be part of research method elaboration yet there's none. <br /> 4. Do all med papers come in this short?? This paper is just too descriptive and only estimation results were presented.

I'd really wait for a full-fledged version, I am reluctant to call this research.

On 2020-01-26 02:10:01, user Dzogchen wrote:

The r0 estimated here at 3.8 seems significantly higher than first estimates by WHO and is likely the biggest factor and assumption above. Only thing I think we can say for certain is r0 is > 1 at this point.

On 2020-01-26 06:35:13, user Wes Wong wrote:

Is the methods supplement available anywhere? I can't find it

On 2020-01-27 17:59:25, user robertinventor wrote:

Just to say the author of this paper tweeted that they now estimate it as 2.5 95% CI 2.4, 2.6 for R0 which would change all the projectons.

This version says 3.8 (95% confidence interval, 3.6-4.0),

Likely those confidence intervals need revising to, if it changes so much with an extra day of data. It is a non peer reviewed preprint.

https://twitter.com/JonRead...

On 2020-01-27 18:30:54, user Cyborg Gabe wrote:

In reviewing the supplementary model details, I note that the rate of exposure in each city is assumed to be directly proportional to the number of infected individuals in that city. However, if quarantine measures being taken in affected areas are at all successful, then this assumption will not be correct. Instead, a declining proportion of the infected will infect others as successful quarantines take effect. I suspect that implementing this change in the model would significantly change the model predictions, though it would require some method of estimating the success of the quarantines.

On 2020-01-28 21:44:55, user Nan-Hung Hsieh wrote:

A minor comment for your result. According to the code you shared, the interval you used in the paper is confidence interval, not credible interval. For example, on page 4, the 95% credible interval should be [4.5, 7.5]. You can use bayestestR package to double-check the result.

On 2020-02-02 21:55:47, user hvoltbb wrote:

Also see this one:<br /> https://doi.org/10.1016/S01...

Those people did exactly the same thing as in this article but with better traffic data, and better discussion. They also paraphrased the terms pretty good.

On 2020-02-06 06:41:02, user Ben Berman wrote:

I want to point out that we recently reported a strong association between global hypomethylation and a proliferative gene expression signature (including key cell cycle markers like FOXM1) in a pan-cancer analysis of TCGA tumors (Zhou and Dinh et al., Nat. Genetics 2018 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41... ). We also reported increased copy number alterations and transposable element insertions in the hypomethylated tumors. We proposed a passive demethylation mechanism, whereby late replicating regions are less efficiently maintained during mitosis in both normal and cancer cells, resulting in both age- and cancer-associated hypomethylation. In our pan-cancer analysis, we found relatively high expression of DNMTs and UHRF1 in hypomethylated tumors, so your findings of low expression in these genes may be a consequence of your normalization to proliferation markers, or something ovarian cancer specific (we did not include ovarian cancer in our analysis, since we did not have 450k data for that cancer type). Please let me know if you have any questions.

On 2020-02-16 21:25:17, user Paul Curto wrote:

You can check this site for daily updates:

https://www.worldometers.in...

The formula which you may use to provide a first-order estimate for <br /> how many deaths daily may occur within a given number of days can be <br /> expressed by:

1.1 raised to the power of the number of days into the future from today, times the current daily death toll

The 1.1 is the ratio of today's death toll divided by yesterday's <br /> death toll as of February 12, 2020. We may use a three day running <br /> average to smooth out the data for spurts of death.

If you use this data and formula, you get over half a million deaths per day within 90 days.

You get over 10 million deaths per day after 120 days.

You get a number in the billions by Thanksgiving.

So much for a seasonal flu. This is a weaponized killer of billions of people.

Since the cat is out of the bag and we still allow cruise ships and <br /> aircraft to use the facilities of over 27 nations outside of China that <br /> have infections, we won't be far behind, at most a few weeks, before we <br /> succumb. Expect a very sad Christmas, indeed.

On 2020-02-27 04:02:53, user ShangShang Gao wrote:

They recruited 125 patients from Nanjing Second Hospital, of which 103 were patients with new coronary pneumonia. The official data till 2.27 showed a total of 93 confirmed diagnoses in Nanjing. How did this sample data come?

On 2020-02-28 01:21:33, user RQ wrote:

It was an easy method to calculate the true T value and CFR without any indigestible mathematical formulas or models requiring severe calculating conditions. Actually, when different T was assumed, if it was smaller (bigger) than the true T, calculated daily CFRs would gradually increase (decrease) to infinitely near the true CFR with time went on. Left of true T is decreasing, right is increasing,so T could be easily determined, then the true CFR could be calculated. The calculated true CFR had accurately predicted the death numbers more than two weeks continuously

On 2020-03-02 16:40:24, user Abed Ghanbari wrote:

We estimated that 18,300 (95% confidence interval: 3770 – 53,470) COVID-19 cases would have had to occur in Iran, assuming an outbreak duration of 1.5 months in the country, in order to observe these three internationally exported cases reported at the time of writing.

How did you reach to these numbers?

On 2020-03-07 17:48:10, user fuyutao wrote:

Figure2 has Leucine and Serine codons swapped.

On 2020-03-08 05:57:17, user James Nokes wrote:

Highly informative paper. Thank you. A few points/questions:

1. Table 1 indicates it is contact-based surveillance with higher proportion male than female contrary to the results text.

2. How was temperature measured and what was the definition of fever?

3. How were nasal samples collected (eg nasopharyngeal swab, per-nasal swab, aspirates). Did the method differ for contact and case-based surveillance?

4. Assessing severity status - (i) can you clarify if moderate required all three of fever, respiratory symptoms, and radiographic evidence of pneumonia? What is included in 'respiratory symptoms'? (ii) How did you measure oxygen saturation?

5. Table S1. It would be useful to include the proportions with fever. The proportion of cases from symptom-based surveillance with shortness of breath (4%) or difficulty breathing (3%) is remarkably low.

On 2020-03-16 13:08:45, user Karl Milhon wrote:

I have been pushing for people to investigate the role of children in transmission very hard since the Chinese CDC first put out their descriptive epi piece. there are numerous articles and quotes pointing toward this element of Covid 19 transmission but it appears that no one is truly trying to get at the problem. Simply utilizing serology testing to do quick and dirty seroprevalence studies would provide some insight. Singapore has developed and utilized some decent serologic tests. I do not understand why this is not being more aggressively pursued.

On 2020-03-11 10:09:13, user Bob Phillips wrote:

Needs the units for bilirubin and ALT, and a very clear description of WHEN these lab tests were taken ('predicting' severe disease when a child has severe liver dysfunction on an ICU isn't that useful)

On 2020-03-13 23:55:07, user Cadence C wrote:

Singapore health ministry stated that pre-symptomatic transmission is not a prominant mode. How did the authors conclude that 40% to 80% there are asymptomatic transmission ?

On 2020-03-14 16:58:24, user J Belcar wrote:

RE immune imprinting, has anyone looked at attack rate or severity of illness in relation to previous (or recent) influenza vaccine?

On 2020-03-17 19:20:48, user RealConspiracy wrote:

And what about "-" Rh-factor?

On 2020-03-20 11:57:18, user Romain G. wrote:

No data about hypertension and diabetes mellitus in these patients, which increase risk for COVID-19 infection and severity. Should be interesting to cross the informations. Here, it is pure speculations. Has to be reviewed, but many other parameters have to be included.

On 2020-03-20 15:00:35, user Jane Ford wrote:

What about those of us with blood type B?

On 2020-03-21 17:15:33, user escabatum wrote:

There's no mention of rates of smoking, underlying lung disease, or other major risk factors between groups. This seems like a pretty useless study.

On 2020-03-20 16:15:46, user Juan B. Gutierrez wrote:

Supplemental material, data, and source code: https://tinyurl.com/USA-COV...

On 2020-03-23 16:03:24, user Ing. Alessandro Zivelonghi wrote:

no ambient temperature is reported in the study... ?????!!!!!

On 2020-03-24 14:01:51, user Sinai Immunol Review Project wrote:

Main findings<br /> The authors collected data on 25 COVID-19 patients (n=11 men, n=14 women) using standard laboratory tests and flow cytometry. All patients were treated with antibiotics. Twenty-four of the 25 patients were also treated with anti-viral Umefinovir and 14 of the patients were treated with corticosteroids. 14 patients became negative for the virus after 8-14 days of treatment. The same treatment course was extended to 15-23 days for patients who were still positive for the virus at day 14. <br /> The authors found a negative association between age and resolution of infection. Patients with hypertension, diabetes, malignancy or chronic liver disease were all unable to clear the virus at day 14, though not statistically significant.<br /> Elevated procalcitonin and a trend for increased IL-6 were also found in peripheral blood prior to the treatment.<br /> A trend for lower NK cell, T cell and B cell counts in patients was also reported. B cell, CD4 and CD8 T cell counts were only increased upon treatment in patients who cleared the virus. NK cell frequencies remained unchanged after treatment in all the patients.

Limitations of the study<br /> 73% of the patients who remained positive for SARS-CoV2 after the 1st treatment, and 43% of all patients who cleared the virus were treated with corticosteroids. Corticosteroids have strong effects on the immune compartment in blood{1}. The authors should have accounted for corticosteroid treatment when considering changes in T, NK and B cell frequencies.<br /> Assessing if IL-6 concentrations were back to baseline levels following treatment would have provided insights into the COVID-19 cytokine storm biology. Patients with higher baseline levels of IL-6 have been reported to have lower CD8 and CD4 T cell frequencies{2}. Correlating IL-6 with cell counts before and after treatment would thus have also been of interest.<br /> The report of the laboratory measures in table 2 is incomplete and should include the frequencies of patients with increased/decreased levels for each parameter.<br /> Correction is needed for the 1st paragraph of the discussion as data does not support NK cell restoration upon treatment in patients who cleared the virus. NK cells remain unchanged after the 1st treatment course and only seem to increase in 2 out of 6 donors after the 2nd treatment course in those patients.

Relevance<br /> Previous reports suggest an association between disease severity and elevated IL-6 or pro-calcitonin concentrations in COVID-19 patients3,4. IL-6 receptor blockade is also being administered to patients enrolled in clinical trials (NCT04317092). This report thus contributes to highlight elevated concentrations of these analytes in COVID-19 patients. Mechanisms underlying the association between viral clearance and restoration of the T cell and B cell frequencies suggests viral-driven immune dysregulation, which needs to be investigated in further studies.

References

1. The CHI Consortium et al. Effects of Systemically Administered Hydrocortisone on the Human Immunome. Sci Rep 6, 23002 (2016).
2. Zhao, Z. et al. Clinical and Laboratory Profiles of 75 Hospitalized Patients with Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Hefei, China. http://medrxiv.org/lookup/d... (2020) doi:10.1101/2020.03.01.20029785.
3. Chen, X. et al. Detectable serum SARS-CoV-2 viral load (RNAaemia) is closely associated with drastically elevated interleukin 6 (IL-6) level in critically ill COVID-19 patients.<br /> http://medrxiv.org/lookup/d... (2020) doi:10.1101/2020.02.29.20029520.
4. Lippi, G. & Plebani, M. Procalcitonin in patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): A meta-analysis. Clinica Chimica Acta 505, 190–191 (2020).

Review by Bérengère Salomé as part of a project by students, postdocs and faculty at the Immunology Institute of the Icahn school of medicine, Mount Sinai.

On 2020-03-25 03:52:12, user Renee Chan wrote:

Hi Dr Liao, Prof Zhang and Prof Zheng, May I know if you have done any fixation of the cell isolated from BAL before doing the downstream procedure using 10X genomics?

On 2020-03-26 20:05:32, user Pedro Perez wrote:

Hemoglobinas could escape for diferent PH with cloroquina

On 2020-03-29 17:21:35, user Sinai Immunol Review Project wrote:

Title: A New Predictor of Disease Severity in Patients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China

Keywords: disease severity – clinical data – Neutrophils/lymphocytes ratio – CRP – D-dimer

Main findings:<br /> 377 hospitalized patients were divided into two groups: severe and non-severe pneumonia. The laboratory results of their first day of admission were retrospectively analyzed to identify predictors of disease severity.<br /> After adjusting for confounding factors from chronic comorbidities (such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), the independent risk factors identified for severe pneumonia were age, the ratio of neutrophil/lymphocytes counts, CRP and D-dimer levels.<br /> To further increase the specificity and sensibility of these markers, they showed that their multiplication [(Neutrophil/lymphocyte count) * CRP * D-dimer] was a better predictor of disease severity, with higher sensitivity (95.7%) and specificity (63.3%), with a cutoff value of 2.68.

Limitations:This study included 377 hospitalized patients. Among them, 45.6% patients tested positive for SARS-Cov-2 nucleic acid test results, and others were included in the study based on clinically diagnosis even if the molecular diagnosis was negative. Thus, additional studies are needed to verify this on a larger number of covid-19 certified patients and the cutoff value might be adjusted. Also, all the patients that did not have the clinical characteristics of severe pneumonia were included in the non-severe pneumonia group, but usually patients are also divided into moderate and mild disease.

Also, studying different subset of lymphocytes could lead to a more specific predictor. Another study showed that the neutrophils to CD8+ T cells ratio was a strong predictor of disease severity [1]. Another more precise study showed that the percentage of helper T cells and regulatory T cells decrease but the percentage of naïve helper T cells increases in severe cases [2]. Taking these subpopulations into account might make the predictor more powerful.<br /> Other studies also noted an inverse correlation between disease severity and LDH [3] or IL6 [4] levels, but the authors here do not discuss LDH nor IL6 levels, although this could help to strengthen the predictor.

The study is based on the results obtained on the first day of admission, studying the dynamic of the changes in patients might also be interesting to better predict disease severity.

Relevance:This study confirms that the neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio can be a predictor of disease severity as shown by many others [2], [5], [6]. The novelty here is that they show that a combination with other markers can enhance the specificity and sensibility of the predictor, although the study could be improved by taking into account sub-populations of lymphocytes and more biological factors from patients such as LDH and IL6.

References:<br /> 1. Longitudinal characteristics of lymphocyte responses and cytokine profiles in the peripheral blood of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients | medRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/con.... Accessed March 29, 2020.<br /> 2. Dysregulation of immune response in patients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China | Clinical Infectious Diseases | Oxford Academic. https://academic-oup-com.do.... Accessed March 29, 2020.<br /> 3. Clinical findings in critical ill patients infected with SARS-Cov-2 in Guangdong Province, China: a multi-center, retrospective, observational study | medRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/con.... Accessed March 29, 2020.<br /> 4. Mortality of COVID-19 is Associated with Cellular Immune Function Compared to Immune Function in Chinese Han Population | medRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/con.... Accessed March 29, 2020.<br /> 5. Clinical Characteristics of 138 Hospitalized Patients With 2019 Novel Coronavirus-Infected Pneumonia in Wuhan, China. - PubMed - NCBI. https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-go.... Accessed March 29, 2020.<br /> 6. Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio Predicts Severe Illness Patients with 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the Early Stage | medRxiv. https://www.medrxiv.org/con.... Accessed March 29, 2020.

Review written by Emma Risson as part of a project of students, postdocs and faculty at the Immunology Institute of the Icahn school of medicine, Mount Sinai.

On 2020-03-30 13:40:15, user Viktor Szathmáry wrote:

This study has fundamental flaws, both in the chosen metrics as well as the stats, plus misleading visualizations.

Details: https://www.facebook.com/53...

On 2020-03-31 15:52:10, user Pedro Thompson wrote:

Is it valid to compare an Italy with a destroyed health system against a Brazil just beginning the problem? I mean, is the mortality rate a constant, in the same country during all the epidemic?

On 2020-04-01 15:52:32, user Peter Hansen wrote:

Comments.<br /> This is a very noisy signal, because data are changing very much from week to week. Current country statistics are more influence by: <br /> 1) The time where COVID-19 began to spread in each country<br /> 2) The degree of preventive measures (e.g. compare Denmark and Sweden).<br /> So all figures in the paper might look very different 2 weeks from now.

Smaller comments.<br /> Would be nice to have a table with actual data for each country, rather than just highlighting selected countries in the figures. BTW.

Where is France in Figure 2? <br /> Number of deaths per capita in France is relatively large (higher than Denmark). <br /> The BCG was mandatory in France for school children between 1950 and 2007, and for healthcare professionals between 1947 and 2010. (Whereas Denmark stopped BCG in the mid 1980s).

On 2020-04-02 02:05:24, user Jesus Bejarano wrote:

Hi, all how can I compute (or derived) the R0 from this model?

On 2020-11-25 05:08:10, user ArthurConanDoyle wrote:

Layman here, w/Covid. Wondering why you don't use sputum for greater accuracy?

Of course, it's not as easy or ubiquitous as saliva, but maybe a sample option?<br /> The major point being accuracy is almost everything, other factors count, but...

On 2020-11-27 19:55:21, user John Butler wrote:

There seems to be either something wrong with the risk calculator or the paper text. If I choose White Female age 70-74, no comorbidities, it says 18.9% higher. I take it that means "multiply the base rate time 1.189". If I switch that to "male" it reports 119.1% higher, which would, to be consistent with the female, mean "multiply the base rate times 2.191". However, if I select Hispanic Male, 80-84 with Chronic Kidney Disease, it report 601.8%, the text reports "6 times higher". All this suggests that the White Female 70-74, as an example, is inconsistent with the form of the others.

On 2020-12-01 04:48:42, user Sandeep B wrote:

Another one !

https://www.statnews.com/20...

On 2020-12-02 11:30:50, user Rafael Moraes wrote:

This preprint has been published in a peer-review journal:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242251

On 2020-12-02 20:32:21, user Roberto Etchenique wrote:

Great work !! We had done the same procedure, but a bit cruder, for City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our results for our country (not published) are coincident with these ones. https://www.medrxiv.org/con...

On 2020-12-10 00:06:10, user Amandeep Goyal wrote:

What kind of scores or testing was used to diagnose polyneuropathy ?

What tests were used if polyneuropathy was due to Diabetes or Amyloidosis ?

On 2020-12-10 17:00:23, user Susan Bewley wrote:

Thanks Russell & team. Would it be possible for you to share the following on #medRxiv too? (i) the research information leaflet you describe, (ii) the informed consent form, (iii) the statistical plan mentioned as S2. Best wishes

On 2020-12-14 08:49:55, user Patrick Schmidt wrote:

Interesting connection between network models and standard inference on contact tracing data.

I have a paper showing that the tendency of superspreading can be estimated without contact tracing data from aggregated surveillance data alone. In line with the results here, I estimate a dispersion of 0.61 (95%-CI: [0.49, 0.77]) for Germany in spring 2020.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011....

On 2020-12-20 22:06:38, user Sam Smith wrote:

Is it possible to begin this treatment too early or too late, or to continue for too long?

On 2020-12-29 00:37:11, user Olga Matveeva wrote:

Several recent preprints support some of this manuscript findings.<br /> 1. Authors from Sweden and China in a study entitled “Pulmonary stromal expansion and intra-alveolar coagulation are primary causes of Covid-19 death” demonstrated that “The virus was replicating in the pneumocytes and macrophages but not in bronchial epithelium, endothelial, pericytes or stromal cells. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202...<br /> 2. Researchers in Brasil investigated SARS-CoV-2 infection of PBMCs and found that in vitro infection of whole PBMCs from healthy donors was productive of virus progeny. They also found that “SARS-CoV-2 was frequently detected in monocytes and B lymphocytes from COVID-19 patients, and less frequently in CD4+T lymphocytes” The preprint is entitled “Infection of human lymphomononuclear cells by SARS-CoV-2”. <br /> doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202...<br /> 3. SARS-CoV-2 infection of macrophages and some other immune cells in deceased patients was suggested in other autopsy related preprint entitled “Broad SARS-CoV-2 cell tropism and immunopathology in lung tissues from fatal COVID-19” doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202... The study was done by US researchers from Pittsburgh. <br /> 4. Researchers in France demonstrated “that SARS-CoV-2 efficiently infects monocytes and macrophages without any cytopathic effect.” Their findings are reported in the preprint entitled “Monocytes and macrophages, targets of SARS-CoV-2: the clue for Covid-19 immunoparalysis” doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/202...

On 2020-12-29 21:12:44, user Meerwind7 wrote:

It seems these evaluations assume that all non-pharmaceutical intervention and prevention measures (e.g. masks and “lockdowns”) would be abolished once the vaccinations start. In a different approach, these measure would be upheld for a while, for example such as to limit prevalence to a certain level for some time, or to limit the number of overall deaths. One such target could be called “partial herd immunity”, which is achieved when the combination of partial vaccination and some amount of precaution measures would in combination be sufficient to assure the reproduction factor not to exceed 1 or to achieve quick shrinking of infection numbers. The combination of some vaccine plus non-pharmaceutical interventions thus would have an effect similar to full herd immunity that is achieved when recurrent infection is avoided with fully “normal” life.

If there was only one type and scope of non-pharmaceutical intervention, an objective could be formulated as “how to minimize the duration of that intervention, when a certain maximum number of deaths (or of severe illness) shall be maintained”, taking into account vaccine doses become available slowly or other restrictions apply. A further objective should be to minimize or cap the number of vaccinated persons that are exposed to virus, because each such expose gives mutants an opportunity to break the barrier from vaccination, just like an evolutionary training.

It would also be possible to optimize vaccine distribution and non-pharmaceutical intervention while setting a target for a particular age group. Even if an upper limit of the death count of, for example, people of 75+ years was a binding target, and some non-pharmaceutical intervention is available, it may be better to vaccinate younger people first, to reduce overall transmission more quickly and then be able to “open” the society quicker, than if 75+ obtain vaccine first.

In further modeling, the extent (effect strength) of the non-phamaceutical measure could be gradually increased, while maintaining a goal like low nomber of overall deaths, lost lifetime or deaths of old people. I believe there could be some point where the results suddenly switch from vaccines for the old to vaccines for the young, and that beyond that point, the duration of the intervention could suddenly be reduced in a non-continuous way while upholding aggregate goals.

On 2020-12-30 01:49:12, user Franko Ku wrote:

Perhaps you should start over based on others' comments..<br /> Only one dose? Should be calcifediol?<br /> What were measured levels of Vit, D in those that received placebo?<br /> Many other studies show those with very low hormone (not a "vitamin" D have much more risk of dying.<br /> https://www.researchsquare....<br /> https://link.springer.com/a...<br /> https://www.sciencedirect.c...<br /> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...<br /> https://medium.com/microbia...

Needed for Prevention - your paper will prevent some from supplementing as Dr Fauci said he does.:<br /> https://www.healthline.com/...

On 2020-11-18 16:18:54, user LB wrote:

Please add, in the Limitations, a comment about the fact that, "The mean time between the onset of symptoms and randomization was 10.2 days." It is quite possible that by the time the vitamin D levels were raised, the "cytokine storm" was already well underway. Thank you!

On 2020-11-19 15:54:00, user Lorenzu Borsche wrote:

Hello, this sentence:

Subsequently, we calculated sample size assuming a 50% between-group difference in hospital length of stay (considering 7 days as a median time of stay, with an expected variability of 9 days).

to me is not quite clear: do you mean, that you preset a desired length of stay to 7 days and the grouped the data so that both groups fit these 7 days? Thus did you mean a 50:50 distribution wrt the 7 days? If so, this cannot be done without distorting the data. If not, please explain, TIA Lorenz Borsche

On 2020-11-28 13:16:44, user Angie wrote:

The description of the amount of vitamin D used doesn't account for the mistake made in calculating vitamin D needs, nor is that mistake discussed in the article. In addition, making active forms of VitD from what is ingested is not an instant magic process. A body under attack may lack the energy to carry it out. Maybe it's just giving something by a pill is ineffective right now. What if you did transdermal? That would avoid the stomach/gut which is a place we know the virus attacks. Also vitamin D doesn't act alone. A person in ICU may not get a lot of vitK and may even be on anti-K blood thinners if they are a stroke risk. How many patients were on Lovenox vs something that thins blood via the vitamin K route? A daily exposure to a UV lamp may be more efficient for providing Vitamin D.

Anyway, the point is, I am not convinced that this test was properly done with reference to vitamin D. It takes weeks to normalize vitamin D in tissues where it is needed. Just testing the blood level after you gave a bolus pill is lying to yourself. It's like adding dye to water and saying, look, the sand at the bottom of the river turned all blue, we can assume it goes deep. What's the vitamin D status of hepatocytes after the one pill you gave? How much enzyme activity was there in the kidney to activate the D you gave?

Giving someone a vitamin is not like giving them a drug. The vitamin has to go to the tissues and do its work. You're thinking far too simplistically. VitaD affects thousands of reactions in the body and is not actively excreted as if it were an invader. That's nothing like a drug. Vitamins aren't drugs, that goes double for the fat soluble ones.

On 2020-12-24 23:19:01, user Matthias Fax wrote:

By design, this study could only fail to meet its hypothesis. It only proves what was to be expected. They used inappropriate dosage in oral form. They accepted an inappropriate delay after onset of symptoms. They didn't mention the significance of 25OHD sufficiency for patient outcome, indicating that the oral dosage was given too late to be of any immunological use.

On 2020-11-18 12:16:47, user Robin Whittle wrote:

I did not see any mention about how long after supplementation the 25OHD levels were tested. D3 takes some days to be converted in the liver to circulating 25OHD.

Since the intervention was with already-hospitalised patients, on average 10 days after their symptoms began - and with 25OHD levels rising over a period days, with the average length of stay about 7 days, this intervention may have been too late, and perhaps too little.

In the Cordoba trial (Castillo et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.j... "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsbmb.2020.105751)") 0.532 mg 25OHD calcifediol would have raised 25OHD levels within a few hours, probably above 100ng/ml on average - if one extrapolates from the curve shown for 0.266mg (a single Hidroferol capsule, of which two were used in Cordoba) in this patent: https://patents.google.com/... This greatly reduced the need for intensive care and eliminated deaths.

Since hospitalised COVID-19 patients have an extremely urgent need for raised 25OHD levels, so the autocrine signaling systems of their immune cells and many other cell types can function properly (McGregor et al. https://www.biorxiv.org/con... "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.18.210161v1)"), a combination of 25OHD calcifediol with bolus D3 may prove more effective than either treatment alone. The bolus D3 would sustain 25OHD levels for weeks, and the D3 itself may protect the endothelium (Gibson et al. https://doi.org/10.1371/jou... "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140370)").

On 2021-01-05 22:41:19, user Troy Richlen wrote:

An important variable that this and other studies have not been able to adequately incorporate into this analysis is the effect of comorbidities on life expectancy of COVID-19 deaths which is due to a lack of appropriate statistical information.<<<br /> This is calculating the delta of the age of death due to Covid versus the average age of death for the population not the population of people who average 2.6 comorbidities. People who are obese, have diabetes and other significant health issues also will have a negative offset from the average age of death.

On 2021-01-15 14:43:05, user Rafael M wrote:

I would like to know the false positivity of PCR compare with the result published by the press .

On 2020-09-11 14:12:07, user Kamran Kadkhoda wrote:

Great paper but it is pivotal to highlight that correlate of protection is ONLY inferred from prospective vaccine efficacy trials instead of from convalescent cases... <br /> The inflation in MBC population shown here may very well partly be from the common CoVs

On 2020-09-13 07:31:07, user OxImmuno Literature Initiative wrote:

https://www.immunology.ox.a...

On 2020-09-14 11:45:41, user Andrew Boswell ???????????? wrote:

"We found that an increase of only 1 ????g/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate"

Is your COVID evidence actually reflecting a more general extreme sensitivity to PMs across underlying respiratory conditions which has been detected through the lense of the COVID research. I found this tweet (https://twitter.com/AliNour... "https://twitter.com/AliNouriPhD/status/1296554508684754945?s=20)") where Dr Ali Nouri says that the same effect has also been observed for other respiratory viruses like Influenza and SARS-1, and reflects the impacts of PMs to the underlying respiratory and cardiac system.

Have you looked into this with your research?

Is there other studies out there which suggests COVID is a lense to see other more underlying effects?

On 2020-09-16 21:36:10, user Qunfeng Dong wrote:

An updated version of this manuscript is now accepted for publication at JAMIA (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association)

On 2020-09-17 11:50:43, user Brian Kennedy wrote:

Semi - comment, also a question.

I am an economist living in Bangkok, Thailand, so this is pretty far out of my area of expertise. Thailand was the first country to get the virus outside China, but it never took off here, at this date still less than 4,000 total cases, and 60 deaths. I think there were a variety of things that led to this, but clearly early and near universal mask usage was part of it.

Your paper looks very interesting, but I could not really follow all the math. So I will trust you on it :)

My question is one of emphasis by public health officials in the U.S. Why has there not been a push on the issue of Viral Load? It seems to me that it is very important concept - even if using the mask doesn't always prevent you from getting infected, it will still reduce the viral load, giving your body more time to deal with the virus, significantly increasing your bodies chances of fighting it off.

Why has this issue been (it seems to me) largely absent from the public sphere, and from the arguments public health officials use to promote mask usage? Note if it has been there and I am missing it from far away, just say so.

Thank you for helping a laymen in your field understand :)

On 2020-09-22 20:47:31, user Scandinavian Journal wrote:

Outpatient treatment has not been the focus of almost any clinical study and this may be among the first that examine the side effects. <br /> Since the doses are very low for the hydroxychloroquine in early treatment it is no surprise that side effects is less of an issue. <br /> In fact a popular treatment is where zinc is the active component that slows virus replication and where the role of hydroxychloroquine is to act as a so called zinc ‘ionophore’ where it works to increase zinc uptake into cells. Early treatment really show so much potential and where the alarms of danger seems based on improper data for outpatient use.

Those hospital studies that gave overdose treatments to seriously ill patients showed several side effects and was incorrectly taken to represent the risks for ALL Covid-19 usage.

On 2020-09-24 14:24:26, user Uri Goldsztejn wrote:

The source code is available on Github:<br /> https://github.com/uri-gold...

On 2020-09-28 09:44:58, user markd wrote:

• very low copies number for air samples, would like to know the LOD for the detection method(s)
• 300l/' x 10' = 3mc, 50l/' x 10' = 0.5mc - why didn't you keep analysis volume the same across sites/samplers?
• can you report on the state/condition of ventilation in the sampled rooms?

On 2020-09-29 09:17:54, user Carlo Wilke wrote:

The article has been published in EMBO Molecular Medicine:

Wilke, C. et al. Neurofilaments in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3: blood biomarkers at the preataxic and ataxic stage in humans and mice. EMBO Mol Med, 2020.<br /> https://doi.org/10.15252/em...

On 2020-09-30 15:25:51, user Sinai Immunol Review Project wrote:

Very interesting paper!

Main Findings<br /> In this preprint, Zietz and Tatonetti explore the relationship between blood type and risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, disease severity, and mortality. Using data from the electronic health records (EHR) of 1,559 patients who presented with suspected COVID-19 (with only 682 who tested SARS-CoV-2 positive) at New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYP), they analyzed four outcome pairs. Two pairs were used to test risk for infection: i) positive for infection vs negative for infection and ii) positive for infection vs general patient population. Another pair was used to test for infection severity: iii) positive patients intubated (179) vs positive patients not intubated. The last pair was used to test risk of infection-related death: iv) deceased vs surviving patients. As a measure of exposure, they used ABO blood type (A, B, AB, or O) alone or with Rh factor. In total, they generated eight contingency tables, two for each outcome pair, one with Rh and one without. Blood type was found to be significantly associated with SARS-CoV-2 infectivity after chi-squared analysis of positively vs negatively tested patients (p=0.006 for ABO system and p=0.031 for ABO+Rh system). To identify specific blood types that may predict viral test outcomes, they specifically tested each blood type against those of a different blood type for all four outcome pairs tested in the chi-squared analysis. Fisher-exact test showed that a significantly higher proportion of patients with the blood type A tested positive for the virus, and a lower proportion of patients with O and AB tested positive (p=0.009, 0.036, 0,033 respectively). When the Rh factor was included in the analysis, Rh-positive patients with the blood type A were at a 38.2% higher risk for testing positive (p=0.004), while those with the blood type O were at a 21.0% lower risk (p=0.024). Furthermore, they performed a meta-analysis by pooling data from NYP and Zhao et al’s data from China, which substantiated the findings on blood types A and O in a random-effects analysis that compared the positively infected patients with the general populations of NYP (USA), Wuhan, and Shenzhen (China) (OR=1.164, p=0.0291, for A, and OR=0.7252, p=0.0012 for O). This analysis also revealed a new increased risk of testing positive for those with blood type B (OR=1.1101, p=0.0361). Logistic regression models confirmed that although other risk factors such as diabetes, age, and obesity correlate with certain blood types, adding the blood type as a variable to the model significantly strengthens the prediction for SARS-CoV-2 positive versus negative outcome. On the other hand, blood type was not found to be a risk factor for disease severity or mortality in any of the analyses.

Limitations<br /> The study should be considered in the context of its limitations. Firstly, blood type-disease association was significant when comparing patients who tested positively for COVID-19 to those who tested negative, but the result was not replicated when comparing positively-tested patients to the general patient population. As the authors note, only a specific population received testing for COVID-19 while the majority of the patients in the EHR system were never tested, which could explain the discrepancy. Another related limitation is that the sample meant to be representative of the general population consisted only of people in NYP’s EHR database, which may be biased toward a specific population, and it is therefore unclear if the results would replicate in another cohort. Additionally, the finding that AB blood type is associated with lower risk of infection can only be taken as preliminary; the sample size was quite small (only 4.4% of the cohort had that blood type), and the result was not replicated in the meta-analysis with the data from China. Furthermore, the analyses that included Rh factor, the sample sizes for all Rh-negative subtypes were also small, and there were no patients with AB-negative blood who tested positive for the virus. This highlights the necessity for larger cohorts from multiple sites, but the preliminary results are promising.

Significance<br /> This preprint on NYP patients supports the previous results by Zhao et al on Chinese Wuhan and Shenzen patients that showed that individuals with the blood type A are at a greater risk of testing positive while those with type O are at a lower risk. As the authors reported, blood type distribution is different in NYP than in China, this substantiates their results and indicates it may be replicable in other geographical and ethnic populations despite blood type heterogeneity. Furthermore, they provide a more detailed picture through a meta-analysis with both NYP and China data, and include the Rh factor in the NYP analysis. Notably, they introduce new findings: a decreased risk for testing positive for those with AB blood in the NYP-only analysis, and an increased risk in those with blood type B in the pooled analysis. With the use of convalescent serum as a disease therapeutic, the knowledge that those with A-positive and B blood types may be at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19 can help ensure that sufficient amounts of plasma donors are compatible with that blood type. Finally, the study shows that blood type is not a significant predictor of disease prognosis in those infected with SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the need for other immunological and serological predictors of disease severity and mortality.

Credit<br /> Reviewed by Miriam Saffern as part of a project by students, postdocs and faculty at the Immunology Institute of the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai.

On 2020-09-30 16:10:46, user Dan Housman wrote:

The paper is interesting although I would have expected to see some associations between genetic SNPs/genes etc, and certain 'eating types'. There is only one mention I saw of a single gene. Is that type of analysis in the works? I'd be interested to see such an association study.

On 2020-10-06 12:01:01, user Jani Ruotsalainen wrote:

I'm teaching systematic review methods on two occasions this autumn and I'm using this article as an example to be evaluated using the AMSTAR II tool. And yes, I'm doing this even though the authors do not in fact identify their work as a systematic review. My point is to show how a meta-analysis (MA) without all the supporting structures of a thorough systematic review does not really make much sense. AMSTAR II has 16 domains that one scores Yes or No. In some cases it also allows also Partial yes and some items might not be applicable when a review does not include MA. However, in the end there is no overall sum score. Anyway, according to my assessment, the manuscript as it is now scored two instances of Yes and fourteen instances of No. In other words, it didn't do too well. The biggest cause of problems is, in my opinion, the lack of a protocol published a priori that would have established the methods to be used in sufficient detail. Now it is impossible to tell if the authors deviated from their original plans along the way and what effect this might have had on their findings. Other problems include not using a satisfactory technique to assess the risk of bias of results extracted from included studies or its possible effects on results obtained with MA. The description of included studies is minimal and the description of excluded studies is nonexistent. There are also issues with the MA itself (proficiently examined by Jesper Kivelä on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JesperK... "https://twitter.com/JesperKivela/status/1291697936842338305)") and more. I'm happy to share my full assessment with the authors.

On 2020-10-06 15:42:18, user T_Rogers wrote:

How do we know that NR was the effective factor?? Perhaps it was the other ingredients in the mixture. Also, only 71 patients with mean age of 35 and limited to no co-morbidities. IOW, exactly the profile that would be expected to recover. So, good result, but inconclusive as to efficacy of NR.

On 2020-10-07 11:50:31, user Zed wrote:

it is confirming this meta-analysis published in CMI: https://www.clinicalmicrobi...

Maybe authors can discuss the main differences and/or similarity?

On 2020-10-09 12:40:32, user Zed wrote:

ooh nice paper ! <br /> The conclusion is pretty much similar to this meta-analysis: https://www.clinicalmicrobi...

On 2020-10-14 20:35:53, user BannedbyN4stickingup4Marjolein wrote:

If "A fraction of the population may also already be intrinsically resistant to infection as a consequence of high functioning innate immunity" as the paper claim, how is it that infection rates of c. 85%, with the potential to rise further upon further exposure (for example https://www.medrxiv.org/con... "https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.13.20173161v1)"), have been observed in homogenous populations?

Such phenomena should surely be referenced in the authors' discussion, without which an entirely theoretical model such as that produced is perhaps an unreliable basis upon which to formulate policy prescriptions.

There is also a recent paper commenting on cross-immunity (https://www.nature.com/arti... "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00460-4)") the conclusions of which the authors should carefully consider.

On 2020-10-16 12:16:12, user Torbjørn Wisløff wrote:

I would seriously consider revisiting the analyses. In Figure 2c, the RR of 1.00 seems not to correspond with the somewhat diverging curves. In Figure 2a, on the other hand, the RR is 0.95, but the curves follow each other very closely.

On 2020-10-17 15:54:52, user Dan Myers wrote:

The results make sense, actually. Antivirals are usually not as useful unless used early.

On 2020-10-18 07:14:28, user Robert Clark wrote:

A key comparison was left out of the report, the effect of HCQ on patients specifically under invasive mechanical ventilation. This is a key category beyond just being “ventilated”. This is when the lung inflammation is so severe the patients have to be intubated, i.e., given a breathing tube inserted down the throat.

HCQ is a highly effective anti-inflammatory. Then it would be this case where it would be most effective for hospitalized patients. Note that the study was primarily focused on these drugs anti-viral effects. HCQ is the only one of them that also has an anti-inflammatory effect. Indeed it may be the only drug among all those being considered for COVID-19 that has both characteristics.

Note that in the RECOVERY trial it was specifically for THIS type of ventilation that the steroid dexamethasone was found to cut mortality, via its anti-inflammatory effect.

But in Table S1 of the Supplementary file to this SOLIDARITY report it states the “ventilation” discussed includes both invasive and non-invasive types:

Table S1

The authors need to add to the report the effect of HCQ specifically for patients under invasive mechanical ventilation.

BTW, the report does show the result of Remdesivir on invasive mechanical ventilation patients in Fig. 3 of the report itself, showing null effect. But this was not a useful set of data anyway because Remdesivir does not have an anti-inflammatory effect.

The more important and relevant case of HCQ was not shown.

Robert Clark

On 2020-10-16 12:17:32, user Criticical Opinion wrote:

Unfortunately it is not clear if there was a difference between a diagnosis of OSA vs treatment for OSA, severity or degree of OSA, or type of treatment for OSA. Without this information, the utility of these findings is questionable at best.

On 2020-10-18 04:17:11, user C Jones wrote:

My family has used the self-administered oral swab at an LA City Covid testing site each time we've tested.<br /> My son (19 yrs) tested last Friday 10/09 & received Negative result.<br /> He was out late on Saturday & I had him retest on Monday 10/12, and he received a Positive result.<br /> He tested again yesterday 10/16 and received a Negative result.<br /> His father & I both tested on 10/09, 10/14, and 10/16 - all results Negative.<br /> Very confusing. How do we proceed?

On 2020-10-20 17:57:35, user Dinofelis wrote:

It is strange to conclude that one observes statistically significant "<br /> PCR negativity in intervention and control groups were (day 7, 182 (52.1%) vs. 54 (35.7%) (P value = 0.001)"and concludes that there is no effect.

Let us remember that statistical non-significance of rejection of H0 is not equivalent to proof of absence of effect. It simply means that the test didn't have enough power to prove anything.

In order to prove absence of effect, one needs to reject with statistical significance the hypothesis that the effect is larger than a given threshold.

I have seen many papers confusing "statistical absence of significance" with "proof of H0".

On 2020-10-31 12:07:38, user Scandinavian Journal wrote:

One issue not talked about much is that a normal HCQ dose as per on the package is not considered lethal, has been around for 50 years with good reliability and costs a few dollars for a package. If I caught the virus would I decide that this is useless because some study say so while others say it is effective ? I would of course put myself under this treatment.<br /> If it is useless well what damage did it do. If it was effective it may have saved my life or made the disease progression milder. For a few dollars. Easy choice.

On 2020-10-21 14:08:08, user Darren Brown; HIV Physiotherap wrote:

The EUROQoL EQ-5D-5L self-reported health related quality of life (HRQOL) measurement tool has been used for statistical purposes, however this baseline data of EQ-5D-5L scores across 5 domains (health status) and index value are not reported. This would be useful data to understand the HRQoL of the sample, with respect to population normative data (https://euroqol.org/eq-5d-i... "https://euroqol.org/eq-5d-instruments/eq-5d-5l-about/population-norms/)").

On 2020-10-21 19:18:46, user Alan Wilson wrote:

I would recommend the authors to check other recently published ASRM abstracts in the topic:

https://www.fertstert.org/a...

https://www.fertstert.org/a...

On 2020-10-23 11:44:52, user Alexander Samuel wrote:

Dear authors,

I fully agree with your introduction, discussion, and everything is done correctly in this paper. After scientific misconducts from Gautret et al. in Didier Raoult's IHU Marseille, and its transfer to USA through J. Todaro followed by Zev Zelenko's strange comments, there is clearly a situation that went out of control about hydroxychloroquine.

My comment on your work is that Recovery + Solidarity weight almost for 90% of the results, In a meta-analysis, I expect a significant effect of all (or most) studies, here it seems like the results are a new read of Recovery + Solidary, with comments on very low weighted unpublished or published clinical trials. Of course, authors mention that there is still no effect in the absence of Recovery, indirectly (published vs unpublished, high dose vs low dose). I think it would be important to not just make a "second read of recovery data" (exagerated statement, sorry for the way it is said). The discussion on the difference between high / low dose is what interested me most in your paper, and would be worth more comments or even analysis.

I would suggest more theoretical molecular biology bibliography (molecular effects of HCQ might reduce the immune reaction more than affect viral cell entry), more introduction elements on in vitro data (which clearly did not favor HCQ that much) for the next effort mentioned in this paper !

Anyways, this is a good paper since it is very honest and shows data properly, congratulations for this work.

Best regards.

On 2020-10-26 00:13:04, user Mahdi Rezaei wrote:

The accepted and peer-reviewed version of the article is now available via open-access Journal of Applied Sciences. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/app...

On 2020-10-27 03:12:46, user Critical Dissection 2 wrote:

Dear authors,

First I just want to say I think that it was great you pursued such an important topic. There were a lot of good things about your article like your clear abstract that very well laid out the different parts of the paper and the main summary of each section. I also like that you laid out the limitations of your study and how they should be solved for in further investigation of this topic. However, there is still some room for improvement in this paper. I thought that the introduction could use more background to contextualize the issue and put some scope into it to explain why people should expand upon your results and see if the data is helpful in the future. I also think that the figures need more explanation in the results section, unless a highly experienced physician is reading it, it is a little hard to tell what we are supposed to be looking at and drawing from the figure that supports your hypothesis. There was also an emphasis drawn between the two patients whose ablation was done with a little more targeting of certain factors compared to patients who underwent standard ablations that was only mentioned in the discussion but is a great point that I think should be brought up earlier maybe somewhere in the results section. I think with these changes you will have a good paper.

On 2020-10-27 16:42:24, user Kamran Kadkhoda wrote:

Again no good panel of confirmed common CoVs to exclude cross-reactivity especially to an Ab like IgM with poor affinity maturation.

On 2020-10-28 08:35:30, user Rasmus Skov Husted wrote:

The final peer reviewed article is published open access - please follow this link: https://bit.ly/3mrLlvZ

On 2020-10-28 16:35:38, user Edsard wrote:

I think we have a chicken and egg issue here. Your pollen theory is pretty good but also the reason why scientist always say: Correlation is not causation. Your pollen is the result of the weather (temperature and humidity, which has explained seasonality of the flu for 10 years already). Here is our paper. https://www.medrxiv.org/con...

On 2020-10-28 17:53:21, user Sam Wheeler wrote:

It it so that non-vaccinated hospital personnel are forced to wear a mask almost all the time to prevent flu, so the protection of flu vaccine is even greater than this study tells?

On 2020-10-30 17:10:52, user gatwood wrote:

I suspect there could be a strong corellation between vaccination status and following a strict adherence to all COVID anti-infection guidelines, PPE etc... Experienced and medically trained Drs and nurses more likely have been vaccinated and also are more likely to follow PPE wearing and careful anti-infection routines. Support staff (food service, assistants and claening staff) with less formal medical training and understanding of infection are probably less likely to be vacinnated and also may be less likely to carefully employ all technical anti-infection measures. Would this account for the vaccinated folks having less COVID infection?

On 2020-10-31 07:52:03, user Robert Eibl wrote:

This looks interesting, although there are a few caveats mentioned in the paper. Nevertheless, it should be possible almost everywhere, and even restrospectively, to check the vaccination status of Covid-19 patients, not only for influenza - and compare this with the average vaccination status of a whole country. Then it should be immediately clear, if there is a major benefit.

On 2020-10-29 15:18:11, user bljog wrote:

In the results you mention "A cluster of sequences in clade 20A has an ad- ditional mutation S:A222V colored in blue" but the Figure 1 has an annotation in blue for S477N.

On 2020-11-03 23:04:46, user David Markun wrote:

Nice study. Copy edit: " If we instead look after September 1, 2002" should refer to 2020.

On 2020-11-04 14:41:47, user Rodrigo Quiroga wrote:

Are´t these results expected regardless of children´s proneness to infection and infectivity? Up until August, the time periods with open schools were also periods with low viral propagation in the UK.

Wouldn´t the interesting period to observe with such an analysis be precisely August-November, with open schools and increasing case numbers?

On 2020-11-05 12:26:14, user Sandra Chydé wrote:

Dear authors,

You are citing one of my papers (reference 15) in a misleading way here : " There are concerns that the use of e-cigarettes in never-smokers may increase the probability that they will try combustible tobacco cigarettes and go on to become regular smokers, particularly among youth and young adults [13-15].".

First, our methodology focused ONLY on ever-smokers aged 17 having experimented with e-cigarette.

Second, we found that in this population of 17 yo, among ever-smokers, those who declared having ever used e-cigarettes were LESS likely than those who did not to transition to daily smoking at 17: RR =0.62 95 %CI [0.60 – 0.64].

This analysis is strongly robust and relies on a sample of 21,401 respondents.

Best,

Sandra Chyderiotis, Pharm.D, MPH

On 2020-11-07 10:32:09, user Ivan Ivanov wrote:

They will never share the primer sequences as the test is being commercialized already. The idea is interesting however I cannot imagine the price for 500ul LAMP reaction. Also what's the point to put DNase and carrier DNA together in the mastermix.

On 2020-11-14 02:00:10, user Melimelo wrote:

Hi, very interesting article. Which software did you use for initial qualitative coding and subsequent text mining? are there particular commands or functions in a given software package that were useful? are you sharing your code anywhere (eg github?)

On 2020-11-14 04:23:20, user Rich Kibbee wrote:

Error, this pdf lists a Centricon 70 Plus 100 kDa filter ...the first version lists it at 10 kDa.

On 2020-11-15 21:48:01, user Ands Hofs wrote:

We in germany do re-testing of positives on a regular basis, and the result is that false-positive diagnostic findings that are actually filed to the patient are in the range of 0,001 %. Even if testing activity of healthy subject was high up to September, the number of people that had a wrong test result is something like a handful a week and totally acceptable in the face of the alternative. Especially since one does a second test some days later.

But right now we have positive testing of 25% of samples in Frankfurt (Main),e.g., just mentioning this to get the perspective right, water is rising above neck to the lips...

A few people (like 1-5%) mentally infect 30% insecure anxious people here, damaging our wakefulness to keep our viruses for ourselves, prohibiting smart distancing to be practice in private contexts, behind closed doors in companies and among friends and neighbors all the same, and this is making the 2nd lockdown necessary.

And causing thousands of deaths not necessary when they would obey the democratic decision: we do not want to do triage. We want to keep the numbers low. We want to keep our viruses to ourselves. We do not want to have unnecessary lockdowns burning away existences, jobs, money... But what choices do we have?

Since we wasted the summer where we had the chance to get incidence real low.

Now the only thing that can save our neck is a (pre-) test that is really free for everyone, and MIT has one: https://digitalreality.ieee...

Every one writing about false positives should weigh his words thoroughly.<br /> Not the rate of one single test method is what people want to know. <br /> They want to have approved quality testing and numbers for "their" lab.

These numbers are there in every German lab, since they are obliged to certify every test they offer and to take part in Ring Tests where labs and their certified tests are tested. This is done by sending a lab unknown but specially prepared samples that each lab has to let run through the lab on a regular basis. This also is done to get quantitative tests to comparable levels between labs.

Comparable Levels for Covid-19-Infected patients:<br /> It is a pity that we do not let some piece of human DNA normally found from throat swabs run together with the Sars-CoV2 Test on a regular basis, resulting in viral units per human DNA count, because this would enable us to estimate the viral load at the place where the sample was taken. It would outrun many variabilities that occur when taking samples that affect the amount of material gained in the sampling process, and one could monitor viral loads across the time line for each infection with high therapeutic value. <br /> I'm so curious if someone has done this with the gargling method for probing, since here the local variability in infection density is not playing any role any more, as is the case for the question how infectious one could be in a certain state of the infection.

Boston children hospital has done this in their study on viral loads in children, where for the first time it was found that children, regardless if having symptoms or not, have viral loads like heavily ill adults. <br /> Since their lungs are smaller proportional to their age and development, of course the net amount of aerosols produced by a small child e.g. up to 8 or 10 years is smaller ( - but proportional to the loudness of their voices ;)) <br /> Still - starting with 11 or 12 years, it starts to reach adult levels, meaning we must do DIY patchwork air ventilation with heat recovery mechanisms out of vapor barrier film and 2 vents in schools or let the pupils sit in the cold of fresh air or 8hrs / day under some masks that muffle sound (many innovative ideas for DIY masks are asked here for).<br /> I like the nordic approach either to do home schooling or do classes under the trees for the younger ones, leaving a lot of space in the school for elderly pupils, especially in classes wanting to have their final exams ;)

Andi

On 2020-11-20 16:49:15, user Jean Kaweskars wrote:

Hello,

Your figures are not consistent.<br /> If you have 11% IFR for 80-90-year-old subjects who represent 6,3% of France population (> 80 years old), it does translate into a minimum of 0,69% overall IFR. If you apply your IFR rates by age, you would actually get an overall 0,91% IFR at minimum.

Regards

On 2020-11-25 15:49:17, user James Wyatt wrote:

In the discussion of weaknesses, you failed to mention that you eliminated approximately 1/3 of the cases for lack of complete data. Did you study these cases to see if their exclusion could possibly have biased your results? What was the crude death rate among these cases?

In Table 1, the disparity between mortality rates per 100k population is solely a function of the difference in incidence rates. That's significant, for sure, but the fact that CFR is the same for whites and blacks is also significant. In its rawest state, that indicates that, once someone is sick, race seems not to matter in the outcome. Doesn't that bear some discussion?

How did you determine cause of death? Covid-19 is rarely the sole cause when death certificates are completed competently and there is some judgment required to clearly identify a covid death. As follow-ups, were there non-Covid-19 deaths in your data? How were they identified? If there were none, can you justify that?

In mortality studies, the key question often is: How did you calculate the exposure? That is, how did you determine the denominators for your ratios? You reference some models, but you give no details.

The paper needs a lot more work, don't you agree?

On 2020-11-25 19:54:26, user Puya Dehgani-Mobaraki wrote:

Interesting data, which are also seen on our study were the persistency of the antibodies were detected and persisted during 8 months.

https://www.medrxiv.org/con...

I do would like to have more informations in regards of the patients selection for the 8 months analysis.<br /> Our cohort was based in patients resulted positive for Sara-Cov-2 early days of March, Italy. As far as my knowledge, very few cases were reported in Australia at that time.<br /> Puya Dehgani-Mobaraki

On 2020-12-04 13:43:42, user Ben Finn wrote:

Why does the paper make no mention at all of the large risk differences between sexes & races? (Men, Black and most Asian people have 2+ times COVID mortality of others.) Straightforward to model. Without considering this it can’t claim to be an ‘optimal vaccination strategy’.

On 2020-12-04 20:45:12, user Sam Wheeler wrote:

Is the full text possible to read as HTML somewhere? I did find the PDF.

On 2020-12-08 09:28:26, user Neville Calleja wrote:

Obviously the people receiving the influenza vaccine are (a) the most at risk of dying with COVID-19, either as an underlying cause of death, or as a contributory cause, and (b) more likely to be coming from affluent countries wherein identification of deaths as a COVID-related death is much more likely due to enough resources permitting testing of all patients. The latter could have been corrected by using excess mortality figures rather than reported COVID-19 deaths, which is highly dependent on the countries' capacity to test. Nonetheless, the first clearly explains the findings completely wherein countries with high life expectancy and therefore high proportion of elderly population with co-morbidities who are typically protected in winter using the influenza vaccines, could not be protected from COVID-19. This could be considered a correlational study at best.

On 2020-12-08 11:30:27, user Abdur Rahman wrote:

This preprint is accepted for publication, and the new link is: <br /> https://onlinelibrary.wiley...