Late last year, partly out of self-interest, and partly altruistically, I decided to enrol in a covid-19 vaccine trial. What I didn’t realise back then, with the second covid-19 wave just about to break, was that the decision would ultimately land me in a bureaucratic and administrative black hole, unable to officially prove my vaccination status, and with no certainty as to when I will be able to do so. 

NHS US healthcare South Asia China Patient and public perspectives More … Access thebmj.com - Left in limbo—barriers to covid “passports” for trial participants will deter people from taking part in research

New study shows animals were often butchered on site in markets and stored in cramped, unhygienic conditions

Over 47,000 Wild Animals Sold in Wuhan Markets Before Covid Outbreak, Study Shows

Since vaccines to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were first approved only months ago, more than 40% of people living in the United States have received at least one dose. But in nations like Mozambique, Namibia, and Sudan, that number is closer to 2%. So far, the World Health Organization’s vaccine-sharing initiative, COVAX, has failed to close the gap.  President Biden recently came out in support of international efforts to convince the World Health Organization to lift intellectual property restrictions in order to allow local manufacturers to produce generic versions of the life-saving drugs.

Waiving COVID vaccine patent rights? It’s complicated

doi:10.1126/science.abj2912

Vaccine regulators have delivered a clear verdict: In most settings, the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) far outweigh the small risk they will cause an unusual and sometimes deadly clotting disorder. But many questions remain about who is most at risk, how the risk-benefit calculus changes when cases fall, and what the side effects mean for the future of these vaccines, which use adenoviruses to ferry the gene for SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein into human cells.

What’s the future of vaccines linked to rare clotting disorders? Science breaks down the latest

10.31234/osf.io/78kma

Does boredom increase risk behaviors in real-world settings, and if so, might it contribute to failure to comply with public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic? In a large cross-national sample of 63,336 community respondents from 116 countries, we examined the prevalence of lockdown-related boredom during the initial outbreak of COVID-19, as well as its demographic and situational predictors. Boredom was higher in countries with more COVID-19 cases, more stringent lockdown policies, and lower GDPs, as well as among men and less educated/younger adults. Additionally, we examined whether “pandemic boredom” predicted longitudinal decreases in social distancing behavior (and vice versa; n = 8031). We found little evidence that changes in boredom predict individual public health behaviors (handwashing, staying home, self-quarantining, avoiding crowds) over time, or that such behaviors had any reliable longitudinal effects on boredom itself. In summary, we found little evidence that boredom affects pandemic health behaviors.

Pandemic boredom: Predicting boredom and its consequences during self-isolation and quarantine

Parents have experienced considerable challenges and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may impact their well-being. This meta-analysis sought to identify: 1) the prevalence of depression and anxiety in parents of young children (< age 5) during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) sociodemographic (e.g., parent age, minority status) and methodological moderators (e.g., study quality) that explain heterogeneity among studies. A systematic search was conducted across four databases from January 1st, 2020 to March 3st, 2021. A total of 18 non-overlapping studies (9,101 participants), all focused on maternal mental health, met inclusion criteria. Random-effect meta-analyses were conducted. Pooled prevalence estimates for clinically significant depression and anxiety symptoms for mothers of young children during the COVID-19 pandemic were 27.4% (95% CI: 21.5-34.3) and 43.5% (95% CI:27.5-60.9), respectively. Prevalence of clinically elevated depression and anxiety symptoms were higher in Europe and North America and among older mothers. Clinically elevated depressive symptoms were lower in studies with a higher percentage of racial and ethnic minority individuals. In comparison, clinically elevated anxiety symptoms were higher among studies of low study quality and in samples with highly educated mothers. Policies and resources targeting improvements in maternal mental health are essential.

10.31234/osf.io/u8pnh

When the Bough Breaks: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Mental Health Symptoms in Mothers of Young Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic

10.31234/osf.io/tcn7e

Risk occupies a central role in both the theory and practice of decision-making. Although it is deeply implicated in many conditions involving dysfunctional behavior and thought, modern theoretical approaches to understanding and mitigating risk, in either one-shot or sequential settings, have yet to permeate fully the fields of neural reinforcement learning and computational psychiatry. Here we use one prominent approach, called conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), to examine optimal risk-sensitive choice and one form of optimal, risk-sensitive offline planning. We relate the former to both a justified form of the gambler’s fallacy and extremely risk-avoidant behavior resembling that observed in anxiety disorders. We relate the latter to worry and rumination.

Peril, Prudence and Planning as Risk, Avoidance and Worry

Nonpharmaceutical interventions to control SARS-CoV-2 spread have been implemented with different intensity, timing, and impact on transmission. As a result, post-lockdown COVID-19 dynamics are heterogeneous and difficult to interpret. We describe a set of contact surveys performed in four Chinese cities (Wuhan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Changsha) during the pre-pandemic, lockdown and post-lockdown periods to quantify changes in contact patterns. In the post-lockdown period, the mean number of contacts increased by 5 to 17% as compared to the lockdown period. However, it remains three to seven times lower than its pre-pandemic level sufficient to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We find that the impact of school interventions depends nonlinearly on the intensity of other activities. When most community activities are halted, school closure leads to a 77% decrease in the reproduction number; in contrast, when social mixing outside of schools is at pre-pandemic level, school closure leads to a 5% reduction in transmission.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe2584

The impact of relaxing interventions on human contact patterns and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in China

The US has backed India and South Africa's bid to temporarily lift patent protection for COVID-19 vaccines. The support for an IP waiver by the WTO has left pharma companies dismayed and health activists asking for more.

Access to COVID vaccine patents is not the same as access to vaccines

DOI: 10.1126/science.abi4711

Viruses need entry proteins to penetrate the cells where they will replicate. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) version is called the spike or S protein. The S protein, also the target of the current vaccines, is quickly adapting to its new human hosts. It took its first major step in this direction early in 2020, when its amino acid 614 (of 1297) changed from an aspartic acid (D) to a glycine (G). Viruses bearing this D614G mutation transmit among humans more rapidly and now form the majority in circulation

How SARS-CoV-2 first adapted in humans

Coronavirus cases are surging in many countries, with the highest number of new cases now being reported in Asia. India alone reported 161,736 new cases on 12 April. In the Indian city of Surat, parts of gas furnaces used for cremations melted after being used non-stop. Meanwhile, millions have been gathering for festivals across the country.

India sees record surges in cases due to coronavirus variants

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00996-y

India, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of vaccines, is facing a COVID-19 vaccine crunch, partly due to an explosion of cases linked to new variants. This spells trouble for many countries relying on Indian-made vaccines supplied through the COVAX initiative for equitable access to vaccines, led by bodies including the World Health Organization.

India’s COVID-vaccine woes — by the numbers

At least 97% of the funding for the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has been identified as coming from taxpayers or charitable trusts, according to the first attempt to reconstruct who paid for the decades of research that led to the lifesaving formulation.

Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine research ‘was 97% publicly funded’

10.31234/osf.io/nf3ja

In the first week after the first COVID-19 patient was reported in the Netherlands, we conducted a pre-registered momentary assessment study (7 surveys per day, 50 participants, 7 days) to study the dynamic relationship between individuals’ occupation with and worries about COVID-19 in daily life, and the moderating role of neuroticism in this relationship. At the group level, higher scores on occupation and worry co-occurred, and occupation predicted worry one hour later, but not vice versa. There were substantial individual differences in the magnitudes and directions of the effects. For instance, occupation with COVID-19 was related to increases in worry for some, but decreases in worry for others. Neuroticism did not predict any of these individual differences in the links between worry and occupation. This study suggests that it is important to go beyond group-level analyses and to account for individual differences in responses to COVID-19.

Daily Fluctuations in Occupation with and Worry about COVID-19

The European Union continues to export more vaccines than it administers, in data highlighting the risk of a backlash against the bloc’s governments amid setbacks that keep threatening to delay its own rollout.

EU Vaccine Exports Outstrip Number of Shots Given Its Own People

10.31234/osf.io/hw9gf

In their seminal paper, Damialis and colleagues (2021, PNAS) report that, in early 2020, higher airborne pollen concentrations were related to higher COVID-19 infection rates. As a mechanism, the authors propose that “pollen exposure weakens the immunity … by diminishing the antiviral interferon response.” Although they assume an effect for the whole population, they speculate that it could be stronger for those with allergies. As a limitation, they acknowledge that they did not account for the countries’ testing strategies. As allergic people may be more likely to show symptoms that may be mistaken for those of COVID-19 (runny nose, headache, increased temperature), we explored whether people with allergies were more prone to get a rapid SARS-CoV-2 antigen test. Moreover, we assessed whether the test result was more likely to be positive among those with allergies.

The human factor between airborne pollen concentrations and COVID-19 disease dynamics

10.31234/osf.io/w9rde

The novel coronavirus has taken a catastrophic toll worldwide on physical and mental health. We focused on the psychosocial impact among students in Uruguay, a country relatively protected from the pandemic. Our study had three main aims : 1) describe in detail the impact among university students, 2) identify relationships between different dimensions and 3) highlight the factors determinant of mental distress. We designed a multi-dimensional questionnaire to investigate the perceived impact on the lives of students. The questionnaire was administered to 144 undergraduates in Uruguay online while the university was closed. 38-66% of students indicated increases in signs of anxiety, depression or sleep disturbances. Independently of other related factors, increases in substance use, impairments in social relationships, negative impacts of school closures, and personal economic worries explained 41% of variance in psychological distress. Findings are discussed in terms of policies for public health and future directions for research on mental health.

Psychosocial Impacts of COVID-19 among University Students in Uruguay

10.31234/osf.io/2u6wq

Psychologists worldwide are becoming increasingly concerned about the negative impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on adolescents’ mental health. However, compared to studies involving adults, research on adolescents is limited. To further understand adolescents’ mental health during the pandemic, the present study examined whether resilience, as a protective factor, buffers the relationship between the personality trait of environmental sensitivity and COVID-19-related distress. A total of 141 adolescents (53.7% women, Mage = 18.91 years, SDage = 0.82 years) living in urban Japan completed an online cross-sectional survey in October 2020. The results showed that sensitivity was positively, though weakly, correlated with COVID-19 stress and negatively correlated with resilience. Resilience was negatively correlated with COVID-19 stress. Mediation analysis showed that resilience buffered the negative relationship between sensitivity and COVID-19 stress, and its indirect effect was statistically significant, albeit close to zero. These results suggest that higher sensitivity is not necessarily a vulnerability factor, if resilience can be enhanced.

Sensory-Processing Sensitivity and COVID-19 Stress in Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Resilience

PSA: When you say "there were 6 cases in 6.8 million doses therefore we can expect about 1 in a million incidents going forward", you're doing a bad statistical estimation in your head and statisticians (like me) can give you a million reasons how this can go wrong.

NEW POLL: The J&J pause makes people *more confident* in vaccines, not less. M-O-R-E C-O-N-F-I-D-E-N-T

The UK government is reportedly considering vaccine passports as a way of bringing people back to offices and factories. Some countries are already using them, while others weigh up the risks and benefits. Where will we use them, who will need them and why are they so controversial?

Covid-19 vaccine passports: Everything you need to know

Mayors expect their residents to spend more time outdoors after being inspired to do so amid the coronavirus pandemic, but few leaders are looking to incorporate pandemic-fueled changes to those spaces into long-term plans, according to a survey report of 130 mayors from 38 states released Wednesday. Three out of four respondents to the Menino Survey of Mayors from Boston University said they expect residents to spend more time outside at open spaces compared to before the pandemic, and around two-thirds said they think residents will spend more time biking and walking. Despite that trend, just over a third of mayors said they do not expect to see changes made to outdoor spaces during the pandemic — like expanded outdoor dining and infrastructure — last long-term due to budgetary constraints. But planning parks and open space with an equity lens is expected to endure, with 52% saying they believe the quality of parks vary across neighborhoods.

Few mayors expect to keep COVID-inspired changes to public spaces, survey finds

10.31234/osf.io/682su

Previous research suggests that people with specific fears may use their subjective experience of anxiety to infer the presence of danger – a process known as ex-consequentia reasoning. While existing research validates the presence of ex-consequentia reasoning among fearful individuals, there are contextual factors that may moderate such emotional inferences. One would expect that even fearful people can acknowledge a difference in the trustworthiness of the intuitive thoughts and feelings of a fearful person relative to an expert in a fear-relevant situation. We investigated whether the expertise of characters described in vignettes about fear of heights and spiders modulated the extent to which fearful and non-fearful participants believed it was appropriate for the character to infer the presence of danger from their emotional reactions. Bayesian ordinal regression and a multiverse analytic approach were used to ensure inferences were not sensitive to particular analytic choices. Consistent with our expectations, fearful and non-fearful participants were more likely to agree that an expert character should listen to their intuitive thoughts and feelings about a situation than a fearful character. Tentatively, we suggest that people’s metacognitive awareness about the relative validity of fear-related thoughts and feelings might be leveraged to help reduce ex-consequentia reasoning.

Knowing when to trust your gut: The perceived trustworthiness of fear varies with domain expertise

10.31234/osf.io/3csuh

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some smokers have experienced increased motivation to quit smoking, due to the higher risk of severe COVID-19 infection. However, this is not found across all smokers, and the motivation to quit appears dependent upon factors such as fear of COVID-19 and perceived risk from COVID-19. In the current investigation, specific COVID-19 risk beliefs were measured to isolate which beliefs predicted the motivation to quit smoking, these being the perceived severity of COVID-19 and perceived probability of COVID-19 infection. UK based smokers (N = 243) completed an online survey between September and October 2020, in which they reported their current motivation to quit smoking, fear of COVID-19, and their beliefs about how severe COVID-19 infection would be and how probable COVID-19 infection was. The only significant predictor of the motivation to quit smoking was the perceived probability of COVID-19 infection. This positive relationship remained when controlling for the general perceived probability and severity of other smoking related health conditions, suggesting a COVID-19-specific effect. Further, fear of COVID-19 only indirectly related to an increase in motivation to quit, when mediated through perceived probability of COVID-19 infection. The result places the perceived probability of COVID-19 infection as a central predictor of motivation to quit during the pandemic. Based on this evidence, messaging to smokers aiming to facilitate smoking cessation during the pandemic should focus on the highly contagious nature of the virus, to increase the motivation to quit.

The influence of COVID-19-specific health risk beliefs on the motivation to quit smoking

Suspension of face-to-face instruction in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to concerns about consequences for students’ learning. So far, data to study this question have been limited. Here we evaluate the effect of school closures on primary school performance using exceptionally rich data from The Netherlands (n ≈ 350,000). We use the fact that national examinations took place before and after lockdown and compare progress during this period to the same period in the 3 previous years. The Netherlands underwent only a relatively short lockdown (8 wk) and features an equitable system of school funding and the world’s highest rate of broadband access. Still, our results reveal a learning loss of about 3 percentile points or 0.08 standard deviations. The effect is equivalent to one-fifth of a school year, the same period that schools remained closed. Losses are up to 60% larger among students from less-educated homes, confirming worries about the uneven toll of the pandemic on children and families. Investigating mechanisms, we find that most of the effect reflects the cumulative impact of knowledge learned rather than transitory influences on the day of testing. Results remain robust when balancing on the estimated propensity of treatment and using maximum-entropy weights or with fixed-effects specifications that compare students within the same school and family. The findings imply that students made little or no progress while learning from home and suggest losses even larger in countries with weaker infrastructure or longer school closures.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022376118

Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic

When vaccines are in limited supply, expanding the number of people who receive some vaccine, such as by halving doses or increasing the interval between doses, can reduce disease and mortality compared with concentrating available vaccine doses in a subset of the population. A corollary of such dose-sparing strategies is that the vaccinated individuals may have less protective immunity. Concerns have been raised that expanding the fraction of the population with partial immunity to SARS-CoV-2 could increase selection for vaccine-escape variants, ultimately undermining vaccine effectiveness. We argue that, although this is possible, preliminary evidence instead suggests such strategies should slow the rate of viral escape from vaccine or naturally induced immunity. As long as vaccination provides some protection against escape variants, the corresponding reduction in prevalence and incidence should reduce the rate at which new variants are generated and the speed of adaptation. Because there is little evidence of efficient immune selection of SARS-CoV-2 during typical infections, these population-level effects are likely to dominate vaccine-induced evolution.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-021-00544-9

Concerns about SARS-CoV-2 evolution should not hold back efforts to expand vaccination

10.31234/osf.io/7w9re

A given event has many causes, but people intuitively view some causes as more important than others. Models of causal judgment have been evaluated in controlled laboratory experiments, but they have yet to be tested in complex real-world settings. Here, we provide such a test, in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Across tens of thousands of simulations of possible election outcomes, we computed, for each state, an adjusted measure of the correlation between a Biden victory in that state and a Biden election victory. These effect size measures accurately predicted the extent to which U.S. participants (N=207, pre-registered) viewed victory in a given state as having caused Biden to win the presidency. This supports the theory that people intuitively select as causes of an outcome the factors with the largest average causal effect on that outcome across possible counterfactual worlds.

Causal judgment in the wild: evidence from the 2020 US presidential election

There are some news outlets & politicians incorrectly reporting and criticising respectively MHRA for advising against use of OxAZ in under 30s. Neither MHRA nor EMA have done this. JCVI have expressed a preference for alternative vaccines for healthy under 30s in the UK context

A new US vaccination record for a Wednesday reporting 2.9 million Now 1 in 3 Americans have at least 1 dose

Vaccine passports for covid-19 are likely to become a “feature of our lives”, according to a UK government review of the scheme, despite mounting political opposition to making proof of vaccination a condition of entry to workplaces, shops and venues.

Covid-19 vaccine passports tested in UK as lockdown restrictions ease

Compliance with behavioral measures

10.31234/osf.io/fmu9w

Health care agencies around the world recommended behavioral measures regarding hygiene and physical distancing to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The current research sheds light on the interplay of psychological factors related to compliance and well-being during the pandemic. We do so by presenting a complex psychological network based on a large-scale survey (N = 6093). In total, participants were invited five times to complete this survey over a period of approximately 10 weeks (April 23th – June 30th 2020). The third and fifth wave included interventions aimed at influencing the psychological networks. We found that 1) compliance and well-being during the pandemic seemed connected through negative emotions and therefore were related factors and 2) trust in authorities influenced support for behavioral measures, which is in turn associated with compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the network structure was used to design multiple interventions, aimed at psychological variables varying in their relative importance for the network. The interventions significantly affected the variables the intervention was aimed at as well as other variables in the networks. The effects of interventions on variables related to the aim of the interventions were partially explained by the network structure. The results suggest that the network structure can be an important source of information for designing effective interventions aimed at influencing the public’s psychological systems in relation to pandemics.

A complex systems perspective on compliance with behavioral measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands: How psychological networks can inform interventions.

10.31234/osf.io/a65tm

In most European countries, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (spring 2020) led to the imposition of physical distancing rules, resulting in a drastic and sudden reduction of real-life social interactions. Even people not directly affected by the virus itself were impacted in their physical and/or mental health, as well as in their financial security, by governmental lockdown measures. We investigated if the combination of these events had changed people’s appraisal of social scenes by testing 241 participants recruited mainly in Italy, Austria, and Germany in an online, pre-registered study conducted about 50 days after the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe. Images depicting individuals alone, in small groups (up to four people) and in large groups (more than seven people) were rated in terms of valence, arousal, and perceived physical distance. Pre-pandemic normative ratings were obtained from a validated database (Kurdi et al., 2017). Several self-report measures were also taken, and condensed into four factors through factor analysis. All images were rated as more arousing compared to the pre-pandemic period, and the greater the decrease in real-life physical interactions reported by participants, the higher the ratings of arousal. As expected, only images depicting large gatherings of people were rated less positively during, compared to before, the pandemic. These ratings of valence were however moderated by a factor that included participants’ number of days in isolation, relationship closeness, and perceived COVID-19 threat. Higher scores on this factor were associated with more positive ratings of images of individuals alone and in small groups, suggesting an increased appreciation of safer social situations, such as intimate and small-group contacts. The same factor was inversely related to the perceived physical distance between individuals in images of small and large groups, suggesting an impact of lockdown measures and contagion-related worries on the representation of interpersonal space. These findings point to rapid and compelling psychological and social consequences of the lockdown measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic on the perception of social groups. Further studies should assess the long-term impact of such events as typical everyday life is restored.

Large gatherings? No, thank you. Devaluation of crowded social scenes during the COVID-19 pandemic

According to @PEI_Germany about 2,7 million people have now been vaccinated with AstraZenaca vaccine in Germany. Amongst these: 31 cerebral venous thromboses (29 women) 19 of these also with thrombocytopenia reported 9 deaths Clearly Germany has to change recommendations for now

According to @PEI_Germany about 2,7 million people have now been vaccinated with AstraZenaca vaccine in Germany. Amongst these: 31 cerebral venous thromboses (29 women) 19 of these also with thrombocytopenia reported 9 deaths Clearly Germany has to change recommendations for now