Coronavirus News and Research

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Searching for safety: Where children hide when gunfire is all too common

Champale Greene-Anderson keeps the volume up on her television when she watches 5-year-old granddaughter Amor Robinson while the girl's mom is at work.

28 May 2020

PKU-led team identifies potent neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2

A joint research team led by Sunney Xie, Director of Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics at Peking University has successfully identified multiple highly potent neutralizing antibodies against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus of the respiratory disease COVID-19, from convalescent plasma by high-throughput single-cell sequencing.

28 May 2020

For seniors, COVID-19 sets off a pandemic of despair

As states relax coronavirus restrictions, older adults are advised, in most cases, to keep sheltering in place. But for some, the burden of isolation and uncertainty is becoming hard to bear.

28 May 2020

Antibody tests were hailed as way to end lockdowns. Instead, they cause confusion.

Aspen was an early COVID-19 hot spot in Colorado, with a cluster of cases in March linked to tourists visiting for its world-famous skiing. Tests were in short supply, making it difficult to know how the virus was spreading.

28 May 2020

Shandong University offers high-tech support to fight against coronavirus epidemic

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the SDU-NTU Joint Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research has developed two types of robots, which were sent to hospitals in Wuhan and Huanggang in China’s Hubei Province to aid front-line fight against the coronavirus epidemic.

28 May 2020

Clinical trial of COVID-19 vaccine starts in Australia

Over 100 candidate vaccines are being explored as a means of ending the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight of these have already made it to clinical trials in humans, and another 94 are in the pre-clinical evaluation stage.

27 May 2020

Faulty ApoE4 gene increases risk for Alzheimer’s and for COVID-19

It has not been clear whether dementia worsens the infection or if it has resulted from the patient's old age and the severity of care home outbreaks. Now, a new study sheds light on the reason why people with dementia are at a high risk of developing severe disease caused by the coronavirus disease.

27 May 2020

WVU partnership produces thousands of swabs to meet demands for COVID-19 testing

With significantly increased testing a key component in the battle against COVID-19, the Innovation Hub at West Virginia University is working with WVU Medicine to churn out up to 10,000 swabs weekly to meet demands for tests.

27 May 2020

Research provides guidance for treating pancreatic cancer patients during COVID-19 pandemic

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic not only affects patients who have the virus, but strikes the entire healthcare system including the care for patients with cancer.

27 May 2020

SARS-CoV-2 RNA in blood tests not associated with infectious virus

The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has challenged hospitals and laboratory services worldwide. Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 initially lagged but is now primarily based on the use of reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to detect viral nucleic RNA in the samples. However, viral RNA has also been reported in several small series of cases, though its significance and frequency remain unclear.

27 May 2020

Masks can help reduce asymptomatic spread of SARS-CoV-2 in aerosols

Growing evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, can be spread by asymptomatic people via aerosols -- a reality that deeply underscores the ongoing importance of regular widespread testing, wearing masks and physical distancing to reduce the spread of the virus, say Kimberly Prather and colleagues in a new Perspective.

27 May 2020

ACE2 receptors in the kidney not linked to high BP or RAS blockers

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to smolder and flare up in various parts of the world, researchers are still trying to make sense of the virus, its routes of spread, its target tissues, and the immune responses it induces. One crucial piece of knowledge is that the primary viral receptor is a human enzyme called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2).

27 May 2020

Researchers to explore the idea of using ultraviolet light to kill novel coronavirus

The idea of UV sterilization is not a new one, but little or no scientific data about its potency against COVID-19 have been collected, until now.

27 May 2020

How India's lockdown has affected mental health

India’s public landscape has transformed dramatically over the last couple of months, with the most prolonged lockdown that the present generation can remember. Declared on March 24, 2020, the lockdown ensured that hundreds of millions of people were effectively confined to home, except when they ventured out, armed with a self-attested affidavit, to stock up on essentials.

27 May 2020

Study shows children and adults have a comparable expression of SARS-CoV-2 entry-related genes

A recent paper by researchers from China demonstrated comparable expression levels of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) cell entry mediators in adults and children, suggesting that previously implied difference in viral-entry associated genes is likely not responsible for milder symptoms in children. The study is currently available on the medRxiv preprint server.

27 May 2020

COVID-19 only kills 1% of people in remote Papuan village with limited resources

A researcher from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and a tropical medicine expert who lives in Wamena, Indonesia have published a unique account of a village in the Papuan highlands of Indonesia that has experienced what was presumed to be an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

27 May 2020