PUNE, India — Mohanish Ellitam watched helplessly as his 49-year-old mother’s oxygen levels dipped dangerously and she gasped for air. “I could see her stomach rising and falling,” Ellitam said. “I was so scared.”

Watching his mother’s health deteriorate, Ellitam knew he couldn’t wait any longer. But in Shevgaon, a small town in the state of Maharashtra, health care facilities were limited and already overwhelmed with people suffering from COVID-19. He frantically called friends, f...

During the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, which began in March, 2021, demand on the health-care system has far exceeded capacity. Despite crippling shortages, patients are prescribed a battery of ineffective therapeutic interventions. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and herbal cocktails continue to receive state patronage. On May 8, 2021, 2-deoxyD-glucose was given emergency authorisation, stating that it will “save precious lives” without any published evidence that i...

More than 1.84 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, equal to 24 doses for every 100 people. There is already a stark gap between vaccination programs in different countries, with some yet to report a single dose.



The data is compiled from government sources by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. A vaccinated person refers to someone who has received at least one dose of a vaccine, and a fully vaccinated person has received all requi...

AbstractBackground
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic overwhelmed healthcare systems, highlighting the need to better understand predictors of mortality and the impact of medical interventions.
Methods
This retrospective cohort study examined data from every patient who tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted to White Plains Hospital between March 9, 2020, and June 3, 2020. We used binomial logistic regression to analyze data for all patients, and propensity score...

COVID-19 poses particular threats in low-resource settings, which typically have underfunded health-care systems and insufficient influence on the global health research agenda. Leadership and coordination have been shown in COVID-19 research in such settings, particularly across Africa, building on earlier experience from research on diseases such as Ebola virus disease and HIV. However, global coordination to achieve a coherent research response and ensure sufficient context-specific...

Data from Qatar provide strongest evidence yet that COVID-19 vaccines can stop strains thought to pose a threat to immunization efforts.
Qatar’s second wave of COVID-19 was a double whammy. In January, after months of relatively few cases and deaths, the Gulf nation saw a surge driven by the fast-spreading B.1.1.7 variant, which was first identified in the United Kingdom. Weeks later, the B.1.351 strain, which is linked to reinfections and dampened vaccine effectiveness, took hold.

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India’s infections set new pandemic records in April, with more than 300 000 positive tests each day for a week. Kamala Thiagarajan looks at the many unanswered questions

On 26 April India saw the highest daily tally of new SARS-CoV-2 infections ever recorded in the world, 360 960, taking its pandemic total to 16 million cases, second only to the US, and more than 200 000 deaths.

The devastating second wave comes a year after the country imposed one of the most rigid lockdow...

Experts debated a warning for women under 50, but decided to reinstate the vaccine without oneJohnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, which faced intense scrutiny in the wake of reports of women who developed rare blood clots after getting the shot, is OK to use, a panel of health experts decided April 23.PAUL HENNESSY/SIPA USA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
After reviewing safety data on rare blood clots linked to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, federal regulators said vaccinations can r...

Household transmission reduced after first vaccine shot
A new study by Public Health England, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, indicates that people who have received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are 40–50% less likely to pass on the SARS-CoV-2 virus if they contract it.

The researchers looked at data from 365,447 households in which one person had a COVID-19 diagnosis. For each of these index cases, the team looked at whether anyone else in the...

Abstract
Common lung diseases are first diagnosed using chest X-rays. Here, we show that a fully automated deep-learning pipeline for the standardization of chest X-ray images, for the visualization of lesions and for disease diagnosis can identify viral pneumonia caused by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and assess its severity, and can also discriminate between viral pneumonia caused by COVID-19 and other types of pneumonia. The deep-learning system was developed using a heterogeneou...

SummaryBackgroundEmergence of variants with specific mutations in key epitopes in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 raises concerns pertinent to mass vaccination campaigns and use of monoclonal antibodies. We aimed to describe the emergence of the B.1.1.7 variant of concern (VOC), including virological characteristics and clinical severity in contemporaneous patients with and without the variant.MethodsIn this cohort study, samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 on PCR that were collected from Nov 9, ...

The high infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 makes it essential to develop a rapid and accurate diagnostic test so that carriers can be isolated at an early stage. Viral RNA in nasopharyngeal samples by RT-PCR is currently considered the reference method although it is not recognized as a strong gold standard due to certain drawbacks. Here we develop a methodology combining the analysis of from human nasopharyngeal (NP) samples by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spec...