Touted as society's way out of widespread lockdowns, scientists say the true potential of these rapidly-developed tests is still unknown.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called them a ‘game changer’. Antibody tests have captured the world’s attention for their potential to help life return to normal by revealing who has been exposed, and might now be immune, to the new coronavirus.

Dozens of biotech companies and research laboratories have rushed to produce the blood tests. And...

Recent studies have suggested that chest computed tomography (CT) scans could be used as a primary screening or diagnostic tool for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in epidemic areas. To study that, some scientifics have created a project to perform a meta-analysis to evaluate diagnostic performance measures, including predictive values, of chest CT and initial reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). 
For the meta-analysis, MEDLINE and Embase articles were searched fro...

A study released on April 17th from the University of Oxford is the first to highlight the importance of age and demographic science in explaining the difference in fatalities across countries affected by the virus.

The research, from Jennifer Beam Dowd, Melinda Mills and colleagues at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford and Nuffield College, emphasises the potential for dramatically higher fatality rates in countries and localities with older popula...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is changing the management of many chronic diseases, including that of patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). In particular, the performance of routine endoscopy is temporarily suspended, and only emergency endoscopy is allowed in many countries where severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread. We highlight different scenarios in which endoscopy should still be performed urgently in patients with IBD, as w...

Experts on cognition tell us that most people think they know more than they really do. One particular indicator for that is if someone is an expert in one field and they feel like all other fields relate to theirs (everything boils down to math or chemistry or physics, for example). This causes them to be overconfident on things they don’t actually know about. When it became clear that the current virus crisis might lead to a shortage of ventilators, many electronic experts set about to ...

The World Health Organization issued a warning Friday about coronavirus testing, saying there’s no evidence serological tests can show whether a person has immunity or is no longer at risk of becoming reinfected.

“These antibody tests will be able to measure that level of serology presence, that level of antibodies, but that does not mean that somebody with antibodies is immune", said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit.



So-calle...

Background
A range of public health measures have been implemented to suppress local transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Hong Kong. We examined the effect of these interventions and behavioural changes of the public on the incidence of COVID-19, as well as on influenza virus infections, which might share some aspects of transmission dynamics with COVID-19.
Methods
We analysed data on laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases, influenza surveillance data in outpat...

MissionThe COVID-19 host genetics initiative brings together the human genetics community to generate, share and analyze data to learn the genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility, severity and outcomes. Such discoveries could help to generate hypotheses for drug repurposing, identify individuals at unusually high or low risk, and contribute to global knowledge of the biology of SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease.
Objectives
The COVID-19 host genetics initiative is a bottom-up coll...

MissionThe COVID-19 host genetics initiative brings together the human genetics community to generate, share and analyze data to learn the genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility, severity and outcomes. Such discoveries could help to generate hypotheses for drug repurposing, identify individuals at unusually high or low risk, and contribute to global knowledge of the biology of SARS-CoV-2 infection and disease.


Objectives
The COVID-19 host genetics initiative is ...

Instagram  founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have teamed up to launch their first product together since leaving the Facebook mothership. Rt.live is an up-to-date tracker of how fast COVID-19 is spreading in each state.









“Rt” measures the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. The higher above the number 1, the faster COVID-19 races through a population, while a number below one shows the virus receding. For exampl...

The diagnostics startup Curative has received an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its novel test to determine COVID-19 infection.




The company says that its tests have already been used by the City of Los Angeles since late March and have tested over 53,000 city residents.




Curative’s tests use an oral-fluid sample collected by having the subject cough to produce sputum, which release the virus from deep in the lungs...

Myocardial injury with ST-segment elevation has been observed in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Here, we describe our experience in the initial month of the Covid-19 outbreak in New York City.




Patients with confirmed Covid-19 who had ST-segment elevation on electrocardiography were included in the study from six New York hospitals. Patients with Covid-19 who had nonobstructive disease on coronary angiography or had normal wall motion on echocardiogra...