Via Science, Martin Enserink and Kai Kupferschmidt write: With COVID-19, modeling takes on life and death importance
Jacco Wallinga's computer simulations are about to face a high-stakes reality check. Wallinga is a mathematician and the chief epidemic modeler at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), which is advising the Dutch government on what actions, such as closing schools and businesses, will help control the spread of the novel coronavirus in the...

Learn how to use a Dräger Evita XL Ventilator!

Other links of interest:Set up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5DG-nJonJsPre-use check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwwF9QoZfhA

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic spread within China, and secondarily also outside China, with a basic reproductive number estimated to be from to and a mortality rate of around 2-3%. In the EU (and European Economic Area) and the UK, as of March 6, 2020, 5544 cases have been reported (423 in France), including 159 deaths (seven in France).
So far, several studies have described demographic, clinical, and biological characteristics of patients with COVID-19, ...

Learn how to use a Philips Respironics V60 Ventilator!

Via MIT NEWS, David L. Chandler write: MIT-based team works on rapid deployment of open-source, low-cost ventilator
Clinical and design considerations will be published online; goal is to support rapid scale-up of device production to alleviate hospital shortages.
One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000...

As of this week, South Korea had just over 9,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, which puts it among the top 10 countries for total cases.

But South Korea has another distinction: Health experts are noting that recently the nation has managed to significantly slow the number of new cases. And the country appears to have reined in the outbreak without some of the strict lockdown strategies deployed elsewhere in the world.

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JOURNAL OF HEART AND LUNG TRANSPLANTATION
COVID-19 Illness in Native and Immunosuppressed States: A Clinical-Therapeutic Staging Proposal.Hasan K. Siddiqi, MD, MSCR, and Mandeep R. Mehra, MD, MSc The journal of heart and lung transplantation has prepared a clinical-therapeutic staging proposal about management of patients with Inmunosuppresed state

Anecdotal reports have been circulating for weeks that Covid-19 can cause people to lose their sense of smell. This week, the idea gained credibility with the British Association of Otorhinolaryngology suggesting that so-called anosmia could be a useful symptom for screening for the virus, based on reports from South Korea, China and Italy, and higher than usual numbers reporting the complaint in UK clinics. On Monday, World Health Organization officials also said they were also...

The WHO says that "according to current evidence," the virus is transmitted through "respiratory droplets and contact routes." By that, the agency means the virus is found in the kind of big droplets of mucus or saliva created through coughing and sneezing.




These droplets can only travel short distances through the air and either land on people or land on surfaces that people later touch. Stopping this kind of transmission is why public health officials urge people to w...

Federal health officials on Friday approved a coronavirus test that can provide results in less than 15 minutes, using the same technology that powers some rapid flu tests.

Teased by Vice President Mike Pence in a Thursday press briefing, the new diagnostic test could accelerate testing in the United States, allowing for rapid results in doctors' offices. But shortages of critical equipment used to collect patient specimens, like masks and swabs, could blunt its impact.
The US Food ...

Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) first began in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019, the viral epidemic has quickly engulfed China. Here we describe a case of a patient with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia with COVID-19.

[...]
In conclusion, clinical and biochemical data of COVID-19 might be partly masked by coexisting chronic lymphocytic leukaemia; better diagnostic strategies (ie, superior CT differential techniques such as radiomics) could be used f...

An epidemiologist of Hospital Vall d'Hebron (Barcelona, Spain) has created a daily-updated, and well-organized repository of scientific publications about COVID-19. 
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