Africa UN Knowledge Hub for COVID-19

A single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine made by either Pfizer or AstraZeneca cuts a person’s risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their closest contacts by as much as half, according to an analysis of more than 365,000 households in the United Kingdom.

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic

Face masks have become commonplace across the USA because of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemic. Although evidence suggests that masks help to curb the spread of the disease, there is little empirical research at the population level. We investigate the association between self-reported mask-wearing, physical distancing, and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the USA, along with the effect of statewide mandates on mask uptake.

What is the latest in COVID-19 vaccine advances? Can currently authorized vaccines protect against newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants? In this Hope Behind the Headlines feature, we examine these and other questions.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic offers health care organizations and state agencies a rare opportunity to rethink their approaches to the well-being of health care professionals—including reexamining long-standing systemic organizational practices, as well as modernizing archaic state policies that contribute to a culture of suffering in silence. In health care, the topic of wellness is still often regarded as something soft and unnecessary or, worse yet, considered a sign of personal weakness.

Arizona is among the states hardest-hit with COVID-19 right now, reporting more than 11,000 new cases and 105 deaths on Sunday. California, Florida, Oklahoma and Rhode Island are also struggling.

All of this playing is out as the bottle-necked national vaccine roll-out continues: 6.7 million Americans have now received a single dose, while 22-million doses have been distributed to hospitals and pharmacies.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) recently launched a study to determine whether drugs that are already approved or in the late stage of clinical development might merit testing in larger clinical trials as a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) treatment.

Nature wades through the literature on the new coronavirus — and summarizes key papers as they appear.

In early October, 2020, three epidemiologists convened in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts, USA. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University Medical School, Stanford, CA, USA), Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford University, Oxford, UK) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) were there to draft an argument for a new strategy to combat COVID-19. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration. It has since been endorsed by thousands of medical practitioners, researchers, and public health scientists.

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting communities worldwide, with direct effects of illness and mortality, and indirect effects on economies, workplaces, schools/daycares, and social life.