#COVID-19 testing labs in npr

[247labsnpr]

We provide covid-19 testing services. 24-7 Labs is the first of a new line of innovative healthcare services providers. Our mission is to give people the power to control their health by providing convenient, affordable, and easy-to-understand options.

[sciencespies]

Why the Most Promising Covid-19 Vaccines Require Super Cold Storage

https://sciencespies.com/news/why-the-most-promising-covid-19-vaccines-require-super-cold-storage/

Why the Most Promising Covid-19 Vaccines Require Super Cold Storage

The last week has brought encouraging news about vaccines being produced by biotechnology companies Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. Both vaccines make use of a relatively new technology, synthetic messenger RNA or mRNA, so both face the same hurdle: they need to be stored at very cold temperatures.

Moderna’s vaccine can be stored long-term only at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, while Pfizer/BioNTech’s needs long-term storage at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, reports Umair Irfan for Vox. Messenger RNA is constantly under threat of being destroyed by other molecules in the environment. To prevent any damage, vaccine producers not only make chemical changes to the synthetic mRNA and wrap it in a protective layer, but also store it at low temperatures to trap chemical reactions in slow-motion.

“Everything happens more slowly as you lower the temperature,” says Margaret Liu, a vaccine researcher and the chair of the board of the International Society for Vaccines, to NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin. “So your chemical reactions — the enzymes that break down RNA — are going to happen more slowly.”

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines use a short snippet of mRNA with the same code as RNA from SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. This mRNA is sort of like a blueprint: human cells can use the code to create a small piece of the virus, almost like a viral Lego brick. The “brick” isn’t enough to cause harm like a whole virus would, but it is enough for the immune system to learn how to recognize that brick and mount an immune response to fight off future infections.

Early results from Phase III trials show that both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccine candidates are about 95 percent effective in adults, though none of their trial data have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Both of the vaccine candidates require people to get two shots, three weeks apart. That means that pharmacies, hospitals and other possible vaccination sites would need to store a lot of vaccine at their facilities.

“It does mean double the capacity requirements, so yes, there is an additional complication,” says UNICEF’s immunization supply chain specialist Michelle Seidel to Vox. To both ship so much vaccine around the country and store it safely at warehouses and in hospitals, cold storage is of paramount importance.

“They lose effectiveness and their potency if they’re exposed to temperatures outside of the range that they’re supposed to be kept in,” Seidel adds to Vox.

The biotechnology companies have made some modifications to the mRNA’s molecular structure to make it more stable. Then, they used nanoparticles of fatty molecules called lipids to wrap up the mRNA, sort of like bubble wrap around a fragile item in the mail. Enzymes called ribonucleases destroy mRNA, and they “are everywhere, even in the controlled environment of the lab,” says Infectious Disease Research Institute vaccine development specialist Alana Gerhardt to Science magazine’s Jocelyn Kaiser. Ribnucleases can be found in a lab workers’ breath and on their skin, for example.

Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine candidate is stable at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which is colder than an Antarctic winter. Maintaining such a cold temperature requires special equipment, which is more often available at urban hospitals than at smaller, rural hospitals, Olivia Goldhill reports for STAT News. Pfizer/BioNTech may update their temperature guidelines as they stress-test their vaccine, but only after real-time testing.

“If a vaccine has a two-year shelf life at refrigerator temperatures, then the manufacturer actually needs to put the vaccine at that refrigerated temperature for two years and see if at the end the product is still effective,” says Debra Kristensen to NPR.

Moderna says its vaccine candidate is stable at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which can be achieved using most common freezers. The company says the vaccine candidate can be stored in a refrigerator for 30 days and remain useful.

That doesn’t mean that one vaccine candidate is better or worse than another one, though. The two vaccine candidates, with different strengths and storage requirements, may complement each other if they are both approved for use by the FDA.

“There might be a situation in which a Pfizer vaccine is a better fit for some places and the Moderna one is better for others, and we’ve got other vaccines coming down the pike,” says City University health policy and management expert Bruce Y. Lee tells National Geographic’s Sarah Elizabeth Richards.

Vermont’s immunization manager Christine Finley tells NPR that the state is considering Pfizer’s vaccine candidate for large population centers, for example, because a city with a university may have both the specialized equipment for storage and enough people to make the large minimum orders worthwhile.

Meanwhile, other vaccine candidates that are effective with only one dose may be more efficient for use in populations without easy access to medical facilities. Vaccine candidates that don’t require cold storage would be more useful to the 3 billion people around the world who aren’t served by a cold supply chain.

In the end, “it may be that the second one or the 50th one is actually a better vaccine,” says Liu to NPR. “This really isn’t a race. Just by sheer numbers, we probably need multiple, multiple vaccines.”

#News

[healthcarenewsme]

UTMB Lab Tests Pfizer COVID Vaccine : Shots - Health News - NPR

UTMB Lab Tests Pfizer COVID Vaccine : Shots – Health News – NPR

Enlarge this image Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch are helping to test the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine against coronavirus variants. Joao Paulo Burini/Getty Images Joao Paulo Burini/Getty Images The government says people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 eight months ago will need a booster. That decision is based in part on blood tests that show antibody levels…

[daniloqp]

When the next animal plague arrives, can this lab stop it?

When the next animal plague arrives, can this lab stop it?

https://theministerofcapitalism.com/blog/when-the-next-animal-plague-arrives-can-this-lab-stop-it/

There were 16 of them pathogens on the terrorist list, written with high, pointed scribbles scrolling across the page. Next to each was the incubation period, the route of transmission, and the expected mortality. The pneumonic plague, contracted when the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague enters the lungs, was at the top of the list. If it is not, the disease it kills everyone it infects. Below were some names from the past of pandemics: cholera, anthrax. But what surprised General Richard B. Myers was something else: most pathogens did not affect humans at all. Stem rust, rice blast, foot-and-mouth disease, bird flu, swine fever. These were biological weapons intended to attack the global food system.

Myers was the chairman of the joint chief of staff in 2002, when Navy SEALS found the list in an underground complex in eastern Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence already suspected it al Qaeda he was interested in biological weapons, but this increased the weight of the idea that, as Myers said, “they were in fact doing it.” Later that year, he said, another intelligence source reported that a group of al-Qaeda members had ended up in the northeast mountains. Iraq, where they were testing various pathogens in dogs and goats.

This article appears in the July / August 2021 issue. Subscribe to WIRED.

Photography: Djeneba Aduayom

“As far as I know, they’ve never gotten to the point where it’s been useful to them in the context of the battlefield,” Myers told us. “But because Al Qaeda, as we discovered with the World Trade Center in New York City, never gives up on an idea, it’s not something you can just rule out.” In fact, he said, “I think there is other information probably classified that would tell you yes no the case, but I am not aware of all this nor am I aware of talking about it “.

Even if al-Qaeda continued, it appears that other groups took the lead in bioterror: in 2014, a Dell portable dust was recovered from an ISIS hideout in northern Syria, the “laptop of misfortune.” , as it was later doubled by Foreign policy—It was found to contain detailed instructions for producing and dispersing bubonic plague using infected animals.

For an aspiring bioterrorist, Myers says, farms and food fields are a “soft target.” They are not well insured and effective pathogens are not particularly difficult to manufacture and deploy. Foot-and-mouth disease, a virus named after large, swollen blisters that causes the tongue, mouth, and feet of clawed animals, is so contagious that the discovery of a case in a herd often leads to massacres. “All you do is put a handkerchief under the nose of a sick animal in Afghanistan, put it in a zippered bag, come to the United States and drop it off at a Dodge City food garden.” , Sen. Pat Roberts told a local NPR affiliate in 2006. “Bingo!”

Agriculture is also highly concentrated: three states supply three-quarters of the vegetables in the U.S. and 2 percent of the plots supply three-quarters of the country’s beef. In addition, both crops and livestock are genetically uniform. A quarter of the genetic material of the entire American Holstein herd comes from just five bulls. (One of them, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, contributed nearly 14 percent). Monocultures like this are exceptionally vulnerable to disease. They are a buffet within reach of pests and pathogens. With or without the assistance of a terrorist scholar, the world is as susceptible to an agricultural pandemic as it was Covid-19“And, if necessary, less prepared to fight it.”

To diagnose deadly diseases and develop treatments and vaccines against them, researchers have to work with them in a laboratory, but there are few facilities safe enough. Foot-and-mouth disease, in particular, is transmitted so easily that the live virus cannot be carried to the American continent without the written permission of the Secretary of Agriculture. The only place researchers can work on is the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, built on a low islet 8 miles off the coast of Connecticut. “Sounds lovely,” like Hannibal Lecter, the murderous antihero of The silence of the lambs, he murmured when he was offered the chance to spend a vacation there.)

Courtesy of MCD

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Plum Island has the advantage of a natural sanitary cordon: the ocean. But it opened in 1954 and its labs are obsolete. They are not certified to handle pathogens that need the highest level of containment, Level 4 biological safety. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BSL-4 microbes are “dangerous and exotic, presenting a high risk of aerosol-transmitted infections.” They can usually infect both animals and humans and have no known treatment or vaccine. Ebola is one of them. So are the most recent Nipah and Hendra viruses. Currently, there are only three facilities in the world equipped to house large animals of this level. If there is an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease tomorrow, researchers should ask their Canadian, Australian or German counterparts for a laboratory space.

That will change next year, when the Department of Homeland Security opens its new $ 1.252 billion lab, the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. Located in Manhattan, Kansas, a college town in the U.S. agricultural core, the NBAF will follow the 21st century trend in infectious disease control: rather than relying on a Plum Island-style geographic barrier to safety , will use extraordinary engineering controls. Here, amid corn and livestock, researchers will work to protect the food supply from an approaching plague.

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[garudabluffs]

Coronavirus FAQ: Should I Get My Antibodies Checked After I Get Vaccinated?

"The current COVID-19 vaccines target the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, so unless the antibody test is looking for antibodies to that protein, the test results will have no meaning. In a recent blog post for the University of Texas, Dr. Luis Ostrosky, head of infectious diseases for the university's medical school, wrote, "when most people sign up for a test, most laboratories and providers are typically testing for anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. The problem with that is those are not antibodies that would be created by the vaccine, but only through natural infection." So in other words, many of the antibody tests available now would only be able to tell you whether you have antibodies as a result of getting COVID, and not from having received a vaccine.

Increasingly however, Ostrosky tells NPR, labs are also producing tests that can detect antibodies to the spike protein.

These still are largely too premature to use, says Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. "The test results will show the number of antibodies the person has to the spike protein, but we have no idea yet how many antibodies a person needs to be protected."

READ MORE https://www.wvpe.org/post/coronavirus-faq-should-i-get-my-antibodies-checked-after-i-get-vaccinated

[agreenroad]

Tested Positive For COVID Virus, But Don't Have Symptoms. What's That Mean? NPR

Tested Positive For COVID Virus, But Don’t Have Symptoms. What’s That Mean? NPR

According to an analysis by The New York Times last summer, the labs that keep track of Ct numbers tend to report them at 37 to 40 — meaning they run a sample through 37 to 40 amplification cycles, if needed, before deciding whether to call it positive or negative. That could mean at least some of the people deemed positive for COVID-19 started off with minuscule amounts of virus. And while…

[247labsnpr]

Depending on the type of allergy and the intensity of the reaction, allergy symptoms might change. If you suspect you may have an allergy, it’s important to speak with a medical laboratory testing providers for proper diagnosis and treatment

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Strides Against HIV/AIDS Falter, Especially in the South, as Nation Battles Covid

Facing a yearlong siege from the coronavirus, the defenses in another, older war are faltering.

This story also ran on NPR. It can be republished for free.

For the last two decades, HIV/AIDS has been held at bay by potent antiviral drugs, aggressive testing and inventive public education campaigns. But the COVID-19 pandemic has caused profound disruptions in almost every aspect of that battle, grounding outreach teams, sharply curtailing testing and diverting critical staff away from laboratories and medical centers.

The exact impact of one pandemic on the other is still coming into focus, but preliminary evidence is disturbing experts who have celebrated the enormous strides in HIV treatment. While the shift in priorities is nationwide, delays in testing and treatment carry particularly grievous risks in Southern states, now the epicenter of the nation’s HIV crisis.

“This is a major derailing,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of medicine at Emory University in Atlanta and head of the Emory AIDS International Training and Research Program. “There will be damage. The question is, how much?”

Clinics have limited in-person visits and halted routine HIV screening in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, with physicians relying instead on video calls with patients, a futile alternative for those who are homeless or fear family members will discover their status. Rapid-testing vans that once parked outside nightclubs and bars and handed out condoms are mothballed. And, in state capitals and county seats, government expertise has been singly focused on the all-hands-on-deck COVID response.

Concrete signs of the impact on HIV surveillance abound: One large commercial lab reported nearly 700,000 fewer HIV screening tests across the country — a 45% drop — and 5,000 fewer diagnoses between March and September 2020, compared with the same period the year before. Prescriptions of PrEP, a preexposure prophylaxis that can prevent HIV infection, have also fallen sharply, according to new research presented at a conference last month. State public health departments have recorded similarly steep declines in testing.

That dearth in new data has led to a precarious, unknowable moment: For the first time in decades, the nation’s lauded HIV surveillance system is blind to the virus’s movement.

Nowhere will the lack of data be felt more profoundly than in the South: The region accounts for 51% of all new infections, eight of the 10 states with the highest rates of new diagnoses, and half of all HIV-related deaths, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even before the COVID pandemic, Georgia had the highest rate of new HIV diagnoses of any state, though lower than that of Washington, D.C. The Georgia Department of Public Health recorded a 70% drop in testing last spring compared with spring 2019.

The slowdown in HIV patient services “could be felt for years,” said Dr. Melanie Thompson, principal investigator of the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta.

She added, “Every new HIV infection perpetuates the epidemic and will likely be passed to one or more people in the months to come if people are not diagnosed and offered HIV treatment.”

Coronavirus testing has commandeered the machines previously used for HIV/AIDS testing, further straining surveillance efforts. The polymerase chain reaction — or PCR — machines used to detect and measure the genetic material in the human immunodeficiency virus are the same machines that run COVID tests around-the-clock.

Over the decades, as HIV migrated inland from coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, it took root in the South, where poverty is endemic, lack of health coverage is commonplace, and HIV stigma is pervasive.

“There is the stigma that’s real. There is legacy racism,” said Dr. Thomas Giordano, medical director of Thomas Street Health Center in Houston, one of the largest HIV clinics in the U.S. The state’s political leaders, he said, view HIV as “a disease of the poor, of Blacks, Latinos and gay. It’s just not mainstream at the state level.”

Black people represent 13% of the U.S. population but about 40% of HIV cases — and deaths. In many Southern states, the disparities are stark: In Alabama, Black residents account for 27% of the population and 70% of new diagnoses; in Georgia, Black people make up 33% of residents and 69% of people with HIV.

HIV clinics that serve low-income patients also face limitations using video and phone appointments. Clinic directors say poor patients often lack data plans and many homeless patients simply don’t have phones. They also must contend with fear. “If a friend gave you a room to sleep and your friend finds out you have HIV, you might lose that place to sleep,” said del Rio of Emory University.

Texting can be tricky, too. “We have to be cautious about text messages,” said Dr. John Carlo, chief executive officer of PRISM Health Care North Texas in Dallas. “If someone sees their phone, it can be devastating.”

In Mississippi, HIV contact tracing — which was used as a model for some local efforts to track the coronavirus — has been limited by COVID-related travel restrictions meant “to protect both staff and client,” said Melverta Bender, director of the STD/HIV office at the Mississippi State Department of Health.

Of all regions in the U.S., the South has the weakest health safety nets. And Southern states have far fewer resources than states like California and New York. “Our public health infrastructures have been chronically underfunded and undermined over the decades,” said Thompson, the Atlanta researcher. “So we stand to do worse by many metrics.”

Georgia’s high HIV infection rate and the state’s slow pace of COVID vaccinations “are not unrelated,” Thompson said.

The porous safety net extends to health insurance, a vital need for those living with HIV. Nearly half of Americans without health coverage live in the South, where many states have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That leaves many people with HIV to rely on the federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and state-run AIDS drug assistance programs, known as ADAPs, which offer limited coverage.

“As a matter of equity, insurance is critical for people to live and thrive with HIV,” said Tim Horn, director of health care access at NASTAD, the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors. Ryan White and ADAPs “are not equipped to provide that full sweep of comprehensive care,” he said.

Roshan McDaniel, South Carolina’s ADAP program manager, says 60% of South Carolinians enrolled in ADAP would qualify if her state expanded Medicaid. “The first few years, we thought about it,” said McDaniel. “We don’t even think about it nowadays.”

Enrollment in the Ryan White program jumped during the early months of the pandemic when state economies froze and Americans hunkered down amid a grinding pandemic. Data from state health departments reflect the increased need. In Texas, enrollment in the state’s AIDS drug program increased 34% from March to December 2020. In Georgia, enrollment jumped by 10%.

State health officials attribute the increased enrollment to pandemic-related job losses, especially in states that didn’t expand Medicaid. Antiretroviral treatment, the established regimen that suppresses the amount of virus in the body and prevents AIDS, costs up to $36,000 a year, and medication interruptions can lead to viral mutations and drug resistance. But qualifying for state assistance is difficult: Approval can take up to two months, and missing paperwork can lead to canceled coverage.

Federal health experts say Southern states have generally lagged behind getting patients into medical care and suppressing their viral loads, and people with HIV infections tend to go undiagnosed longer there than in other regions. In Georgia, for example, nearly 1 out of 4 people who learned they were infected developed AIDS within a year, indicating their infections had long gone undiagnosed.

As vaccinations become widely available and restrictions ease, HIV clinic directors are scouring their patient lists to determine who they need to see first. “We are looking at how many people haven’t seen us in over a year. We think it’s over several hundred. Did they move? Did they move providers?” said Carlo, the doctor and health care CEO in Dallas. “We don’t know what the long-term consequences are going to be.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Strides Against HIV/AIDS Falter, Especially in the South, as Nation Battles Covid published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Do-It-Yourself Contact Tracing Is a ‘Last Resort’ in Communities Besieged by Covid

The contact tracers of Washtenaw County in Michigan have been deluged with work and, to cope, the overburdened health department has a new tactic: It is asking residents who test positive for covid-19 to do their own contact tracing.

This story also ran on NPR. It can be republished for free.

Washtenaw is a county of nearly 350,000 residents who live in and around the city of Ann Arbor, about 45 minutes from Detroit. Until mid-October, a county team of 15 contact tracers was managing the workload. But by Thanksgiving, more than 1,000 residents were testing positive for the coronavirus every week, and the tracers could not keep pace.

In Washtenaw County, the process starts with people called case investigators, who receive lab reports of positive coronavirus tests. Their job is to call anyone who has tested positive, tell them they need to isolate and ask them for the names of people with whom they have had close contact. After creating a list of potentially exposed “contacts,” investigators pass it to a new team to start the actual contact tracing. As the number of positive cases builds, the number of calls tracers must make swells.

But in recent weeks, it’s not just the number of positive cases that has increased, overwhelming the capacity of case investigators — so has the number of contacts that each infected person has, said contact tracer Madeline Bacolor.

“There’s just so many more people that are gathering and that are exposed,” she said. “It used to be, we had a case, and maybe that person had seen two people, and now it’s a whole classroom full of day care students or a whole workplace.”

The work to keep people who have been exposed to the virus away from people who have not is crucial, said public health professor Angela Beck, because it breaks viral transmission chains and prevents the virus from spreading unchecked through a community.

Beck teaches at the University of Michigan and runs the campus program for tracing coronavirus exposures among students.

When you’re trying to contain an infectious disease, she said, running out of contact tracers is “not a situation that you want to be in.”

But it’s happening now in health departments in Michigan and around the U.S. where contact tracing workforces have grown, but not fast enough to keep pace with the pandemic’s spread.

As a result, health departments are asking some residents with covid to reach out to their contacts on their own.

Trying ‘a Compromised Strategy’

Once billed as one of the fundamental tools for stemming the spread of the virus, contact tracing has fallen apart in many regions of the country. It’s a systematic breakdown that Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, said hasn’t happened since the spread and stigma of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s.

In Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula, a public health district spanning five counties warned residents that its tracers were overwhelmed and that they might not receive a call at all, despite testing positive. Health workers would need to focus their efforts on residents 65 and older, teens and children attending school in person, and people living in group settings.

In Michigan’s southwestern corner, contact tracers in Van Buren and Cass counties can no longer keep up with their calls. It’s the same situation in Berrien County: “If you test positive, take action immediately by isolating and notifying close contacts,” the county health officer urged residents in a press release.

Health officials have taken similar actions in all regions of the country, including Oregon, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia.

Within many health departments, the shortage of contact tracers has been exacerbated by the communications challenge of relaying a recent change in quarantine guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — it reduced the quarantine period from 14 days to 10 for some individuals exposed to the virus.

The idea behind the change was that the risk of transmission after 10 days of quarantine was low, and shorter quarantine periods might increase people’s willingness to comply with the orders. But the shift also meant that contact tracers had to spend time learning and explaining the new procedures just when caseloads were exploding.

“It makes things more confusing,” said Bacolor, the contact tracer in Washtenaw County. “People might be hearing something different from their job or school than they are from the health department.”

Asking infected people, some of whom might be sick, to call their own friends and families — in effect, conduct their own contact-tracing operation — is far from ideal, public health experts said.

“It is a last-resort tool,” said Beck, the University of Michigan professor. “It is the best that we can do in the situation that we’re in, but it’s a compromised strategy.”

Contact tracing is more than just alerting people to a potential exposure so they can quarantine. Part of the process is to conduct carefully structured interviews with those exposed, to determine if they’ve developed symptoms of covid-19. If so, contacts of those people also need to be traced and told to quarantine, to prevent the virus from proliferating through successive chains of people in the community.

Trained contact tracers also often ask valuable questions to learn more about how the virus was transmitted from person to person so that local health officials can piece together an understanding about which settings and activities seem particularly likely to promote spread — in-person choir rehearsals and crowded bars, for example — and which are unlikely to generate outbreaks.

Contact tracing is a key part of a tried-and-true strategy known as “test, trace and isolate.” Public health professor Beck said the strategy has been used all over the world and it works — when there are enough people and enough time to do it properly.

And she said effective contact tracing can help mitigate the economic pain of a pandemic because it means that only people with known exposures to the virus must stay away from workplaces and school and refrain from other activities.

But success requires significant investment in public health infrastructure, something that Beck and other researchers said has been lacking for decades in the U.S.

This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR and KHN.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

Do-It-Yourself Contact Tracing Is a ‘Last Resort’ in Communities Besieged by Covid published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[anonymusbosch]

Also, the test for coronavirus takes at least 4 hours to run and needs to be sent to a lab which can actually perform it. They're not doing a rapid test in the Red Cross waiting room.

Moreover, according to NPR at least, all COVID testing is considered essential and private insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid must cover them at no cost to the patient.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/11/814189027/no-guarantee-youll-get-tested-for-covid-19-even-if-your-doctor-requests-it

[kmsherrard]

Lab in the time of covid-19

"...since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others."

-Herman Melville

These days I go into lab once or twice a week. The plants I brought home in March in a massive rescue operation are back on the broad, light-filled windowsills. Once again they thrive in the peaceful assurance that they will not  be chewed on by bored cats. Lab is almost as quiet as it used to be when I would go in as early in the morning as I could manage (nowadays, I prefer to reserve early mornings for walks or runs, before the summer heat gets too bad). For me, it has always been a relief to turn to lab work as a break from the hard intellectual labor of planning and analyzing experiments and placing your findings in the context of the published scientific literature; it is hard to escape the impression that there are just too many biologists making far too many discoveries nowadays to have much hope of making sense of anything. If the ratio of data to story gets much higher, I fear we’ll have to cede the project of interpretation to pattern-detecting software, which would take much of the fun out the whole enterprise.

In any case, one of the great pleasures of doing biology is that you get to use your hands for part of the work. Not so much in recent months, however. During the shelter in place and exile from lab that my university experienced from March-June, all that was left was the intellectual work of reading, thinking, analyzing, writing, attending meetings and  talking with colleagues by zoom. It's unbalanced to have all your work take place within the narrow, two-dimensional confines of a computer screen. So I am very grateful to be back to doing experiments with flies.

Many fly experiments start with a cross of two different stocks to get progeny one or more generations down the line with certain desired characteristics, such as a particular protein lighting up with a fluorescent label in a particular tissue at a particular time. So you sit at a microscope and knock out flies with carbon dioxide gas, and gently push them around with a paintbrush to separate males from females and virgin females from experienced ones. How can you tell? You keep the females who look paler and softer than their compatriots, because they emerged from their pupal cases within the past 20 minutes or so, and assume all the others have been around the block. And why do only the females need to be virgins? For the exact same reason that people in many times and places have cared about this.

For more involved crosses, you will be selecting for or against various visible markers to assist sorting out your desired genotypes: stubbly vs. long hairs on the dorsal thorax; stubbly vs. long or abundant vs. sparse hairs on the lateral front thorax (reminding me of an old Seattle joke in poor taste: How do tell the bride at a Swedish wedding? She’s the one with braided armpit hairs); wings straight or so curly the flies should be called crawls because they cannot fly anymore; eyes white or orange or brick red or many shades between, including some only visible by fluorescent light—just to name a few. I’m convinced that looking hard at anything is one form of meditation, and we Drosophologists get to know our flies very well. Then again, there is the early-grade-school satisfaction of circling and crossing out: keep these flies, discard those. This is algebra embodied in living, breeding organisms. In certain types of crosses, we can see direct evidence of that fundamental generator of evolutionary diversity and sexual healing, meiotic crossing over.

In the old, pre-pandemic days, this work took place in a communal “fly room,” where a half-dozen different labs kept stations for fly work. There were two radios, usually both turned on and both playing NPR. I don’t know how it was for others, but my attention to the news stories wandered in and out depending on how complicated my crosses were to sort out. Sometimes someone would turn the volume way down in order to have a conversation, maybe half the time to do with science and the other half something else.

Now, the labs have set up fly stations in their private spaces, where access can be limited to one or two people, minimizing airborne exposure to the virus and reducing the need to exhaustively clean the scopes between users. It’s yet another of the ways this pandemic has isolated us from our habitual social spaces. I hear there’s a Slack for former fly room aficionados, but I don’t have the bandwidth for that these days: I am spending much of my free time keeping up with extended family and a few close friends near and far (since that distinction hardly matters any more, for better and for worse).

Today, working at my lonely fly station in a quiet lab, I put NPR on, streaming it from my laptop into my headphones. We used to be asked to refrain from wearing headphones or earbuds while in lab during regular hours, as it discouraged conversation and normal interaction. Now, of course, none of that can be helped in any case. Despite the often worrying content of the news—covid cases rising in the majority of U.S. states, most horrifically in Florida, governor of Oklahoma tested positive; Greece now requiring tourists provide proof of recent negative test; White House attempting to roll back climate-change mitigating regulations on infrastructure projects; Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the hospital for an unspecified infection (but also: legitimacy and extent of reservations in Oklahoma resoundingly upheld by the Supreme Court, in a rare promise kept to Native Americans; public radio examines its own racial biases in the workplace; White House gives up on demanding colleges and universities hold in-person classes or have their foreign students lose their visas)--despite this, it was a wholly comforting experience, to sit in the air-conditioned lab listening to calm, reasoned voices sort through local, national, and international news while putting my flies in order.

[jesseneufeld]

'Unprecedented Demand' Slows Results From Some Coronavirus Labs

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Adm. Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary of health, who's in charge of the federal testing response. People being tested for COVID-19 report delays in getting results.

'Unprecedented Demand' Slows Results From Some Coronavirus Labs published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

[edsenger]

'Unprecedented Demand' Slows Results From Some Coronavirus Labs

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Adm. Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary of health, who's in charge of the federal testing response. People being tested for COVID-19 report delays in getting results.

'Unprecedented Demand' Slows Results From Some Coronavirus Labs published first on https://brightendentalhouston.weebly.com/

[wsmith215]

Racism, Not Genetics, Explains Why Black Americans Are Dying Of COVID-19

There is still plenty we don’t know about COVID-19, but one fact is inescapable: African Americans are disproportionately represented among the dead. Although the numbers are incomplete, the non-profit APM Research Lab estimates that, as of May 27, the overall death rate from COVID-19 is 2.4 times greater for African Americans than it is for white people.

It is easy to lose sight of what this ratio really means, the human toll it represents. So let’s be clear: If Black people were dying at the same rate as white Americans, at least 13,000 mothers, fathers, daughters, sons and other loved ones would still be alive.

One would expect this staggering inequality to provoke outrage. For some, it has. But much of the public and scientific reaction has instead invoked baseless ideas about unknown genes that make African Americans vulnerable to the virus, rather than focusing on abundant evidence for the devastating biological consequences of systemic inequality and oppression.

The racist idea that vulnerability is intrinsic to blackness comes from politicians, scientists, physicians, and others. In an NPR interview, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who was a medical doctor before entering politics, claimed, without providing evidence, that “genetic reasons,” among other factors, put African Americans at risk of diabetes and, therefore, of serious complications from COVID-19. Scientists writing in the Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, suggested—also without evidence—that ethnic disparities in COVID-19 mortality may be partly attributable to “genetic make-up” and speculated on a “genomically determined response to viral pathogens.” Epidemiologists writing in Health Affairs noted that “that there may be some unknown or unmeasured genetic or biological factors that increase the severity of this illness for African Americans.”

This racialized view of biology is not only wrong but harmful. (Nor is it new in medicine, as documented in Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention, Rana Hogarth’s Medicalizing Blackness or Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid.) For starters, we know that race is a poor proxy for human genetic variation. Compared to other primates, humans exhibit remarkably little genetic variation—a consequence of our relatively recent origin as a species—and the variation that does exist is patterned geographically but not racially. Consider skin color, which varies gradually from the equator to the poles but never reveals a discrete break corresponding to distinct “races.” Genetic variation, moreover, does not come in neatly colored packages. For example, the genes that influence skin color are distributed independently of genes that influence the risk for any particular disease. Given the heterogeneity of groups we call “black” or “white,” treating those categories as proxies for genetic variation almost always leads us astray.

How, then, do we explain that “black” and “white” still predict biological endpoints like hypertension, diabetes or—now—COVID-19? The answer is straightforward: Human biology is more than the genome. Our environments, experiences and exposures have profound impacts on how our bodies develop, turning genetic potential into whole beings. Most of us learned this lesson in high school—phenotype is the product of genotype and environment—but we tend to forget it when it comes to race. If we take the lesson seriously, it becomes clear that systemic racism is as much a part of biology as genomes are: The conditions in which we develop—including limited access to healthy food, exposure to toxic pollutants, the threat of police violence or the injurious stress of racial discrimination—influence the likelihood that any one of us will suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes or serious complications from COVID-19.

Unfortunately, this whole-person view of biology remains uncommon even in fields where it should be widespread. Consider a highly cited 2006 paper in Human Genetics by Hua Tang and colleagues from the University of Washington and the University of California, San Francisco. The researchers analyzed data from the Family Blood Pressure Program, a sizeable clinical study, to test whether DNA-based estimates of genetic ancestry—which they tellingly dubbed “racial admixture”—predicted body mass index and blood pressure in Mexican American and African American adults. Tang and colleagues concluded that their results were “suggestive of genetic differences between Africans and non-Africans that influence blood pressure,” though they acknowledged that genetic effects were likely to be small compared to environmental ones.

In suggesting a genetic basis of racial disparities in blood pressure, Tang and colleagues reprised a long-standing but unsubstantiated assumption that people of African ancestry are predisposed to hypertension. This assumption matters anew because some are invoking it to account for racial inequalities in death rates from COVID-19. Renã Robinson, a professor of chemistry at Vanderbilt University, told NPR that African Americans can be characterized as “potentially having genetic risk factors that make them more salt sensitive,” an apparent reference to a widely disseminated yet discredited hypothesis for hypertension, which suggests that the Atlantic slave trade created conditions favoring salt-retaining genotypes among enslaved Africans and their descendants. (Robinson noted there are likely to be additional causes.) In fact, billions of dollars’ worth of effort to find alleged genetic contributors to racial disparities in cardiovascular disease has turned up nothing.

The study by Tang and colleagues illustrates two common errors that allow racial-genetic thinking to persist. The first, remarkably, is that the study found no statistically significant relationship between African genetic ancestry and blood pressure. The suggestion of “genetic differences,” then, clearly reaches beyond the data. Such unwarranted inferences are not as rare as you’d think. In April, the Journal of Internal Medicine published a paper asserting a genetic basis for racial differences in obesity without actual genetic evidence.

The second problem is more subtle. Recall that Tang and colleagues examined two biological variables—genetic ancestry and blood pressure. If they found an association, they assumed it was because of some unidentified genetic variants that (a) increase susceptibility to high blood pressure and (b) were more common in people of African ancestry. Yet they did not test that assumption, nor did they pursue the alternative possibility that biological associations could be driven by sociocultural processes.

It is easy to take the logic used by Tang and colleagues for granted. Most researchers assume that genetic ancestry is related to health through genetic effects. But what if genetic ancestry and blood pressure are linked because of systemic racism, rather than DNA? What if people with more African ancestry in a racist society are more likely to be poor (they are), to experience discrimination (they do), or to face any number of other stressors we know are associated with high blood pressure? Evidence indicates such connections are better explanations than alleged genetic differences.

Not long after the Tang study came out, Amy Non, then a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Florida and now an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, took a hard look at the underlying data from the Family Blood Pressure Program. She noticed a single, crude proxy for the wide-ranging consequences of systemic racism: educational attainment. Working with myself and Connie Mulligan, a genetic anthropologist and Non’s advisor at Florida, she replicated Tang and colleagues’ analysis of genetic ancestry and blood pressure but added years of education as another variable. Whatever evidence there might have been for a genetic effect evaporated. Instead, as we reported in the American Journal of Public Health, every additional year of education was associated with an 0.51 mmHg drop in blood pressure, on average. Genetic ancestry added nothing.

In the time of COVID-19, this finding is a reminder that genetic ancestry might matter only because we think it should. If we assume that people who are racialized as “black” or “white” are fundamentally different and treat them accordingly, the paradoxical result is that it will produce the very biological differences we presumed to exist in the first place. But it’s not because of any deep-seated differences in our DNA. It’s because our social structures and attitudes promote the well-being of some and devalue others.

In his NPR interview, Cassidy downplayed the role of systemic racism as a root cause of COVID-19 inequalities. “That’s rhetoric, and it may be,” he said. “But as a physician, I’m looking at science.” However, the science does not say what Cassidy thinks it does. Thanks to decades of careful research, we know that what we gloss as “race” corresponds poorly to genetic variation, and we know that racism is deadly. An ethical, scientific response to COVID-19 demands that we honor the highest standards of evidence in evaluating genetic guesswork, while measuring the biological costs of systemic racism and intervening to stop it.

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[realcleargoodtimes]

n granular detail, Bush called for increased epidemiological research, improved vaccine technology, detailed quarantine plans, and more stockpiling of everything from vaccines to personal protective gear.

His advice seems prescient now, but much of the plan has been ignored or contradicted by the Trump administration. The result has been a delayed and chaotic response to the pandemic.

1. Detect outbreaks early Hospitalman Olivia Backstrom, assigned to Naval Medical Center San Diego, counts the amount of white and red blood cells through a microscope in the hospital's core lab, February 6, 2020. Hospitalman Olivia Backstrom, assigned to Naval Medical Center San Diego, counts the amount of white and red blood cells through a microscope in the hospital's core lab, February 6, 2020.

US Navy/Mass Comm Specialist 2nd Class Erwin Jacob Miciano

"A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said in 2005. "If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage; if allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it."

US intelligence started reporting about a dangerous virus in China in November, and first warned President Trump about the threat on January 3.

Later that month, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro sent the president a memo indicating the coronavirus could kill as many as 500,000 Americans.

But on January 30, Trump called the virus "a very little problem." As late as February 28, he told reporters it was "going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

The president didn't acknowledge the severity of the outbreak until mid-March after it was declared a pandemic.

Rick Bright, the highest-ranking scientist on the government's coronavirus response team, told "60 Minutes" that when he spoke with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar about the coronavirus on January 23, Azar downplayed the threat.

According to a federal whistleblower complaint, Bright was demoted in April after opposing the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.

2. Establish a global response The logo of the World Health Organization at its headquarters in Geneva. The logo of the World Health Organization at its headquarters in Geneva. FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images

"To respond to a pandemic, members of the international community will continue to work together," Bush said. "An influenza pandemic would be an event with global consequences, and therefore we're continuing to meet to develop a global response."

Bush requested $251 million from Congress to help foreign nations train local medical personnel, expand their surveillance and testing capabilities, and detect and contain outbreaks.

In September 2019, the Trump administration stopped funding PREDICT, an initiative under the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that worked with dozens of foreign laboratories — including the one in Wuhan, China, that identified the novel coronavirus.

The program also trained thousands of people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to detect new viruses, according to the Los Angeles Times.

PREDICT was resurrected in April with $2.26 million in emergency USAID funding. But that same month, Trump ordered the US to stop funding the World Health Organization, claiming the organization allowed China to conceal the extent of the contagion.

The US has also pulled back from collaborating on international efforts to combat the pandemic: It didn't send a representative to the Coronavirus Global Response, a virtual summit that raised more than $8 billion for a vaccine, The Guardian reported.

And it has not said if it will attend the Global Vaccine Summit in London on June 4.

"What the United States has chosen in these recent meetings – not to attend, and not to participate – it has chosen instead to begin talking about a sort of go-it-alone approach," Stephen Morrison, director of the Center on Global Health Policy, told the Guardian.

That approach, he added, "fractures the international efforts and creates tensions and uncertainties and insecurities."

3. Strengthen domestic surveillance National Security Advisor John Bolton disbanded the National Security Council's Global Health Security and Biodefense unit in 2018. National Security Advisor John Bolton disbanded the National Security Council's Global Health Security and Biodefense unit in 2018. STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images

"By creating systems that provide continuous situational awareness, we're more likely to be able to stop, slow, or limit the spread of the pandemic and save American lives," Bush said in his pandemic address.

His administration launched the National Bio-surveillance Initiative in 2005, which increased the government's ability to rapidly detect, quantify, and respond to outbreaks in both humans and animals.

It also set up systems to quickly share data between local, state, national, and international public health officials.

In 2018, Trump's National Security Adviser, John Bolton, disbanded the National Security Council's Global Health Security and Biodefense unit, set up by the Obama administration to handle pandemic preparedness.

Bolton tweeted that it was a "streamlining" of NSC structures.

Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, the top official responsible for overseeing our pandemic response, left the administration shortly thereafter.

The White House also eliminated the $30 million Complex Crises Fund, which the secretary of state can access to deploy disease experts.

Trump's budget proposals have consistently called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's budget to be slashed by millions of dollars, though Congress has declined those provisions.

4. Stockpile vaccines, antiviral drugs, and medical supplies Sue Ogrocki/AP Images

Workers carry boxes of supplies at a Strategic National Stockpile warehouse in an undisclosed location in Oklahoma City on April 7, 2020. Workers carry boxes of supplies at a Strategic National Stockpile warehouse in an undisclosed location in Oklahoma City on April 7, 2020. Bush warned that, in a pandemic, "everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators, masks, and protective equipment would be in short supply."

In 2003, the Bush administration placed the country's reserve of vaccines and antitoxins under the control of the Department of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security.

It also expanded the reserve to include medical equipment, like ventilators and personal protective equipment, and renamed it the Strategic National Stockpile.

In his address, Bush asked for $1.2 billion for enough avian flu vaccine to inoculate 20 million Americans and $1 billion to stockpile antivirals like Tamiflu.

The Obama administration utilized the stockpile during the 2009 H1N1 and 2016 Zika outbreaks but did not replenish it. The Trump administration also failed to replace those items despite warnings the stockpile was not prepared for a pandemic, according to NBC.

In February, HHS requested $2 billion to replenish the stockpile, but was rebuffed by the Office of Management and Budget, the Washington Post reported, resulting in a screaming match in the Situation Room between Azar and an OMB official.

The White House ultimately trimmed Azar's request down to $500 million when it was brought to Congress.

Once the virus came to the US, hospitals and state officials sounded the alarm about a lack of protective gear, but Trump called PPE shortages "fake news."

The White House has appeared territorial about the stockpile: at an April 3 White House press briefing, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said states should not expect support from the Strategic National Stockpile.

"It's supposed to be our stockpile," he said. "It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use."

5. Accelerate new vaccine technologies A subject enrolled in a coronavirus vaccine clinical trial at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, on May 4, 2020. A subject enrolled in a coronavirus vaccine clinical trial at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, on May 4, 2020. Associated Press

In the event of a pandemic, Bush said, the US "must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine online quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American."

He made new vaccine technology the cornerstone of his strategy, calling for $2.8 billion to speed the development of cell-culture vaccines, which are grown in mammal cells rather than chicken eggs, flu vaccines had been typically.

Bush's goal was to have enough vaccine for every American to be inoculated within six months of the start of a pandemic.

But a 2019 National Security Council study that called for the government to speed up the production and distribution methods for new vaccines went "unheeded" by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.

It wasn't until the end of April that Trump announced "Operation Warp Speed," a consortium of scientists, government officials, and corporate leaders tasked with producing 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by November, CNN reported, even though experts say a vaccine may be more than a year away.

Trump has also been hesitant to use the Defense Production Act, which enables the government to force businesses to work on vaccines and medical equipment.

"We're a country not based on nationalizing our business," he said in March, NPR reported.

6. Prepare the country for an outbreak President Bush (center) and Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on November 6, 2007. President Bush (center) and Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on November 6, 2007. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

"A pandemic is unlike other natural disasters," Bush said. "Outbreaks can happen simultaneously in hundreds, or even thousands, of locations at the same time. And unlike storms or floods, which strike in an instant and then recede, a pandemic can continue spreading destruction in repeated waves that can last for a year or more."

Bush asked for more than $500 million for pandemic preparedness, including $100 million to help states develop and test out pandemic exercises before a health crisis hit.

And he tasked HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt to work with state and local public health officials on coordinating their contingency plans.

During the first months of the pandemic, Trump put the burden on states and local governments to scale up their testing plans and pandemic responses.

In 2017, outgoing members of the Obama administration briefed Trump's team on dealing with a pandemic, according to Politico, though some staffers were dismissive of the simulated exercises.

The Trump White House also declined to use Obama's 69-page pandemic preparedness playbook because it was "dated," Politico reported.

7. Give Americans accurate information to protect themselves and others Vice President Mike Pence (center) was criticized for not wearing a mask while visiting a COVID-19 patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, on April 28, 2020. Vice President Mike Pence (center) was criticized for not wearing a mask while visiting a COVID-19 patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, on April 28, 2020. Associated Press

"The American people need to have information to protect themselves and others," Bush said. "In a pandemic, an infection carried by one person can be transmitted to many other people, and so every American must take personal responsibility for stopping the spread of the virus."

Bush felt education was a vital part of any response, and launched pandemicflu.gov, offering tips to decrease the odds of infection or spreading disease.

That website now forwards to a general Centers for Disease Control and Prevention landing page for pandemic influenza, with a link off to the CDC's separate page for the current coronavirus pandemic.

[xtruss]

A US researcher who worked with a Wuhan virology lab gives 4 reasons why a coronavirus leak would be extremely unlikely

— Aylin Woodward | MAY 2, 2020 | Business Insider

Public-health researchers work in their laboratory at an airport in Qingdao, Shandong province, August 11, 2014.

A fringe theory suggests the coronavirus could have leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, but there’s no evidence of this.

One US researcher who has worked with scientists at that Wuhan lab explained to Business Insider why an accidental lab leak is extremely unlikely.

The high-security lab says it has no record of the novel coronavirus’ genome, and follows strict safety measures.

It’s far more likely that the virus spilled over naturally from bats, jumping to humans via an intermediary animal host.

A fringe theory suggests that the new coronavirus leaked by accident from a lab in Wuhan.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) study infectious diseases, including coronaviruses, and did before the pandemic started. So as questions about how the pandemic started continue to go unanswered, the lab has drawn scrutiny.

Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, asked intelligence agencies in January to look into the idea of a Wuhan lab leak, The New York Times reported. But CIA officers didn’t find any evidence.

There’s a reason for that, according to Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with and trained WIV researchers in the past.

“I know that we worked together to develop very stringent safety protocol, and it’s highly unlikely this was a lab accident,” she told Business Insider. Here are four reasons why.

Reason 1: The lab’s samples don’t match the new coronavirus

The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s Hubei province, April 17, 2020.

The WIV houses China’s only Biosafety-level-4 laboratory. Scientists study the most dangerous and infectious microbes known to humankind in these types of facilities. Some of the institute’s researchers, including virologist Shi Zhengli, have collected, sampled, and studied coronaviruses that circulate Chinese bats. In 2013, Shi and her collaborators pinpointed the bat population most likely responsible for spreading SARS, in the Shitou Cave near Kunming.

After her team sequenced the COVID-19 virus, Shi told Scientific American that she quickly checked her laboratory’s record from the past few years to check for accidents, especially during disposal. Then she cross-referenced the new coronavirus’ genome with the genetic information of other bat coronaviruses her team had collected. They didn’t match.

“That really took a load off my mind,” Shi said told Scientific American, adding, “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Mazet has met and worked with Shi through PREDICT, a pandemic early-warning program started by the US Agency for International Development. The program has trained staff and funded labs in 30 countries, including the WIV, but President Donald Trump shut down PREDICT last fall.

“I’ve spoken to her recently,” Mazet said of Shi. “She is absolutely positive that she had never identified this virus prior to the outbreak happening.”

Mazet added that Shi set up a secure, shared database into which PREDICT members could upload their work for public release.

Reason 2: The lab implements rigorous safety protocols

In 2018, US officials raised concerns about safety issues at WIV, according to diplomatic cables obtained by The Washington Post. But Mazet said Shi’s work in the lab and in the field was above reproach.

“In the field, they wear extreme personal protective equipment, including multiple layers of gloves, eye protection, full body suits, and masks,” she said. (She noted, however, that she has not personally visited the WIV and couldn’t speak to all the research done there.) Samples collected from bats, Mazet added, get immediately split between some vials that contain chemicals that deactivate the virus, and other containers that leave the virus alive.

A laboratory technician working on samples from people to be tested for the new coronavirus at ‘Fire Eye’ laboratory in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province.

All samples are then dunked into liquid nitrogen on the spot, which freezes them, then the vials are disinfected and transported to the lab. There, scientists wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) unload them into a freezer set to minus 80 degrees Celsius.

When the samples are studied later, researchers only use the deactivated, non-infectious ones, Mazet said, adding that the vials with viable virus are locked down in a special area.

Reason 3: The coronavirus is the latest in a long line of zoonotic disease outbreaks

Rather than a leak, the coronavirus is more likely the latest disease to have jumped from an animal host to humans, experts say.

This type of cross-species hop, called a spillover event, also led to outbreaks of Ebola and SARS. Both of those viruses originated in bats, and genetic research has all but confirmed the same for the new coronavirus – a study published in February found that it shares 96% of its genetic code with coronaviruses circulating in Chinese bat populations.

Three out of every four emerging infectious diseases come to us from other species; these pathogens are known as zoonotic diseases. The coronavirus is the seventh zoonotic virus to have spilled over into people in the last century.

A greater horseshoe bat, a relative of the Rhinolophis sinicus bat species from China that was the original host of the SARS virus.

The 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic – swine flu – started in pigs then killed nearly 300,000 people. People have caught bird flus via direct contact with infected poultry. Other pandemic influenza strains, including the 1957 “Asian flu” and the 1968 Hong Kong pandemic, likely started in birds, too.

And in the last 45 years, at least four epidemics have been traced back to bats.

Reason 4: Everyday people are more likely to get infected than researchers who wear protection

The caves and wild habitats in which samples get collected from bats are dangerous places for people, since humans can be exposed to the live viruses circulating in the animals, Mazet said.

Shi’s researchers navigate those caves in full PPE; but tourists, hunters, poachers, and other people who rely on animals in some capacity for food or trade wander into such places less protected.

The mouth of a cave off of the Li River in Guilin-Yangshuo, China, May 2017.

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance (which managed PREDICT’s relationship with the WIV), told NPR last week that his colleagues are “finding 1 to 7 million people exposed” to zoonotic viruses in Southeast Asia each year.

“That’s the pathway. It’s just so obvious to all of us working in the field,” he said.

A study published in March 2019 even predicted that bats would be the source of a new coronavirus outbreak in China. That’s because the majority of coronaviruses – those that affect humans and animals – can be found in China, and many bats “live near humans in China, potentially transmitting viruses to humans and livestock,” the authors said.

Spillovers will keep happening

The frequency of spillover events will increase as humans encroach further into wild habitats that house disease-carrying species we haven’t interacted with before, Mazet said. Researching how past spillovers happened and which habitats present the greatest risk for such events helps scientists make predictions about the next pandemic.

A researcher with a protective face mask holds a bat.

Since 2014, Shi’s group at the WIV has received nearly $US600,000 from a multi-million dollar, five-year grant funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to research the spillover of bat coronaviruses. The grant, which is managed by EcoHealth Alliance, was renewed for another five years in 2019.

However, after being questioned about that funding at a White House briefing on April 17, President Trump said his administration would “end that grant very quickly.”

A week later, the National Institutes of Health cancelled it.

Eroding confidence between US and Chinese researchers

Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s biosafety laboratory, told Reuters that “malicious” claims about the lab had been “pulled out of thin air” and contradicted all available evidence.

The persistent circulation of the lab-leak theory could impact future scientific cooperation and information sharing between the US and China, according to Mazet.

“What’s happening sociologically right now is our biggest risk -who’s going to want to work on this if they’re the ones put under a microscope?” Mazet said. “I think the real danger of what’s going on now is that experts like Shi and myself may not be able to keep collaborating to identify these viruses because of government pressures.” Mazet said.

That would make it harder to discover where the COVID-19 virus came from, as well as to forecast and prepare for the next spillover.

A German scientist works on research related to a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Mazet added that she worries a blame game could even put lives at risk in the short term.

“If we point fingers at other nations that have best opportunity to develop a vaccine, why would we expect them to freely share that with us?” Mazet said. “Collaboration is key right now, otherwise you have countries developing things in parallel, and you can’t assume the US is the best at everything.”