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European COVID cases surge, with the Melbourne example suggested as the fix.
Alex Polyakov, an epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, said in getting COVID figures down to single digits Victoria had “achieved what a lot of people thought was unachievable”.
European coronavirus cases surge with Melbourne model suggested as fix
The people who helped, and hindered , during the Victorian crisis.
The people who helped and hindered during the Victorian crisis
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Of all the places that have seen off a second coronavirus wave, only Vietnam and Hong Kong have done as well as Victorians
Of all the places that have seen off a second coronavirus wave, only Vietnam and Hong Kong have done as well as Victorians
Doctors in Europe who test positive for COVID have been asked to keep working.
Doctors who test positive to coronavirus asked to keep working
Germans urged to maintain discipline, to head off a second wave of the virus. Interestingly, German States decide on measures to combat the virus.
Merkel is meeting with Germany's 16 state premiers, who she must convince to agree to the restrictions, which were described by Bild as "lockdown light." Measures taken to combat the coronavirus pandemic in Germany are decided at the state level.
Coronavirus: Merkel urges discipline as Germany mulls tougher restrictions | News | DW | 27.10.2020
More on the German system, one country, 17 governments.
One country, 17 governments
Rather like the US, and in stark contrast to France, Germany's 16 states hold considerable political power. In fact, Article 70 of Germany's constitution explicitly states that all lawmaking rests in the states' hands unless stated otherwise in the Basic Law itself.
This list of regional powers is therefore long: Health provision, education, policing, cultural policy, construction planning — each state even has its own independent domestic intelligence service and its own court system.
Coronavirus in Germany: How the federal system hampers the fight against the pandemic | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 12.10.2020
"Totally under control ", the COVID -19 documentary all Americans need to see.
" I forgot, for instance, that in February and March, cruise ships that couldn’t dock had been petri dishes that carried infected Americans while the administration dismissed the virus’s threat. I forgot that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once discouraged the general public from wearing masks, because health-care workers needed the limited supply. I also forgot that Nancy Messonnier, of the CDC, warned at the end of February that the virus would spread in the U.S., and days later, she stopped appearing in the White House’s briefings
.If Totally Under Control simply presented all of these facts as events on a timeline, it would have come off as a brutal but rote history lesson. Instead, Gibney and his co-directors make the scope of America’s failures clear by comparing America’s response with that of South Korea. The two first-world countries found their first cases on the same day in January, but only one managed to avoid shutdowns and an economic free fall.
In a rather wistful interview, the South Korean doctor Kim Jin Yong speaks candidly about how much he admired America and the CDC. He points out that 90 percent of the medical textbooks in South Korea are American, and that America has paved the way for medical advances, including inventing the N95 face mask in the 1990s. So watching America flounder has been, he says bluntly, “so sad.”
The COVID-19 Documentary All Americans Need to See - Defense One
Thought this was a interesting statement about how Germany is coping with the second wave, from an expert and MP. There are lessons we could learn, I think.
Will Germany's effective Covid strategy work again as it enters a second wave? | Karl Lauterbach | Opinion | The Guardian
Why autopsies are proving crucial during COVID-19. EDIT.
Why Autopsies Are Proving Crucial During Covid-19
Advances in medical imaging have reduced the need for the procedure, but it is leading to discoveries that may help with better treatment
"As those autopsies began, though, pathologists started to make discoveries that could change the way physicians and researchers understand the effects of Covid-19 on the body. “When you look at autopsies now,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci told CNN in April, “we’re seeing things that we didn’t expect.”
In particular, early autopsies showed that Covid-19 was causing blood clots all over the body. Some were fatal: Fowkes says that in the first 17 patients her team autopsied, four had died from pulmonary emboli, blockages in the blood vessels of the lungs. Jeffrey Jhang, a pathologist at Mount Sinai who runs laboratory tests for living patients, had noticed some large clots in blood samples he received early on. As autopsies also demonstrated the pervasiveness of clotting, the team at Mount Sinai decided they should treat Covid-19 patients with blood thinners and regularly test for signs of clotting.
It seemed to work: Out of the next 83 Covid-19 patients Fowkes’ team autopsied, only one had died from a pulmonary embolus. Based on autopsy reports and other findings, anticoagulants are being tested in several randomized trials, and some national treatment guidelines now call for doctors to give clot-reducing medication to most Covid-19 patients.
Still, doctors are debating whether the treatment is beneficial for all hospitalized Covid-19 patients — barring those with certain underlying conditions — and at what dose. Some experts have criticized physicians at Mount Sinai for not conducting a randomized controlled trial when they adjusted their protocol, in order to better gauge its effects.
Autopsies have also built on observations made by physicians. As patients exhibited neurological symptoms like confusion and loss of smell, Fowkes and her team found the virus in the frontal lobe of a patient’s brain. The finding, published in the Journal of Medical Virology in April, provided some of the earliest evidence of the virus invading the central nervous system. But she was surprised to also find the virus in the lining of the brain’s blood vessels. The pathologists continued searching other organs for signs of SARS-CoV-2 infiltration and found clues that the virus may hide in vasculature throughout the body. She and her team now wonder if some patients may have low levels of virus “hanging around in the body” with the potential to reignite infection — a question that has inspired extensive debate among experts."
Why Autopsies Are Proving Crucial During Covid-19
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Science
| Smithsonian Magazine
How Latin America's pandemic defences were broken. Trump has a lot to answer for.
How Latin America’s pandemic defenses were broken
Latin America has one-third of all Covid-19 deaths and has suffered more acutely from the virus than any other region in the world.
Why has it fared so poorly?
New York Times reporters looked into this question in the latest installment of the Behind the Curve series, which explores the missteps and misunderstandings that have allowed Covid-19 to spread around the world.
In Latin America, weak health systems and overcrowded cities made the region inherently vulnerable to the coronavirus. But President Trump and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, with their shared disregard for science and fierce opposition to leftist governments, made a bad situation worse by dismantling the region’s defenses.
- Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro drove 10,000 Cuban doctors and nurses out of impoverished areas of Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and El Salvador. Many left without being replaced only months before the pandemic arrived.
- The two presidents attacked the international agency most capable of fighting the virus — the Pan American Health Organization — citing its involvement with the Cuban medical program. With help from Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Trump nearly bankrupted the agency by withholding promised funding at the height of the outbreak, to an extent not previously disclosed.
- And with help from Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro made hydroxychloroquine the centerpiece of Brazil’s pandemic response, despite a medical consensus that the drug was ineffective and even dangerous.