Modeling Finds Under-20s Just Half As Susceptible to COVID-19 as Adults

 A new computational analysis suggests that people under the age of 20 are about half as susceptible to COVID-19 infection as adults, and they are less likely to infect others. Itai Dattner of the University of Haifa, Israel, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Earlier studies have found differences in symptoms and the clinical course of COVID-19 in children compared to adults. Others have reported that a lower proportion of children are diagnosed compared to older age groups. However, only a few studies have compared transmission patterns between age groups, and their conclusions are not definitive.

To better understand susceptibility and infectivity of children, Dattner and colleagues fitted mathematical and statistical models of transmission within households to a dataset of COVID-19 testing results from the dense city of Bnei Brak, Israel. The dataset covered 637 households whose members all underwent PCR testing for active infection in spring of 2020. Some individuals also received serology testing for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.

By adjusting model parameters to fit the data, the researchers found that people under 20 are 43 percent as susceptible as people over 20. With an infectivity estimated at 63 percent of that of adults, children are also less likely to spread COVID-19 to others. The researchers also found that children are more likely than adults to receive a negative PCR result despite actually being infected.

These findings could explain worldwide reports that a lower proportion of children are diagnosed compared to adults. They could help inform mathematical modeling of COVID-19 dynamics, public health policy, and control measures. Future computational research could explore transmission dynamics in other settings, such as nursing homes and schools.

“When we began this research, understanding children’s role in transmission was a top priority, in connection with the question of reopening schools,” Dattner says. “It was exciting to work in a large, multidisciplinary team, which was assembled by the Israeli Ministry of Health to address this topic rapidly.”

Reference: “The role of children in the spread of COVID-19: Using household data from Bnei Brak, Israel, to estimate the relative susceptibility and infectivity of children” by Itai Dattner, Yair Goldberg , Guy Katriel, Rami Yaari, Nurit Gal, Yoav Miron, Arnona Ziv, Rivka Sheffer, Yoram Hamo and Amit Huppert, 11 February 2021, PLOS Computational Biology.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008559

https://scitechdaily.com/mathematical-modeling-finds-people-under-20-are-just-half-as-susceptible-to-covid-19-as-adults/

White House cites 'deep concerns' on WHO COVID report, demands early data from China

 The White House on Saturday called on China to make available data from the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, saying it has “deep concerns” about the way the findings of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 report were communicated.

FILE PHOTO: A logo is pictured outside a building of the World Health Organization (WHO) during an executive board meeting on update on the coronavirus outbreak, in Geneva, Switzerland, February 6, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said all hypotheses are still open about the origins of COVID-19, after Washington said it wanted to review data from a WHO-led mission to China, where the virus first emerged.

A WHO-led mission, which spent four weeks in China looking into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak, said this week that it was not looking further into the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab, which it considered highly unlikely.

The Trump administration had said it suspected the virus may have escaped from a Chinese lab, which Beijing strongly denies.

Sullivan noted that U.S. President Joe Biden had quickly reversed the decision to disengage from the WHO, but said it was imperative to protect the organization’s credibility.

“Re-engaging the WHO also means holding it to the highest standards,” Sullivan said. “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.”

Biden, who is spending his first weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in the mountains of western Maryland, will meet with his national security advisers on Saturday, a White House official said.

China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s investigators, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.

The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the WHO team, told Reuters.

“It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government,” Sullivan said.

“To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make available its data from the earliest days of the outbreak,” he said.

No comment was immediately available from the Chinese embassy in Washington or the WHO.

Going forward, all countries, including China, should participate in a transparent and robust process for preventing and responding to health emergencies, Sullivan said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKBN2AD0FX

Reopening indoor dining ‘reckless’ as new, more transmissible coronavirus strains spread

 Reopening indoor dining is “an extraordinarily reckless and premature decision” as new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus spread in the U.S., virologist Angela Rasmussen told CNBC Friday.

Indoor dining resumed at a limited capacity in New York and Portland, Oregon, on Friday.

“While I appreciate the economic importance of opening businesses back up and while cases are on the decline, we have new variants that are circulating that are more transmissible,” Rasmussen said on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith.”

Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, said the United Kingdom relaxed Covid restrictions early last December. Then, cases surged after a new, more transmissible coronavirus strain was identified.

New, more contagious coronavirus strains originating in the U.K., South Africa and Brazil have been spreading in the U.S.

The strain first identified in the U.K. is doubling its reach in the U.S. approximately every 10 days, according to a study published by researchers on Sunday.

“We don’t need to create new opportunities for the virus to spread among strangers who are not in each other’s household groups,” Rasmussen said.

Indoor dining increases an individual’s risk of coronavirus infection, according to Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Ventilation flow inside restaurants can cause aerosols to spread at distances greater than six feet, a study published in November found.

“We need to hang in there a little bit longer with the non-pharmaceutical interventions that are meant to reduce exposure risk, such as masking and distancing, until we can get more people vaccinated,” Rasmussen said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/12/reopening-indoor-dining-is-an-extraordinarily-reckless-and-premature-decision-virologist-says.html

Apple Watch may predict Covid-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing

 A new study from Mount Sinai researchers published in the peer-reviewed “Journal of Medical Internet Research” found that wearable hardware, and specifically the Apple Watch, can effectively predict a positive COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before current PCR-based nasal swab tests.

The investigation dubbed the “Warrior Watch Study,” used a dedicated Apple Watch and iPhone app and included participants from Mount Sinai staff. It required participants to use the app for health data monitoring and collection, and also asked that they fill out a day survey to provide direct feedback about their potential COVID-19 symptoms and other factors, including stress.

During the course of the study, the research team enlisted “several hundred healthcare workers” to participate, and collected data over several months, between April and September. The primary biometric signal that the study’s authors were watching was heart rate variability (HRV), which is a key indicator of strain on a person’s nervous system. This information was combined with information around reported symptoms associated with COVID-19, including fever, aches, dry cough, gastrointestinal issues, and loss of taste and smell, among others.

The Warrior Watch Study was not only able to predict infections up to a week before tests provided confirmed diagnoses, but also revealed that participants’ HRV patterns normalized fairly quickly after their diagnosis, returning to normal roughly one to two weeks following their positive tests.

As to what the study could lead to in terms of actual interventions, the study’s authors note that it can help anticipate outcomes and isolate individuals from others who are at risk. Most importantly, it provides a means for doing so remotely, allowing caregivers to anticipate or detect a COVID-19 case without even doing a physical exam or administering a nasal swab test, which can help take precautionary measures in high-risk situations when cases are suspected, possibly preventing any spread before someone is highly contagious.

The study is ongoing and will expand to examine what else wearables like the Apple Watch and their onboard sensors can tell us about other impacts of COVID-19 on the health of care workers, including what factors like sleep and physical activity can have in association with the disease.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/mount-sinai-study-finds-apple-watch-can-predict-covid-19-diagnosis-up-to-a-week-before-testing/

Covid-19 Vaccines Becoming Important Diplomatic Currency

 When an Indian Navy aircraft landed in the archipelago nation of Seychelles last month, the country's foreign minister and other senior officials lined up on the tarmac to welcome its precious cargo: 50,000 doses of Indian-made AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.

Two weeks earlier, the Indian Ocean island nation -- total population, 98,000 -- received a separate shipment of 50,000 doses of the Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine manufactured in China, which is seeking to make strategic inroads in a region long seen by India as part of its sphere of influence.

Covid-19 vaccines are becoming an important form of diplomatic currency around the world, as nations jockey for soft-power gains. China and Russia are touting their own vaccines, as are Western drug companies.

Now India, a pharmaceutical giant that manufactured some 60% of global vaccines before the pandemic, is joining the fray, seeking to strengthen ties and expand its influence in its neighborhood and beyond.

Beijing has for years sought to derail Indian efforts to establish a military outpost in Seychelles that would allow New Delhi to keep tabs on Chinese naval and civilian vessels in the area. India has worked to blunt Chinese intrusions and helped build a network of coastal radar stations.

The end result of the dueling vaccine diplomacy here has been an unusual abundance of doses: the Seychelles now ranks third in the world in terms of the proportion of its population that has been inoculated, behind Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

This achievement could enable the island nation to reopen its tourism industry, the mainstay of the economy, as soon as next month, Foreign Minister Sylvestre Radegonde said. "It's a tremendous benefit," he said. "We appreciate that in our hour of need India, like China, is always present."

The Pune-based Serum Institute of India is manufacturing millions of doses a day of the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC and the University of Oxford, and has committed to produce this year as much as a billion doses of another vaccine developed by Maryland-based Novavax Inc. once it receives regulatory approval. Two other Indian companies, Bharat Biotech and Zydus Cadila, are conducting trials of their own homegrown vaccine candidates.

Since starting vaccine exports last month, India has shipped 23 million doses, with 6.5 million of them donated by the government to regional neighbors like the Seychelles, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Cambodia -- as well as to remote recipients such as Dominica and Barbados in the Caribbean.

Indian-made AstraZeneca vaccines are slated to make up the bulk of the World Health Organization-led Covax global vaccine program, with 240 million doses expected to be shipped in the first half of the year -- including 17 million earmarked for India's rival Pakistan.

"Many countries, when they think vaccines, they think India," said Ashok Malik, policy adviser to India's ministry of external affairs.

Every week, Mr. Malik said, a special interministerial committee meets in New Delhi to discuss what amount of vaccines India's own vaccination campaign can process, and authorizes the remainder to be exported.

"This was a commitment we made early on: we would be cognizant of our responsibility, we would not resort to vaccine nationalism," he said. "People appreciate that we are not hoarding the vaccines at home. Whatever is available is being shipped out as soon as possible."

So far, with the vaccination infrastructure still being set up, India has exported more than three times the amount of doses that it has supplied to its own citizens. Chinese vaccine makers, meanwhile, have been delaying shipments abroad as new outbreaks of the virus keep erupting at home.

"One of the challenges for China is how to balance the domestic vaccination needs and international demands," said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. "That will in a way give India an opportunity to compete more effectively with China."

On a recent evening, Serum Institute of India workers wearing blue protective equipment rolled out one of the latest deliveries: four pallets containing more than one million doses bound for South Africa. Big insulated boxes lined with ice packs were loaded onto a truck, which drove to an airport 100 miles away. The South African government purchased the vaccines.

Amid a global vaccine shortage, the company keeps getting orders from places where it hadn't planned to export because rival suppliers have been running into production problems, said Serum Institute Chief Executive Adar Poonawalla. "The Chinese -- who are actually excellent in everything they do -- they've not been able to manufacture it the way that we have," he said.

Only a tiny amount of vaccines made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE and by Moderna Inc., mainstays of the inoculation campaign in the U.S. and Europe, have been made available to the developing world, in part because of their high cost and the need to keep them cold.

Unlike Serum Institute, which is teaming up with Western companies, China -- and Russia -- are offering their own independently developed vaccines, and are publicly casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of Western-made products like Pfizer. For both, the ultimate aim is to bolster their geopolitical clout at the expense of the U.S. and allies.

To what extent India's vaccine diplomacy works remains to be seen. In the Seychelles, the government that came to power in elections last year had campaigned against plans by its predecessor to lease parts of the remote Assumption Island to the Indian military. The vaccine donation didn't sway it to accept Indian troops.

"Relations are excellent between our two countries. We have joint concerns about the safety and the security of the Indian Ocean, which is a shared ocean," said Mr. Radegonde, the foreign minister. "But we've been over this military-base issue, and it is behind us and is something that is no longer on the table."

The U.A.E., whose crown prince owns a residence in the Seychelles and frequently stays there, paid for the Chinese vaccine shipment.

Sri Lanka, too, has been caught in the rivalry between Asia's two giants, with its 2017 agreement to lease the Hambantota port to China for 99 years viewed by New Delhi as a threat to India's national security. Sri Lanka's current government received 500,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India so far, and has yet to authorize the use of Chinese vaccines.

"We will be dependent on India for the vaccine, so to that extent the government of Sri Lanka as well as the recipients will be happy and grateful to India for providing the vaccine on time," said Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of the Pathfinder Foundation think tank in Colombo and a former Sri Lankan ambassador to Beijing and Washington. "But this is only one element of the relationship, and there are many elements. Whether it will help improve our bilateral relations, it's difficult to say."

Indian political scientist C. Raja Mohan, director of the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, said India's new vaccine diplomacy -- while limited -- is a valuable tool in New Delhi's efforts to secure its neighborhood and prevent Chinese domination of the region.

"This doesn't immediately translate into direct geopolitical gains," Mr. Mohan said. "But it adds to the good side of the ledger for India: that India is there, and that it has capabilities."

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ASTRAZENECA-PLC-4000930/news/AstraZeneca-Covid-19-Vaccines-Are-Becoming-Important-Diplomatic-Currency-32430177/

Oxford University to test COVID-19 vaccine response among children for first time

 The University of Oxford has launched a study to assess the safety and immune response of the COVID-19 vaccine it has developed with AstraZeneca Plc in children for the first time, it said on Saturday.

The new mid-stage trial will determine whether the vaccine is effective on people between the ages of 6 and 17, according to an emailed statement from the university.

Around 300 volunteers will be enrolled and first inoculations are expected this month, Oxford said.

The two-dose Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been hailed as a 'vaccine for the world' because it is cheaper and easier to distribute than some rivals.

AstraZeneca has a target to produce 3 billion doses this year and aims to produce over 200 million doses per month by April.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ASTRAZENECA-PLC-4000930/news/AstraZeneca-Oxford-University-to-test-COVID-19-vaccine-response-among-children-for-first-time-32432456/

Gene-Based Blood Test for Melanoma Spread Evaluates Treatment Progress

  A test that monitors blood levels of DNA fragments released by dying tumor cells may serve as an accurate early indicator of treatment success in people in late stages of one of the most aggressive forms of skin cancer, a new study finds.

Led by NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Perlmutter Cancer Center researchers, the investigation looked at adults with undetectable levels of freely circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) four weeks into drug treatment for metastatic melanoma tumors that cannot be removed surgically (unresectable). The study showed that these patients, all of whom had common genetic changes (BRAFV600 mutations) linked to cancer, were living nearly twice as long without cancer growth as those who continued to have detectable levels.

Normally, the study authors say, physicians would have to wait three months before an X-ray, CT scan, or other measures could reveal whether a tumor is growing or shrinking in response to treatment.

"Our findings suggest that levels of ctDNA may serve as a fast and reliable tool to gauge whether an anticancer medication is working," says study senior author David Polsky, MD, PhD. "The blood test results could help support continuing the current treatment strategy or else encourage patients and physicians to consider other options," adds Polsky, the Alfred W. Kopf, M.D. Professor of Dermatologic Oncology at NYU Langone Health and its Perlmutter Cancer Center.

Polsky notes that swift treatment modification could potentially be helpful in a disease as aggressive as melanoma, which kills nearly 7,000 Americans a year and is notoriously difficult to treat once it spreads to other body parts. Early feedback from a blood test might save lives, he says.

Researchers have long searched for better ways to monitor certain cancers using blood tests, or so-called biomarkers, which can be performed more easily, more often, and less expensively than imaging scans or surgical procedures and provide a clearer picture of tumor behavior over time. With melanoma, one frequently used option, a test for the presence in blood of an enzyme called lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), has had only limited success as such a tool, because non-cancer ailments such as liver injury and bone damage can also cause levels to spike. Although more specific biomarkers have been identified in cancers of the prostate, breast, and colon, the study investigators say a reliable signpost for melanoma has until now remained elusive.

According to Polsky, also a professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone, early research by the same team had pointed to ctDNA as a promising candidate. This method works by targeting the most common mutations in the DNA code found in melanoma cells. This mutated DNA spills into surrounding blood as the cancer cells break down. In previous small studies, the blood test was shown to outperform LDH in predicting melanoma recurrence, as well as tracking progression of other forms of cancer.

The new investigation, publishing Feb. 12 in the journal The Lancet Oncology, was conducted over two years and is the largest analysis to date of the potential utility of this blood test for skin cancer, says Polsky.

https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/gene-based-blood-test-for-melanoma-spread-evaluates-treatment-progress/