The coronavirus pandemic has forced economists, financiers, executives, and policymakers to jettison or dramatically revise their forecasts for 2020. But what will the future look like on the other side of the crisis? We asked a variety of leaders from around the world for their best guess on how our lives will be fundamentally changed.
Economists, investors, and CEOs on how the coronavirus has forever changed the world.
Masks, gowns, and other personal protective equipment (PPE) are essential for protecting healthcare workers. However, the textiles and materials used in such items can absorb and carry viruses and bacteria, inadvertently spreading the disease the wearer sought to contain.
When the coronavirus spread amongst healthcare professionals and left PPE in short supply, finding a way to provide better protection while allowing for the safe reuse of these items became paramount.
Research from the LAMP Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering may have a solution. The lab has created a textile coating that can not only repel liquids like blood and saliva but can also prevent viruses from adhering to the surface. The work was recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
On April 7, Karin Shetler awoke in the middle of the night to a toe that was throbbing violently. She threw back the covers to reveal her purple-colored middle toe.
“I wondered whether I had somehow broken my toe,” said Shetler. “I iced it, not understanding what it was, and called my physician sister in New Orleans the next morning.”
She asked if it might be gout. It wasn’t.
Hypothetical COVID-19 Treatments.
The virus causes clotting everywhere and widespread epithelial damage. One is tempted to treat it like stroke prophylaxis. Patients clot rather than bleed, almost always. The same thing happens in influenza, also.
The pro-clotting effects of corticosteroids may be a reason why they have not stood out yet. The profound anticlotting treatment necessary to treat patients with ECMO extracorporial oxygenation in COVID-19, might have its own therapeutic value (it’s not just the artificial lung but the heparin they need to put you on it!). The lungs of COVID-19 patients in trouble are not only full of fluid, but macro and micro-emboli. Low molecular weight heparin, given in all ICUs, looks like a good gamble.
Aspirin if not contraindicated. Also even Plavix (clopidagrel) for patients with D-dimer showing.
The w-3 fatty acids in fish oil are anti-inflammatory in ways that inhibit clotting, and have been used against shock lung and other inflammatory lung pathologies. Work on COVID-19 is continuing but all are in the hypothetical pipeline.
Drugs which in theory modulate inflammation and clotting in the right direction would be Ca-blockers (particularly verapamil) and ACE-1 inhibitors (particularly lisinopril). The anticlotting antiinflammatory pentoxiphylline (Trental) looks interesting. Trental decreases inflammasomes along with azithromycin (do not exceed recommended dose!), long of interest in COVID-19. Doxycycline and minocycline have specific antiinflammatory activity synergistic with azithromycin.
The advance is unique: the patients have used a mind-controlled prosthesis in their everyday life for up to seven years. For the last few years, they have also lived with a new function – sensations of touch in the prosthetic hand. This is a new concept for artificial limbs, which are called neuromusculoskeletal prostheses – as they are connected to the user’s nerves, muscles, and skeleton.
In the week of April 12–18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too —and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the new Amazon #1 Best Seller, “Face Mask, Pack of 50”.
When covid-19 hit, we started buying things we’d never bought before. The shift was sudden: the mainstays of Amazon’s top ten—phone cases, phone chargers, Lego—were knocked off the charts in just a few days. Nozzle, a London-based consultancy specializing in algorithmic advertising for Amazon sellers, captured the rapid change in this simple graph.
It took less than a week at the end of February for the top 10 Amazon search terms in multiple countries to fill up with products related to covid-19. You can track the spread of the pandemic by what we shopped for: the items peaked first in Italy, followed by Spain, France, Canada, and the US. The UK and Germany lag slightly behind. “It’s an incredible transition in the space of five days,” says Rael Cline, Nozzle’s CEO. The ripple effects have been seen across retail supply chains.
Scientists at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences have discovered a new way for T cells to attack cells infected by viruses or deranged by cancer.
Published online by the journal Science on Thursday 7 May 2020, the new research from the Dustin Group describes the structure and composition of supramolecular attack particles (SMAPs) and their role in killing targeted cells.
Cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) are essential components in the immune response against viruses and cancer. CTLs are known to recognise infected or damaged cells and release soluble protein molecules, which create perforations in the membrane of the targeted cell. These holes allow toxic enzymes to enter and initiate a self-destruct program, killing the targeted cell (cytotoxicity).
If you think tracking apps will keep people safe as economies reopen, look to South Korea, Singapore, and Australia to see why you’re mistaken.
The attacks on Gilead reflect a growing trend of state-backed hackers targeting intelligence related … [+] to a treatment for coronavirus.
As expected, they discovered large fluctuations in the composition and daily changes of the human and mouse gut microbiomes. But strikingly, these apparently chaotic fluctuations followed several elegant ecological laws.
“Similar to many animal ecologies and complex financial markets, a healthy gut microbiome is never truly at equilibrium,” Vitkup says. “For example, the number of a particular bacterial species on day one is never the same on day two, and so on. It constantly fluctuates, like stocks in a financial market or number of animals in a valley, but these fluctuations are not arbitrary. In fact, they follow predictable patterns described by Taylor’s power law, a well-established principle in animal ecology that describe how fluctuations are related to the relative number of bacteria for different species.”
Other discovered laws of the gut microbiome also followed principles frequently observed in animal ecologies and economic systems, including the tendency of gut bacteria abundances to slowly but predictably drift over time and the tendency of species to appear and disappear from the gut microbiome at predictable times.
“It is amazing that microscopic biological communities—which are about six orders of magnitude smaller than macroscopic ecosystems analyzed previously—appear to be governed by a similar set of mathematical and statistical principles,” says Vitkup.
Laws allow identification of abnormal bacterial behavior.
These universal principles should help researchers to better understand what processes govern the microbial dynamics in the gut. Using the statistical laws, the Columbia researchers were able to identify particular bacterial species with abnormal fluctuations. These wildly fluctuating bacteria were associated with documented periods of gut distress or travel to foreign countries in humans providing data for the study. Thus, this approach may immediately allow researchers to understand and identify which specific bacteria are out of line and behave in a potentially harmful fashion.
Using mice data, the researchers also observed that microbiomes associated with unhealthy high fat diets drift in time significantly faster compared with microbiomes feeding on healthier high fiber diets. This demonstrates that ecological laws can be applied to understand how various dietary changes may affect and perhaps alleviate persistent microbiome instabilities.