Month: September 2020

Electron microscope image of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus particles (yellow) on a cell (red).Credit: NIAID/NIH/SPL When news broke last week that a man living in Hong Kong had been infected with the coronavirus again, months after recovering from a previous bout of COVID-19, immunologist Akiko Iwasaki had an unusual reaction. “I was really kind of happy,” she says. “It’s a nice textbook example of how the immune response should work.” For Iwasaki, who has been studying immune responses to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the case was encouraging because the second infection did not cause symptoms. This, she says, suggested that the man’s immune system might have remembered its previous encounter with the virus and roared...

Roberto Arias prepares a grave for burial at Woodlawn Cemetery during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Everett, Massachusetts, U.S., May 27, 2020. Brian Snyder | Reutes The U.S. will top more than 410,000 Covid-19 deaths by the end of the year as the country heads into the fall and winter, according to a new forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Covid-19 has already killed at least 186,800 people in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The model by IHME, whose models have previously been cited by the White House and state officials, forecasts that the death toll will more than double by Jan. 1 and could reach as high as 620,000 if states aggressively ease coronavir...

A key forecasting model often cited by experts and used by the White House has revised its prediction of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., now estimating a peak of 410,451 by Jan. 1.  The model created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington posted an update Friday predicting an additional 224,000 Americans will die by the beginning of next year.  The model says that as many as 122,000 of those deaths could be avoided with safety measures, including near-universal mask use, but it warns that easing restrictions could cause the death toll to be more than 620,000. “We all must learn from those leaders of nations where the virus has been contained, or where second waves of infections have occurred, and where swift action has been taken ...

DUBLIN — Psychotic disorders, probably most synonymous with schizophrenia, are characterized by a disconnect from reality. Psychosis patients often see things that aren’t there, hear voices, or suffer from intense paranoia. Suffice to say, psychosis is an awful condition. Unfortunately, attempting to identify individuals at an elevated risk of developing psychosis later in life has proven elusive. Now, however, researchers from RSCI University have developed a novel and potentially game changing new way to predict if a person is at risk of psychosis years down the line: a blood test. Some people exhibit mild or brief psychotic symptoms throughout their lives, and are thus considered at a high risk of developing psychosis in the future. But, even in these cases, only 20-30% of such peo...