Around the world, people have been placed under lockdown. As the weeks tick on, people are becoming increasingly tired of the process, so we're asking... how long is this going to last. In the video, we explain how long the lockdown is likely to continue and why it's not going to be over soon.
4 April 2020
Fortune: Countries that mandate TB vaccine are seeing fewer coronavirus deaths
The preliminary study posted on medRxiv, a site for unpublished medical research, finds a correlation between countries that require citizens to get the bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine and those showing fewer number of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19. Though only a correlation, clinicians in at least six countries are running trials that involve giving frontline health workers and elderly people the BCG vaccine to see whether it can indeed provide some level of protection against the new coronavirus.
Gonzalo Otazu, assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, started working on the analysis after noticing the low number of cases in Japan. The country had reported some of the earliest confirmed cases of coronavirus outside of China and it hadn’t instituted lockdown measures like so many other countries have done. [...]
Among high-income countries showing large number of Covid-19 cases, the U.S. and Italy recommend BCG vaccines but only for people who might be at risk, whereas Germany, Spain, France, Iran and the U.K. used to have BCG vaccine policies but ended them years to decades ago. China, where the pandemic began, has a BCG vaccine policy but it wasn’t adhered to very well before 1976, Otazu said. Countries including Japan and South Korea, which have managed to control the disease, have universal BCG vaccine policies. Data on confirmed cases from low-income countries was considered not reliable enough to make a strong judgment.
Flandersnews: “Virus was probably present among the young much earlier ”
The country’s got a thousand confirmed cases but only two deaths. Prof Herman Goossens, a microbiologist from Antwerp University, points to Iceland’s higher testing capacity. It means more people can be tested even people without symptoms. This shows us that more people are infected than we thought. Young people appear to be carriers and spreaders of the virus without even displaying symptoms. [...]
Iceland was able to carry out more testing thanks to a unique project: the deCODE company registers the genetic code of the entire population, some 360,000 souls. It reveals who is related to who. The genetic research means the company can carry out molecular tests. The whole company has now been reoriented to map out the corona outbreak in the island. [...]
Prof Goossens: “If you look at the age curve, you see the same picture as in South Korea: most of those infected are aged between 20 and 40. Half of these people are unaware of it.”
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