COVID19

GHealth News - The CIA now believes that the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory, based on an assessment that points to China. However, the agency has expressed "low confidence" in this conclusion. This assessment, which was not based on new intelligence, was completed at the request of the Biden administration and former CIA Director William Burns. It was declassified and released on Saturday under the leadership of John Ratcliffe, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and sworn in as CIA Director on Thursday. The agency's findings suggest that, while the total evidence leans toward a lab origin, the evidence is not conclusive, and the CIA has assigned a low degree of confidence to this conclusion due to gaps, contradictions, or...

There is significant global variation in COVID-19 treatment recommendations and disease severity stratifications, according to a study published online April 22 in BMJ Global Health. Mia Cokljat, M.B.Ch.B., from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and colleagues compared the COVID-19 treatment guidelines of each World Health Organization (WHO) member state to the WHO COVID-19 therapeutic guidelines. The analysis included COVID-19 therapeutic national guidelines for 109 of the 194 WHO member states. The researchers found considerable variation in guidelines and in disease severity stratifications. There were also substantial differences in therapeutic recommendations in many national guidelines versus the WHO guidelines. In late 2022, 93 percent of national guidelines...

GHealth News - Hospitals in at least four U.S. states have reinstated mask mandates amid a rise in cases of COVID, seasonal flu and other respiratory illness. Healthcare facilities in New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts have made masks mandatory among patients and providers. New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan told WABC TV on Wednesday that mask mandates had resumed at all 11 of the city's public hospitals, 30 health centers and five long-term care facilities. "What we don't want is staffing shortages, right? When we saw the omicron wave in 2022, the biggest issues were not only people getting sick, but that we had a lot of frontline health workers, they were out with COVID," Vasan told WABC. The most recent weekly data from the Centers for Disease C...

GHealth News - A Japanese-led research team has said it has identified how infections with the coronavirus can cause inflammation in blood vessels and blood clots, resulting in severe COVID-19 cases. In severe cases, blood clots form in blood vessels throughout the body, leading to multiple organ failure. The team, including researchers from Osaka University, Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Takeda Pharmaceutical, elucidated the mechanism by using vascular tissue made from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The research results, published Friday in the U.S. journal Cell Stem Cell, are expected to facilitate the development of drugs to prevent serious COVID-19 complications. Osaka University professor Takanori Takebe and other team members succeeded in producing vascul...

GHealth News - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday the new BA.2.86 lineage of coronavirus may be more capable than older variants in causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received vaccines. CDC said it was too soon to know whether this might cause more severe illness compared with previous variants. But due to the high number of mutations detected in this lineage, there were concerns about its impact on immunity from vaccines and previous infections, the agency said. Scientists are keeping an eye on the BA.2.86 lineage because it has 36 mutations that distinguish it from the currently-dominant XBB.1.5 variant. CDC, however, said virus samples are not yet broadly available for more reliable laboratory tes...

GHealth News - The World Health Organization ended the global emergency status for COVID-19 on Friday more than three years after its original declaration, and said countries should now manage the virus that killed more than 6.9 million people along with other infectious diseases. The global health agency's Emergency Committee met on Thursday and recommended the UN organization declare an end to the coronavirus crisis as a "public health emergency of international concern" - its highest level of alert - which has been in place since Jan. 30, 2020. "It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that the end of the emergency did not mean COVID was over as a global health threat. ...

Shot focused on a kind looking nurse wearing scrubs, a stethoscope, white rubber gloves and a protective face mask. She is smiling at the nervous patient with her eyes. The nurse is prepping the patients arm before she injects her with the COVID-19 vaccine. GHealth News - After three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems in countries have started showing the first major signs of health system recovery, according to the WHO interim report on the “Fourth round of the global pulse survey on continuity of essential health services during the COVID-19 pandemic: November 2022–January 2023”.  By early 2023, countries reported experiencing reduced disruptions in the delivery of routine health services, but highlighted the need to invest in recovery and stronger resilience for the futur...

GHealth News - Beijing's subway has dropped mandatory mask requirements for travellers, local media reported on Sunday, days after a Chinese health expert said the threat of COVID-19 to humans is no longer at a serious level. The mask move is in line with broader measures by China, which said last week it was now no longer mandatory to wear face masks when using public transport, according to state media. "It's as if an era has passed," a user said on China's popular social e-commerce app Xiaohongshu, as social media was abuzz with news of the rules being eased. Staff at a Beijing subway station tore down signs reminding people to wear masks, Beijing Daily reported. The pandemic is nearing its end, based on World Health Organization data, said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at...

A campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China The virus that drove the Covid-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak but not as part of a weapons program, according to an updated and classified 2021 US energy department study provided to the White House and senior American lawmakers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The department’s finding – a departure from previous studies on how the virus emerged – came in an update to a document from the office of national intelligence director, Avril Haines, the WSJ reported. It follows a finding reportedly issued with “moderate confidence” by the FBI that the virus spread after leaking out of a Chinese laboratory. The conclusion from the energy department – which oversees a network of 17 US ...