Via The Guardian: Coronavirus live news: Spain records highest single-day death toll and withdraws 'inaccurate' testing kits. Excerp:
4m ago 09:19 Researchers in Germany, where the number of confirmed infections is at over 47,400 and 286 deaths by lunchtime, have proposed a mass study into how many people are immune to the Covid 19 virus, in an effort to allow those for whom it is safe to do so, to return to leading a normal life.
According to Spiegel magazine, which has seen the preparations for the study, which is awaiting the approval of authorities, researchers hope to be able to test the blood of more than 100,000 volunteers for Covid 19 antibodies from mid-April.
The test would be repeated on the same volunteers and expanded to use different groups, at regular intervals, in order to oversee how the pandemic is progressing. The scientists - a team compiled from various bodies, including the government’s leading public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, the German Centre for Infection Research, blood donation services, and the Institute for Virology at the Charite hospital in Berlin - hope to discover the extent to which Covid 19, or Sars-CoV-2 has already spread, and how many infected people it really kills.
The results of the study would make it easier to decide for instance, when schools should reopen, and large-scale events be allowed to take place, the authors say. If everything goes to plan, the first results would be available by the end of April.
“Those who are immune could be issued with a sort of ‘Immune pass’ that would allow people to be excluded from the restrictive measures currently in place”, Gérard Krause, an epidemologist from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, told Der Spiegel.
4m ago 09:16 A short while ago, Associated Press filed this troubling report from Tehran, the Iranian capital where people are drinking toxic methanol in the mistaken belief it will combat the coronavirus.
Standing over the still body of an intubated 5-year-old boy wearing nothing but a plastic diaper, an Iranian health care worker in a hazmat suit and mask begged the public for just one thing: Stop drinking industrial alcohol over fears about the new coronavirus.
The boy, now blind after his parents gave him toxic methanol in the mistaken belief it protects against the virus, is just one of hundreds of victims of an epidemic inside the pandemic now gripping Iran.
Iranian media reports nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 1,000 sickened so far by ingesting methanol across the Islamic Republic, where drinking alcohol is banned and where those who do rely on bootleggers. It comes as fake remedies spread across social media in Iran, where people remain deeply suspicious of the government after it downplayed the crisis for days before it overwhelmed the country.
“The virus is spreading and people are just dying off, and I think they are even less aware of the fact that there are other dangers around,” said Dr. Knut Erik Hovda, a clinical toxicologist in Oslo who studies methanol poisoning and fears Iran’s outbreak could be even worse than reported. “When they keep drinking this, there’s going to be more people poisoned.”
11m ago 09:09 In the UK, after prime minister Boris Johnson tested positive for coronavirus, it now emerges that health secretary Matt Hancock has COVID-19 too.
