The Most Important Coronavirus News This Week
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There’s really never a dull moment in a pandemic and this week was filled with Covid-19 news — both good and bad. Here are three stories from Medium’s Coronavirus Blog to get you caught up as you head into the weekend.
WTF happened at the CDC and FDA? “It’s hard to know when my faith in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) died,” writes Dana Smith on the blog. Smith shares her anger over the seeming capitulation of the two storied health organizations to the whims of political leaders. First, the FDA gave the green light to plasma therapy before it was proven effective for Covid-19. Then, the CDC changed its recommendations and said people who come into contact with an infected person do not need to get tested for the virus if they don’t have symptoms. The advice goes against what science says about Covid-19 spread. As Dana writes, “This is no longer negligence. This is not incompetence. This is sabotage.”
Rapid-response testing moves forward. Our team has written a lot about the appeal and promise of rapid-response tests. This week the FDA granted emergency-use authorization to Abbott Laboratories for a $5 rapid-response Covid-19 test. The company says it will start shipping tens of millions of the newly authorized tests in September, and plans to increase production to 50 million tests in October. The U.S. government also announced a $750 million deal to buy 150 million rapid Covid-19 tests from Abbott. This is all very good news, as it will greatly increase the U.S.’s rapid testing capacity. Read more below.
Men may fare worse with Covid-19. Men are nearly twice as likely to become severely sick and die from Covid-19 compared to women, research has shown. Now, a new study from Yale, published on Wednesday in Nature, gives new clues as to why men fare so much worse with the coronavirus. It’s the first study to look at the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 by sex, and it found that men produce an overall weaker immune response to the virus than women. “We now have clear data suggesting that the immune landscape in Covid-19 patients is considerably different between the sexes and that these differences may underlie heightened disease susceptibility in men,” senior author Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, told Yale Medicine.
