Covid 19

Asymptomatic people were feared to be silent spreaders of Covid pandemic, which has so far claimed six million lives, and almost 15 million excess mortality. But a review of 130 different studies, published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine, found that the proportion of asymptomatic infection were 50 per cent or lower in most studies.

The study, published in Nature Communications, showed that vaccination, however, does afford protection. Though Covid was rare and mild in children, some of those infected faced severe multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS). The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines MIS-C as a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, provides insights into the possible long-term complications of Covid-19. Covid survivors were so far known to experience debilitating, lingering symptoms that affect the heart, brain, lungs and other parts of the body. However, the full spectrum of clinical manifestations, especially the influence of SARS-CoV-2 infection on bone metabolism, has yet to be fully understood.

"breakthrough infection" is when a fully vaccinated person contracts Covid. Researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine said that people with cancer and Alzheimer's are often more susceptible to infection in general, and are also among the population's most vulnerable to severe health outcomes from Covid infections as well.

In experiments using mice and blood samples from donors who were infected with Omicron, researchers at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) in the US, found that the Omicron variant induces only a weak immune response.AIn vaccinated individuals, this response - while weak - helped strengthen overall protection against a variety of Covid strains.

"Getting a better understanding of how immunity against this broad family of coronaviruses changes with Covid-19 infection is an important step toward developing better coronavirus vaccines, both for Covid-19 and for future, related pathogens," said Andrew Ward, Professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research.

"A pandemic has thrown an unprecedented spotlight on mental health. An armed conflict is profoundly affecting the mental health of millions of people," Xinhua news agency quoted the WHO's European Regional Director Hans Kluge as saying here. More than two months of conflict in Ukraine has led to incalculable uncertainty, insecurity, grief and loss, said the WHO official.

A new canine coronavirus was first identified in two Malaysian human patients who developed pneumonia in 2017-18. A group of other scientists isolated the canine coronavirus, sequenced it, and published their findings in 2021. Now, a team led by researchers from Cornell and Temple University in the US has identified a pattern that occurs in a terminus of the canine coronavirus spike protein - the area of the virus that facilitates entry into a host cell.A

The team at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and the University of Melbourne identified disease mechanisms in children with Covid who present with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, where different body parts can become inflamed including the heart, lungs, and brain and acute respiratory distress syndrome, a type of lung disease.

An international research team, led by Simon Fraser University in Canada conducted a global study on countries' responses to the pandemic. They found there have been worse mental health trajectories in countries that attempted to control Covid-19 transmission with stricter public health restrictions, such as Canada, than those which tried to suppress or eliminate Covid-19 transmission.