The medical device, which clips onto a patient’s finger, has saved millions of lives and is a vital tool in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
Takuo Aoyagi, a Japanese engineer whose pioneering work in the 1970s led to the modern pulse oximeter, a lifesaving device that clips on a finger and shows the level of oxygen in the blood and that has become a critical tool in the fight against the novel coronavirus, died on April 18 in Tokyo. He was 84. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his employer, Nihon Khoden, a Tokyo-based company that makes medical equipment. A niece, Kyoko Aoyagi, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause. The pulse oximeter has become “an indispensable addition to medicine,” said V. Courtney Broaddus, a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Historically, patients were measured by four vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, pulse and respiratory rate. “It has become the fifth vital sign,” she said of oxygen level. While many coronavirus patients do feel chest pain, fever and other symptoms, Dr. Broaddus said, the pulse oximeter “has become especially important because humans do not sense a low oxygen saturation alone.” Moreover, some Covid patients seem not to have other symptoms. As a result, when moderately or mildly ill patients test positive for the coronavirus, they may be sent home with a pulse oximeter so that they can track their oxygen level and return to the hospital if it drops.
Starbucks plans to reopen 85 percent of its locations under modified operations and hours across the US by the end of the week, the coffee giant announced. The company’s mobile app — already used by about 20 million customers — will be optimized for voice ordering through Siri, curbside pickup, entryway handoff, and improved drive-thru experiences, according to a letter CEO and president Kevin Johnson wrote to customers Monday. “We are putting immense emphasis on the safest and most convenient way for customers to order their favorites from Starbucks,” Johnson said. The company will “shift toward more cashless experiences, knowing that the handling of cash creates consumer concerns about the spread of viruses,” according to Johnson. “We predict the mobile app will become the dominant form of payment,” he said. A Starbucks spokesman said the company does not yet have specific details about openings in the Big Apple. Even before the pandemic, more than 80 percent of orders at U.S. Starbucks were placed “on the go” through a drive-through or mobile app, according to Johnson. The Seattle-based chain temporarily shuttered about 8,000 of its company-owned stores across the country in late March — and is one of the first national chains to share its reopening plans, The Washington Post reported. By early June, more than 90 percent of Starbucks locations are expected to be back in business, Johnson said.
MIAMI — Last month, police departments in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Connecticut unveiled what was initially touted as a potential new tool against a pandemic: drones capable of taking a person’s temperature from 300 feet in the air. Both agencies quickly backtracked on using the machines to track the novel coronavirus after backlash from civil liberty groups warning about the implications of a “Big Doctor” in the sky singling out people simply for running a fever, when it might be nothing more than a more common and less deadly flu. They raised other concerns as well: Are cops supposed to be monitoring health information that is private under federal law? Are drone readings, even with sophisticated infrared sensors, a trustworthy way to protect public health without violating individual rights? “It collects data and information on everybody without guaranteeing it’s accurate,” said Kara Gross, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Not only that, the other people around the person may have COVID. So the information could be bad and inaccurate.”
Italy was spending its last day in total lockdown Sunday, but the partial easing of strict coronavirus measures after a two-month shutdown was causing anxiety and confusion rather than elation. Across the country, attempts to make plans for the first day of freedom were hampered by uncertainty over the rules. The government has a list of permitted activities, but regions are also making up their own regulations. “I’m hoping this morning’s paper will clear it up. I want to take my old mum to the seaside, can I?” asked 53-year old cleaner Pietro Garlanti as he queued patiently in the sun at a kiosk in the capital’s historic centre. In this first stage, Italy’s 60 million inhabitants will be able to move more freely within their own regions, visiting relatives, going to re-opened parks with their children and cycling or running further from home. None of that can be done in groups, however, so big family lunches are forbidden. Going to holiday homes is not allowed. And people cannot leave their own regions, except for emergencies or for health reasons. Italy’s 20 regions, however, have put their own spin on the rules. Two of them, Veneto and Calabria, even lifted their lockdowns early, opening to bars and restaurants with outdoor tables this week. Liguria is thinking about letting people go sailing in small groups, and is reopening its beaches. So is the Marghe region, but for walks not sunbathing. Emilia-Romagna is keeping them closed, even to those who live by the sea. “We’ve been waiting with longing for May 4, but now it’s finally arrived it’s a letdown. Until they tell me I’m really free, I’ll feel paranoid, like I’m breaking the rules in some way,” 37-year old Michele Magna told AFP. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte further puzzled many by telling Italians visits with “congiunti” were allowed. The Italian word can mean either relatives or kinsmen. He then attempted to clarify by saying that extended to people who had “relationships of steady affection”. The government was forced Saturday to publish a Q&A that specified people could see extended relatives — including, for example, the children of their cousins — but friends, however dear, were out of bounds. The government hopes easing the coronavirus lockdown, the longest in the world, will reboot a crippled economy. There were further encouraging signs Sunday that the pandemic had been brought under control. Italy reported 174 new coronavirus deaths, its lowest toll since the stay-at-home orders were imposed on March 10. But Conte has warned he will be watching closely to see if the virus flares up again, and is ready to enforce localised lockdowns if necessary to stop the return of a pandemic which has claimed nearly 29,000 lives. “I’m extremely worried about the reopening, I don’t trust people to act responsibly,” said salesman Tiziano Mazzoli. Father Duilio Diligente, 38, said he was concerned about how children such as his eight-year old would re-adjust. “We were out on our bikes last night in an empty square, when he suddenly swerved massively to avoid a man and his dog, and fell off. He said he was afraid of going near them in case they had the virus,” he said. “It’s going to take time for us to be really, psychologically ready for the end of the lockdown.”
ISTANBUL — A smartphone app in Turkey asked for Murat Bur’s identity number, his father’s name and information about his relatives. Did he have any underlying health conditions, the app wondered, presenting him a list of options. How was he feeling at the moment, it asked. It also requested permission to track his movements. In 2011, two scientists at Cambridge University in the UK devised a clever way to measure and model the spread of the flu—an app called FluPhone that used Bluetooth and other wireless signals as a proxy for interactions between people and asked users to report flu-like symptoms. If you’d had lunch with someone who later got sick, FluPhone would let you know. Besides slowing the spread of the flu, the app promised to help health authorities monitor and model the spread of influenza. FluPhone made headlines and the front page of the BBC website at the time. But in the end fewer than 1 percent of people in Cambridge signed up to use it. As the deadly Covid-19 respiratory virus stalks the US, some techies suggest using smartphones to track and report transmissions. The idea raises many questions, including how well such a system would actually work, whether it might sow unnecessary alarm or confusion, and whether such tools might enable unwanted corporate or government surveillance. The creators of FluPhone, Jon Crowcroft and Eiko Yoneki, certainly believe an app like theirs could help fight the coronavirus. “The health protection agencies could use it to populate anonymized map data,” which might help reduce transmission, Crowcroft says. He says an app would also help researchers learn “how long the virus survives on a surface, what fraction of the population are asymptomatic carriers, and where to target critical medical resources.” Inspired by the way China and South Korea apparently used smartphones to slow the spread of Covid-19, some US technologists have begun working on tracking apps.
Roche Holding AG received emergency-use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its new Covid-19 antibody test, according to a company statement. Governments are trying to learn how many people have been exposed to Covid-19 as they reopen economies and end social-distancing measures. The restrictions have resulted in millions of lost jobs, closed schools and businesses and sent the financial markets through the most turbulent period since the 2008 financial crisis. With no vaccine available yet for the novel coronavirus, more than 100 different programs have been launched to develop and test treatments. These include everything from antiviral drugs and antibody-containing plasma from recovered patients, to traditional Chinese herbal medicine. Gilead Sciences Inc.’s antiviral drug remdesivir was cleared by U.S. regulators on May 1 for emergency use in Covid-19 patients, becoming the first medication backed by early clinical data to be made available to fight the disease. The Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2 test is designed to determine if a patient has been exposed to the coronavirus and has developed antibodies against it, Roche said on Sunday.
Government clinical trial investigators changed the primary metric for measuring the success of Gilead’s experimental drug remdesivir as a coronavirus treatment two weeks before Anthony S. Fauci’s announcement that the drug would be the new “standard of care.” Instead of counting how many people taking the drug were kept alive on ventilators or died, among other measures, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it would judge the drug primarily on a different outcome: how long it took surviving patients to recover. Death and other negative outcomes were moved to secondary measure status: They would still be tracked, but they would no longer be the key measure of remdesivir’s performance. The switch — which specialists said is unusual in major clinical trials but not unheard of — was publicly disclosed on the government’s clinicaltrials.gov website on April 16 but did not receive much attention at the time. The change reflects evolving scientific understanding of the fast-moving nature of the virus and uncertainties around how the lethal effects reveal themselves in patients, said NIAID, Gilead, and outside specialists. But the change also adds weight to the assessment of government and medical researchers that remdesivir is not a knockout drug that will change the trajectory of the coronavirus pandemic. On Friday, as expected, the Food and Drug Administration approved an emergency use authorization for the drug that will allow it to be prescribed for hospitalized patients infected with the coronavirus. The newly adopted criteria were a central feature of this week’s declaration by Fauci, NIAID’s director, that remdesivir reduced the time to recovery for surviving patients from 15 days to 11 days, a 31 percent improvement. “The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery,” Fauci said as he sat in an Oval Office meeting with President Trump and other members of the president’s coronavirus task force. “It’s highly significant.” The difference in death rate, one of the original primary measures, was not statistically significant, Fauci said, showing only a marginal reduction from 11 percent in patients given a placebo to 8 percent in patients given remdesivir. Full release of the trial results would be made soon, Fauci said. Some medical research specialists questioned the change in the primary outcome measure of the trial, which had 1,063 patients. “I think that they thought they weren’t going to win, and they wanted to change it to something they could win on,” said Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and expert clinical investigator who has led numerous drug trials. “I prefer the original outcome. It’s harder. It’s a more meaningful endpoint. “Getting out of the hospital early is useful,” he said, “but it’s not a game-changer.”
Bombshell ‘Five Eyes’ Western intelligence dossier claims China lied about human-to-human transmission, ‘disappeared’ whistle-blowers and refused to help other countries prepare a vaccine for coronavirus
Chinas ‘risky’ research on bat-related diseases stretching back years. It describes how Beijing was outwardly downplaying the outbreak on the world stage while secretly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease. This involved ‘destroying’ laboratory samples, bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of ‘silent carriers’ of the virus and stonewalling sample requests from other countries. The secrecy has fanned a clamour in Five Eyes nations for Western governments to come down hard on Beijing when the pandemic eventually passes. Tory MP Bob Seely told MailOnline that ‘at the end of this when the dust settles it is also clear that there has to be a re-evaluation by the West of its relationship with China’. In a damning portrayal of a mass cover-up, the bombshell report reveals:
Chinese researchers of bat-related viruses studied a sample which had a 96 per cent genetic match to Covid-19 as early as 2013;
Their ‘risky’ research found in 2015 that the disease was transmissible from bats to humans;
Information on asymptomatic carriers of the disease was ‘kept silent’ by the Chinese state;
Beijing started censoring search engines in December to stop any internet surfing relating to the virus;
The World Health Organisation followed China by denying evidence of human-to-human transmission until late January despite concerns raised by neighbouring countries’;
The Five Eyes countries lashed out at China for criticising other countries’ flight freezes while simultaneously locking down Hubei Province.
The Food and Drug Administration will authorize Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir, a decade-old experimental therapy first tested on Ebola disease patients, as a COVID-19 treatment.
Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day told investors during an earnings call that talks with the FDA about an emergency use authorization (EUA) or a formal approval have intensified over the last 48 hours. “There’s a big sense of urgency,” he said, according to a FactSet transcript of the call. “We think the FDA will move quite quickly.” Shares of Gilead GILD, -4.84% were down 6.9% on Friday following at least three downgrades of the stock on concerns about remdesivir’s moneymaking potential. (“We don’t know what a sustainable revenue stream from remdesivir will look like,” SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analysts wrote in a note.) Year-to-date, the company’s stock has gained 20.4%, hitting a low of $62.23 on Jan. 21 before soaring to a $85.97 high for the year on March 19. The drug has been widely considered a front-runner in the rush to find viable treatments for a disease that has sickened more than three million people worldwide and killed at least 220,000, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. It would be the first new drug to get an EUA, a type of authorization that the FDA is using during the pandemic. The regulator in March authorized chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to be repurposed for some COVID-19 patients though both drugs have previously been approved to treat other diseases, like malaria. Investors and clinicians have been paying close attention to the snippets of study data about the antiviral drugs, sending the company’s shares up or down depending on the day. Though experts have had mixed responses to the clinical findings so far, it’s clear that demand is high. There are no proven treatments for infections caused by the coronavirus, making it difficult for the nation’s health-care workers to care for the patients who end up in their emergency rooms and intensive care unit beds. There’s also the economic angle. The market largely swings up in response to remdesivir data, driven by the investor stance that a proven treatment, even more so than vaccine, would support the prospect of an economic rebound for the U.S., which is in its worst recession since the Great Depression. Gilead began developing remdesivir in 2009. It was later tested as a treatment for Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), among other diseases. The company said it began providing doses of remdesivir to the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention & Prevention in January when the coronavirus outbreak there began to worsen. By February, the investigational therapy had been moved into a number of clinical trials in the U.S. and abroad, including one conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Government officials including President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIAID director, have talked up the results, with Fauci saying remdesivir would become the standard of care in the treatment of COVID-19 patients, other medical experts have been more measured in their responses to the clinical-trial data. “Under the emergency-use authorization, one could charge for the product,” CEO O’Day told investors on the earnings call. “We made a decision, as you know, to donate 1.5 million vials, which is the entirety of our supply through the early summer.” The vials encompass 140,000 10-day treatment courses. O’Day later said during the call that donating the investigational therapy “is the right thing to do at this time.”
Wholesale American beef prices jumped 6% to a record high of $330.82 per 100 pounds, a 62% increase from the lows in February, according to Bloomberg, citing new USDA data.
The surge in beef prices comes at a time when the nation’s food supply chain network has been severely damaged by meatpacking plants going offline due to virus-related shutdowns and worker shortage. Bloomberg highlights the latest plant closures in the map below:
Soaring food inflation came one day after President Trump said he would be issuing an executive order to address meat shortages. “Because of the virus, meat slaughtering is 40% below where it needs to be to handle all of the animals coming to market, said Arlan Suderman,” chief commodities economist at INTL FCStone.
“Processing plants were generally in favor of the executive order that would give them liability cover when reopening,” Suderman said. “Yet, the order still does not solve the problem of employee absenteeism.” At least 20 workers in meat and food processing have died and 5,000 have tested positive or forced to self-quarantine due to coronavirus, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International union.
Just days ago, Tyson Foods warned in a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday that the “food supply chain is breaking.” And with tens of millions of Americans out of work, a crashed economy that is plunging into depression, and rapid food inflation — this could all suggest that the evolution of the virus crisis is not just an economic crisis but also social instabilities are ahead.
