Lifeboat Foundation

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Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massive revision to his model on Wednesday.

Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve.

However, after just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured. Now, the epidemiologist predicts, hospitals will be just fine taking on COVID-19 patients and estimates 20,000 or far fewer people will die from the virus itself or from its agitation of other ailments, as reported by New Scientist Wednesday.

The Future of Human Aging: Implications of Induced Tissue Regeneration (iTR), with Michael D. West, Ph.D., Co-CEO of BioTime.

A French medical laboratory has said it is ready to give the French authorities “millions of doses” of an anti-malaria medication that early tests have suggested may help cure Covid-19.

The initial cases of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)–infected pneumonia (NCIP) occurred in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019 and January 2020. We analyzed data on the first 425 confirmed cases in Wuhan to determine the epidemiologic characteristics of NCIP.

Since December 2019, an increasing number of cases of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)–infected pneumonia (NCIP) have been identified in Wuhan, a large city of 11 million people in central China.^1–3 On December 29, 2019, the first 4 cases reported, all linked to the Huanan (Southern China) Seafood Wholesale Market, were identified by local hospitals using a surveillance mechanism for “pneumonia of unknown etiology” that was established in the wake of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak with the aim of allowing timely identification of novel pathogens such as 2019-nCoV.⁴ In recent days, infections have been identified in other Chinese cities and in more than a dozen countries around the world.⁵ Here, we provide an analysis of data on the first 425 laboratory-confirmed cases in Wuhan to describe the epidemiologic characteristics and transmission dynamics of NCIP.

If you’ve never heard of a tensegrity structure, you should stop now and watch the video below. In it, [The Action Lab] shows a 3D printed table that is held up only with strings. We didn’t say suspended by strings but held up. Or so it appears. The model is from Thingiverse, but it is one of those things you have to see to believe.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Strings have a lot of tensile strength but collapse under the slightest compressive force. The arrangement of strings puts the force on the center string which is essentially hanging — the force is pulling the string down. The other three strings aren’t just for show, though, they keep the structure from tipping over in any one direction.

Continue reading “Table Held Up” »

As countries work to fight the spread of the coronavirus, it has become clear that traditional methods of fighting disease have proven ineffective. Considering the threat, Russia is now pushing for more digital payments so it won’t be spread out on cash. Russia isn’t alone in worrying about people contracting coronavirus from handling cash, as widespread concerns over if you can get coronavirus from currency have caused many leaders to call for less money changing hands.

What do you think? Agree or disagree?

According to Sky News host Rowan Dean “China willfully inflicted” the coronavirus upon the world a spectacular display of “communism” at its very worst”. “Let’s be absolutely crystal clear, this is an inevitable consequence of communism and totalitarianism,” Mr Dean told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “First of all they tried to shut it up and suppress those individuals who were sounding the alarm” after which they panicked “attributed the blame to the United States which is just laughable,” Mr Dean said. “China must be held to account for this…and countries around the world need to start looking at their relationship with China in light of this disaster”. “If it were a company or if it were an individual… that had caused such worldwide damage other countries would be asking for reparations,” Mr Dean said. Image: Getty.

Healthcare professionals and infectious disease experts around the world agree that extensive testing is the best way to combat coronavirus. However, the extreme shortage of COVID-19 testing kits has made that impossible. The Public Health England (PHE) just announced it was planning to begin rolling out at-home COVID-19 testing kits in the coming days. These tests could tell people if they’ve been infected with COVID-19 in as little as 15 minutes.

Current coronavirus testing is time-consuming and expensive because it requires healthcare practitioners to collect samples from the patient and have them processed in a laboratory. The test promised by the UK government would look like a pregnancy test and needs just a drop of blood to diagnose the individual.

Several companies are working on at-home COVID-19 tests, but PHE didn’t say which test it planned to deploy. According to PHE, the unnamed test takes 15 minutes to work, and it will be available at pharmacies and online via retailers like Amazon. The test will detect antibodies in the user’s blood that indicate they have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It works with both Immunoglobulin M and Immunoglobulin G (IgM and IGG) type antibodies. IgM peaks early in an infection and IgG remains even after the infection has subsided.