Detroit-area hospitals need refrigerated trucks for the coronavirus dead
Detroit’s Sinai-Grace Hospital made national headlines this week after CNN showed photographs allegedly leaked by staff of white body bags piled up in empty rooms and propped on chairs amid the coronavirus surge.
The revelations come as metro Detroit hospitals say they’ve begun storing bodies in refrigerated trucks to handle the surge.
Brian Taylor, a spokesman for the Detroit Medical Center, which includes Sinai-Grace, told Detroit Free Press on Monday that COVID-19 “has caused significantly greater than normal mortality rates in the Detroit community.”
Covid 19 coronavirus: Mutation threatens race to develop vaccine
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By: Stephen Chen
14 Apr, 2020 12:56pm
A coronavirus strain isolated in India carried a mutation that could upend vaccine development around the globe, according to researchers from Australia and Taiwan.
The non-peer reviewed study said the change had occurred in part of the spike protein that allows the virus to bind with certain human cells.
This structure targets cells containing ACE2, an enzyme found in the lungs which also allowed the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) virus to infect people.
Scientists know more about this receptor than any other so had been working on antibodies that target it, but an unexpected structural change could render them useless.
The researchers – led by Wei-Lung Wang, from the National Changhua University of Education in Taiwan, and collaborators from Murdoch University in Australia – said this was the first report of a significant mutation that could threaten development of a vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19.
“The observation of this study raised the alarm that Sars-CoV-2 mutation with varied epitope [something an antibody attaches itself to] profile could arise at any time,” they wrote in a paper released on preprint review site biorxiv.org on Saturday.
“[This] means current vaccine development against Sars-CoV-2 is at great risk of becoming futile.”
Although the strain in question was first sampled by the National Institute of Virology from a patient in Kerala as early as January, the full genome sequence was only released to the international community last month – a delay that raised eyebrows among some researchers.
The patient was said to be a medical student returning from Wuhan, but the strain does not appear to be closely related to any of those identified in the Chinese city and appears to be an outlier compared with variants recorded in other countries.
The researchers found that the mutation occurred in the spike protein’s receptor-binding domain (RBD
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