COVID-19: endgames
... the hard reality is that the selfless actions of health-care workers will not alone restore the world to normality. Ending the COVID-19 pandemic will take many more months, if not years, so it is time to revisit what we know and make some difficult choices about mitigating subsequent infection waves...
.. Presently, one vaccine candidate is in a phase 2 trial, four in phase 1 trials, and 56 in preclinical studies, but the earliest any might be available is September. The key reason for the lockdowns is to allow health-care systems to cope with a spike of severe cases. However, many systems in high-income countries are still under-resourced. For example, only on April 10 did the UK Government publish a plan on managing personal protective equipment (PPE)...
emergency measures such as sterilising single-use respirator masks with H2O2 could be considered...
...contact-tracing is no longer feasible as a standalone approach. A complementary random, cross-sectional testing scenario where one in three to four people get tested every 14 days for both active infection and antibodies could be considered. This approach would fill gaps in contact-tracing and would allow people with confirmed immunity to return to work, easing pressures on government welfare schemes....
Apr 17
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30298-X/fulltext
:The COVID-19 situation in LMICs is discussed in The Lancet Global Health May 2020 Editorial. “ (NOTE: the link is active but the editorial hasn’t been posted yet)
“Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience”
- see https://ethics.harvard.edu/covid-roadmap
- see https://ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-for-ethics/files/roadmaptopandemicresilience_final_0.pdf for report