Free Republic

'When you look at all of the evidence together, it's an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,' Worobey told the New York Times. Worobey and his team said that they focused on about 156 cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan in December 19. They continued by mapping cases in January and February using data from Chinese researchers of over 700 cases that popped up away from the market in Wuhan, particularly those with a lot of older residents. The team then studied mutations in what's known as the virus' family tree and concluded that they had...

Mild cases of COVID-19 could also leave a lasting impact on the human brain, according to a recent study. In August, researchers from England’s University of Oxford and the Imperial College of London wrote that brain imaging from the UK Biobank – including the data from more than 40,000 people in the United Kingdom, dating back to 2014 – showed differences in gray matter thickness between those who had been infected with COVID-19 and those who had not. The team said that using both hypothesis-driven and exploratory approaches, with false discovery rate multiple comparison correction, they had identified respectively 68...

The first live Asian giant "murder hornet" of 2021 has been spotted in Washington state — and it was caught in the act of living up to its name, attacking a wasp nest. Entomologists on Thursday confirmed the report of Vespa mandarinia — the world's largest hornet and a worrisome invasive species that originates from East Asia and Japan — by a person in a rural area east of the town of Blaine, south of Vancouver, British Columbia, near the Canadian border. "This hornet is exhibiting the same behavior we saw last year – attacking paper wasp nests," state entomologist...

The first results from a study by a German virologist show a significantly lower death rate from COVID-19 than the one that is widely reported, and may be a step toward easing restrictions on individuals and businesses going forward. What's the study? The COVID-19 case cluster study was led by Dr. Hendrik Streeck of the Bonn University Institute of Virology. It was done in the Gangelt district of Heinsberg, one of the earliest places to experience the spread of the coronavirus in Germany. About 1,000 people participated in the study by way of questionnaires, throat swabs, and blood tests to...

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this article, with lots of charts, data and models with plenty of sources: How many cases of coronavirus will there be in your area? What will happen when these cases materialize? What should you do? When?

Amid all the fears, quarantines and stockpiling of food, it’s important to point out that for most people, coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe ailments may take three to six weeks to rebound.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced Wednesday new rules to try to stop the spread of coronavirus, including limiting mass gatherings and restricting the number of visitors to people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. "We're in a different chapter of working our way through this," DeWine said. "The essential function of government is to do everything we can to protect people. ... We know it's going to be bad. The question is how bad is it going to be? It is within our hands to determine what that outcome is going to be." Among the actions DeWine announced: there...

The first phase of the coronavirus outbreak was a domestic challenge for China and a border containment one for the United States and others. Now we are in the second phase: community mitigation. Math and history must guide our next steps. The near-term objective should be to reduce the acute, exponential growth of the outbreak, in order to reduce suffering and the strain on our health-care system. That will require significant effort, but it can work, as we have seen: Hong Kong and Singapore have achieved linear growth of covid-19 cases, staving off the terrifying exponential upward curve confronting Italy...