Weekly update –
An overview of some of the developing stories of the past week.
during the pandemic, Ars has done its best to keep you on top of the most important news. But there are definitely gaps in our coverage: small updates to stories we’ve covered, or news that we’ve decided wasn’t worth the time to report deeply. Focusing on breaking news also limits our opportunity to provide bigger-picture perspective. To make up for this, we’re going to try doing a series of Monday updates to help keep you informed. Global trends On Friday, the World Health Organization extended its declaration of global health emergency . SARS-CoV-2 is now being actively transmitted on every inhabited continent, and many new cases are occurring in developing nations in Africa and South America, which have more limited health care systems and far less testing capacity. Thus, it’s difficult to tell just how much the virus is spreading in these countries (to be fair, it’s difficult to tell how fast it’s spreading in many developed nations as well).
, new cases diagnosed in a single day, a record for that country. Meanwhile, a number of countries that were hit very hard in the early period of the pandemic appear to have gotten new infections under control. France, Italy, and Spain have now seen their daily fatality count drop to numbers not seen since early March , allowing them to start planning the lifting of some restrictions on public life.
Updates
A huge US consortium (with some assists from France and the UK) has figured out all the human proteins we might target with drugs in order to treat COVID – . In order to reproduce, the virus has to rely on human proteins. To find out which ones, the authors tagged of the 62 proteins encoded by SARS-CoV-2, then used them to pull out any human proteins the virus’ proteins interacted with. This resulted in a list of human proteins that the virus may need to reproduce. Of that number, are already targeted by drugs; of those are already approved for human use, and 020 are in clinical trials for other disorders.
This does not mean these drugs will do anything to SARS-CoV-2 or that they’ll even be safe to use in COVID – 15 patients, but it does help provide a rational reason to expedite further screening.
For several weeks, the Trump administration had touted its ability to keep the number of deaths in the United States below some the predictions of some models, which are placed the low end of possible fatalities at , . With that number having been exceeded last week, President Trump on Sunday used a virtual town hall to acknowledge things would be worse but hopefully not much worse. Trump placed his new estimate at between , 05 and 683, 04 fatalities in total. With many states showing a long plateau of cases, the low end of that estimate is already looking unrealistic.
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