The Unequal Pandemic Bambra, Clare; Lynch, Julia; Smith, Katherine E
06/2021
eBook
Odprti dostop
Rated as a top 10 book about the COVID-19 pandemic by New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2021/07/best-books-about-covid-19-pandemic
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under ...CC-BY-NC- ND
It has been claimed that we are ‘all in it together’ and that the COVID-19 virus ‘does not discriminate’.
This accessible, yet authoritative book dispels this myth of COVID-19 as an ‘equal opportunity’ disease, by showing how the pandemic is a syndemic of disease and inequality.
Drawing on international data and accounts, it argues that the pandemic is unequal in three ways: it has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally.
These inequalities are a political choice: with governments effectively choosing who lives and who dies, we need to learn from COVID-19 quickly to prevent growing inequality and to reduce health inequalities in the future.
COVID-19 is an unequal pandemic.
COVID-19 is a severe infectious disease that has claimed >150,000 lives and infected millions in the United States thus far, especially the elderly population. Emerging evidence has shown the virus ...to cause hemorrhagic and immunologic responses, which impact all organs, including lungs, kidneys, and the brain, as well as extremities. SARS-CoV-2 also affects patients', families', and society's mental health at large. There is growing evidence of re-infection in some patients. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of SARS-CoV-2-induced disease, its mechanism of infection, diagnostics, therapeutics, and treatment strategies, while also focusing on less attended aspects by previous studies, including nutritional support, psychological, and rehabilitation of the pandemic and its management. We performed a systematic review of >1,000 articles and included 425 references from online databases, including, PubMed, Google Scholar, and California Baptist University's library. COVID-19 patients go through acute respiratory distress syndrome, cytokine storm, acute hypercoagulable state, and autonomic dysfunction, which must be managed by a multidisciplinary team including nursing, nutrition, and rehabilitation. The elderly population and those who are suffering from Alzheimer's disease and dementia related illnesses seem to be at the higher risk. There are 28 vaccines under development, and new treatment strategies/protocols are being investigated. The future management for COVID-19 should include B-cell and T-cell immunotherapy in combination with emerging prophylaxis. The mental health and illness aspect of COVID-19 are among the most important side effects of this pandemic which requires a national plan for prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
The spring of 2020 marked a change in how almost everyone conducted their personal and professional lives, both within science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) and beyond. ...The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global scientific conferences and individual laboratories and required people to find space in their homes from which to work. It blurred the boundaries between work and non-work, infusing ambiguity into everyday activities. While adaptations that allowed people to connect became more common, the evidence available at the end of 2020 suggests that the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic endangered the engagement, experience, and retention of women in academic STEMM, and may roll back some of the achievement gains made by women in the academy to date.
The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identifies, names, and documents how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the careers of women in academic STEMM during the initial 9-month period since March 2020 and considers how these disruptions - both positive and negative - might shape future progress for women. This publication builds on the 2020 report Promising Practices for Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nuanced ways these disruptions have manifested. The Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will inform the academic community as it emerges from the pandemic to mitigate any long-term negative consequences for the continued advancement of women in the academic STEMM workforce and build on the adaptations and opportunities that have emerged.
COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic ...consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.
This Open Access book examines many of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic through the distinctive lens of civility. The idea of civility appears often in both public and academic debates, ...and a polarized political climate frequently leads to allegations of uncivil speech and behaviour. Norms of civility are always contested, even more so in moments of crisis such as a global pandemic. A focus on civility provides crucial insight and guidance on how to navigate the social and political challenges resulting from COVID-19. Furthermore, it offers a framework through which citizens and policymakers can better understand the causes and consequences of incivility, and devise ways to recover civility in our social and political lives.
A safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 is urgently needed in quantities that are sufficient to immunize large populations. Here we report the preclinical development of two vaccine candidates ...(BNT162b1 and BNT162b2) that contain nucleoside-modified messenger RNA that encodes immunogens derived from the spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2, formulated in lipid nanoparticles. BNT162b1 encodes a soluble, secreted trimerized receptor-binding domain (known as the RBD-foldon). BNT162b2 encodes the full-length transmembrane S glycoprotein, locked in its prefusion conformation by the substitution of two residues with proline (S(K986P/V987P); hereafter, S(P2) (also known as P2 S)). The flexibly tethered RBDs of the RBD-foldon bind to human ACE2 with high avidity. Approximately 20% of the S(P2) trimers are in the two-RBD 'down', one-RBD 'up' state. In mice, one intramuscular dose of either candidate vaccine elicits a dose-dependent antibody response with high virus-entry inhibition titres and strong T-helper-1 CD4
and IFNγ
CD8
T cell responses. Prime-boost vaccination of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) with the BNT162b candidates elicits SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing geometric mean titres that are 8.2-18.2× that of a panel of SARS-CoV-2-convalescent human sera. The vaccine candidates protect macaques against challenge with SARS-CoV-2; in particular, BNT162b2 protects the lower respiratory tract against the presence of viral RNA and shows no evidence of disease enhancement. Both candidates are being evaluated in phase I trials in Germany and the USA
, and BNT162b2 is being evaluated in an ongoing global phase II/III trial (NCT04380701 and NCT04368728).
A fast and accurate self-testing tool for COVID-19 diagnosis has become a prerequisite to comprehend the exact number of cases worldwide and to take medical and governmental actions accordingly. ...SARS-CoV-2 (formerly, 2019-nCoV) infection was first reported in Wuhan (China) in December 2019, and then it has rapidly spread around the world, causing ~14 million active cases with ~582,000 deaths as of July 2020. The diagnosis tools available so far have been based on a) viral gene detection, b) human antibody detection, and c) viral antigen detection, among which the viral gene detection by RT-PCR has been found as the most reliable technique. In this report, the current SARS-CoV-2 detection kits, exclusively the ones that were issued an “Emergency Use Authorization” from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, were discussed. The key structural components of the virus were presented to provide the audience with an understanding of the scientific principles behind the testing tools. The methods that are still in the early research state were also reviewed in a subsection based on the reports available so far.
•The structural biomarkers of SARS-CoV-2 are described.•Viral gene, antigen, and antibody-based detection methods are discussed.•Emergency Use Authorization-issued commercial test kits are explained.•The methods at early research-stage are summarized.
Breakthrough infections with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in fully vaccinated individuals are receiving intense scrutiny because of their importance in determining how ...long restrictions to control virus transmission will need to remain in place in highly vaccinated populations as well as in determining the need for additional vaccine doses or changes to the vaccine formulations and/or dosing intervals. Measurement of breakthrough infections is challenging outside of randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind field trials. However, laboratory and observational studies are necessary to understand the impact of waning immunity, viral variants and other determinants of changing vaccine effectiveness against various levels of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity. Here, we describe the approaches being used to measure vaccine effectiveness and provide a synthesis of the burgeoning literature on the determinants of vaccine effectiveness and breakthrough rates. We argue that, rather than trying to tease apart the contributions of factors such as age, viral variants and time since vaccination, the rates of breakthrough infection are best seen as a consequence of the level of immunity at any moment in an individual, the variant to which that individual is exposed and the severity of disease being considered. We also address key open questions concerning the transition to endemicity, the potential need for altered vaccine formulations to track viral variants, the need to identify immune correlates of protection, and the public health challenges of using various tools to counter breakthrough infections, including boosters in an era of global vaccine shortages.