Coronavirus contagiousness put under question and vaccine approved for limited use
- sexynetworknews
- Jun 29, 2020
- 2 min read
Image courtesy of the New York Times
The contagiousness of the Coronavirus was put under question last Thursday when Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC stated in an interview, "Our best estimate right now is that for every case that's reported, there actually are 10 other infections,". This discovery comes after an analysis of blood samples across the country that were tested for Covid-19 antibodies. For every confirmed case, there were 10 more people who had antibodies. If this analysis is accurate, the real number of cases would be approximately 23 million in the United States alone, with most being asymptomatic. Redfield stated, "This virus causes so much asymptomatic infection," followed by, "The traditional approach of looking for symptomatic illness and diagnosing it obviously underestimates the total amount of infections." With the large amount of asymptomatic infections, this begs the question on whether or not the country is safe for reopening. If Redfield's statements are correct, as of the writing of this article, the symptomatic infection rate would be approximately 11.5% and the fatality rate being 0.56%.
Image courtesy of the New York Times
In other news, the race for a vaccine continues. According to the New York Time's Coronavirus vaccine tracker, there are over 125 vaccines that have been created, with only 3 being advanced to phase 3 and 1 being approved for limited use as of the writing of this article. The first vaccine in phase 3 is being developed by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford and is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus called ChAdOx1. The second vaccine is being developed by Chinese company Sinopharm. The last vaccine is being developed by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, with hopes of finding a pre-existing vaccines to partially defend against the virus. However, one vaccine based on an adenovirus called Ad5, created by the Chinese company CanSino Biologics in partnership with the Institute of Biology at China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences was approved by the Chinese military for a one year time span on June 25 as a "specially needed drug."
Sources:
NBC News
New York Times
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