Only 38 per cent of people supported the UK government's change to coronavirus restrictions announced on 10 May, compared to 90 per cent of people who said they supported the lockdown measures announced on 23 March, according to a survey conducted by researchers at King's College London and Ipsos MORI. The measures brought in on 10 May largely affected England. They included a stronger emphasis on people going to work if they are unable to work from home, encouraging people to avoid public transport as much as possible, letting people exercise outside more than once a day and allowing people to meet up with one person from a household other than their own, providing the meeting takes place outside and at a distance of at least 2 metres. The poll, which surveyed 2254 people in the UK aged 16 to 75, was conducted between 20 and 22 May, before it emerged that prime ministerial aide Dominic Cummings drove more than 260 miles from home with his son and ill wife in March, at a time when the ...

Researchers across the globe are seeking to rapidly repurpose existing drugs or discover new drugs to counter the the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). One promising approach is to train machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to screen large numbers of small molecules. As a contribution to that effort, we are aggregating numerous small molecules from a variety of sources, using high-performance computing (HPC) to computer diverse properties of those molecules, using the computed properties to train ML/AI models, and then using the resulting models for screening. In this first data release, we make available 23 datasets collected from community sources representing over 4.2 B molecules enriched with pre-computed: 1) molecular fingerprints to aid similarity searches, 2) 2D images of molecules to enable exploration and application of image-based deep learning methods, and 3) 2D and 3D molecular descriptors to speed development of machine learning models. This data release encompasses structural information on the 4.2 B molecules and 60 TB of pre-computed data. Future releases will expand the data to include more detailed molecular simulations, computed models, and other products.

Delaying the reopening of primary schools in England on 1 June by two weeks could halve the risk to each child of being exposed to an infectious classmate, according to a report by the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, a recently-formed group of scientists that is seeking to provide alternative advice to the UK government. The group say that modelling suggests that waiting until September would reduce this risk further, to less than the risk to children of road traffic accidents. The group is chaired by former government chief scientific advisor David King and is separate from the official SAGE committee that advises the UK government. "The crucial factor allowing school reopening around the world has been the presence of well-functioning local test, trace and isolate protocols – something that is now accepted will not be in place in England by early June," the report says. It adds that before schools can reopen, it is important to confirm that daily new ...

The NHS Confederation, a membership body that represents people who commission or provide NHS services, has warned of the urgent need for a UK contact tracing strategy. "Our members are concerned that unless there is a clear strategy, then there must be a greater risk of a second wave of infections and serious health consequences," chief executive Niall Dickson wrote in a letter sent to the UK's health and social care minister Matt Hancock yesterday. "We would therefore urge you to produce such a strategy with a clear implementation plan ahead of any further easing of the lockdown." Dickson welcomed Prime Minister Boris Johnson's new commitment to trace 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day by 1 June, adding that "delivery and implementation will be critical, and we await further details." However, he said that a strategy for tracing contacts "should have been in place much sooner". An international randomised controlled trial investigating whether hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine ...

UK prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs today that he is confident that the government will have recruited 25,000 coronavirus contact tracers by the start of June, which he says will provide the capacity to trace the contacts of 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day. Johnson said 24,000 contact tracers have already been recruited. In April, health secretary Matt Hancock said the government hoped to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May, to coincide with the planned release of the NHS covid-19 contact tracing app. But the widespread release of the app, currently being trialled on the Isle of Wight, has now been delayed until June. There are also ongoing concerns about privacy. In a recent report, security researchers wrote that there should be a legal requirement that all data collected by the app is deleted at the end of the coronavirus crisis, rather than being anonymised or repurposed.

For patients with COVID-19, terrifying shortness of breath can set in virtually overnight. In many cases, it's caused by an aggressive pneumonia infection in the lungs, which fills them with thick fluid and robs the body of life-giving oxygen. Detecting these severe cases early on is essential for treating them successfully. At the moment, however, the only way to tell whether a patient's pneumonia is caused by the coronavirus is by examining X-ray and CT scans of the chest--and as cases rack up worldwide, radiologists are being deluged with images, creating a backlog that may delay critical decisions about care. One solution, said Karen Panetta, may involve taking some of that workload away from humans.

Zebra Medical Vision, the deep-learning medical imaging analytics company, announced on Monday that it secured its 5th FDA clearance, this time for an AI solution that identifies findings suggestive of compression fractures in scans. The Israeli firm said the FDA gave 510(k) clearance for its Vertebral Compression Fractures (VCF) product that enables clinicians to place patients at risk of osteoporosis "in treatment pathways to prevent potentially life-changing fractures," Zebra Medical said in a statement. The solution can be applied to abdominal or chest CT scan performed for any clinical indication, the company says. Founded in 2014 by Eyal Toledano, Eyal Gura, and Elad Benjamin, Zebra uses AI to read medical scans and automatically detect anomalies. Through its development and use of different algorithms, Zebra Medical has been able to identify visual symptoms for diseases such as breast cancer, osteoporosis, and fatty liver, as well as conditions such as aneurysms and brain bleeds.

UK government advised to'urgently' build up contact tracing capacity The UK House of Commons science and technology committee has made recommendations to the government based on evidence from its on-going inquiry into the role of science in the country's pandemic response. These include a call for the government to "urgently" build up capacity for contact tracing. The committee also recommended that the government be more transparent about the scientific advice it receives, asking that the published list of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) members be updated regularly. They also suggested the government set out a plan for tackling infections spread by people who do not have any covid-19 symptoms, and called for the systematic recording of the ethnicity of everyone who dies from the disease. The committee also urged the government to publish its rationale for concentrating coronavirus testing in a limited number of Public Health England laboratories, rather than making ...

Using ORNL's Summit supercomputer, scientists can comb through millions of medical journal articles looking for possible connections among FDA-approved drug therapies and known COVID-19 symptoms. Scientists have tapped the immense power of the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to comb through millions of medical journal articles to identify potential vaccines, drugs, and effective measures that could suppress or stop the spread of COVID-19. A team comprising researchers from ORNL and Georgia Tech are using artificial intelligence methods designed to unearth relevant information from about 18 million available research documents. They looked for connections among 84 billion concepts and cross-referenced keywords associated with COVID-19 -- such as high fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath -- with existing medical solutions. "Our goal is to assist doctors' and researchers' ability to identify information about drug therapies that are already approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration," said ORNL's Ramakrishnan "Ramki" Kannan.

A preliminary test in only eight volunteers suggests the first coronavirus vaccine to be tested in people seems to be safe and can stimulate an immune response against the virus. Antibodies generated by the volunteers were able to stop the virus from replicating in human cells in the laboratory and the levels of antibodies in their blood were similar to those previously detected in recovered covid-19 patients. Tal Zaks of Moderna, the US firm developing the vaccine, said that if the next stages go well, it could be widely available by the end of this year or early next year. The US stock market was up sharply today following the announcement. However, it remains to be seen if such speedy testing and manufacturing of a vaccine is really possible – no vaccine has ever been produced in less than five years. Meanwhile, a trial of another vaccine, developed by researchers at the University of Oxford found it wasn't able to stop six rhesus macaque monkeys from becoming infected with the ...