Highlights From COVID-19 Research Papers Published in September 2020

This is an article by Gabriel Leung, Dean of Medicine at Hong Kong University Medical Center and Malik Peiris Professor at the University Hong Kong 1) COVID vaccines are needed, even if they have minimal impact on transmission 2) COVID vaccines may not help us achieve herd immunity 3) COVID vaccine trials primarily assess prevention of virologically confirmed disease - not infection or transmission 4) an "effective" vaccine confers protection from disease but might not reduce spread 5) if COVID vaccines are effective in reducing morbidity & mortality in high-risk groups, they would have an important role, irrespective of impact on transmission and population immunity 6) if high-risk populations can be shielded by vaccination, COVID control measures could be recalibrated 7) the idea that COVID vaccine-induced population immunity will allow a return to normalcy may be based on false assumptions 8) no country will be truly safe until the entire world is vaccinated. This new study from Akiko Iwasaki, PhD and colleagues at Yale University offers the first clear evidence that COVID can invade brain cells 1) 40-60% of hospitalized COVID patients experience neurological complications including nerve damage and stroke 2) this study suggests that COVID in the brain may be more lethal than the respiratory infection caused by COVID 3) COVID hijacks brain cells to make copies of itself then exploits the brain cells' machinery to multiply 4) then COVID chokes off oxygen to adjacent brain cells causing them to die 5) a few days into the infection there is a dramatic decrease the number of synapses (the connections between neurons in the brain) 6) the researchers didn't find any evidence of an immune response to remedy this problem. It's a silent infection with evasion mechanisms 7) some people may be susceptible because of their genetic background or high viral load. Researchers used Summit Supercomputer to analyze 2.5 billion genetic combinations from COVID; then they made the Bradykinin Hypothesis 1) it took Summit 1 week to run the numbers. These high-powered microscopic images show very high viral loads of SARS-CoV-2 on human respiratory surfaces ready to spread the virus 1) Camille Ehre PhD and colleagues at UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine generated these microscopic images showing very high viral loads of SARS-CoV-2.