Saturday, April 11th, 2020

Time	Event
12:50a	Florian Krammer, PhD, Discusses New Coronavirus Serological Assay The PCR [polymerase chain reaction] or nucleic-acid based test is to figure out if somebody is acutely infected with the virus. The serological test is to figure out if somebody had been infected with the virus, it's not for finding acute infections. You might, during an acute infection, already see some antibody, but typically that comes later. It has a lot of uses in research. We can use it to better understand the antibody response and the dynamics. We can now perform serosurveys to figure out how widespread spread the virus actually is. People who might not have symptoms might still produce an immune response. Those are the research reasons for doing this. Now, there's 2 more practical reasons. There is a large initiative to look for people who seroconverted, and then ask them to donate plasma and maybe use that as a therapeutic. This has been done in China to a certain degree and in Italy. There are no clinical trials that show that this is effective, but there's anecdotal evidence that it might work. China is also doing a clinical trial. If you can screen people and look who has a strong immune response, you can identify them and ask them to donate. You could also do that with a neutralization assay, but that takes a few days and you need to do that at biosafety level 3. While the ELISA assay that we developed is very easy to do—there's no infectious virus involved at all, and the output is relatively high. With 1 operator, the current setup that he has, you can run a few thousand samples per week. Everybody's at home, self-quarantining. If you would know who was already exposed and infected and who has an immune response, we might be able to let these people go back to work. Because if they're immune, and they can't get infected anymore, they're no danger for others because they're not able to spread the virus on anymore. That is more hypothetical. There's no approved use of that assay for that purpose right now. But that's something that we may want to think about when we think about restarting the economy. A lot of health care workers also probably got exposed early in the game, and they might now be immune. Knowing that you're immune might be some comfort if you have to deal with COVID-19 patients. https://youtu.be/6DgVNvFPUdk Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Interview mit dem Entwickler des ersten Coronavirus-Immuntests (16 Comments | Comment on this)
2:11a	Clarissa Bebber Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Helena Hauff Boiler Room x Dekmantel Festival DJ Set (Comment on this)
10:22a	Tagesreport DIVI Intensivregister 10.04.2020 Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
11:56a	Compassionate Use of Remdesivir for Patients with Severe Covid-19 To date, no therapy has demonstrated efficacy for patients with Covid-19. This preliminary report describes the clinical outcomes in a small cohort of patients who were severely ill with Covid-19 and were treated with remdesivir. Although data from several ongoing randomized, controlled trials will soon provide more informative evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of remdesivir for Covid-19, the outcomes observed in this compassionate-use program are the best currently available data. Specifically, improvement in oxygen-support status was observed in 68% of patients, and overall mortality was 13% over a median follow-up of 18 days. In a recent randomized, controlled trial of lopinavir–ritonavir in patients hospitalized for Covid-19, the 28-day mortality was 22%. It is important to note that only 1 of 199 patients in that trial were receiving invasive ventilation at baseline. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
12:44p	Kode9 & Spaceape - 9 Samurai A stone will be thrown at the state, and a stone will be thrown at the churches. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Kode9 & Spaceape - 9 Samurai (Comment on this)
7:50p	Warhafftige Contrafactur Current Mood: sleepy (12 Comments | Comment on this)

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