COVID-19: Beyond tracking and face-covering

The Irish COVID-19 tracker app has been phenomenally successful and while the widespread use of face masks has been shown to reduce the spread, there is far more that we need to do to manage this pandemic.

While there are over 160 coronavirus vaccines in development around the world, about 140 of these are at the preclinical stage, meaning they are still being looked at in laboratories and in animal tests.

“Practical realities will require a process that focuses global efforts on a small handful of candidates that may have the highest impact,” according to the World Health Organization.

The much larger phase III trials in the coming months, involving thousands of people, will give a better idea of which vaccine might be deployed first. Any vaccines that are successful in clinical trials will still need to be manufactured at scale, which will affect the time it takes to get a vaccine for general use.

“We are seeing things happening at unprecedented speeds. Maybe something could be licensed for use within 18 months from now,” according to Sheuli Porkess of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

According to the latest research published in the journal, Nature, “Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 might help the virus to thwart potent immune molecules.”

This affects the effectiveness of both antibody tests and of our own resistance to the virus.

It is likely that the SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID-19 will continue to mutate so that a single vaccine will not be a solution in a way that it is with polio or smallpox and the best we may be all to do will be an annual vaccine for the new families of COVID-20, COVID-21 and so forth like the flu vaccine which reduces the incidence and never completely eliminates it.

COVID-19 – Potential resurgence

World Health Organization reports that the world is facing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases as the pandemic continues to accelerate and as mutation set in scientists are anticipating a second wave which may be more widespread and virulent and cost more lives than the original spread.

Research by Dr. Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero from the UK’s Queen Mary’s Centre for Globalisation Research (CGR) reports that the probability of riots, violence against civilians, food-related conflicts and food looting is increasing under lockdown making a second wave universal lockdown problematic.

On top of the track and trace, there is a clearcut and far stronger way of stemming the spread or pandemic.

This is to actually identify those people who carry the virus and then to quarantine these individuals as early as possible.

The problem is that antibody testing has proved to be expensive and not sensitive to the virus within some tests being sold in parts of the world to inhere sensitivity of 40 %.

Claimed figures for other tests were at 90% are often under very specific conditions and its very unspecific periods of time.

There are narrow windows where the testing has been done at a certain number of weeks after the patient is infected neither more nor less.

The problem is the patient may infect large numbers of people prior to being diagnosed. Even the very best testing method used by scientists in major laboratories is the so-called rt-PCR method which is considered the gold standard of Covid-19.

This test detection only works up to two weeks after the patient is infected. This means for a period of time a person can be infected in spreading the disease without anyone knowing.

The infected person only starts to show symptoms long after disease is been spread to many many people even though the test is considered both sensitive and powerful.

But now, scientists in the UK have developed a new home test which does not involve expensive reagents and can be done with an inexpensive device attached to a smartphone.

The test involves a very simple blood test, which examines the white cells in the patient’s blood and looked at the early part of the patient’s immune response before the antibodies are created and before the virus is propagated.

The strength of this is that the test detects the presence of a SARS-CoV2 virus which causes Covid-19 almost immediately on infection.

This means that anyone who has caught the disease knows immediately and will not spend the time period up to two weeks spreading it without knowing.

Governments could offer these tests by issuing the test devices to everyone with a smartphone free of charge and encouraging weekly testing to everyone who interacts with the public.

This could eliminate the need for lockdown as everyone who knows they are SARS-CoV2 free would be able to travel around without being infectious.

In fact, it would also eliminate the need for social distancing and personal protective equipment for people who have been tested.

COVID-19 – Signs of hope

The government could provide grants and support for those who test positive to stay at home and be quarantined but as we know that generally represents a relatively small population who are disproportionately responsible for the R factor. The test could be integrated with the COVID tracker app but this is not actually essential.

Currently, trials are starting in Europe and a network of 33 Italian hospitals to extend the original trial set used to develop a technique from a 5000 in San Paulo Brazil to over 20000 freshly monitored European patients.

At the same time, a number of hospitals and research institutions in Japan as well as health care companies are developing the technology and they need to manufacture it so that it can be distributed across the far east to stop the rapid expansion in that area there in its tracks.

So how does the new technique work? What it does it takes a tiny drop of blood is in diabetic lancets and look at the ratio of white blood cells and platelets within that blood.

These are the characteristics of the body’s immune response to viruses and infection.

It turns out that SARS-CoV2 creates a very distinctive pattern known as the CLDC. Published in the pre-reviewed journals this month this method turns out to be 98.7% sensitive to the SARS-CoV2 virus, but the specificity allowing it to identify the virus has been different in every 20 other tested pathogens.

Rather on waiting between 1 and 14 days which is the latency of symptoms appearing in patients and the delay time that is needed before the sensitive current tests to detect SARS-CoV2, this test almost immediately picks up the bodies changes in white blood cells utilising human bodies very sensitive detection methods far sooner than laboratory tests which are currently in the US can hope to do.

At the time of global pandemic when it seems to be nuclear capsulations and every method seems to have its flaws and weaknesses this new method of CLDC creates a ray of hope, giving a chance for the way we can stop the pandemic in its tracks almost immediately and prevent the spreading ever again without masks, without widespread social isolation or widespread lockdown being necessary in the future. It’s an exciting way forward.

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