New online COVID-19 mortality risk calculator could help determine who should get vaccines first

A new online calculator for estimating individual and community-level risk of dying from COVID-19 has been developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The researchers who developed the calculator expect it to be useful to public health authorities for assessing mortality risks in different communities, and for prioritizing certain groups…

A saliva-based smartphone platform could rapidly expand COVID-19 testing

Offering an ultrasensitive yet accessible approach to COVID-19 testing, a portable saliva-based smartphone platform provides results within 15 minutes without the resource-intensive laboratory tests the current gold standard requires, according to a new study. The approach was tested in 12 people infected with COVID-19 and 6 healthy controls. Bo Ning and colleagues demonstrate that this…

Political partisanship has had outsized influence on individual social mobility during COVID-19 pand

In the United States, political partisanship has played a much stronger role in individuals’ decisions to limit their social mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic than the local incidence of the disease in their own communities, according to a new survey-based study of 1,135,638 million responses collected between April 4 and September 10, 2020 via Survey…

Texas Biomed to test CBD/THC against HIV-induced neurological disorder

San Antonio, Texas (December 11, 2020) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded Professor Mahesh Mohan, D.V.M., Ph.D., and collaborators more than $3.5 million over five years to investigate the effects of cannabinoids on Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND). This research project aims to evaluate whether delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and Cannabidiol (CBD)…