The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday reversed a controversial recommendation suggesting people who have had close contact with a person infected with the coronavirus do not need to get tested if they have no symptoms. The change comes after widespread criticism of the earlier guideline, as well as reporting from The New…
Many things will have to work out to end the coronavirus pandemic. Drug companies will have to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Billions of people will have to consent to vaccination. But there are more prosaic challenges, too. Among them: Companies may have to transport tiny glass vials thousands of miles while keeping them…
SAN FRANCISCO — Ian MacDonald, a 14-year-old in Portland, Ore., got a treat from his parents the other day. He was allowed to go outside. It was for less than five minutes. “I let him take out the garbage. We wore N95 masks,” said his father, Dr. Kelvin MacDonald, who has been insisting his family…
ImageThe Affordable Care Act has survived many attempts to stop it, including the stripping of the individual mandate. Credit…Tim Gruber for The New York Times Health economists long had a favorite metaphor for explaining why Obamacare’s unpopular individual mandate was good policy: the three-legged stool. Obamacare would work, they’d explain, only if it did three things:…
Hospitals across the country are charging private insurance companies 2.5 times what they get from Medicare for the same care, according to a new RAND Corporation study of hospital prices released on Friday. In a half-dozen of 49 states in the survey, including West Virginia and Florida, private insurers paid three or more times what…
Here’s what you need to know: ImageTesting at the Wyandotte County Health Department in Kansas last month.Credit…Christopher (KS) Smith for The New York Times A much-criticized testing recommendation on the C.D.C.’s website last month was not written by C.D.C. scientists. A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about…
I am the mother of four, but addiction is my ever-present extra child. My grandparents died of alcoholism. My father-in-law did, too. My 43-year-old brother died of a heroin overdose in May. He became addicted after taking prescribed OxyContin following an appendectomy. When my 13-year-old daughter needed hernia surgery as my brother was hitting rock…
In March, researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering– a shared department in the schools of Dental Medicine, Medicine, and Engineering–began to develop a new, low-cost, CRISPR-based diagnostic platform to detect infectious diseases, including HIV virus, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Today, the method is one step closer to being a cutting-edge diagnostics technology for rapid…
Scientists have used a new high-speed, in vitro selection method to isolate 9 antibody-like proteins (ALPs) that bind to the SARS-CoV-2 virus – 4 of which also exhibited neutralizing activity – within 4 days, according to a new study. While much research has focused on the identification of whole antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 – the causative…
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Studies indicate that homemade masks help combat the spread of viruses like COVID-19 when combined with frequent hand-washing and physical distancing. Many of these studies focus on the transfer of tiny aerosol particles; however, researchers say that speaking, coughing and sneezing generates larger droplets that carry virus particles. Because of this, mechanical…