Browsing: Government

Coronavirus tests require complex and pure reagents, such as enzymes, probes, and primers, which have been harder to come by during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coronavirus tests require complex and pure reagents, such as enzymes, probes, and primers, which have been harder to come by during the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re the tip of the testing spear in the fight against the coronavirus. Reagents are the main ingredients of any chemical-based test, which in this pandemic includes inorganic solutions as well as enzymes, probes, and primers created to match the coronavirus’s genome. And they are a necessity for the coronavirus test kits…

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The UK’s Daily Mail report on the origins of the Coronavirus, doesn’t look so good for China. Entitled: Wuhan doctor who went public over spread of coronavirus ‘goes missing’ gives a compelling presentation of the attempt to bury the story. If ever there was lesson to be learned, this was it. Transparency is critical to saving lives. The doctor, Dr Ai Fen, who identified the disease back in December and brought it to the attention of colleagues was severely reprimanded. The story provides a summary and timeline of how the Chinese Authorities knew this was happening but worked to cover…

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By learning from a MERS outbreak in 2015, South Korea was prepared and acted swiftly to ramp up testing when the new coronavirus appeared there. Meanwhile, the U.S., plagued by delay and dysfunction, wasted its advantage. In the aftermath of a 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that killed 38 people and cratered the economy, South Korea took a hard look at what had gone wrong. Korean officials enacted a key reform, allowing the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency. Within weeks of the current outbreak in Wuhan, China, four Korean companies had…

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This will include a range of perspectives in the week in review. Is the cure worse than the disease? It appears physicians immersed in the midst of it all are seeing it that way. Most compelling was an opinion written by St. Barnabas Hospital Emergency director Daniel G. Murphy MD.  The Bronx New York hospital which serves a lower income community is in the center of the pandemic. Another physician, Scott Atlas MD who is from Stanford has taken to the airwaves advocating an end to the lockdown. We summarize their perspectives as the controversy will likely grow. Both wrote…

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