ABOUT A THOUSAND AMERICANS ARE DYING EVERY DAY — A TOLL SO GRIM THAT IT'S HARD TO COMPREHEND.

Leaked documents dated to earlier this week, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by Yahoo News, warn that new coronavirus cases are spiking again as Americans relax their social distancing practices.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s top infectious disease expert and a national figurehead against the virus, lamented this week that the outbreak has become his “worse nightmare.”

“In a period of four months, it has devastated the whole world,” he said. “And it isn’t over yet.”

Does that amount to the widely-feared “second wave” of COVID, which could lead to more mass deaths and knock down an economy that’s only starting to recover? It remains unclear — especially because the fight against the virus is going very differently in different areas of the country.

Atlantic writer James Hamblin, whose early warnings about the severity of the pandemic proved prescient, pushed back against the idea that the U.S. is experiencing a second wave. It would be more accurate, he said yesterday, to characterize COVID cases in the U.S. as “one long wave” that’s leveled out around 20,000 new cases — and, chillingly, around 1,000 deaths — per day.

CHINESE COVID-19 VACCINE EFFECTIVE IN MONKEYS

Researchers at Beijing pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech have developed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that it says protected macaques from infection, ScienceMagazine reports.

The vaccine was based on a tried-and-true formulation that included an inactivated version of the virus SARS-CoV-2, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the server bioRxiv on April 19.

“These data support the rapid clinical development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for humans,” reads the paper.

The team at Sinovac injected eight macaque monkeys with two different doses. Three weeks after injection, they introduced the coronavirus straight into the money’s lungs. There were reportedly no side effects.

None of the monkeys developed an infection beyond a small “viral blip.” A less fortunate control group of monkeys developed severe pneumonia after being infected by the virus.

“This is old school but it might work,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-authored a status report on COVID vaccine candidates, told Science Mag. “What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.”

Critics say, though, that the sample size in Sinovac’s trial was too small to produce generalizable results. Questions also remain about the viability of the vaccine candidate for use in humans — especially considering that monkeys don’t experience the same severe symptoms of COVID as humans.

In a separate Sinovac experiment, the researchers mixed a cocktail of antibodies from patients in China, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom with the virus.

According to the team, the antibodies “potently neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, indicative of a possible broader neutralizing ability.”

And that’d be good news.

“This provides strong evidence that the virus is not mutating in a way that would make it resistant to a #COVID19 vaccine,” tweeted of Oregon Health & Science University immunologist Mark Slifka on Wednesday.

Sinovac Biotech is now planning trials on thousands of human subjects.

COVID 19 - a Different Perspective

I am seeing alot of negative things about the Covid - 19 virus but let's just take a second to look at some positive things.

“Since the lockdown..... 

Venice's canals have become crystal clear.

Italy coasts have dolphins coming nearer and nearer.

Japan now has deer roaming free in the streets, and  Thailand: the same with monkeys.

 China has record breaking pollution cuts.

The Earth has already began showing signs of amazing things that are happening from the absence of human pollution.

What if- and hear me out..- what if the entire human population used this as an opportunity to restart society on a greener, more environment conscious foot.

 What we're seeing in the span of a couple of days is amazing.  A pipe dream.

Maybe it’s time for us humans to look after our planet, maybe it’s time to listen to the universe . Things happen for a reason and maybe the planet just needs a bit of time to heal! 

❤ See the positives even in crisis ❤

Inspirational and Motivational Quotes 8 - by Life is Fun

Motivational and Inspirational Quotes 5 - by Life is Fun

Inspirational and motivational quotes 2 - Doodly by Life is Fun

SPACEX SAYS IT WILL LAUNCH SPACE TOURISTS AS SOON AS NEXT YEAR

SpaceX announced a partnership this week with space tourism Space Adventures to start launching passengers to orbit aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft starting as early as 2021, TechCrunch reports.

SpaceX says it will send four privately-paying space tourists to orbit the Earth for five days in its Crew Dragon capsule between “late-2021 and mid-2022,” according to CNBC.

“This historic mission will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it, and we are pleased to work with the Space Adventures’ team on the mission,” SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement.

Space Adventures already sells seats on Russian Soyuz rockets.

SpaceX’s passenger-carrying Crew Dragon capsule, developed as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has so far completed a successful test trip and docking maneur  to the International Space Station last year, but has yet to make the journey with any passengers on board.

Earlier this year, SpaceX tested its space taxi’s emergency abort system in dramatic fashion, intentionally blowing up a Falcon 9 rocket in the process.

READ MORE: SpaceX and new partner announce space tourism launches on Dragon starting as early as 2021 [TechCrunch]

SCIENTISTS CREATE ARTIFICIAL GENOME THAT CAN REPRODUCE

German scientists say that for the first time ever, they’ve created a lab-grown artificial genome that can reproduce itself like a natural one.

It’s not quite one of those replicants from “Blade Runner,” but it’s a step toward the holy grail of synthetic biology: fully artificial organisms that can survive and reproduce like the real thing.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications this week, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry describe how they assembled genomes made up of blueprints for proteins — and demonstrated that it was capable of replicating 116 kilobytes worth of its own RNA and DNA.

Next up, according to a press release, the team plans to build an “enveloped system” that can reproduce like this last one — but also consume nutrition and dispose of waste, like a living cell.

READ MORE: Reproductive genome from the laboratory [Max Planck Society]

THESE ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF CORONAVIRUS

As the deadly coronavirus 2019-nCoV spreads throughout the world, doctors are getting a better understanding of what symptoms and warning signs to keep an eye out for.

Some extreme cases involve patients coughing up blood or going into septic shock.  More typically, however, symptoms remain milder — potentially letting some cases slip under the radar and worsening the outbreak.

Like other coronaviruses, 2019-nCoV can cause pneumonia and other respiratory and cardiovascular conditions: coughing, fever, fatigue, and soreness. Because the outbreak is in the middle of flu season, that can make distinguishing between the two difficult.

As the disease progresses, it can cause more severe symptoms including difficulty breathing, kidney injury, and heart damage.

The virus is most dangerous for the elderly or people who are already sick — the mortality rate is substantially higher within those particular groups than the general population.

Screening for new cases is also difficult because 2019-nCoV patients can spread the disease while they remain asymptomatic for as long as two weeks — compared to most viral infections which cause symptoms within the first few days.

As 2019-nCoV, the coronavirus that emerged in China last month, continues to spread to over a dozen countries, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the elderly and chronically ill are at a greater risk than the general population.

The coronavirus can cause symptoms ranging in severity from fever and fatigue to pneumonia and septic shock. But older people, and people who were already sick before contracting 2019-nCoV, seem to be getting hit harder,

The Play Theory of Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism.

Play counters the tendency to dominate, in humans and in other mammals.

Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies—whether in Africa, Asia, South America or elsewhere—have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies (e.g. Ingold, 1999). The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people per band. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.

Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies—whether in Africa, Asia, South America or elsewhere—have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies (e.g. Ingold, 1999). The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people per band. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.

Wherever else we look in the human world, outside of band hunter-gatherers, we see hierarchical structures, in which some people dominate others. Pre-state agrarian tribes are headed by chiefs; modern governments are headed by leaders, elected or not, that have the power to dominate.  We see hierarchy in the workplace, where bosses tell employees what to do. We see it in gangs and in all sorts of formal or informal gatherings, especially of boys and men, who jockey, sometimes violently, for dominance. We see it in schools, where principals tell teachers what to do and teachers tell students what to do. We see it in families where parents dominate children. We also see dominance hierarchies almost everywhere we look in other primates, with alpha individuals (generally males) on top and frequent fighting for status.

It would seem from all this that we humans, or more generally all of us primates, are predisposed genetically to live in dominance hierarchies in which individuals, especially males, more or less continuously strive to move up in the hierarchy. But if that is so, then how do hunter-gatherers manage to live in their egalitarian way? Genes can’t account for that difference. Indeed, people just a generation or so away from being hunter-gatherers, who now live in agricultural societies, often quickly lose their egalitarian tendencies and fall into dominance patterns.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201908/the-play-theory-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism