Timeline 2020: Week 21

Monday, 18 May

Merkel and Macron announce a 500,000 million euro aid plan for the reconstruction of Europe (El País).

Moderna announces that its experimental vaccine mRNA-1273 has generated antibodies in eight healthy volunteers ages 18 to 55. The levels of neutralizing antibodies matched or exceeded the levels found in patients who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection (The Guardian).

Wednesday, 20 May

After an outbreak of coronavirus, Chinese authorities seal off the city of Shulan, a city of 700,000 close to Russian border, imposing measures similar to those used in Wuhan (The Guardian).

Google and Apple release their Exposure Notification System to notify users of coronavirus exposure: https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications.

We discover a website which shows where infected people in Hong Kong are at all times: https://chp-dashboard.geodata.gov.hk/covid-19/en.html (Figure 7). There is no doubt that the tighter you control the infected, the less restriction you have to impose on the uninfected. In Europe, strict measures such as those adopted in Hong Kong and South Korea are currently not compatible with existing legislation about privacy.

 

Figure 7. Screenshot of the “Latest Situation of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in Hong Kong”, https://chp-dashboard.geodata.gov.hk/covid-19/en.html.

 

Thursday, 21 May

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informs that rats rely on the food and waste generated by restaurants and other commercial establishments, the closures of which have led to food shortage among rodents, especially in dense commercial areas. CDC warns of unusual or aggressive rodent behavior.

Will SARS-CoV-2 seal the fate of the Airbus A380? Air France chooses to end the operations of the aircraft, judged to be too expensive, too polluting and not profitable enough (Le Monde).

Friday, 22 May

Zhu et al. publish Safety, Tolerability, and Immunogenicity of a Recombinant Adenovirus type-5 Vectored COVID-19 Vaccine.

Fafi-Kremer 2020 et al. pre-publish Serologic responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection among hospital staff with mild disease in eastern France, reporting that neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 were detected in virtually all hospital staff (n=160) sampled from 13 days after the onset of COVID-19 symptoms (see also Le Monde).

Saturday, 23 May

In Lower Saxony, Germany, 50 people are in quarantine after an outbreak in a restaurant (Der Spiegel).

In Frankfurt, Germany, authorities report more than 40 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 after a religious service (Der Spiegel).