With about six months passing since the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus overtook Wuhan, China, South America has now become the new epicenter of the global pandemic, according to the World Health Organization.
"We've seen many South American countries with increasing numbers of cases and clearly there's a concern across many of those countries, but certainly the most affected is Brazil at this point," Mike Ryan, executive director of the agency's emergencies program, stated during the W.H.O.'s Friday press conference in Geneva. "In a sense, South America has become a new epicenter for the disease."
Total Global Cases: Over 5.3 Million
Total Deaths: Over 340,000
Total Recovered: Over 2.1 Million
Vaccine Update
In an interview with NPR about the United States' effort on vaccine development, Dr. Anthony Fauci, United States' top infectious disease expert, stated that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready by December.
"Back in January of this year when we started the phase 1 trail, I said it would likely be between a year and 18 months before we would have a vaccine. I think that schedule is still intact," Fauci commented on the ongoing partnership to develop a COVID-19 vaccine between the National Institutes of Health and Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA).
"I think it is conceivable, if we don't run into things that are, as they say, unanticipated setbacks, that we could have a vaccine that we could be beginning to deploy at the end oft his calendar year, December 2020, or into January 2021," Fauci added. He noted that researchers are compiling full data of the potential vaccine for submission to a peer-review journal in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, researchers from the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and CanSino Biologics (OTC: CASBF) published an early-stage trial in The Lancet that is showing positive results. The study included 108 participants, with subjects who received the vaccine showing moderate immune responses to the virus.
"The ability to trigger these immune response does not necessarily indicate that the vaccine will protect humans for m COVID-19," lead researcher Wei Chan from the Beijing Institute of Biologic stated in The Lancet. "This result shows a promising vision for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, we we are still a long way from this vaccine being available to all."
According to The Associate Press, the CanSino/Beijing vaccine uses a harmless virus to carry a gene for the "spike" protein that coats the coronavirus to the body, preparing the immune system to react if it encounters a real infection. Other leaders in the race for a vaccine, like Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INO), use a piece of the coronavirus to cause an immune system response.
New Research
According to another study published in The Lancet on Friday, the use of the malaria hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COIVD-19 increases the risk of death in hospitalized patients.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital alongside other institutions looked a data from patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19 between December 20 and April 14. The study looked at more than 96,000 patients from 671 hospitals across six continents. The researchers pulled data from close to 15,000 patients treated with the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, either alone or in combination with a macrolide (Z-PAK), while the remaining 81,000 were the control group.
The study found that after controlling for multiple factors--age, race, sex and underlying health conditions--there was a 34% increase in risk of death for patients who took hydroxychloroquine and a 137% increased risk of arrhythmia, or abnormal heart rhythm.
However, the study did not have a randomized controlled trial.