And the case fatality rate for covid may be as high as 40% in those aged 90 years and older.
Welcome to The Medical Republic’s COVID Catch-Up.
It’s the day’s covid-19 news in one convenient post. Email bianca@biancanogrady.com with any tips, comments or feedback.
24 June
- Sydney’s covid outbreak grows but authorities maintain current restriction levels.
- Case fatality rate for covid may be as high as 40% in those aged over 90 years, study suggests.
- Half of people with mild covid experience persistent symptoms six months later.
- Moderna vaccine can start registration process in Australia, TGA says.
- Nearly one in 20 people without a covid diagnosis still have antibodies, US study finds.
- Meet Eta, Zeta, Theta and their friends: the World Health Organisation’s ‘variants of interest‘.
- Covid deaths and new infections still declining globally, but on the rise in parts of Africa.
- Latest covid-19 infection numbers from around Australia.
Sydneysiders will not face further restrictions for the time being, as health authorities say that contact tracing is so far mostly keeping up with the spread of the Delta strain of SARS-CoV-2 in the latest outbreak.
After introducing mandatory masking indoors and restrictions on movement and social gatherings yesterday, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the current restrictions would remain as they are, despite 18 new cases being reported yesterday and six new cases overnight.
At a press conference today, NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said all but one of the new cases reported yesterday had been traced to the source of infection. The one mystery case is under investigation.
When queried about why NSW was not undertaking a three-day lockdown, Dr Chant said that a short lockdown period was only of use if contact tracing was struggling to keep up with the spread of infection, and so far that was not the case.
NSW Health also reported that fragments of SARS-CoV-2 RNA had been detected at at the Cronulla sewage treatment plant and in the Bellambi sewage network. Both areas have known covid cases in isolation, but authorities have asked residents in those areas to seek testing for any symptoms. A complete list of exposure sites around Sydney is available here.
The federal government has declared the City of Sydney, Waverley, Woollahra, Bayside, Canada Bay, Inner West and Randwick as covid-19 hotspots, which means they will prise open the National Medical Stockpile of PPE and share it around, provide support for asymptomatic testing through GP clinics and provide access to temporary disaster payments if required.
Queensland has reported three new cases that appear to have been acquired in hotel quarantine, and Victoria also reported a case in a man who returned from Sydney.
The fatality rate for covid-19 infection may be as high as 40% in those aged 90 years and older, according to a study published in BMC Medical Research Methodology.
The study used data from covid infections and deaths in Victoria from 25 January to 10 December 2020, representing 820 deaths among 20,344 infected individuals.
Mortality was ‘negligible’ for those aged under 50 years, with only four deaths recorded among 14,123 cases. In those aged 60-69 years, the case fatality rate was 2.9%, increasing to 13.7% among those aged 70-79 years, 32% among those aged 80-89 years and 40% in those aged 90 years and older.
The mean time to death from diagnosis was just 18 days, and did not vary much across different age groups.
More than 60% of patients with covid-19 have persistent symptoms six months after their infection, which affect even those with mild disease.
A study published in Nature Medicine followed 247 home-isolated and 65 hospitalised individuals with covid-19 in Bergen, Norway, who were infected during the first wave of the pandemic.
Six months after their infection, 61% reported persistent symptoms, most commonly fatigue, difficulty concentrating, altered smell or taste, memory problems and breathlessness.
The frequency of symptoms increased with increasing age, although the effects on smell and taste were more frequent in younger people. The frequency also increased with increasing severity of infection, but even among those who weren’t hospitalised, 55% reported persistent symptoms at six months.
Nearly one-third of the home-isolated patients reported fatigue at six months, and 7% reported severe fatigue, as did 24% of hospitalised patients.
“It is worrying that non-hospitalized, young people (16–30 years old) suffer potentially severe symptoms, such as concentration and memory problems, dyspnea and fatigue, half a year after infection,” the authors wrote.
Moderna has been given the go-ahead to apply to register its covid-19 vaccine in Australia.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration has granted ‘provisional determination’ to the company for its mRNA vaccine, which is the first step in the process of registering the vaccine in Australia.
While the company has yet to start the process of registration, the Australian government has already pre-purchased 25 million doses of the vaccine, with 10 million to be delivered this year and 15 million next year.
Nearly one in 20 people in the US who have never tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 nonetheless have antibodies against the virus, suggesting an additional 16.8 million infections weren’t diagnosed to July 2020, a study has found.
Writing in Science Translational Medicine, researchers report the outcomes of a serosurvey of just over 9000 individuals who had never been diagnosed with covid-19, which was conducted between May and July 2020.
The study found the overall seropositivity rate was 4.6%, however this varied enormously across geographic and demographic subsets. The estimated seroprevalence was 5.5% among females and 3.5% among males. The highest rate was seen in African Americans, who had a seropositivity rate of 14.2%, and lowest among those identifying as Asian, who had a seropositive rate of just 2%.
People who knew they had been exposed to a SARS-CoV-2-infected person had a seropositivity rate of 15.6%, compared with 2.7% in those who hadn’t.
“This study demonstrates that spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the US during the first six months of the pandemic was more widespread than has been suggested by data reporting diagnostic test-confirmed cases,” the study author wrote.
We’ve just got used to Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, but prepare your brain for Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda.
These are the current ‘variants of interest’ (as opposed to ‘variants of concern’) that the WHO is keeping an eye on. All have appeared on the radar since March this year, in countries such as the US, Brazil, the Philippines, India and Peru.
Variants of interest are SARS-CoV-2 variants with specific genetic changes that could affect receptor binding genes, susceptibility to antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, susceptibility to treatments, or increase transmissibility or disease severity, but which are yet to demonstrate those features.
Deaths from covid-19 dropped 12% globally last week, and new infections dropped 6%, according to the latest WHO update.
Around 2.5 million new cases and over 64,000 deaths were reported in the past week. The bad news is the cases are on the rise in the African region, particularly in Namibia, Botswana, Tunisia and South Africa.
Here are the latest covid-19 infection numbers from around Australia to 9pm Wednesday:
National – 30,379 with 910 deaths
ACT – 124 (0)
NSW – 5665 (11)
NT – 177 (1)
QLD – 1674 (1)
SA – 788 (0)
TAS – 234 (0)
VIC – 20,696 (0)
WA – 1020 (0)
