Face masks "offer much more protection against coronavirus than many think," reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate version here ....] There's a common refrain that masks don't protect you; they protect other people from your own germs, which is especially important to keep unknowingly infected people from spreading the coronavirus. But now, there's mounting evidence that masks also protect you.

If you're unlucky enough to encounter an infectious person, wearing any kind of face covering will reduce the amount of virus that your body will take in. As it turns out, that's pretty important. Breathing in a small amount of virus may lead to no disease or far more mild infection. But inhaling a huge volume of virus particles can result in serious disease or death. That's the argument Dr. Monica Gandhi, UC San Francisco professor of medicine and medical director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is making about why — if you do become infected with the virus — masking can still protect you from more severe disease...

She cited an outbreak at a seafood plant in Oregon where employees were given masks, and 95% of those who were infected were asymptomatic.... The protective effects are also seen in countries where masks are universally accepted for years, such as Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Singapore. "They have all seen cases as they opened ... but not deaths," Gandhi said.
"The emerging scientific data is clear: wearing a mask doesn't only protect others, it also significantly reduces your own risk of getting Coronavirus," one U.S. governor recently pointed out.

"So if you're a selfish bastard and wearing a mask to protect others isn't enough of a reason to do so, then maybe protecting yourself is?"

The World Health Organization (WHO) should soon get results from clinical trials it is conducting of drugs that might be effective in treating COVID-19 patients, its Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday. From a report: "Nearly 5,500 patients in 39 countries have so far been recruited into the Solidarity trial," he told a news briefing, referring to clinical studies the U.N. agency is conducting. "We expect interim results within the next two weeks." The Solidarity Trial started out in five parts looking at possible treatment approaches to COVID-19: standard care; remdesivir; the anti-malaria drug touted by U.S. President Donald Trump, hydroxychloroquine; the HIV drugs lopinavir/ritonavir; and lopanivir/ritonavir combined with interferon. Earlier this month, it stopped the arm testing hydroxychloroquine, after studies indicated it showed no benefit in those who have the disease, but more work is still needed to see whether it may be effective as a preventative medicine. Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergencies programme, said it would be unwise to predict when a vaccine could be ready against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has killed more than half a million people. Earlier this week, the WHO also warned the some countries may have to reinstate lockdowns as coronavirus pandemic accelerates.

"What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime?" asks the New York Times.

"In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease." (Alternate source here.) Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed. "This could be the cure for heart disease," said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come. The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published...

Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes' function do not get heart disease.

Nearly 25 million Americans may have contracted the coronavirus, a figure 10 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday. The Hill reports: In a briefing with reporters Thursday, CDC Director Robert Redfield said surveys of blood samples taken from around the country suggest that millions of Americans may have contracted the virus either without knowing it or with only minimal symptoms. For every one confirmed case, Redfield said, the CDC estimates that 10 more people have been infected. "This virus causes so much asymptomatic infection," Redfield said. "We probably recognized about 10 percent of the outbreak."

Almost 2.4 million Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. Redfield said the serological surveys of blood samples, collected both for coronavirus tests and for other reasons like blood donations or laboratory tests, showed that between 5 percent and 8 percent of Americans have contracted the virus. Most people who contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus show few if any symptoms, and only a small percentage require hospitalization. But while the number of potentially infected people is multitudes higher than the number of confirmed cases, Redfield also said the relatively low percentage of Americans who have been infected means hundreds of millions more remain at risk.

One study promised that popular blood-pressure drugs were safe for people infected with the coronavirus. Another paper warned that anti-malaria drugs endorsed by President Trump actually were dangerous to these patients. The studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, were retracted shortly after publication, following an outcry from researchers who saw obvious flaws. From a report: The hasty retractions, on the same day this month, have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process and opened the door to fraud, threatening the credibility of respected medical journals just when they are needed most. Peer review is supposed to safeguard the quality of scientific research. When a journal receives a manuscript, the editors ask three or more experts in the field for comments. The reviewers' written assessments may force revisions in a paper or prompt the journal to reject the work altogether. The system, widely adopted by medical journals in the middle of the 20th century, undergirds scientific discourse around the world. "The problem with trust is that it's too easy to lose and too hard to get back," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published one of the retracted papers in early May. "These are big blunders." If outside scientists detected problems that weren't identified by the peer reviewers, then the journals failed, he said. Like hundreds of other researchers, Dr. Kassirer called on the editors to publish full explanations of what happened.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: British scientists halted a major drug trial on Friday after it found that the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine, touted by U.S. President Donald Trump as a potential "game changer" in the pandemic, was "useless" at treating COVID-19 patients. "This is not a treatment for COVID-19. It doesn't work," Martin Landray, an Oxford University professor who is co-leading the RECOVERY trial, told reporters.

"This result should change medical practice worldwide. We can now stop using a drug that is useless..."

Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University, noted the "huge speculation" about the drug as a treatment for COVID-19 but said there had been until now "an absence of reliable information from large randomised trials". He said the preliminary results from RECOVERY, which was a randomised trial, were now quite clear: hydroxychloroquine does not reduce the risk of death among hospitalised patients with COVID-19.

"If you're admitted to hospital, don't take hydroxychloroquine," he said.
The trial involved over 11,000 patients in a randomized trial begun in March.

The article ends by quoting Parastou Donyai, director of Pharmacy Practice at the University of Reading in England, who describes the announcement as "welcome relief to thousands of scientists, doctors and academics who have been crying out for proper proof of whether hydroxychloroquine works in COVID-19 or not" -- and calling the conclusion that it does not work "definitive."

The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine did not help prevent people who had been exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease, according to the results of an eagerly awaited study that was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. From a report: Despite a lack of evidence, many people began taking the medicine to try to prevent infection early in the Covid-19 pandemic, following anecdotal reports it could be effective and claims by President Trump and conservative commentators. Trump, too, said he took hydroxychloroquine to prevent infection. But the new study, the first double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine, found otherwise. "I think in the setting of post-exposure prophylaxis, it doesn't seem to work," said Sarah Lofgren, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who is a co-author of the study. Other studies of hydroxychloroquine are ongoing. Also Wednesday, the World Health Organization said it is resuming a clinical trial testing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment after pausing it over safety concerns.

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known U.S. healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world's most prestigious medical journals. Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided the database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies. Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American counties. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. Late on Tuesday, the Lancet released an "expression of concern" about its published study. The New England Journal of Medicine has also issued a similar notice. According to an independent audit by authors not affiliated with Surgisphere, the article includes a list of "concerns that have been raised about the reliability of the database." Some of the main points include: Surgisphere's employees have little or no data or scientific background; While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest growing hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence; and The firm's chief executive, Sapan Desai, has been named in three medical malpractice suits.

Jon Hamilton, reporting for NPR: Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared. The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person's blood rather than the virus itself. The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous. "The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

That's in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person's body. And the revised estimates support an early prediction by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force. In an editorial published in late March in The New England Journal of Medicine, Fauci and colleagues wrote that the case fatality rate for COVID-19 "may be considerably less than 1%." But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says. "That is many times more deadly than seasonal influenza," she says. The new evidence is coming from places such as Indiana, which completed the first phase of a massive testing effort early in May. Further reading: Antibody Tests and Accuracy Issues Leave Some Americans With More Questions Than Answers.

Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him "like a bus" in March. From a report:"This is the revenge of the viruses," said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "I've made their lives difficult. Now they're trying to get me." Dr. Piot, 71 years old, is a legend in the battles against Ebola and AIDS. But Covid-19 almost killed him. "A week ago, I couldn't have done this interview," he said, speaking recently by Skype from his London dining room, a painting of calla lilies behind him. "I was still short of breath after 10 minutes." Looking back, ruefully, on being brought down by a virus after a life as a virus-hunter, Dr. Piot said he had misjudged his prey and had become the hunted.

"I underestimated this one -- how fast it would spread. My mistake was to think it was like SARS, which was pretty limited in scope. Or that it was like influenza. But it's neither." In 1976, as a graduate student in virology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Piot was part of the international team that investigated a mysterious viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. To avoid stigmatizing the town, team members named the virus "Ebola" after a nearby river. Later, in the 1980s, he was one of the scientists who proved that the wasting disease known as "slim" in Africa was caused by the same virus that was killing young gay men elsewhere. From 1991 to 1994, he was president of the International AIDS Society, and then the first director of U.N.AIDS, the United Nations' anti-H.I.V. program.

New research from Imperial College London suggests the coronavirus "may still be spreading at epidemic rates" in 24 different states in America, reports the Washington Post: Some states have had little viral spread or "crushed the curve" to a great degree and have some wiggle room to reopen their economies without generating a new epidemic-level surge in cases. Others are nowhere near containing the virus. The model, which has not been peer reviewed, shows that in the majority of states, a second wave looms if people abandon efforts to mitigate the viral spread. "There's evidence that the U.S. is not under control, as an entire country," said Samir Bhatt, a senior lecturer in geostatistics at Imperial College....

The Imperial College researchers found in 24 states, the model shows a reproduction number over 1 [suggesting the virus is not waning]. Texas tops the list, followed by Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Missouri, Delaware, South Carolina, Massachusetts, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Maryland....

This has become a geographically complex pandemic, one that will evolve, especially as people increase their movements in coming weeks. Laws and health regulations vary from state to state, county to county and city to city. There are communities where wearing facial coverings is culturally the norm, while in other places it is rejected on grounds of personal liberty or as refutation of the consensus view of the hazards posed by the virus... Experts in Tennessee are also concerned about people from other states beginning to flock to Nashville and Memphis on summer vacations.

If a surge happens, said David Aronoff, director of the Vanderbilt University infectious disease division, "the tricky part will be putting the toothpaste back in the tube" by shutting down again.
In addition to "behavioural precautions," the researchers recommend rapid testing and contact tracing. But If there's no change in the relationship between mobility and transmission, their report states bluntly that "We predict that deaths over the next two-month period will exceed current cumulative deaths by greater than two-fold...

"We predict that increased mobility following relaxation of social distancing will lead to resurgence of transmission, keeping all else constant."

"The drug US President Donald Trump said he was taking to ward off Covid-19 actually increases the risk of patients with the disease dying from it," reports the BBC, citing a new study published Friday in the Lancet.

"The study said there were no benefits to treating patients with the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine..." Hydroxychloroquine is safe for malaria, and conditions like lupus or arthritis, but no clinical trials have recommended the use of hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus. The Lancet study involved 96,000 coronavirus patients, nearly 15,000 of whom were given hydroxychloroquine — or a related form chloroquine — either alone or with an antibiotic.

The study found that the patients were more likely to die in hospital and develop heart rhythm complications than other Covid patients in a comparison group. The death rates of the treated groups were: hydroxychloroquine 18%; chloroquine 16.4%; control group 9%. Those treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in combination with antibiotics had an even higher death rate.

The researchers warned that hydroxychloroquine should not be used outside of clinical trials.
The BBC also reports that a separate trial involving over 40,000 healthcare workers around the world is now testing whether hydroxychloroquine could prevent infection.

UPDATE (6/4/2020): The study's three authors retracted their study on June 4th, "because independent peer reviewers could not access the data used for the analysis," reports The Hill. "The source of the data was Surgisphere Corporation, which told peer reviewers it would not transfer the full dataset used for the study because it would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements."

However, the same day the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a new double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial which found hydroxychloroquine didn't help prevent people exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease. One of the study's co-authors said that as a preventative agent, "It doesn't seem to work."

A research team from Duke University has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly shut down pain. "It's located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety," reports ScienceDaily. From the report: The researchers found that general anesthesia also activates a specific subset of inhibitory neurons in the central amygdala, which they have called the CeAga neurons (CeA stands for central amygdala; ga indicates activation by general anesthesia). Mice have a relatively larger central amygdala than humans, but [senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N. Broad Distinguished Professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine] said she had no reason to think we have a different system for controlling pain. Using technologies that Wang's lab has pioneered to track the paths of activated neurons in mice, the team found the CeAga was connected to many different areas of the brain, "which was a surprise," Wang said.

By giving mice a mild pain stimulus, the researchers could map all of the pain-activated brain regions. They discovered that at least 16 brain centers known to process the sensory or emotional aspects of pain were receiving inhibitory input from the CeAga. Using a technology called optogenetics, which uses light to activate a small population of cells in the brain, the researchers found they could turn off the self-caring behaviors a mouse exhibits when it feels uncomfortable by activating the CeAga neurons. Paw-licking or face-wiping behaviors were "completely abolished" the moment the light was switched on to activate the anti-pain center.

When the scientists dampened the activity of these CeAga neurons, the mice responded as if a temporary insult had become intense or painful again. They also found that low-dose ketamine, an anesthetic drug that allows sensation but blocks pain, activated the CeAga center and wouldn't work without it. Now the researchers are going to look for drugs that can activate only these cells to suppress pain as potential future pain killers, Wang said. The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Bob Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has had a front-row seat to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Wachter's job, at least in part, is to keep the department's 3,000 or so faculty, trainees and staff current on developments in research, education and clinical care. But most days he sets aside at least two hours to keep another group informed: his Twitter followers. Dr. Wachter, 62 years old, is part of a growing group of scientists and public-health officials who are increasingly active and drawing large audiences on social media. They say they feel a moral obligation to provide credible information online and steer the conversation away from dubious claims, such as those in "Plandemic," a video espousing Covid-19 conspiracy theories that drew millions of views last week. [...]

Dr. Wachter typically writes his tweets in threads, long strings of posts on a single topic or idea; on Wednesday, he posted about masks. [...] To compose his tweets, Dr. Wachter keeps a document open throughout the day, where he drops in material he believes could be relevant to his followers. He starts writing posts between 4 and 6 p.m.; his wife, a journalist, often proofreads them, he says. His tweets post between 7 and 8 p.m. The doctors feel like they "have an obligation to put out information that is as correct as it can be," says Dr. Wachter. This is important during amidst a pandemic, especially after a new paper in the journal Nature this week found that antivaccination views are drowning out the more mainstream voices online, "partly due to the ways antivaccination advocates interact with some users of social media platforms," reports the WSJ.

"As a result, researchers predict, antivaccination views 'will dominate in a decade.'"

A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug "do not fare better than those not receiving the drug," reports Time: Dr. Neil Schluger, chief of the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at Columbia, and his team studied more than 1,300 patients admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Irving Medical Center for COVID-19. Some received hydroxychloroquine on an off-label basis, a practice that allows doctors to prescribe a drug that has been approved for one disease to treat another — in this case, COVID-19. About 60% of the patients received hydroxychloroquine for about five days.

They did not show any lower rate of needing ventilators or a lower risk of dying during the study period compared to people not getting the drug.

"We don't think at this point, given the totality of evidence, that it is reasonable to routinely give this drug to patients," says Schluger. "We don't see the rationale for doing that." While the study did not randomly assign people to receive the drug or placebo and compare their outcomes, the large number of patients involved suggests the findings are solid. Based on the results, Schluger says doctors at his hospital have already changed their advice about using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. "Our guidance early on had suggested giving hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients, and we updated that guidance to remove that suggestion," he says.
In another study conducted at U.S. veterans hospitals where severely ill patients were given hydroxychloroquine, "the drug was found to be of no use against the disease and potentially harmful when given in high doses," reports the Chicago Tribune.

They also report that to firmly establish whether the drug has any effect, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now funding a randomized, controlled trial at six medical institutions of hundreds of people who've tested positive for Covid-19.

"Over at ScienceDirect, they report on a French 'retrospective' study of just over 1,000 patients across all age groups with very good results," writes long-time Slashdot reader kenh. The analysis found that administration of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin (AZ) before COVID-19 complications occur "is safe and associated with very low fatality rate in patients." From the report: Background: In France, the combination hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZ) is used in the treatment of COVID-19.

Methods: We retrospectively report on 1061 SARS-CoV-2 positive tested patients treated with HCQ (200 mg three times daily for ten days) + AZ (500 mg on day 1 followed by 250 mg daily for the next four days) for at least three days. Outcomes were death, clinical worsening (transfer to ICU, and more than 10 day hospitalization) and viral shedding persistence (more than 10 days).

Results: A total of 1061 patients were included in this analysis (46.4% male, mean age 43.6 years -- range 14-95 years). Good clinical outcome and virological cure were obtained in 973 patients within 10 days (91.7%). Prolonged viral carriage was observed in 47 patients (4.4%) and was associated to a higher viral load at diagnosis (pA poor clinical outcome (PClinO) was observed for 46 patients (4.3%) and 8 died (0.75%) (74-95 years old). All deaths resulted from respiratory failure and not from cardiac toxicity. Five patients are still hospitalized (98.7% of patients cured so far). PClinO was associated with older age (OR 1.11), severity at admission (OR 10.05) and low HCQ serum concentration. PClinO was independently associated with the use of selective beta-blocking agents and angiotensin II receptor blockers (p less than .05). A total of 2.3% of patients reported mild adverse events (gastrointestinal or skin symptoms, headache, insomnia and transient blurred vision). On the contrary, a separate study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found the two primary outcomes for COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were death and the need for mechanical ventilation.

"The study analyzed only 368 patients but represented the largest look at the outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine -- with or without azithromycin, a common antibiotic -- anywhere in the world," The Hill reported more than two weeks ago.

UPDATE (5/9/2020): A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug don't do any better than those not receiving the drug.

"A new, Linux-like platform could transform the way medicine is developed — and energize the race against COVID-19," reports Fast Company, while arguing that the old drug discovery system "was built to benefit shareholders, not patients."

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: Drug development in the U.S. has traditionally been cloistered and profit-motivated, which means that it has sometimes failed to tackle pressing needs. But an initiative called the Open Source Pharma Foundation hopes to apply some of the lessons of open-source software to the creation of new drugs — including ones that could help fight COVID-19.
From the article: The response to COVID-19 has been more open-source than any drug effort in modern memory. On January 11, less than two weeks after the virus was reported to the World Health Organization, Chinese researchers published a draft of the virus's genetic sequence. The information enabled scientists across the globe to begin developing tests, treatments, and vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies searched their archives for drugs that might be repurposed as treatments for COVID-19 and formed consortiums to combine resources and expedite the process. These efforts have yielded some 90 vaccine candidates, seven of which are in Phase I trials and three of which are advancing to Phase II. There are nearly 1,000 clinical trials listed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to COVID-19.

The gathering of resources and grassroots sharing of information aimed at combating the coronavirus has put open-source methods of drug development front and center. "It's our moment," said Bernard Munos, a former corporate strategist at pharma company Eli Lilly... Munos has been arguing for an open-source approach to developing drugs since 2006. "A lot is at stake because if it's successful, the open-source model can be replicated to address other challenges in biomedical research."
So now the Open Source Pharma Foundation hopes to offer "a platform where scientists and researchers can freely access technological tools for researching disease, share their discoveries, launch investigations into molecules or potential drugs, and find entities to turn that research into medicine..." according to the article.

"If the platform succeeds, it would allow drugs to succeed on their merit and need, rather than their ability to be profitable."

"Data from connected scale users suggests Americans, on average, are not gaining weight during lockdowns," writes long-time Slashdot reader pfhlick.

The Washington Post reports: Withings, the maker of popular Internet-connected scales and other body-measurement devices, studied what happened to the weight of some 450,000 of its American users between March 22 — when New York ordered people home — and April 18. Despite concerns about gaining a "quarantine 15," the average user gained 0.21 pounds during that month... Over the same March-April period in 2019, Withings said its American users gained slightly less weight — 0.19 pounds on average — though fewer people had the scales last year...

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University — who wasn't involved with the Withings analysis — said he found the results a bit disappointing. "With the shutdown of the restaurants, I thought the numbers would have gotten better," he said. Home-cooked meals tend to be healthier than dining out.
Withings' numbers varied slightly for other countires. But citing a professor of medicine at Stanford, the article notes that average weight gains may be misleading, since some people "may be hitting their groove during stay-at-home orders by embracing cooking and taking up jogging. But others could be using food to cope with stress and gaining large amounts of weight." In fact, 37% of the scale owners gained more than a pound. (Which, if my math is correct, suggests that the other 63% had to lose at least .13 pounds.)

The article also notes that for buyers of Withings' scales, "contributing aggregate data is a condition included in its terms of service; its customers don't get the option to opt out if they want to use Withings products."

New Slashdot submitter Joe2020 shares a report from the BBC: Firefighters in Corsica, France, are aiming to teach canines how to sniff out coronavirus, as they can other conditions. It's hoped that detection dogs could be used to identify people with the virus at public places like airports. Their trial is one of several experiments being undertaken in countries including the UK and the USA. "Each individual dog can screen up to 250 people per hour," James Logan, head of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told The Washington Post. "We are simultaneously working on a model to scale it up so it can be deployed in other countries at ports of entry, including airports." The dogs are trained using urine and saliva samples collected from patients who tested positive and negative for the disease.

"We don't know that this will be the odor of the virus, per se, or the response to the virus, or a combination," Cynthia Otto, director of the Working Dog Center at Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine, told the publication. "The dogs don't care what the odor is ... What they learn is that there's something different about this sample than there is about that sample."

A government-run study of Gilead's remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. From a report: Gilead made the announcement in a statement Wednesday, stating: "We understand that the trial has met its primary endpoint." The company said that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is conducting the study, will provide data at an upcoming briefing. The finding -- although difficult to fully characterize without any data for the study -- would represent the first treatment shown to improve outcomes in patients infected with the virus that put the global economy in a standstill and killed at least 218,000 people worldwide.

During an appearance alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said the data are a "very important proof of concept" and that there was reason for optimism, but cautioned the data were not a "knockout." Over the past few weeks, there have been conflicting reports about the potential benefit of remdesivir, a drug that was previously tried in Ebola. As previously reported by STAT, an early peek at Gilead's study in severe Covid-19 patients, based on data from a trial at a Chicago hospital, suggested patients were doing better than expected on remdesivir. Days later, a summary of results from a study in China showed that patients on the drug did not improve more than those in a control group.