“China eats weird animals disease”

COPENHAGEN/LONDON, May 10 (Reuters) – For many people worldwide, having cotton swabs thrust up their nose or down their throat to test for COVID-19 has become a routine and familiar annoyance.

But two years into the pandemic, health officials in some countries are questioning the merits of repeated, mass testing when it comes to containing infections, particularly considering the billions it costs.

Chief among them is Denmark, which championed one of the world’s most prolific COVID testing regimes early on. Lawmakers are now demanding a close study of whether that policy was effective.

More than a century ago, Mark Twain identified two fundamental problems that would prove relevant to the Covid pandemic. “How easy it is to make people believe a lie,” he wrote, “and how hard it is to undo that work again!” No convincing evidence existed at the start of the pandemic that lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates would protect people against the virus, but it was remarkably easy to make the public believe that these policies were “the science.” Today, thanks to two years of actual scientific evidence, it’s clearer than ever that these were terrible mistakes; yet most people still believe that the measures were worthwhile—and many are eager to maintain some mandates even longer.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has ended the city’s COVID-19 emergency declaration.

The emergency was first declared on March 23, 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact the world.

It was the first official emergency declared in the history of modern Toronto, City officials said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is closely monitoring two new COVID-19 subvariants of Omicron, the highly transmissible variant of concern now dominant around the world.

Since January, more than 300 cases of the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-lineages have been reported in several countries, according to data by cov-lineages.org. Most of those cases have been detected in South Africa.

As of May 3, Canada had detected three cases – two of BA.4 and one of BA.5, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) told Global News on Friday.

Wow! 3 cases! But a new wave?

Sweden has logged one of the lowest pandemic death tolls in Europe despite its refusal to impose lockdowns, World Health Organization estimates suggest.

The Scandinavian nation became an international outcast when it defied scientific advice and chose not to shut down in 2020 — instead relying on people’s common sense and light social restrictions.

Now, the WHO’s analysis of excess deaths — people who died directly and indirectly from Covid — suggests the highly-controversial hands-off approach has been vindicated.

h/t RM

The US is approaching one million Covid deaths – the highest total officially recorded anywhere in the world.

But a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows several other countries recorded more deaths above their normal levels than the US over the last two years.

So does the US really have the highest Covid death toll, and by what measure?

May 5 (Reuters) – Almost three times as many people have died as a result of COVID-19 as official data show, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report, the most comprehensive look at the true global toll of the pandemic so far.

There were 14.9 million excess deaths associated with COVID-19 by the end of 2021, the U.N. body said on Thursday.

The official count of deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 and reported to WHO in that period, from January 2020 to the end of December 2021, is slightly more than 5.4 million.

COVID-19 vaccination was “significantly associated” with a 25% jump in emergency medical services (EMS) for heart problems in 16-39 year-olds in Israel, whose vaccination rate is among the world’s highest, according to a peer-reviewed study by MIT researchers.

Published last week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, the study found no association with COVID infections, however.

A new Danish study reveals disparities in all-cause mortality between mRNA and adenovirus vaccines

Do the covid vaccines save lives? That is the question on many people’s minds, that has led to heated discussions across the world.

A bombshell new study by a distinguished team of Danish researchers led by Prof. Christine Stabell-Benn suggests a surprisingly nuanced answer. In the randomized trials of the covid vaccines, the adenovector-based vaccines, including the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, reduced all-cause mortality of study participants relative to people randomly assigned a placebo. Indeed, the reduction in mortality is larger than expected from the Covid effect and may suggest additional beneficial “non-specific effects” from those vaccines against other health threats.