​HELP US SPREAD GOOD NEWS!

I run this site in my spare time and thoroughly enjoy giving you all positive news!  If you've enjoyed the site we'd love for you to help me share the good news far and wide, share us on Reddit, your Facebook or your Twitter and spread a little positivity around.

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that data from a coronavirus drug trial testing Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir showed “quite good news” and sets a new standard of care for Covid-19 patients.

Speaking to reporters from the White House, Fauci said he was told data from the trial showed a “clear-cut positive effect in diminishing time to recover.”

Fauci said the median time of recovery for patients taking the drug was 11 days, compared with 15 days in the placebo group. He said the mortality benefit of remdesivir “has not yet reached statistical significance.”

The results suggested a survival benefit, with a mortality rate of 8% for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6% for the placebo group, according to a statement from the National Institutes of Health released later Wednesday.

“This will be the standard of care,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added. “When you know a drug works, you have to let people in the placebo group know so they can take it.”

“What it has proven is a drug can block this virus,” he said.

U.S. health officials are expected to release the full results of a drug trial conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases later Wednesday. Gilead Sciences announced earlier in the day that the study had met its primary endpoint but did not provide further details.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/dr-anthony-fauci-says-data-from-remdesivir-coronavirus-drug-trial-shows-quite-good-news.html

A top U.S. health official said Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental antiviral drug remdesivir is likely to become the standard of care for COVID-19 after early results from a key clinical trial on Wednesday showed it helped certain patients recover more quickly from the illness caused by the coronavirus.

Preliminary results from a U.S. government trial show that patients given remdesivir had a 31% faster recovery time than those who received a placebo, results hailed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, as “highly significant.”

Gilead earlier on Wednesday said remdesivir helped improve outcomes for patients with COVID-19 in the government-run trial, and provided additional data suggesting it worked better when given earlier in the course of illness, sending its shares up more than 7%.

“The data shows that remdesivir has a clear cut significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recover. This is really quite important,” Fauci told reporters at the White House, likening it to a moment in 1986 “when we were struggling for drugs for HIV and we had nothing.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-gilead-remdesivir/gilead-says-remdesivir-shows-improvement-in-covid-19-patients-when-used-early-idUSKBN22B1T9

HELP US SPREAD GOOD NEWS!

I run this site in my spare time and thoroughly enjoy giving you all positive news!  If you've enjoyed the site we'd love for you to help me share the good news far and wide, share us on Reddit, your Facebook or your Twitter and spread a little positivity around.

Dr Christian Chenay’s 99th birthday is nearing, but he continues to care for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

He is France’s oldest doctor and after 70 years of service, he says he still wants to help people in the "forgotten" suburbs of Paris. 

Before the epidemic, the doctor’s waiting room on a quiet street in a low-income Paris suburb would be so full that patients spilled out to the pavement. 

Some from distant areas would travel there as early as 4am to be sure of a place in line.

Chenay’s decision to keep working is partly due to France’s shortage of local family doctors.

Although the country has a reputation for one of the world’s best healthcare systems, the lack of general practitioners has reached a crisis point.

The problem is most acute in rural areas where millions struggle to access care, but also in some of the low-income Paris banlieues.

"I'm almost 99 years old, I should reduce my activity for many reasons,” Dr Chenay said.

“I work slower than before, I have to take care." 

Many of his patients say they struggle to get appointments in the Paris suburb of Chevilly-Larue which has three doctors for a population of 19,000.

“We have a disease that is very contagious, that hasn't affected a lot of people yet. We feel powerless. We don't have a treatment,” says Dr Chenay.

“We don't have the possibility of isolating people, we don't have the means of knowing who's sick and who's not. I was in contact with quite a few sick people who were probably positive, it would be surprising if I wasn't positive too, especially as I had the symptoms for a while."

However, Dr Chenay had to end face-to-face appointments and go into quarantine after he began showing symptoms of COVID-19.

"I had to give up, I had no protection,” he said. “I would not have been doing a service if I had stayed open, I would have been a virus hotspot, a centre of infection, it's impossible." 

The veteran physician treated typhus patients during the second world war. Chenay began work as a general practitioner in this area of the Val-de-Marne almost 70 years ago. He has outstayed his own son, who also worked as a doctor but retired at 67. 

Now, after his self-quarantine is over, he is back at work holding virtual consultations over the phone and internet. 

“I've seen the typhus epidemic coming back from the war, there were very few that caught it amongst the caregivers, we had masks, we were really shielded, we were really covered, we actually had gas masks,” Chenay says. 

“It was difficult to live through, but we didn't catch the illness, and we isolated the sick, thank God we had a treatment." 

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/newsfeed/2020/04/98-year-doctor-fighting-coronavirus-200420110138267.html

​HELP US SPREAD GOOD NEWS!

I run this site in my spare time and thoroughly enjoy giving you all positive news!  If you've enjoyed the site we'd love for you to help me share the good news far and wide, share us on Reddit, your Facebook or your Twitter and spread a little positivity around.

Early tests of a potential coronavirus vaccine have shown promising results against the deadly virus, Queensland researchers say.

The University of Queensland's COVID-19 vaccine has shown in pre-clinical tests it can raise high levels of antibodies that can neutralise the virus.

The university's project co-leader Professor Paul Young said the results were an excellent indication the vaccine worked as expected.

"This is what we were hoping for, and it's a great relief for the team given the tremendous faith placed in our technology by CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation), federal and Queensland governments and our philanthropic partners," Professor Young said in a statement on Wednesday.

"We were particularly pleased that the strength of the antibody response was even better than those observed in samples from COVID-19 recovered patients."

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/coronavirus-vaccine-breakthrough-as-queensland-scientists-raise-high-levels-of-antibodies-in-testing

In the global race to find a vaccine, Oxford University just jumped way ahead of the pack. Human testing is already underway, and scientists say they're hopeful a coronavirus vaccine will be widely available by September.

Technology the lab had already developed in previous work on inoculations for other viruses, including a close relative of COVID-19, gave it a head start.

"Well personally, I have a high degree of confidence about this vaccine, because it's technology that I've used before," said Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the university.

The vaccine takes the coronavirus' genetic material and injects it into a common cold virus that has been neutralized so it cannot spread in people. The modified virus will mimic COVID-19, triggering the immune system to fight off the imposter and providing protection against the real thing.

The experimental vaccine has reportedly worked in protecting rhesus macaque monkeys that were exposed to heavy quantities of COVID-19.

In the human trials, 550 participants are given the vaccine, and another 550 receive a placebo.

Wasting no time, the largest drugmaker in the world, based in India, will start producing millions of the Oxford vaccines by next month, even before they've been proven to work.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oxford-university-vaccine-scientists-say-coronavirus-vaccine-widely-available-by-september-covid-19/

The Health Secretary has promised 25,000 coronavirus home test kits will be dispatched every day from the end of the week.

Speaking at today’s Downing Street press conference Matt Hancock said the country is ‘ramping up’ its capacity to meet the Government’s goal of 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month. He added: ‘We’re continuously opening new drive-through centres, there are now 41 with 48 going live this week.

‘For people who can’t get to the tests, we’re expanding home testing to bring the tests to them. We’re increasing the dispatch of home test kits from 5,000 per day last Friday, to 25,000 a day by the end of the week.

‘At the weekend, 17 mobile testing units manned by the army were operational. By the end of the week, we plan to have over 70 deployed with trained crews right across the country. All of this has led to an increase in daily testing capacity, which now stands at 73,400 – and this has allowed us progressively to expand access to testing.’

​https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/28/uk-promises-send-25000-home-test-kits-day-end-week-12623490/

Sandra Borns glances at her husband, her expression a mix of surprise and concern. His head is bowed. His eyes glisten. His forehead rests on a bony hand.

“We’ve been married for over 60 years,” she says. “I’ve never seen Bob cry.”

But on this Thursday morning in April, perched on a wheelchair in the living room he thought he would never see again, Bob Borns tears up over and over. It mostly happens when he talks about how grateful he is. For his long life. For his loving family. For the nurses who helped him and Sandra fight off death.

“Angels without wings,” he calls them, over and over again. When their shifts ended, they promised the man some dubbed “Papa” that they would see him in the morning, that he would get better. He was “shocked,” he says, “that anybody would give a damn so much. And work so hard.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-28/angels-without-wings-saved-couple-in-their-80s-from-covid-19

Jennifer Laubach of Michigan gave birth to twin sons, Mitchell and Maksim Laubach, on April 3.

The COVID-19 survivor did not get to meet her sons in-person again until 20 days later, on April 23, after both she and her husband Andre, who also beat COVID-19, were cleared by doctors to enter the NICU at Troy Beaumont Hospital in Troy, Michigan.

“It was very emotional because at that point it had been three weeks since their birth,” Laubach, 36, told Good Morning America. “It felt like I gave birth and they were just gone.”

The couple was tested for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and received the test results on April 2, just a few minutes after Laubach’s water broke. She was just 32 weeks pregnant.

Mitchell, who weighed 4 pounds, 3 ounces at birth, went home from the hospital with his parents on Saturday. Maksim, who weighed 3 pounds, 14 ounces, has been on a ventilator and feeding tube during his time in the NICU but is now off of both of those and making progress toward coming home.

https://kneb.com/abc_national/parents-who-beat-covid19-meet-their-twin-sons-20-days-after-birth-abcid36278262/

HELP US SPREAD GOOD NEWS!

I run this site in my spare time and thoroughly enjoy giving you all positive news!  If you've enjoyed the site we'd love for you to help me share the good news far and wide, share us on Reddit, your Facebook or your Twitter and spread a little positivity around.