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World Health Organization Reports 80 Percent Rise In Global COVID Infections

The World Health Organization's (WHO) weekly update on the global COVID-19 pandemic found that in the last four weeks, there was an 80 percent rise in infections with 1.5 million new COVID-19 cases reported. 

Most of these cases come from South Korea, which is an outlier, not so much in the intensity of the pandemic, as in collecting and reporting statistics on it. The WHO cautions, "Currently, reported cases do not accurately represent infection rates due to the reduction in testing and reporting globally. During this 28-day period, 44 percent of countries reported at least one case to WHO—a proportion that has been declining since mid-2022."

In effect, the WHO is suggesting that the 56 percent of countries not reporting any cases are simply not bothering to count COVID infections, while those reporting small numbers are only going through the motions.

According to the international public health agency, global cumulative cases reported to the WHO are approaching 770 million. COVID deaths are approaching seven million. However, including excess deaths over the number expected based on historical trends, a more accurate figure, particularly for countries with poorly functioning health reporting, the accepted estimate stands at a catastrophic 24.6 million deaths or 3.5 times the official figures. 

The disparity may be even greater: when one compares today's figures to those from one year ago, while there have been a little more than half a million COVID deaths officially reported worldwide, there have been 4.2 million excess deaths, or a difference that is more than eight-fold higher.

Since last month, even though reported COVID deaths have fallen as low as seven per day, excess deaths have nearly doubled, with more than 11,400 per day. The ludicrous disparity in these figures only underscores the tremendous efforts made by every government across the globe to hide the damning reality from their populations.

During the August 9 WHO coronavirus press brief, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that since the agency officially ended the emergency phase of the COVID pandemic, only 25 percent of countries and territories have reported death numbers to the WHO and only 11 percent have reported hospitalization and ICU admission figures, which are currently on the rise as the summer COVID wave is surging throughout the northern hemisphere.

World Health Organization Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (center) declaring the coronavirus pandemic a Public Health emergency of International Concern in March 2020. [Photo: Fabrice Coffrini]

He said, "WHO continues to assess the risk of COVID-19 to the global public as high. The virus continues to circulate in all countries, continues to kill and continues to change." On the emergence of the latest variant of interest, EG.5 (accounting for 17 percent of all global cases), and other highly mutated strains, he cautioned, "The risk remains of a more dangerous variant emerging that could cause a sudden increase in cases and deaths … Today, on the advice of the [review] committee, I am issuing standing recommendations for countries in seven major areas. These recommendations reinforce the advice that the WHO has provided to countries in its COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan published in May." 

These recommendations include tracking and testing for COVID-19 in the population, implementing measures to reduce the risk of transmission, collaborating with national public health agencies to track new strains, reporting on vaccine effectiveness, and conducting critical research in understanding the causes of and treatment for post-viral syndromes. Additionally, the WHO has called for reporting trends in infection rates, severity of disease and deaths. Most importantly, they call for the equitable distribution of vaccines and access to proven treatments in light of the ongoing pandemic though they are careful not to use that term. 

Dr. Ghebreyesus added, "We recognize that many people in governments think of it as a thing of the past. So, why are these recommendations still important? For those who lost someone they loved, for those who continue to be at risk for severe disease or death, for those who suffer from post-COVID-19 conditions or Long COVID, for those COVID-19 is still a daily threat and a daily trauma." 

This is essentially every person on the planet, yet they are being told that COVID has ended, and they should pay no attention to the threat these ominous statistics pose and pay little mind to why they have developed a horrible cold in the summer or suffer the lingering symptoms of severe fatigue and disorientation.

The WHO's present warnings now stand as an indictment of their decision in May to end the public health emergency, knowing this was simply giving the green light every capitalist government needed to end their pretense of protecting their population from the virus.

Estimated infections per day in the United States, from the beginning of the pandemic. [Photo by Biobot Analytics]

In the United States, to ensure people forget about COVID, the Biden administration and Congress have systematically ended all public spending on testing and vaccinations, which means that a person will have to spend $11 on average for each at-home rapid COVID-19 test and fork over $110 to $130 for the latest COVID vaccines when they are barely able to stay afloat economically.

According to wastewater data from Biobot Analytics, which has become the main source for tracking COVID, the surge that began in mid-June has continued nationwide, with a massive rise in new cases that commenced in the latter half of July. 

Across the country, wastewater levels of SARS-CoV-2 are up 2.5 times from their June lows. And more recently, hospitalizations and ICU admissions have been climbing, providing confirmation of the data from wastewater levels. Similar findings from Italy and the UK provide further evidence of the dangers of ignoring the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Graph from Biobot shows the wastewater data on COVID infections for the four regions of the United States. [Photo by Biobot Analytics]

Meanwhile, even as some in local governments in the United States and in the corporate press have begun to acknowledge that the summer surge is well underway, they downplay these observations by minimizing the threat these infections pose to the population. 

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A major danger is that the current wave is intersecting with the return to K-12 schools and universities by tens of millions of children, youth and young adults. A recent report published in Journal of the American Medical Association found that more than 70 percent of household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child after they attended in-person school. 

As the authors noted, "Once US schools reopened in fall 2020, children contributed more to inferred within-household transmission when they were in school, and less during summer and winter breaks, a pattern consistent for two consecutive school years." This means that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is estimated to infect around a half a million new people per day, could very well find human fuel to skyrocket even higher, with the added risk of viral evolution finding newer mechanisms to evade immunity and grow more transmissible. 

School officials are seeking to dispel the fully justified fears raised in many communities as school reopening gets underway. Los Angeles Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, for example, has openly urged students to return even if they are sick, claiming their mental health would be better addressed if they attended school, regardless of the threat they posed to other students, teachers and the community as a whole. 

Attempting to calm skeptical parents, Carvalho said during a press conference last Friday, "I understand the surprise of some parents, but we have always been informed as a school system by the expert voices of medical entities. Times have changed. Conditions have changed and the recommendations of protocols have shifted as well."

A report in Fortune found that across the country student absenteeism has been on the rise at record rates. Many of these students cite illness, economic distress, and a hostile school environment that is a byproduct of school staffing shortages, and a general sense of community anxiety and depression where schools feel like unwelcome places. 

On top of the social crisis that has impacted schools through chronic underfunding and low wages for teachers and ancillary staff, the impact of infection and reinfection on the well-being of youth is a major negative. In a Lancet study published in July, the researchers found that cognitive deficits following SARS-CoV-2 infection were detectable almost two years afterwards in a subset of the people they were studying. 

Among children and youth with Long COVID, severe sleep disturbances, extreme fatigue from exercise, difficulty remembering things, inability to find the right words or work with math and numbers were common. They also complained of persistent ringing in their ears, absent-mindedness, chest pain and feeling pain in their joints.

A recent population study from Australia in highly vaccinated people found that one in five respondents reported Long COVID symptoms three months after a confirmed Omicron infection. Another study by researchers from the National Institute of Health (NIH) said that POTS [Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome], a condition that leads to rapid heart rate, dizziness, weakness and cognitive impairment when sitting up or standing, can appear six to eight months after a COVID-19 infection. 

The ending of the pandemic was motivated by political decisions based solely on the economic interests of the ruling elites. Not only is the COVID pandemic continuing at a dangerous pace, raising the specter of a virus evolving to evade every vaccine and treatment available in the anemic arsenals of the health care system, but it is also spawning a chronic mass disabling event on which the public health agencies and entire political apparatus have turned their backs.

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Prior Hookworm Infection Could Offer Protection From Severe COVID-19 Symptoms

Prior infection by a parasitic hookworm has been shown to protect mice from severe SARS-CoV-2 disease, offering a potential explanation as to why certain human populations seemed to fare better during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This work stemmed from an observation that certain regions in the world didn't fare as badly from the early days of the pandemic as you would expect," says Malaghan Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Kerry Hilligan who collaborated with colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, U.S., on the study, recently published in Science Immunology.

"Countries throughout Africa and Asia were reporting fewer cases of severe infections, such as hospitalizations or death, much less than the rest of the world. This was the case even when accounting for some confounding factors in the data and lower reporting rates."

"What's interesting is that these regions strongly correlate or overlap with areas where hookworm infections are endemic—consistently present within the population. We think that perhaps this endemic infection by hookworms is causing a population-wide 'interference' in the establishment of more severe SARS-CoV-2 viral infections."

"Infection interference" is a term used to describe the observation that in some cases people don't get sick from more than one infectious organism at a time. This was first described for viruses in the 1960s, where it was observed that one viral infection can be accompanied by a small grace period before a person can catch something new.

Most recently we've seen this effect in the COVID pandemic, where it is thought that people recovering from a SARS-CoV-2 infection have a few weeks of relative immunity from the other respiratory viruses (RSV, influenza) before they become susceptible again. The reasons for this phenomenon aren't yet fully understood, but are of particular interest to Dr. Hilligan.

"It's generally accepted that as an infection activates and stimulates the immune system, there's the additional benefit of this stimulation excluding or preventing other organisms from gaining a toe hold," says Dr. Hilligan. "What is really interesting to explore is that this effect seems to hold true regardless if it's a virus, bacteria or a parasite in the case of COVID-19.

"What my collaborators Dr. Oyebola Oyesola, Dr. P'ng Loke and Dr. Alan Sher at the National Institutes of Health and I wanted to know is whether we could test this effect in relation to the current pandemic and whether we'd see similar protective effects."

The study looked at hookworm infection in the lungs of mice, as their immune system and cell biology closely mirrors our own. The collaboration found that the mice infected with hookworm were less likely to develop severe COVID symptoms and recovered from the infection much more quickly than their counterparts, even after the worms were cleared from the body.

Looking more closely at what was going on at a cellular level, the study observed that the hookworms were affecting a transformational change to specific type of lung-resident immune cells called macrophages.

"Post-helminth infection we could see a stark difference at the transcriptomic level—the level at which different genes are switched on or off—between macrophages that have been exposed to helminth infection and those that haven't," says Dr. Hilligan.

The result was that these helminth-affected macrophages were much better at raising the alarm to other infectious threats—in this case the COVID-19 virus. They did this by secreting specific chemical compounds that recruit other immune cells called CD8 T-cells, which specialized in removing viruses, to the site of the infection much faster than the control group.

"We found the recruitment for these CD8 T-cells, which are essential for viral responses, were boosted. Thanks to these modified macrophages, the T-cells came into infected tissue faster and cleared infection faster, which resulted in much less severe disease symptoms.

"What's more, this effect seems to be long-lasting, with the macrophages retaining this very strong ability to recruit and activate CD8 T-cells long after the hookworm has been cleared from the body."

While the research is preclinical and yet to be translated to humans, the researchers are currently focused on better understanding these macrophages and what the hookworms are doing to them to drive such a change in behavior.

"Looking forward we want to understand the signals that bring in these T-cells to the lung. Leading on from that, we want to understand more about what the worm is doing to create these specialized macrophages, and whether we can replicate this effect, without the need for the worm as an intermediary."

More information: Oyebola O. Oyesola et al, Exposure to lung-migrating helminth protects against murine SARS-CoV-2 infection through macrophage-dependent T cell activation, Science Immunology (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.Adf8161

Citation: Prior hookworm infection could offer protection from severe COVID-19 symptoms (2023, August 14) retrieved 16 August 2023 from https://medicalxpress.Com/news/2023-08-prior-hookworm-infection-severe-covid-.Html

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Study Explores The Protective Effect Of Transmembrane Mucins Against SARS-CoV-2 Infection

A recent PLOS Pathogens study analyzed the role played by host mucins and mucin glycans with regard to SARS-CoV-2 entry into the airway epithelial cells.

Study: Glycosylated extracellular mucin domains protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection at the respiratory surface. Image Credit: Nenad Cavoski/Shutterstock.Com Background

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus caused the devastating coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Individuals experience a wide range of symptoms from mild respiratory illness to severe respiratory distress syndrome.

A deeper knowledge of host factors influencing viral entry is important to elucidate host-SARS-CoV-2 interactions and identify novel therapeutic targets.

What are mucins?

Mucins are a family of high molecular weight O-glycosylated proteins. They are crucial in protecting the respiratory tract against viral and bacterial infections. MUC5AC and MUC5B are gel-forming mucins that clear pathogens by mucociliary clearance.

Meanwhile, MUC1, MUC4, and MUC16 are transmembrane (TM) mucins that can facilitate or restrict microbial invasion at the apical surface of the epithelium. StcE, which is the mucin-selective protease, cleaves the glycosylated extracellular portion of the mucins without disturbing the underlying domains.

About this study

SARS-CoV-2 is a single-stranded, enveloped, and positive-sense RNA virus that belongs to the β-coronavirus genus, within the Coronaviridae family. To gain entry into the host, it utilizes the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as an entry receptor. Additionally, proteolytic cleavage of the spike protein, mediated by the transmembrane serine protease 2 (TMPRSS2), is required for viral entry.

In the respiratory tract, human coronaviruses depend on sialic acids linked to glycoproteins or gangliosides as the main attachment sites. Glycosylated mucins might provide viral binding sites by being decorated with sialic acids. They could also restrict access to the ACE2 receptor.

This study analyzed the role played by transmembrane mucins and their terminal glycans in the SARS-CoV-2 entry process in primary airway cultures and a respiratory cell line.

Key findings

Human lung epithelial Calu-3 cells were seen to express high levels of MUC1. TM mucins MUC16 and MUC4 and secreted mucin MUC5AC were almost undetectable.

MUC1 and MUC16 were expressed and some secreted MUC5AC was detected in organoid-derived airway cultures. Viral infection was enhanced with enzymatic removal of extracellular mucin domains, but not individuals' fucose sugars or sialic acid.

The current study demonstrated for the first time that ACE2 and MUC1 colocalize on the apical surface of Calu-3 cells. In air-liquid differentiated airway cultures, it was observed that MUC16 and MUC1 have distinct expression patterns in different cells. Based on these observations, a model was proposed in which glycosylated extracellular mucin domains form a protective layer on the ACE2 receptor. This would prevent access of the virus to the receptor.

The study found that during SARS-CoV-2 infection, endogenously expressed TM mucins MUC1 and MUC16 played a protective role. Overexpression of TM mucins reduced SARS-CoV-2 infection, in comparison to cells with a non-targeting guide (NTG). Also, enzymatic removal of overexpressed MUC4 was seen to result in increased viral entry.

However, given the current state of research, it is difficult to conclude whether some specific mucins, such as MUC1, MUC4, or MUC16, or TM mucins in general are protective or contribute to severe disease, within the complexity of the body, during different stages of pathogenesis.

Documenting the function of specific mucins during in vivo infections will be important for future research.

No significant increase in SARS-CoV-2 infection was observed in live virus experiments after neuraminidase or fucosidase treatment. Consecutive treatment with StcE and heparinase or neuraminidase did not result in a difference in viral entry.

On negatively charged surfaces, differences in viral dependence could be explained by the accessibility of the receptor for the viral spike protein and the levels of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 protease expression.

It was concluded that during SARS-CoV-2 infection of human respiratory Calu-3 cells the MUC1 extracellular domain prevents the binding of the virus to the underlying receptor.

Conclusion

In sum, this study sheds light on the role of glycosylated extracellular mucin domains as a host defense mechanism during SARS-CoV-2 entry.

Excess accumulation and overproduction of gel-forming mucins in the lungs of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients could lead to life-threatening situations. Researchers are currently focussing on a therapeutic strategy based on reducing mucin expression overall.

Future research should be conducted on characterizing the role and expression of specific soluble and TM mucins in different cell types, at various stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

An approach that boosts expression of protective TM mucins, while simultaneously reducing secretion of soluble mucins could be the way forward in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection or other respiratory pathogens and improving disease outcomes.

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