COVID Catharsis Corner - Reports from around the world from today, Sunday 13th of December:
- World: 71,986,171 confirmed cases and 1,609,413 confirmed deaths.
- US: Researchers at Yale University identify those with more serious infection and Long COVID appear to have an autoimmune reaction to the Novel Virus which causes the autoantibodies to attack organs and even the immune systems itself.
- Germany: Country will go into and remain in Lockdown over Christmas after failure to bring infection levels back down to safer levels. There will be a small concession for a small amount of household to close family household mixing between December 24th and December 26th.
- UK: Public Health expert states mass testing could be a big waste of resources: "We simply don't know whether you'll find enough cases who would have transmitted a lot, and who don't [transmit Covid-19] simply because you found them," [...] "And we don't know whether telling lots of people they're negative could actually undermine any potential benefit. [...] "It could be the most massive scale of waste of resources." - Note the use of "Don't know" and "Could", meaning that although there may not be an outstanding amount of evidence to endorse mass testing, there also isn't an outstanding amount of evidence to condemn it, either, which has been one of the biggest issues with official responses to the pandemic across the world, where a lack of evidence in either direction has resulted in inaction rather than taking sensible and effective precautions until it is too late for them to be of major benefit. Officials point to successes in Wales, Liverpool and multiple other cities across the globe, with the Wales mass testing pilots showing a detection rate of 70% using the less accurate but faster rapid Lateral Flow tests, which assisted in pulling down case levels in those areas.
- Canada: To receive first doses of Pfizer vaccine later today.
- Bahrain: Approves Sinopharm Vaccine candidate having been part of the trials for the treatment, with an 86% efficiency.
- Spain: Expects to attain Hurd Immunity by the beginning of Autumn 2021 if enough people can be vaccinated by then.
- Switzerland: Directors of five of the countries largest hospitals recommend stricter COVID restrictions after roughly 1.3% of the population has been infected with COVID in the last 28 days.
