Black fungus worsens India cases
- Canine COVID in Malaysian kids
Coronavirus patient Parvesh Dubey died within just one week of contracting black fungus—the latest victim of a horrifying COVID-19 complication sweeping India.
Thousands have developed the fungus in recent weeks in a wave of infections blamed on excessive use of steroids to treat the country's millions of COVID patients, experts say.
Previously very rare, mucormycosis, as it is scientifically known, is highly aggressive and surgeons sometimes have to remove patients' eyes, nose, and jaw to stop it from reaching the brain. The death rate is over 50 percent.
Dubey, 33, was being treated for coronavirus in the central state of Madhya Pradesh before doctors moved him to a different hospital after the fungus was detected and his condition worsened.
"The doctors there operated on his nose and jaw. One of his eyes was already damaged and the doctor said they were working on saving the other one," a relative told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Family members of Dubey's in different states across India scrambled to obtain medicines and get them to him by asking bus passengers to transport them to Madhya Pradesh, but it was too little, too late.
"We lost him in a week. We did whatever was possible with available resources," the relative said.
India normally deals with fewer than 20 black fungus cases a year but now there are several thousand across the country including more than 2,000 in Maharashtra state, home to India's financial capital Mumbai.
At least nine Indian states have declared the problem an epidemic. The cities of New Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Bangalore have opened special wards.
Canine coronavirus in Malaysia
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Professor Gregory Gray at Duke University's Global Health Institute tasked a graduate student at his lab with developing a pan-species coronavirus test in order to help prevent the next catastrophe.
The idea was to deploy the tool, once its accuracy was validated, to look back at test samples from human patients in order to search for signs of coronaviruses that might have begun to cross over from animals.
Gray and his colleague's findings, released Thursday in Clinical Infectious Diseases, showed a canine coronavirus was present in a group of mostly children patients admitted to hospital for pneumonia in Malaysia in 2017 and 2018.
The team suspect the dog virus caused their illness, as opposed to merely being present in the patients' airways – but can't conclusively prove it.
Given the genetic makeup of the virus it's unlikely that it is currently circulating between humans.
"What we're advocating for… is more application of pan-species diagnostics to look for five different viral families we think are the most problematic in causing epidemics in humans," Gray told AFP.
Excess COVID death toll much higher: WHO
Up to three times more people have died due to the pandemic than indicated by the officially reported COVID deaths, the World Health Organization said Friday.
So far, more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide have officially been attributed to COVID-19 since the disease first surfaced in China in late 2019.
But according to a global health statistics report from the WHO, far more people have died who would otherwise not have died had it not been for the pandemic, either due to COVID or because they could not get treatment for other ailments.
"Total deaths are at least two to three times higher than officially reported," Samira Asma, the WHO assistant director-general in charge of data, told reporters.
In 2020, the report found there had been at least three million excess deaths due directly or indirectly to COVID-19, while the official number of COVID deaths was 1.8 million at the end of the year.