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The world may have undercounted Covid-19 deaths by a staggering margin, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The actual count may actually be 6.9 million deaths, more than double official tolls.
The United States alone is estimated to have had 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, vastly more than the 579,000 deaths officially reported, and more than any other country. The calculation is based on modeling of excess mortality that has occurred during the pandemic.
The drastic difference highlights how difficult it is to keep track of even basic metrics like deaths when a deadly disease is raging. The higher toll also means the ripples of the pandemic have spread wider than realized, particularly for health workers on the front lines who have repeatedly faced the onslaught with limited medical resources and personal protec
Seattle startup TwinStrand raises $50M to expand tech that identifies rare genetic mutants
May 5, 2021 at 10:55 am
Jesse Salk, CEO and co-founder of TwinStrand Biosciences. (TwinStrand Photo)
New funding: Gene-sequencing startup TwinStrand Biosciences raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Section 32, a California-based fund focused on biotech, technology, healthcare and life sciences. Total venture capital funding is now north of $70 million for the 6-year-old company.
Double strands of innovation: TwinStrand, which spun out of the University of Washington, has developed technology in both gene sequencing and analyzing sequencing results to help it find what the company calls “genetic needles in the haystack.”
As experts track the official metrics, we pause to consider the personal ones.
By
Seattle Met Staff
5/6/2021 at 9:30am
Our dogs will be awfully lonely when remote workers head back out into the world.
Photograph by Chona Kasinger
Washington s spike of infections and hospitalizations just as all the state s adults finally become vaccine eligible is just the latest point of proof: Our fight against coronavirus isnât exactly straightforward. Amid all the data dashboards and vaccine stats, most of us have some sort of personal benchmark for what it will mean when we really, truly, finally make our way back to normal.
Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
A team of prominent scientists has doubled down on its controversial hypothesis that genetic bits of the pandemic coronavirus can integrate into our chromosomes and stick around long after the infection is over. If they are right skeptics have argued that their results are likely lab artifacts the insertions could explain the rare finding that people can recover from COVID-19 but then test positive for SARS-CoV-2 again months later.
Stem cell biologist Rudolf Jaenisch and gene regulation specialist Richard Young of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the work, triggered a Twitter storm in December 2020, when their team first presented the idea in a preprint on bioRxiv. The researchers emphasized that viral integration did not mean people who recovered from COVID-19 remain infectious. But critics charged them with stoking unfounded fears that COVID-19 vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) m