updated: May 01 2021, 18:43 ist
Minority ethnic groups in general and South Asians, in particular, had a higher risk of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and of Covid-19 related hospitalisations, intensive care (ICU) admissions and deaths during the second wave of the pandemic in the UK compared to the first, according to a new observational study of 17 million people.
Led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the study published in the medical journal ‘Lancet’ on Friday accounted for a large number of explanatory variables such as household size, social factors and health conditions across all ethnic groups and at different stages of Covid-19, from testing to mortality.
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For the first time, researchers have systematically analysed social and clinical factors associated with psychiatric hospital admission of children and adolescents, finding nearly one-quarter (23.6%) were admitted involuntarily. The study was published in
The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal.
Researchers also found that children and adolescents who were involuntarily hospitalised were nearly three times more likely to belong to a Black rather than a white ethnic group than those hospitalised voluntarily and more likely to have a diagnosis of psychosis, substance misuse, or intellectual disability.
Involuntary hospitalisation is a legal procedure used to compel an individual to receive inpatient treatment for a mental health disorder against his or her will. Mental health legislation varies nationally and regionally, with different legal criteria for involuntary hospitalisation. There is growing evidence from research into adult psychiatric hospitalisations that
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The largest study of its type in the UK has identified differences in the immune response to COVID-19, between people with no symptoms, compared to those suffering a more serious reaction to the virus.
Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Newcastle University, University College London, University of Cambridge, EMBL s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their collaborators within the Human Cell Atlas initiative, found raised levels of specific immune cells in asymptomatic people. They also showed people with more serious symptoms had lost these protective cell types, but gained inflammatory cells. These differences in the immune response could help explain serious lung inflammation and blood clotting symptoms, and could be used to identify potential targets for developing therapies.
Patterns and bottlenecks
A year into the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic, we are experiencing waves of new variants emerging. Some of these variants have worrying functional implications, such as increased transmissibility or antibody treatment escape. Lythgoe
et al. have undertaken in-depth sequencing of more than 1000 hospital patients isolates to find out how the virus is mutating within individuals. Overall, there seem to be consistent and reproducible patterns of within-host virus diversity. The authors observed only one or two variants in most samples, but a few carried many variants. Although the evidence indicates strong purifying selection, including in the spike protein responsible for viral entry, the authors also saw evidence for transmission clusters associated with households and other possible superspreader events. After transmission, most variants fizzled out, but occasionally some initiated ongoing transmission and wider dissemination.
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