CNBC reports: Microsoft is working with a consortium of pharmaceutical companies to recruit people who have recovered from Covid-19 to donate their plasma, which could be used in treatments for the disease. To help get the word out, the company is launching a chatbot, which it refers to as its "plasmabot," to lead people through a series of questions to determine if they're a candidate to donate plasma. The plasmabot, which goes live this weekend, will also provide information about the procedure and direct them to a nearby site where they can safely make the donation...

In a blog post, Microsoft says there are two possible approaches with collected plasma: Make transfusions directly available to those who are battling the virus, or incorporate the antibodies to help develop a medicine. Microsoft's head of research Peter Lee said the company is supporting the efforts of a plasma alliance formed by companies like Octapharma, Takeda, CSL Behring and others. That project kicked off in late March, and counts the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among its advisors.

After conducting its own research into the approach, Lee said he believes it has the "potential to save lives." So the company is setting aside computing resources and other infrastructure, as well as engineering talent. It is also promoting the plasmabot through a website, and it's search, web and social channels.

Microsoft is getting behind the effort now because plasma of recovered patients is only useful for a limited time. "There's a window from onset of symptoms that lasts from 21 to about 56 days," said Lee.
Meanwhile, a Florida newspaper reports that the Mayo Clinic is also coordinating its own study with a network of hospitals across America to "gauge the effectiveness" of plasma treatments.

This week U.S. president Donald Trump suspended America's $900 million annual contribution to the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, called Trump's move a "crime against humanity...."

The Hill reports: "Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity," he added...

The American Medical Association (AMA) late Tuesday called Trump's decision a "dangerous step in the wrong direction" and urged him to reconsider. "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO — rather than focusing on solutions — is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," the AMA said in a statement. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, meanwhile, said Wednesday that there was "no reason justifying" Trump's move...

And Bill Gates said in a tweet that halting funding to the WHO amid a world health crisis "is as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist added. "The world needs @WHO now more than ever."
Agreeing with Bill Gates was 95-year-old former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Newsweek quotes Carter's newly-released statement calling the WHO "the only international organization capable of leading the effort to control this virus."

The head of the United Nations also called the WHO "absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

While criticizing the WHO, this week an article in the Atlantic called president Trump's moves "a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic." The Democrats speaker of the House added that Trump's decision "is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged."

But the science magazine Nature still published an editorial harshly criticizing Trump's attempt to defund the WHO. "[E]ven talk of doing so in the middle of a global health and economic crisis cannot be condemned strongly enough." They argue that withholding America's funds "will place more lives at risk and ensure that the world takes longer to emerge from this crisis... It is right that researchers, funders and governments have been protesting against Trump's decision, and they must continue to do so in the strongest terms."

And Newsweek also published the comments of the WHO's Director-General, who had this message for its critics. "[O]ur focus, my focus, is on stopping this virus and saving lives... This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy.

"When we're divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us."

Newsweek reports: There is no evidence to back claims the coronavirus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a lab in China, scientists have told Newsweek.

Adam Lauring, an associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School and an expert in the evolution of viruses, told Newsweek: "This claim is a conspiracy theory and it is not supported at all by the available data... The SARS-CoV-2 virus has some key differences in specific genes relative to previously identified coronaviruses — the ones a laboratory would be working with," said Lauring. "This constellation of changes makes it unlikely that it is the result of a laboratory 'escape.'"

Alexandre Hassanin, a lecturer at France's Sorbonne University National Museum of Natural History department of origins and evolution, similarly highlighted to Newsweek: "Even if it is difficult to prove that a laboratory accident did not take place, you should know that SARS-CoV-2 is not closely related to any previous viruses; it was never sequenced (even partially) in previous studies, and the COVID-19 outbreak began in November/December, as in previous SARS epidemic events (2002 and 2003)."

Hassanin said: "These two points suggest therefore that the current outbreak was not the consequence of a laboratory accident."
An anonymous reader adds: Today the Associated Press also called it "an outlier theory" being spread by president Trump and officials in his administration "without the weight of evidence."

On Twitter, Eric Hundman, an Assistant Professor at NYU Shanghai, had stern words for anyone still spreading this misinformation. "Insinuating that the virus escaped from a lab in China by saying 'well, there's no evidence that it didn't' is not only untrue, it amounts to disinformation that could further ratchet up US-China tensions and distract from more urgent priorities.

*There actually is scientific evidence against the "escaped from a lab" theory."
He then cites five different scientists who wrote in Nature magazine that "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

In fact, "Most experts push back on the lab leak theory," CNN reported earlier this month. "I think it has no credibility," they were told by Vincent Racaniello, a microbiology professor at Columbia University who hosts a podcast called "This Week in Virology."

And they got the same response from Dr. Simon Anthony, a professor at the public health grad school of Columbia University and a key member of PREDICT. "It all feels far-fetched. Lab accidents do happen, we know that, but... there's certainly no evidence to support that theory."

That's also the opinion of America's intelligence community. Business Insider writes: The US intelligence community has also been investigating whether the virus was collected by researchers and then accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab but has found no evidence to date backing it up, according to Politico, which cited multiple sources familiar with the matter. Or, as Politico puts it: Congressional intelligence committees have been asking various agencies if hard evidence exists to support it. So far, there is none, multiple sources familiar with the matter told POLITICO.
UPDATE (4/19/20): On Sunday even Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, acknowledged "I don't have evidence that it was a laboratory accident."

GeekWire reports: The University of Washington School of Medicine's Virology Lab is reporting encouraging results from trial runs of a new test from Abbott Laboratories that detects the antibodies created by people who have had COVID-19, whether they knew they had it or not. "This is a really fantastic test," Keith Jerome, who leads UW Medicine's virology program, told reporters today. He said UW's lab could process 4,000 samples per day starting next week, and conceivably ramp up to 14,000 samples per day within a couple of weeks.

The test will be made available through health care providers, in medical clinics or perhaps through workplaces... Epidemiologists say knowing who has had the virus will be key to tracking the true spread of COVID-19, and giving assurances to people who are returning to school and work — particularly in front-line jobs ranging from first responders and health care workers to grocery store clerks.

"It's possible this could be part of a back-to-work process," Jerome said. It's not yet clear how much immunity people develop to COVID-19 in the course of fighting off the virus, but if SARS-CoV-2 behaves like other coronaviruses, people with antibodies should have at least some protection from re-infection...

There's also a chance that being able to detect antibodies for COVID-19 will speed the development of vaccines in the months ahead.
1 million of the tests will be shipped this week in the U.S., and up to 4 million in the month of April, GeekWire reports.

And by June the company plans to be shipping 20 million tests per month.

In a preprint academic paper published in early April, MIT researchers describe a model that quantifies the impact of quarantine measures on the spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. From a report: Unlike most of the models that have so far been proposed, this one doesn't rely on data from studies about previous outbreaks, like SARS or MERS. Instead, it taps an AI algorithm trained to capture the number of infected individuals under quarantine using the SEIR model, which groups people into classes like "susceptible," "exposed," "infected," and "recovered." This approach potentially achieves accuracy higher than or comparable to previous work, which could help to better inform governments, health systems, and nonprofits as they make treatment and policy decisions about social distancing. For instance, the model found that in places like South Korea, where there was immediate government intervention, the virus spread plateaued more quickly.

"Our model shows that quarantine restrictions are successful in getting the effective reproduction number from larger than one to smaller than one. The [model] is learning what we are calling the 'quarantine control strength function,'" said George Barbastathis, MIT professor of mechanical engineering, who developed the model over the course of several weeks with civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. candidate Raj Dandekar as a part of a final class project. "That corresponds to the point where we can flatten the curve and start seeing fewer infections."

The world's biggest trial of drugs to treat Covid-19 patients has been set up in the UK at unprecedented speed, and hopes to have some answers within weeks. From a report: The Recovery trial has recruited over 5,000 patients in 165 NHS hospitals around the UK in a month, ahead of similar trials in the US and Europe, which have a few hundred. "This is by far the largest trial in the world," said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at Oxford University, who is leading it. He has previously led Ebola drug trials in west Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Recovery team expects to be the first to have definitive data. "We're guessing some time in June we may get the results," said Prof Horby. "If it is really clear that there are benefits, an answer will be available quicker." But he warned that in the case of Covid-19, there would be no "magic bullet."

China on Friday raised its coronavirus death toll by 50 percent in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak first emerged, amid accusations that the government had concealed the extent of the epidemic. From a report: Officials placed the new tally at 3,869 deaths from the coronavirus in the central Chinese city, an increase of 1,290 from the previous figure. The number of cumulative confirmed infections in the city was also revised upward to 50,333, an increase of 325. The move appeared to be a response to growing questions about the accuracy of China's official numbers and calls to hold the country responsible for a global health crisis that has killed more than 142,000 people and caused a worldwide economic slowdown. China has been criticized as having initially mismanaged and concealed the extent of the epidemic, though it ultimately swung into action and seemingly tamed the virus. Recently, as other countries have grappled with their own outbreaks, Chinese officials have come under even greater pressure to explain how exactly the epidemic unfolded in Wuhan.

The University of Oxford's Big Data Institute found that 56% of the general population, or 80% of current smartphone owners, would need to use a contact-tracing app for it to be effective in helping stop the coronavirus. The BBC reports: If there is lower uptake, academics say the app would still help slow the spread of Covid-19. They add that letting people self-diagnose the illness could be critical. The experts say "speed is of the essence", and that delaying contact tracing by even a day from the onset of symptoms could make the difference between epidemic control and resurgence. "There would be more people receiving notifications as a result of false warnings," explained Prof Christophe Fraser.

The team estimates that 56% of the general population must use the app to halt the outbreak. Prof Fraser said that equated to 80% of all existing smartphone owners, based on data from Ofcom. "That's a very ambitious target," the professor acknowledged. "It's not something that would typically happen for a new app - even an incredibly popular one - but if we can explain that this is a public health intervention, that will be new and different. [...] More than 80% of people surveyed said they were likely to or would install this app when it was explained in detail what it would be doing." Even if fewer people install the app, the team estimates that one infection will be averted for every one to two users.

In his annual shareholder letter, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said that a next step for the company could be regularly testing its employees for the coronavirus, even if they show no symptoms. From a report: "Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running," he wrote Thursday. Amazon first discussed the concept of developing its own testing capabilities last week. Bezos' public support for this initiative follows a similar push on Wednesday from banking and financial services leaders, who told President Donald Trump in a conference call that more widespread coronavirus testing is needed before the public would feel comfortable going out regularly again, The Wall Street Journal reported. This work is part of early-stage discussions by the White House, state governments and business leaders on how they will start reopening the economy following weeks of restrictive stay-at-home orders and mandated store closures. Along with far more testing, calls for people to regularly use face masks in public places are gaining more traction.

On Tuesday, General Motors revealed that its first ventilators are ready for delivery. "The automaker has a contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services to license-build 30,000 Ventec Life Systems V+ Pro critical care ventilators," reports Ars Technica. "These ventilators are designed to treat the most critically ill patients, who need invasive intubation (tubes inserted into the lungs) as opposed to non-invasive machines like CPAP or BiPAP devices, which are also often referred to as ventilators." Ars Technica reports: GM says that it will ship the first 600 ventilators by the end of April, with "almost half the order" ready by the end of June and the full 30,000 by the end of August. The company has the capacity to produce more if needed. The automaker has leveraged its logistics chain and worked with suppliers to source parts and assemblies, and it has worked closely with Ventec to make these urgently needed medical devices.

Preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals are seeing surging audiences, with many new readers not well versed in the limitations of the latest research findings. From a report: Early on Feb. 1, John Inglis picked up his phone and checked Twitter, as he does most mornings. He was shocked at what fresh hell awaited. Since 2013, Dr. Inglis, executive director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York, has been helping manage a website called bioRxiv, pronounced "bio archive." The site's goal: improve communication between scientists by allowing them to share promising findings months before their research has gone through protracted peer review and official publication. But the mess he was seeing on Twitter suggested a downside of the service provided by the site, known as a preprint server, during the emerging coronavirus pandemic. The social media platform was awash with conspiracy theories positing that the new coronavirus had been engineered by the Chinese government for population control. And the theorists' latest evidence was a freshly submitted paper on bioRxiv from a team of Indian researchers that suggested an "uncanny similarity" between proteins in H.I.V. and the new virus.

Traditionally, the Indian researchers would have submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, and their manuscript would be scrutinized by other scientists. But that process takes months, if not more than a year. BioRxiv, medRxiv -- another site co-founded by Dr. Inglis -- and other preprint servers function as temporary homes that freely disseminate new findings. For scientists on the front lines of the coronavirus response, early glimpses at others' research helps with study of the virus. But there is a growing audience for these papers that are not yet fully baked, and those readers may not understand the studies' limitations. Views and downloads on medRxiv, for instance, have increased more than 100-fold since December, Dr. Inglis says. People with little scientific training, or none at all, are desperate for new knowledge to better inform their day-to-day decisions. The news media wants to keep readers and viewers updated with the latest developments. And agents of disinformation seek to fuel conspiratorial narratives.

Verily, the Alphabet life sciences division that launched its COVID-19 screening and testing program last month, is still under scrutiny from lawmakers over how it is collecting users' data, as well as its plans to expand its test sites outside of California. From a report: At the end of March, five US senators wrote to Verily asking, among several other things, whether its screening website was compliant with the HIPAA Privacy Rule, and whether Verily intended to remove the requirement that all users who screen for COVID-19 have a Google account. Verily has now addressed those questions in a letter sent to the same senators and obtained by Business Insider. In it, Verily assured the senators that any data collected wouldn't be used for commercial purposes or sold to third parties. But it also confirmed that its screening site was not in compliance with the HIPAA privacy rule.

"Verily has focused on the protection of the security and privacy of personal health information since the inception of its Baseline COVID-19 Program," the company wrote. "With respect to its Baseline COVID-19 Program, Verily is not acting as a covered entity or a business associate as defined by HIPAA. As the Program expands, we will continue to prioritize the protection of individual health data. However, in the future if we engage in a program where we do become a covered entity or we are required to sign a BAA we will take all the appropriate steps to ensure compliance with HIPAA."

Nectar Gan, Caitlin Hu and Ivan Watson, reporting for CNN: China has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the novel coronavirus, according to a central government directive and online notices published by two Chinese universities, that have since been removed from the web. Under the new policy, all academic papers on Covid-19 will be subject to extra vetting before being submitted for publication. Studies on the origin of the virus will receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by central government officials, according to the now-deleted posts.

A medical expert in Hong Kong who collaborated with mainland researchers to publish a clinical analysis of Covid-19 cases in an international medical journal said his work did not undergo such vetting in February. The increased scrutiny appears to be the latest effort by the Chinese government to control the narrative on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives and sickened 1.7 million people worldwide since it first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December. Since late January, Chinese researchers have published a series of Covid-19 studies in influential international medical journals.

Researchers have developed a nasal Alzheimer's vaccine that was successful in reducing atrophied brain matter in mice by blocking a protein that causes the disease. It also reduced changes and abnormal behavior in the brain normally associated with the disease. The study was published in the journal Nature. Interesting Engineering reports: "Much more research is necessary for the vaccine to be used in humans, but it is an accomplishment that can contribute to the development of a dementia cure," team member Haruhisa Inoue, a professor at Kyoto University, told The Asahi Shimbun. Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia are characterized by an abnormal accumulation of tau proteins in the brain. In the study, the research team incorporated a gene into a harmless virus to make it produce tau.

They then administered the virus nasally to mice with genes that made them prone to developing dementia. The vaccine proceeded to stimulate the mice's immune system, causing them to build antibodies that removed the tau proteins. These antibodies were more than double in mice who had the vaccine administered compared to those that did not. In addition, the vaccinated mice's brain areas were only two-thirds as atrophied as those who were not vaccinated. Finally, no detrimental side effects were recorded during the eight months the scientists observed the mice.

There are 70 coronavirus vaccines in development globally, with three candidates already being tested in human trials, according to the World Health Organization, as drugmakers race to find a cure for the deadly pathogen. From a report: The furthest along in the clinical process is an experimental vaccine developed by Hong Kong-listed CanSino Biologics and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, which is in phase 2. The other two being tested in humans are treatments developed separately by U.S. drugmakers Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, according to a WHO document. Progress is occurring at unprecedented speed in developing vaccines as the infectious pathogen looks unlikely to be stamped out through containment measures alone. The drug industry is hoping to compress the time it takes to get a vaccine to market -- usually about 10 to 15 years -- to within the next year.

The UK public will soon be able to find out if they may have been in the vicinity of people unwell with coronavirus via a new contact-tracing app, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has said. From a report: At No 10's daily press conference on Sunday, Hancock said the NHS app would allow people to report their symptoms, and then the app would anonymously alert other app users that had been in contact with that person in recent days. The Guardian reported last week that the app, developed by NHSX -- the health service's digital transformation arm -- with academic and industry partners, is in the advanced stages of evaluation and is weeks away from being ready to be deployed. About 60% of the adult population would need to sign up and engage with the app by registering their symptoms or positive test results for it to be effective. Their proximity to other users would be logged, and they would follow advice given in alerts to self-isolate -- even in cases where they were not aware of having been in contact with someone infected.

A team in Colombia is to test a ventilator made with a Raspberry Pi computer and easy-to-source parts. From a report: The design and computer code were posted online in March by a man in California, who had no prior experience at creating medical equipment. Marco Mascorro, a robotics engineer, said he built the ventilator because knew the machines were in high demand to treat Covid-19. His post prompted a flood of feedback from healthcare workers. He has used the advice to make improvements. "I am a true believer that technology can solve a lot of the problems we have right now specifically in this pandemic," he told the BBC. The Colombian team said the design was important for their South American country because parts for traditional models could be hard to obtain. By contrast, Mr Mascorro's design uses only easy-to-find parts -- for example, the valves it employs can commonly be found at car and plumbing supply stores. The machine is set to be put through a fast-tracked round of tests at two institutions in Bogota -- the University Hospital of the Pontifical Xavierian University and Los Andes University.

Yahoo News shares an encouraging report from former Newsweek correspondent Andrew Romano: Until very recently, nationwide data about how many COVID-19 patients are currently receiving treatment in hospitals was hard to come by. It's still incomplete and inconsistent. But on April 7, researchers at the University of Minnesota launched the U.S. COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which is just what it sounds like: the first effort to capture, track, visualize and compare daily data on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the 37 state departments of health that are reporting this information (so far).

The reason this information is so valuable is simple. Because hospitalization typically occurs a week or so after infection, it's less of a lagging indicator than the death count (which trails by two to two and a half weeks) and more directly tied to the trajectory of the epidemic than the testing-dependent case count. It's also a measure of the most pressing public health concern of all: how close we are to exceeding the capacity of our hospital system, which can make COVID-19 much deadlier than it would otherwise be.

Which brings us to New York and California. Chart each state's hospitalization data over the last seven days or so, and two different narratives emerge. Both are encouraging...

On Wednesday, New York's daily death count hit an all-time high: 799. But that reflects infections from weeks ago, before the state's lockdown started. The number of people testing positive stayed relatively flat. Meanwhile, there were fewer new hospitalizations — just 200 — than on any day since March 18. It wasn't a blip. The amount of new daily hospitalizations has been declining since last Thursday: from 1,427 on April 2 to 1,095 on April 3 to 656 on April 6 to 200 on April 8. (There are some questions about inconsistencies between the data from New York state and New York City, but the trend line is the same.) Previously, the total current number of coronavirus patients in New York hospitals had been increasing by at least 20 percent a day for weeks. Now the overall number of hospitalizations is barely increasing at all...

The good news in New York is that the state might be peaking now. The good news in California is that the state might not peak for a long time — but its path to that peak will be so incremental, its curve so flat, that coronavirus patients will never come close to overwhelming the hospital system.
The numbers do look encouraging. (Click on the "Currently Hospitalized" rectangle and then select each state's two-letter abbreviation from the dropdown menu.) In fact, the San Francisco Bay Area recorded its fourth day of declining ICU patients on Saturday. "Home-sheltering efforts may well be paying off, at least according to the number of hospitalizations and patients in ICU," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup.

And SFGate noted Friday that the statewide hospitalization figures "have also been relatively flat in recent days, with Governor Gavin Newsom expressing guarded optimism after the number of individuals in intensive care units decreased Thursday."

This week the Washington Post asked their "business of health care" reporter to explain the true status in the scientific community of hydroxychloroquine, an already-approved malaria drug also used to control inflammation in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients.

"There is no clear evidence that the drugs work against the coronavirus," he writes, "despite their use by hospitals and doctors in the United States and other countries since the outbreak began." Their antiviral properties have been proved in test tubes, but rigorous clinical trials to test their effectiveness in humans have not been completed. Limited studies on coronavirus patients have been published by researchers in France and China, but their extremely small size and other problems prevented them from being statistically significant. The French study included a combination of hydroxychloroquine with the antibiotic azithromycin that showed benefit in six patients... Another study in 11 patients in France showed no evidence the regimen works. A Chinese study also showed no benefit over the standard course of treatment.

Mainstream scientists caution against using the drugs without more evidence they are effective... The dangerous side effects of the drugs are much better known. Most seriously, the drugs can trigger arrhythmia, which can lead to a fatal heart attack in patients with cardiovascular disease or who are taking certain drugs, including anti-depression medications. Doctors recommend screening with an electrocardiogram to prevent the drug from being given to the 1 percent of patients at the greatest risk of a cardiac event. The drugs also can cause vision loss called retinopathy with long-term use, and chloroquine has been associated with psychosis...

As the coronavirus has spread from China across the world and to the United States, the dire reality is that there is no vaccine and no approved drug available to treat the serious respiratory symptoms that are claiming thousand of lives.
Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool shares doubts raised about that small French study, as even its publisher now acknowledges it "does not meet" their own expected standards.

The Post does note that multiple trials are "ongoing" (though six different research centers testing the drug told CNN it would be "months" before results were known). But the Post adds that already "public and political interest has caused runs, hoarding and severe shortages in recent weeks."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: U.S. deaths due to the coronavirus surpassed 20,000 on Saturday, the highest reported number in the world, according to a Reuters tally, although there are signs the pandemic might be nearing a peak. Italy has the second most reported deaths at 19,468 and Spain is in third place with 16,353.

The United States has five times the population of Italy and nearly seven times the population of Spain.

The United States has seen its highest death tolls to date in the epidemic with roughly 2,000 deaths a day reported for the last four days in a row.
While America has 4.3% of the world's population, it appears to have nearly 20% of the world's 100,000 confirmed fatalities from COVID-19. [Update: This comparison might be skewed by countries underreporting their fatalities.] Long-time blogger Jason Kottke notes the virus is now causing more deaths per day in the U.S. than any other cause, including heart disease and cancer.

But earlier this week Kottke also shared graphs from six different countries visualizing positive new statistics from the Imperial College team suggesting social distancing has worked in 11 European countries they analyzed.

"We estimate that interventions across all 11 countries will have averted 59,000 deaths up to 31 March," the researchers write, adding "Many more deaths will be averted through ensuring that interventions remain in place until transmission drops to low levels."