The new rules will apply from 24 July and those failing to comply will face a fine of up to £100.

• Viruses are everywhere, but most do not harm humans
• Conditions have to be just right for viruses to ‘leap’ from an animal to a human
• Human behaviour, like modern travel, makes it easier for viruses to spread 

Factors smaller than a cell and as large as the planet are at play when a virus leaps from an animal to a human.

The question of how that happened with SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease Covid-19, is crucial for several reasons, said best-selling author and science journalist David Quammen. The answer could help scientists find a vaccine to end this pandemic. It could uncover ways to prevent the next.

And prevention, he and other experts say, will involve making people everywhere understand their own role, even if they live far from the places where the viruses emerge. As Quammen put it: “All the eating and buying and consuming and reproducing that we’re doing are pulling dangerous viruses closer to us.” Which means everyone has a chance to be part of the solution.

Viruses are everywhere

You could write a book about the myriad ways animals, humans and viruses interact. Quammen did. “Spillover,” released in 2012, warned about a pandemic unfolding almost exactly as Covid-19 has.

Not all human viruses come from animals. But several of the most infamous, including West Nile and HIV, did. Even so, it takes a lot for a virus to make such a leap, said Raina Plowright, an associate professor of epidemiology at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Viruses are everywhere, she said. Take a walk, and you might inhale them from plants, soil, birds, even pets. Most do no harm. They’re killed by the mucus in our respiratory tract, or the acid in our stomach, or they can’t bind to our cells to reproduce.

Plowright describes these many barriers as a series of walls stacked like Swiss cheese: All the holes have to line up precisely for something to get through.

Animals that harbour a virus are called reservoir hosts. They serve as a kind of viral warehouse. Sometimes, a virus might hitch a ride on what’s known as a vector, often an insect, to get from host to human. Mosquitos that spread West Nile virus from birds to people are an example.

Often, a spillover, or zoonotic, virus gets help from a middleman species, called an amplifier.

Billions of potential hosts

New influenzas, for example, often start in wild waterfowl. They might first spill into domestic birds – poultry, chickens and ducks, which might share a farm with pigs. Pigs can harbour human influenza and serve, as Quammen put it, as a place for viral genes to “mix and match”.

If that mixing causes a mutation that gives a virus an easy way to be transmitted from animal to human and to leap between people, that virus suddenly has billions of potential hosts around the world, he said. “That’s a virus that’s won the evolutionary sweepstakes.”

SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have originated in bats. Its genetic fingerprint suggests it evolved similarly to a virus that Chinese researchers warned about in 2017.

Bats, which have been reservoir hosts for several lethal viruses in recent decades, are an area of expertise for Plowright. She makes an appearance in Quammen’s book for her work on the Hendra virus, which has killed horses and humans in Australia.

Bats have some amazing adaptations that let them host viruses without harm, she said. But those viruses often need an amplifier to get into humans. That connection might happen when a bat harbouring a communicable virus is kept near other animals at a crowded wildlife market. It’s not clear if that’s what happened with SARS-CoV-2, she said.

Modern travel good for viruses

But such interactions don’t need to be exotic. With the Hendra virus, for instance, horses picked it up from grass beneath trees where bats fed, then spread it to human caretakers.

Closeness is crucial. “If you have a bat shedding a pathogen in the middle of a forest with no humans, then it’s of no risk,” Plowright said. But if that bat sheds the virus in a town or market, it is.

And here’s how humans help with that: “We’re rapidly changing our environments and rapidly changing our contacts with bats,” she said.

Development brings humans closer to bats and robs them of food. A stressed, hungry bat is more susceptible to viruses, she said. It’s also likely to go searching near people for something to eat.

Modern travel is another way humans make life easier on viruses, said Quammen, who’s working on a book about Covid-19. A bat-filled cave in rural China is only a plane ride away from Los Angeles or London. As one expert told him, “A disease anywhere is a disease everywhere.”

‘A roll of the dice’

You also can find risk factors in your own pocket, he said. Your cellphone needs a mineral called coltan that’s mined mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The miners who work there need to eat, but their only protein might come from hunting bushmeat – such as monkeys, rodents and bats. “Bingo,” said Quammen. “You’ve got contact between humans and wild animals.”

Plowright agrees people need to think about such connections if they want to be a part of stopping the next pandemic.

Each human encounter with a wild animal, and each time we plunge into their space, is a roll of the dice on whether we might stir up a dangerous virus.

“We’re rolling the dice thousands of times every second now,” Plowright said.

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• Flavoured cigarettes appeal to youths and young adults
• An analysis found that a ban on menthol cigarettes may make smokers either quit or switch to e-cigarettes
• The study concluded that a menthol cigarette ban is an important opportunity to improve public health

Want to make smoking less attractive to young people? Try taking menthol cigarettes off the market, a new analysis suggests.

The US Food and Drug Administration banned flavours in cigarettes in 2009 because flavours appeal to youth and young adults, and the agency recently announced that it also intends to ban menthol in cigarettes.

To assess what effect a ban on menthol cigarettes would have, Georgetown University researchers reviewed 24 studies on the impacts of restrictions on flavours in cigarettes.

Six of the studies examined menthol bans implemented across Canada, 12 assessed the potential effects of hypothetical menthol bans in Canada, the United States and Europe, and six looked at prior bans of non-menthol flavours in cigarettes in Canada and the United States.

E-cigarette alternatives

Based on their review, the researchers concluded that 11%–45% of current US menthol smokers might quit smoking in response to a menthol cigarette ban, while 15%–30% of menthol smokers might switch to e-cigarettes.

Menthol smokers quitting or switching to e-cigarettes are more likely to be young adults, and a menthol cigarette ban may reduce the number of youth who start smoking by 6%, according to the researchers.

They also found that while overall compliance with the menthol ban in Canada was high, studies into non-menthol flavour bans in the United States found that some retailers continued to sell banned products.

The review was published on 8 July in the journal BMC Public Health.

“Further research is needed to determine the potential influence of e-cigarette alternatives and their availability to consumers, and should consider the effects of menthol cigarette bans that have already been implemented in local areas of the US,” study lead author and Georgetown professor David Levy said in a journal news release.

“Nevertheless, the evidence to date indicates that a menthol cigarette ban, especially if implemented nationally with high compliance, provides an important opportunity to improve public health by reducing smoking-attributable diseases,” Levy said.

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The governor has rolled back reopening plans across the state as virus cases soar.

Modelling suggests there could be a deadly second peak, killing more than 100,000 people in the UK.

• In a great turnaround, New York City is removing restrictions that have shut down public life

• A British study found that physical distancing measures have saved millions of lives worldwide 

• The close physical proximity during the protests against police brutality across America may, however, have led to a new wave of coronavirus transmissions  

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New York City finally reopened its economy on Monday after being the epicentre of the US coronavirus pandemic for months, and a new study shows that stay-at-home orders may have been worth it, preventing nearly 60 million US infections.

The research, published in Nature medical journal, examined how different physical distancing policies and measures might have limited the spread of Covid-19, the Washington Post reported.

A second study, from epidemiologists at Imperial College London and also published in Nature, found the shutdowns saved approximately 3.1 million lives in 11 European countries and dropped infection rates there by an average of 82%.

In the first study, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley examined six countries – China, the United States, France, Italy, Iran and South Korea – and estimated how more than 1 700 different interventions, such as stay-at-home orders, business closings and travel bans, altered the spread of the virus.

School closures ineffective

The report concluded that those six countries collectively managed to avert 62 million test-confirmed infections, which the researchers estimated would correspond to roughly 530 million total infections, the newspaper said.

Surprisingly, school closures had no significant effect, although the authors said the issue requires further study, the Post reported.

Meanwhile, New York City began to ease restrictions that had shut down schools, businesses and much of city life in March and April, the Associated Press reported.

“You want to talk about a turnaround, this one, my friends, is going to go in the history books,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Saturday.

Even as all states have now reopened, public health officials have raised concern about future coronavirus spread following days of police brutality protests across the country. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday it was closely monitoring the demonstrations and warned such gatherings could spur coronavirus transmission, CNN reported. Some states are already seeing upward trends in new cases.

The protests make it hard to follow physical distancing guidelines and “may put others at risk”, CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said in a statement, CNN reported.

“It is too early to know what, if any, effect these events will have on the federal Covid-19 response. Every local situation is different. State and local officials will make decisions to protect public health and safety based on circumstances on the ground,” she added.

Some good news on the economic front

On Friday, new federal data offered signs of hope on the economic front, as jobless numbers actually fell – from 14.7% in April to 13.3% in May.

The economy, hit hard by stay-at-home orders and shuttered businesses tied to the coronavirus crisis, ended up adding 2.5 million jobs in May, as some Americans warily crept back to work, The New York Times reported.

It was very welcome news: According to the Times, the unemployment rate in April was the highest seen since the federal government began keeping record after World War II.

Many economists expect that unemployment numbers will slow further as states reopen and more employees return to work.

However, none of the good economic news has stopped the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19.

By Monday, the US coronavirus case count had topped 1.9 million and the death toll passed 110 000. And a new review shows that crowded protests against police brutality have occurred in every one of the 25 US communities with the highest concentrations of new Covid-19 cases.

Jail increases risk of spread

The AP analysis also found that some cities – Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles among them – have witnessed protests on multiple days. In some communities, such as Minneapolis where the protests started, the number of people hospitalised with Covid-19 has also been rising, the news agency added.

The close proximity of protesters and their failure in many cases to wear masks, along with police using tear gas, could fuel new transmissions.

Tear gas can cause people to cough and sneeze, as can the smoke from fires set in some instances, the AP said. Both factors can also prompt protesters to remove their masks.

Putting arrested protesters into jail cells can also increase the risk of spread, the AP reported.

Remdesivir in short supply

But the US government’s supply of remdesivir, the only drug known to work against Covid-19, will run out at the end of the month, Dr Robert Kadlec, a US Department of Health and Human Services official, told CNN.

The government’s last shipment of the drug will go out the week of 29 June. Gilead Sciences, the company that makes remdesivir, is ramping up to make more, but it’s unclear how much will be available this summer.

“Right now, we’re waiting to hear from Gilead what is their expected delivery availability of the drug as we go from June to July,” Kadlec said. “We’re kind of not in negotiations, but in discussions with Gilead as they project what the availability of their product will be.”

The government has been working to help Gilead “with some of their supply chain challenges in terms of raw materials and being able to accelerate the process”, said Kadlec, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response.

He added that it’s clear that “whatever the supply may be, there may not be enough for everyone who may need it”.

Meanwhile, the search for an effective vaccine goes on. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in late May that it would provide up to $1.2 billion to the drug company AstraZeneca to develop a potential coronavirus vaccine from Oxford University, in England.

A note of optimism

The fourth, and largest, vaccine research agreement funds a clinical trial of the potential vaccine in the United States this summer with about 30 000 volunteers, the Times reported.

The goal? To make at least 300 million doses that could be available as early as October, the HHS said in a statement.

The United States has already agreed to provide up to $483 million to the biotech company Moderna and $500 million to Johnson & Johnson for their vaccine efforts. It is also providing $30 million to a virus vaccine effort led by the French company Sanofi, the Times reported.

Last week, Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, sounded a note of optimism about a future vaccine for coronavirus.

He told the American Medical Association that 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine will be available by year’s end, CNN reported.

“Then, by the beginning of 2021, we hope to have a couple hundred million doses,” Fauci added.

It’s still not clear which vaccine will be effective, but “I’m cautiously optimistic that with the multiple candidates we have with different platforms, that we are going to have a vaccine that will make it deployable,” Fauci said.

According to a Times tally, the top five states in coronavirus cases as of Monday are: New York with nearly 383 000; New Jersey with over 164 000; California with nearly 132 000, Illinois with over 128 000 and Massachusetts with over 103 400.

Nations grapple with pandemic

Elsewhere n the world, the situation remains challenging. On Monday, the United Kingdom’s coronavirus death count passed 40 600, the second-highest in the world, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally. Britain has now surpassed Italy, Spain and France for Covid-19 deaths in Europe. With Prime Minister Boris Johnson easing lockdown measures, schools across England have reopened amid fierce debate over whether the move is premature, the Post reported.

Brazil has become a hotspot in the coronavirus pandemic. By Monday, the South American country had reported over 36 400 deaths and over 691 700 confirmed infections, according to the Hopkins tally. Trump has issued a ban on all foreign travellers from Brazil because of the burgeoning number of Covid-19 cases in that country, CNN reported.

President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has stopped publishing a running total of coronavirus deaths and infections, the AP reported. Critics called the move, which came after official numbers showed Brazil had the third-highest number of deaths and the second-highest number of cases in the world, an attempt to hide the true toll of the disease.

Cases are also spiking wildly in Russia: As of Monday, that country reported the world’s third-highest number of Covid-19 cases, at over 476 000, the Hopkins tally showed.

One country had good news to report on Monday: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she’s confident her country has halted the spread of the coronavirus after the last known infected person in the country recovered, the AP reported. It has been 17 days since the last new case was reported in New Zealand.

Worldwide, the number of reported infections passed seven million on Monday, with more than 403 000 deaths, according to the Hopkins tally.

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“Targeted action” means outbreaks are being swiftly dealt with, the health secretary says.

Llamas’ specially evolved small antibodies are the basis for a coronavirus treatment breakthrough.

• Multipurpose contact lenses may soon be a reality
• Apart from correcting your vision, such lenses would be able to measure your blood glucose and deliver medication 
• It is, however, a challenge to measure glucose levels without using blood

Contact lenses may someday do more than correct poor vision, with new, preliminary research in animals suggesting they could also monitor your diabetes and deliver medications.

The new lenses were designed to check blood sugar levels and to deliver drugs to the eye, possibly for the eye disease related to diabetes called diabetic retinopathy. After trying them out on rabbits, scientists found the new lenses worked on both counts.

It may sound like science fiction, but the researchers noted there is already a contact lens that’s been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for measuring the pressure in the eye when worn overnight. Levels of eye pressure are important to know for people with the eye disease glaucoma.

Ultrathin electrical circuits

“Among various wearable devices, a smart contact lens is especially promising for health care applications because it can be used as an excellent interface between the human body and an electronic device,” said senior study author Sei Kwang Hahn. He’s a professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, and a visiting professor at Stanford University in California.

Hahn said this is the first study to show a combination of blood sugar sensing and drug delivery technology in a contact lens. However, what works well in animals doesn’t always work well in humans.

The smart contact lens contains ultrathin, flexible electrical circuits and a microcontroller chip. It’s currently about 0.2 millimeters (mm) thick, and Hahn said the researchers hope to reduce that to 0.15 mm. Hahn said the current lens is already thinner than the FDA-approved lenses that measure eye pressure.

Dr John Hovanesian, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, said the lens would likely be comfortable enough for people to wear, but it is significantly thicker than a standard contact lens.

Chemicals on the contact lens bind with glucose and trigger an electrical current change that is proportional to the amount of glucose. The electric current is also used to dissolve gold membranes that seal drug reservoirs, triggering the release of a dose of the drug, Hahn explained.

Lots of exciting possibilities

“This study is ambitious and bold. They’re trying a moonshot. But, I would be cautious in my expectations,” Hovanesian said.

“One of the biggest challenges to monitoring glucose in the eye with contacts is that you have to be cautious about the use of contact lenses in people with diabetes because infections and injuries can become more serious,” he noted.

Still, he added, “there are a lot of exciting possibilities with this.”

One big possibility is the potential to deliver drugs that are commonly used to treat diabetic retinopathy via the contact lens. Those drugs are currently delivered via injections to the eye.

In this study, the researchers used a drug called genistein, which isn’t approved by the FDA in the United States.

No need to draw blood

Sanjoy Dutta, vice president of research at JDRF (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), said, “They’ve done good preliminary preclinical work. Looking forward, we need to know how accurate tear glucose is compared to blood glucose. And, the Achilles’ heel may be in connecting the two components (glucose sensing and drug delivery).”

Dutta said that there are a number of research projects looking at ways to measure glucose levels without having to draw blood or wear a continuous glucose monitor. Some other options that have been tried or are being tried are monitoring through sweat, tears, saliva and infrared light.

“Any non-blood-based glucose monitoring is very challenging,” Dutta noted.

Hahn and his team are hoping to begin human clinical trials in 2021. If those go well, their hope is to have a commercial product as soon as 2023.

The findings were published on 24 April in the journal Science Advances.

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• During the lockdown, many of us picked up unhealthy habits and gained weight
• Making changes to our lifestyles can help us drop the excess weight
• We can start by getting more exercise and making healthier food choices 

Life in lockdown has led many to overeat and gain weight, a phenomenon referred to as the “Covid-15”.

But some small changes can get you back into shape, a weight management specialist suggests.

“Covid-19 changed how we eat, what we eat and how we spend our day,” said Dr Peter Jian, an assistant professor of family and community medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

“Unfortunately, for some of us that meant less healthy choices,” Jian added in a Baylor news release.

Jian offered these tips for working off the excess pounds and returning to a healthy lifestyle:

• Learn how to cook. Or start other new hobbies to keep active. “Use this time as an opportunity to focus on the things that we can do in order to improve our health,” Jian said.
• Stay physically active. If you’re afraid to go to the gym, try biking, hiking and walking outside. You can also join an online fitness programme.
• Eat a healthy diet. Buy nutritious foods with curbside pickup or delivery. If you shop in person, choose foods placed at the front and side aisles, where the fresh and organic produce is available. Avoid prepackaged and processed foods.
• To lose weight, start small. Gradually introduce new eating and exercise habits. This makes changes easier to adjust to.
• Stay clear of fad diets. Many of these programmes aren’t backed by science and could be harmful. If you have difficulty losing weight, see your doctor.

“It’s a very challenging time. But I think the best we can do is focus on the positives and focus on the things that we can control, and the things that we can do to positively influence our own health,” Jian said.

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