Tag Archives: Coronavirus

Immune system can cause broad damage in COVID-19; dogs can detect coronavirus in people

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Immune system can self-attack broadly in COVID-19

Antibodies are supposed to attack invading germs, but severely ill COVID-19 patients have so-called autoantibodies that mistakenly attack not just their own tissues and organs but even virus-fighting proteins produced by the immune system, new research shows. Scientists studied 194 COVID-19 patients, including 55 with severe disease, plus a control group of 30 people without the virus. In the sickest patients, they found a high frequency of autoantibodies created by the immune system causing injury to the central nervous system, blood vessels, and connective tissues like cartilage, ligaments and tendons. They also found a high prevalence of autoantibodies that interfere with substances involved in the functioning of the immune system itself, including cytokines and other “immunomodulatory” proteins. “The surprising extent of autoantibody reactivities” in these patients indicates that these mistakenly targeted antibodies are “an intrinsic aspect” of COVID-19. The report was posted on medRxiv on Saturday ahead of peer review.

Dogs can sniff out COVID-19

Trained dogs can identify people with COVID-19, even those with no symptoms, according to researchers. In the preliminary study published on Thursday in PLoS One, dogs who sniffed swab samples of armpit sweat could tell which samples came from COVID-19 patients and which were from people who tested negative for the new coronavirus. That study was conducted in March. More recently, the researchers have validated the findings in additional trials, said study leader Dominique Grandjean of Alfort Veterinary School in France. Dogs can identify infected individuals with 85% to 100% accuracy and rule out infection with 92% to 99% accuracy, Grandjean said. “It takes one tenth of a second for a trained dog to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” he said. Training requires 3 to 8 weeks depending on whether the dog is already trained for odor detection. COVID-19-detecting dogs have already been deployed in airports in the United Arab Emirates, Grandjean said. On Wednesday, the UAE and the International K9 Working Group Against COVID-19 will host a virtual workshop on the use of these trained dogs, with 25 countries expected to participate, according to the organizers.

COVID-19 not linked with Guillain-Barré syndrome

COVID-19 is not associated with the potentially paralyzing disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a large UK study shows. In GBS, the immune system mistakenly attacks nerves in the feet, hands and limbs. Smaller studies have suggested a link between COVID-19 and GBS. But when researchers compared the number of GBS cases recorded in the UK’s National Health Service database in 2016 to 2019 to the number recorded in the first half of 2020, they found the annual incidence was 40% to 50% lower during the pandemic. “No causal link of COVID-19 to GBS can be made,” Stephen Keddie of University College London said in a statement. His team reported on Monday in the journal Brain that they also looked for – but could not find – any genetic or protein structure in the new coronavirus that might trigger an immune response causing GBS, which is good news for vaccine development. “Most COVID-19 vaccinations are based on the (coronavirus’) spike protein, which drives a complex immune response creating antibodies to fight infection,” Keddie said. Since researchers found nothing in the virus that is known to drive GBS, “concerns that COVID vaccination might cause GBS in any significant numbers are therefore almost certainly unfounded,” he said.

Antibiotic azithromycin fails to help in severe COVID-19

The antibiotic azithromycin failed to help seriously ill adults infected with the new coronavirus, according to results from a clinical trial. Based on the result, the only COVID-19 patients who should get the antibiotic are those who also have bacterial infections, the study leaders said. The trial, conducted at 176 hospitals across the UK, involved more than 9,000 patients and tested multiple drugs to see if any would be more effective than standard hospital care in treating COVID-19. According to preliminary data published on Monday on medRxiv ahead of peer review, patients who were randomly assigned to receive azithromycin did no better than patients who got standard care in terms of deaths, duration of hospitalization, or need for mechanical ventilation. “More than 75% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are prescribed antibiotics,” the researchers point out. “Although we detected no harm to individual patients treated with azithromycin, there is a risk of harm at a societal level from widespread use of antimicrobial agents,” researchers said. The widespread use of antibiotics in COVID-19 patients “in general must be questioned,” they concluded.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

U.S. crosses 300,000 COVID-19 deaths as vaccine rollout begins

By Anurag Maan

(Reuters) – The number of coronavirus deaths in the United States crossed 300,000 on Monday, according to Reuters tally, as the hardest hit nation rolled out its first vaccine inoculations on Monday.

The staggering death toll comes as the nation begins a historic inoculation campaign using a vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE. Moderna Inc’s vaccine could get approval as soon as this week.

The vaccine comes as COVID-19 cases explode across the nation and hospital intensive care units run out of beds. Daily coronavirus cases and deaths have set records multiple times since Thanksgiving holidays with daily fatalities topping 3,000 for the second time last week on Friday, the same day the vaccine got approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

It took 27 days to go from 250,000 total U.S. COVID-19 deaths to 300,000 – the fastest 50,000-death jump since the pandemic began. Some models project that deaths could reach 500,000 before vaccines become widely available in the spring and summer.

In recent weeks, South Dakota and North Dakota have led the nation in deaths per capita. Overall, New Jersey and New York, early epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, lead the nation in per capita deaths.

The United States recently crossed 16 million confirmed cases – the most in the world.

According to Reuters analysis, the United States is reporting 91 deaths per 100,000 people, seventh worst in the world on a per capita basis and 2.5 times the rate in Canada.

The nation’s hospitals are flooding with COVID-19 patients, threatening to overwhelm healthcare systems and providers. There are over 108,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, the highest since the first coronavirus case was detected in the country in January.

(Reporting by Anurag Maan in Bengaluru and Lisa Shumaker in Chicago; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Drug combination improves COVID-19 pneumonia outcomes; five genes linked to severe disease

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) -The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Two-drug combo improves COVID-19 pneumonia outcomes

For hospitalized COVID-19 patients with pneumonia, treatment with Gildead Sciences Inc’s antiviral remdesivir and the Eli Lilly and Co arthritis drug baricitinib was more effective than remdesivir alone, according to a clinical trial published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Overall, the 515 patients who received baricitinib – sold under the brand name Olumiant – along with remdesivir recovered in an average of seven days, compared to eight days for the 518 who got remdesivir alone. People treated with both drugs also had fewer serious adverse events, plus 30% higher odds of showing improved health status after two weeks. They also had a lower risk of death within four weeks of starting treatment – 5.1% versus 7.8% with just remdesivir. The effect was most pronounced among patients who needed high amounts of extra oxygen but were not sick enough to require ventilators to breathe for them. In this group, the average time to recovery was 10 days with the two-drug treatment compared to 18 days with remdesivir alone. The study authors note that baricitinib, a pill, is a generally safe drug that does not interact with other medications.

Five genes linked with severe COVID-19

Scientists have linked the most severe form of COVID-19 with five genes that affect lung inflammation and the body’s ability to fight off viruses. Their findings, from a study of 2,700 COVID-19 patients in intensive care units across Britain, point to several existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat people who risk becoming critically ill. The genes – called IFNAR2, TYK2, OAS1, DPP9 and CCR2 – partially explain why some people become desperately sick with COVID-19, while others are not affected, said Kenneth Baillie of Edinburgh University, coauthor of the study published on Friday in Nature. The new information should help scientists design clinical trials of medicines that target specific antiviral and anti-inflammatory pathways. Among those with the most potential, Baillie said, should be a class of anti-inflammatory drugs called JAK inhibitors, including Eli Lilly’s arthritis drug baricitinib, which has been found to help hospitalized pneumonia patients in combination with Gilead’s remdesivir.

Online tool estimates COVID-19 mortality risk

A new online tool helps to estimate individuals’ risk of dying from COVID-19 depending on where they live in the United States, which could provide useful information on which individuals should be prioritized for early vaccinations. The calculator, developed by Johns Hopkins University researchers, incorporates a variety of factors, including age, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic conditions, underlying medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes or cancer, and local pandemic intensity to produce estimates of adults’ COVID-19 mortality risk. Currently, it does not incorporate information on occupation, such as whether individuals are frontline workers, which may increase risk, said Nilanjan Chatterjee, whose team developed the calculator. The researchers reported on Friday in Nature Medicine that they found large variations in risk across U.S. cities and counties. “This information may be helpful for local policy makers to understand the need for vaccine allocations for local communities,” Chatterjee said.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Kate Kelland; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

U.S. extends restrictions at Mexico, Canada borders through Jan. 21

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. land borders with Canada and Mexico will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least Jan. 21 with coronavirus cases spiking to record numbers across the country, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Friday.

Canada has shown little interest in lifting the restrictions as the virus runs rampant across the United States. U.S. officials had previously sought some revisions especially for restrictions impacting residents along the Canadian border.

The United States recorded more than 200,000 COVID-19 cases per day for four straight days, according to a Reuters tally of official data. The U.S. also reported a record 3,253 deaths on Wednesday.

The United States has reported about 15.6 million cases and 292,642 deaths since the start of the pandemic. By contrast, Canada has had about 442,000 confirmed cases with just over 13,100 deaths.

Statistics Canada said in October that August visits to Canada by car by U.S. travelers were down 95.7%, and the number of U.S. travelers to Canada by plane fell by 97.9%.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been considering lifting restrictions that ban most non-U.S. travelers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil, and the 26 countries in the so-called Schengen border-free area of Europe.

Reuters first reported on Nov. 25 the White House was considering rescinding the European and Brazilian entry bans.

The plan won the backing of White House coronavirus task-force members, public health and other federal agencies.

Trump may still opt not to lift the restrictions, given the high number of coronavirus infections in Europe. One potential hurdle is the fact that European countries are not likely to immediately allow most Americans to resume visits, officials said.

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Bill Berkrot)

‘The country needs me:’ cleaner in Chicago’s COVID wards proud to fight pandemic

By Shannon Stapleton and Ana Isabel Martinez

CHICAGO (Reuters) – When hospital cleaner Evelia De La Cruz was assigned to the COVID-19 ward in March, she was afraid.

A 60-year-old immigrant from the southern coast of Mexico, De La Cruz was tasked with stripping sheets and sanitizing beds as first a handful, and then a deluge, of coronavirus patients brought infection to her Chicago hospital.

“I prayed for God to give me the courage,” she said.

Some of De La Cruz’s colleagues refused to work the COVID-19 wards, she said, leaving the hospital understaffed. She has been laboring seven days a week, at times for weeks on end.

“Every day I went to work, even on my days off, because I know that the patients need me, the hospital and the country needs me,” she said.

Throughout the northern hemisphere spring, as the coronavirus ravaged through international cities, residents of Rome, Madrid, New York City and beyond took to their balconies to applaud frontline medical workers who, often overlooked in non-pandemic years, had become symbols of sacrifice in terrifying times.

Ten months and over a million and a half global deaths later, nurses and doctors continue to risk their lives every day as they report to the hospitals.

Yet, their ability to work has relied on a less visible category of frontline staff: cleaners and janitors like De La Cruz.

These workers also risk infection and death but receive far fewer accolades.

In the United States, many are immigrants from Latin America, a population already hard-hit by the pandemic.

Since the outbreak began, the only time De La Cruz took more than the occasional day off was in July, when she herself was infected with the virus.

After a month-long recovery, she returned to disinfecting the coronavirus-contaminated areas of the hospital.

She keeps a vase filled with fresh flowers in her home, where she prays for the health of her family and for an end to the pandemic.

“I’m proud to serve the sick and this country,” said De La Cruz, who has lived in the United States for three decades.

Her neighbors sometimes stop to thank her, she said.

“‘You’re so brave,’ they tell me,” she said.

(Reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez in Mexico City and Shannon Stapleton in Chicago, writing by Laura Gottesdiener, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

One year on, Wuhan market at epicentre of virus outbreak remains barricaded and empty

By Cate Cadell

WUHAN, China (Reuters) – For over six years, 38-year-old Wuhan restaurant owner Lai Yun started most days the same way – with a trip to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, just ten minutes walk from his house.

“I’d send the kids to school, have breakfast and then walk over to the market. It was very convenient,” he said.

That changed on Dec. 31, 2019, after four cases of a mystery pneumonia were linked to the market and it was shuttered overnight. By the end of the month, the city had begun a grueling 76-day lockdown that came with just hours notice and barred people from leaving their homes.

Almost a year since the outbreak began, COVID-19 has claimed more than 1.5 million lives, and the Wuhan wet market where it was initially detected stands empty even as the city around it has come back to life.

It’s become a symbol of the fierce political and scientific battle raging around the origin of the virus with Beijing continuing to spar with the United States and other countries, accusing them of bias.

A team of World Health Organization experts has yet to visit Wuhan, let alone the market. Health authorities in China and abroad have warned that origin tracing efforts could take years and yield inconclusive results.

In Wuhan, where the stigma of being the first coronavirus epicenter hangs heavy, over a dozen residents and business owners told Reuters they don’t believe the virus began in the city.

“It certainly couldn’t have been Wuhan… surely another person brought it in. Or surely it came from some other product brought from outside. There were just certain conditions for it to appear here,” said a wet market vendor in the city’s center who gave his name as Chen.

In recent months, Chinese diplomats and state media have said they believe the market is not the origin but the victim of the disease, and have thrown support behind theories that the virus potentially originated in another country.

RESTRICTED ACCESS

Experts say the market still plays a role in the investigation and is therefore unlikely to be demolished, though much of that research will rely on samples taken immediately after the outbreak began.

“The first cluster of cases was there, so at least it would be of interest to find out the origin of those and put forward a few hypotheses, like whether it’s more likely from the wild animals or perhaps points to a human super-spreader,” said Jin Dong-Yan, professor of virology at the University of Hong Kong.

Access to the area remains heavily restricted. People who visited before the lockdown remember a bustling building with hundreds of stalls divided into sections for red meat, seafood and vegetables.

Recently, the local government has added leafy green plants and traditional Chinese paintings to the semi-permanent blue barricades encircling the area. Inside, wooden boards line the stalls and windows.

On the second floor above the empty market, shops selling glasses and optometry equipment reopened in June.

This week, a guard at the entrance to the eyewear market took temperatures and warned journalists not to take videos or photos from inside the building.

“Maybe some people have some bad feelings about it, but now it’s just an empty building … who feels anxious about an empty building?” said a shop assistant selling contact lenses, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

While Wuhan hasn’t reported any new locally transmitted cases of COVID-19 since May, for some who relied on the market making ends meet is still a struggle.

Lai, who reopened his Japanese restaurant in June, says the market’s closure and subsequent public panic about the safety of imported seafood has increased the cost of procuring some ingredients five-fold.

“Our goal for the next year is to just survive.”

(Reporting by Cate Cadell; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Cabin fever: Singapore cruise passengers stuck in rooms after COVID-19 case

By Chen Lin and Yi Shu Ng

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – A Royal Caribbean “cruise-to-nowhere” from Singapore confined nearly 1,700 passengers to their cabins in port for more than 16 hours after a COVID-19 case was detected on board, before allowing some to disembark on Wednesday.

All passengers aboard the Quantum of the Seas vessel had cleared a mandatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for the virus up to three days before the four-day cruise began on Monday.

Authorities said close contacts of the COVID-19 patient among the 1,680 guests and 1,148 crew members on board had so far tested negative. The passengers were stuck in their rooms while contact tracing was being conducted.

“I feel relieved, it was obviously a very boring wait,” said Isaac Lung, a 16-year-old student, who had taken the cruise with his parents.

The coronavirus patient, an 83-year-old male, had reported to the ship’s medical center with diarrhea and a subsequent onboard test revealed the infection. He was taken to hospital on Wednesday after the ship returned to port.

Other guests were awoken with the news of the infection in the early hours.

“I was like: ‘there it goes, the worst fear has happened’,” said passenger Melvin Chew, a 31-year-old business development manager, who said he learned about the infected guest via an announcement on the ship’s tannoy around 3 a.m. (1900 GMT on Tuesday).

The Quantum of the Seas returned to Singapore at 8 a.m. local time, and a Reuters witness saw some passengers disembarking at about 8 p.m. All passengers will undergo mandatory COVID-19 testing before leaving the terminal.

The ship’s captain told passengers over the tannoy that the passenger disembarkation process would start around 7:30 p.m. and would take 3-4 hours. The crew will rest overnight and take PCR tests in the morning, he added.

“I am terribly sorry that the cruise ended a day early and ended this way,” the captain said in a recording heard by Reuters.

Royal Caribbean said in an emailed statement it was cancelling its upcoming trip on Thursday “in an overabundance of caution” and plans to resume sailing on Dec. 14.

‘REALITY CHECK’

The “cruise-to-nowhere” by Royal Caribbean is one of its first sailings since the company halted global operations in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The sailing in waters off Singapore is open only to Singapore residents and makes no stops.

The cruises are a part of Singapore’s plans to revive its tourism industry, which has been battered due to the novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 68 million people globally and killed 1,554,271​.

Singapore, which has reported just over 58,000 COVID-19 cases and 29 deaths, has been registering less than a handful of daily infections in recent weeks.

Part of the precautions for the resumption of cruises in Singapore involved pre-departure testing within 48 to 72 hours prior to boarding, and for guests to carry an electronic contact tracing device, wear masks and social distance at all times.

Infectious disease experts said there could be many reasons why the patient got through pre-departure screenings.

They said the PCR test may have been a false negative or failed to pick up fragments of an old virus, or the patient may have been incubating at the time or was infected between the test and boarding.

“It is a reality check that the current tests are not perfect,” said Paul Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

The infected case’s close contacts will be placed in quarantine or health surveillance, Singapore’s health ministry said in an advisory sent to passengers.

Others will need to monitor their health, while continuing regular activities including going to school or work, and undergo a swab test at the end of a 14-day monitoring period.

(Reporting by Chen Lin, Yi Shu Ng, Aradhana Aravindan, John Geddie and Nivedita Balu; Writing by John Geddie and Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Michael Perry, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Mark Heinrich and Shounak Dasgupta)

U.S. CDC reports 282,785 deaths from coronavirus

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday reported 14,823,129 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 186,215 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 1,532 to 282,785.

The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4 pm ET on Dec. 7 versus its previous report a day earlier.

The CDC figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

(Reporting by Trisha Roy in Bengaluru)

As pandemic lifelines expire, Americans in housing free fall

By Michelle Conlin

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Clarence Hamer doesn’t expect to hang on to his house much longer.

His downstairs tenant owes him nearly $50,000 in back rent on the four-bedroom duplex he owns in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Without those rental payments, Hamer has been unable to pay the thousands he owes in heat, hot water and property taxes. In September, after exhausting his life savings, he stopped paying the mortgage, too.

“I don’t have any corporate backing or any other type of insurance,” said Hamer, a 46-year-old landlord who works for the city of New York. “All I have is my home, and it seems apparent that I’m going to lose it.”

America’s mom-and-pop landlords, along with their tenants, have been dangling by a thread for nine months. Now, with Congress still deadlocked over the contours of a second pandemic stimulus package, they are entering a new housing abyss, a perilous period of pandemic limbo as the last of the safety nets are set to expire.

The day after Christmas, the extended unemployment benefits that have kept 12 million people and their families afloat are scheduled to expire. Then, mere days after that cliff, on New Year’s Day, a national ban on renter evictions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also set to lapse.

Overnight, an unprecedented bill of $70 billion in unpaid back rent and utilities will come due, according to estimates by Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi. In all, up to 40 million people could be threatened with eviction over the coming months, research from the Aspen Institute says.

Much of the focus has been on tenants. But Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the Kansas City Regional Housing Alliance, says more than 40% of the landlords surveyed in her coalition said that they expected to have to sell their units in the coming months due to rental income losses.

“They are sheltering our citizens free of charge and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Johnson-Cosby. “This is their retirement income.”

She added that small landlords are also terrified of speaking out for fear of drawing the ire of tenant rights groups who promote “Cancel Rent” and have bombarded landlords with publicity campaigns featuring their pictures and barricades at apartment buildings and local courthouses.

“What they don’t realize is that if they run us out and we fail, it will be private equity and Wall Street firms that buy up all our properties, just like they did with houses after the last foreclosure crash.”

PANDEMIC DEADLOCK

A $908 billion second stimulus relief package proposed by a bipartisan group of senators is gaining traction in Washington but it is unclear if President Donald Trump will support the plan, and it only includes $25 billion for rent relief—far from the $70 billion needed in January.

President-elect Joe Biden has indicated he will sign executive orders the day he takes office extending moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures as well as other relief measures.

But that will not address a brutal 20 days in January, between the safety net expirations and Biden’s inauguration, when the free fall will begin. And economists say this period of uncertainty has already contributed to economic scarring that could threaten the U.S. economic recovery, which is showing signs of slowing and veering back into recession.

Though Biden will likely be telegraphing his administration’s solutions in the coming weeks, “the reality on the ground is going to be very dark, with people losing homes in the dead of winter during a pandemic, said Moody’s Zandi. “It’s going to be very painful and devastating. There’s going to be a lot of people who fall through the cracks.”

Underscoring the urgency of the situation is the fact that new research shows that evictions have led to increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

A report released Nov. 30 by a consortium of university researchers found that there were 433,700 excess cases of COVID and 10,700 excess deaths associated with the lifting of eviction moratoriums during the summer, before the blanket CDC ban began. States that let moratoriums expire had a 2.1-times higher incidence of cases and 5.4-times higher mortality, according to the researchers from Johns Hopkins University and other four other universities.

The cost of this housing instability is not spread evenly, as Blacks, whose employment has been hit the hardest during the pandemic, comprise 80% of those facing eviction in major cities and are also more than twice as likely to die of COVID than whites.

ZOMBIE PROPERTIES

At first, it all seemed easy. In May 2019, Clarence Hamer’s new tenant had passed a background check and said she would live a quiet life with her elderly father and boyfriend in the $3,250-a-month duplex.

Two months after moving in, she stopped paying the full rent. Hamer tried everything: calling her, texting her, knocking on her door—but to no avail. In August 2019, he filed an eviction notice. But the court date kept getting delayed until March 2020, when COVID-19 hit and the courts ground to a halt.

Then, his tenant sublet the unit to other people –Hamer is hamstrung from getting them out, too. He says they have trashed the once tidy unit, and that there is a constant odor of marijuana, and foot traffic in and out of the home at all hours of the day. He watches it all and feels powerless, his net worth now turned into a zombie property.

“They are going to foreclose. It’s only going to be a matter of time,” said Hamer. “And rightfully so, I can’t blame them. Apparently we are all in this together—unless you are a landlord.”

(Reporting by Michelle Conlin; Editing by Tom Lasseter and Lisa Shumaker)

Scientists spray saliva-like droplets in stadium to study how fans spread aerosols

By Bart H. Meijer

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Scientists are using the Netherlands’ largest football stadium to model how a cheering football crowd might spread aerosols through the air by spraying fine droplets, made to resemble saliva, over the empty stands.

Their hope is that by finding out more about the behavior of aerosols or airborne particles, which could spread the coronavirus within a crowd, they will be able to remove them from the air and get fans back into stadiums and concert halls.

“There is almost no information in scientific literature about the behavior of aerosols in this kind of environment”, lead researcher Bert Blocken told Reuters.

The tests are taking place at the Johan Cruyff Arena in Amsterdam, home of Ajax Amsterdam.

“We want to get a fundamental insight in the behavior of aerosols in a stadium filled with football supporters. By air cleaning technologies you can drastically reduce concentrations and make stadiums safe in terms of aerosol transmission of the virus,” he added.

There is growing consensus among scientists that transmission via aerosols plays a part in the spread of the novel coronavirus, although it is unclear to what extent.

The research could provide insight in how to minimize the concentration of aerosols and limit their epidemic risk, said Blocken, a professor in aerodynamics at the Technical University of Eindhoven.

A computer model will extrapolate the data gathered during weeks of testing to show the effects for a full capacity crowd of around 55,000.

Researchers also hope to get permission soon to experiment with a real crowd of 730 football fans, seated close together.

The final goal is to get capacity crowds back into stadiums, Blocken said, possibly through the use of large scale COVID-19 testing, face masks and ventilation.

That would be exactly what the Johan Cruyff Arena needs to survive, its director told Reuters.

“This is a very costly building, and the income is less than half of what is normal, so we are making a loss every month”, said Henk Markerink.

“We try to keep the ship afloat, but this shouldn’t take too long because in the end this cannot be financed.”