- Grants to help with global pandemic preparedness: This week, the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund announced the recipients of its first round of grants. The fund is a finance initiative to “strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacities,” particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Its first round of grants will go to 37 countries across 6 global regions, distributing $338 million in funding. The full list of awards is available on the World Bank’s website.
- Genetic marker of asymptomatic COVID-19: A new paper published in Nature this week reports on a common genetic marker that may lead people to have symptom-free COVID-19 cases. The researchers (a team from the University of California San Francisco and other institutions) searched for genetic patterns among 30,000 people who shared their COVID-19 symptom information through a smartphone app. They found a correlation between asymptomatic infection and a specific version of a gene related to T cells. As Eric Topol notes in his newsletter, this study follows two others that examined genetic markers of Long COVID.
- Quantifying cognitive symptoms of Long COVID: Speaking of Long COVID: researchers at Kings College London studied the condition’s cognitive symptoms (also called brain fog) by measuring patients’ performance in different mental tasks. The study included over 3,000 participants, more than half of whom completed two rounds of testing over two years. Overall, the researchers found that cognitive symptoms persisted for nearly two years after patients’ initial infections, and most severe for patients with the longest-lasting Long COVID impacts. For these patients, “the effect of COVID-19 on test accuracy was comparable in size to the effect of a 10-year increase in age,” per a press release by Kings College London.
- Long COVID is common in children: Another Long COVID study published this week: researchers at a hospital in Toronto compiled a review paper examining the condition’s prevalence among children. Their review included 30 studies including about 15,000 total pediatric patients. Across all the studies, researchers reported that about 16% of children experienced at least one Long COVID symptom three or more months after their COVID-19 infections. However, compiling these data was a challenging task because different studies used different definitions of Long COVID, different methods of following up with patients over time, and other inconsistencies, the authors wrote.
- Dogs detecting COVID-19 through scent: One more paper that stuck out to me this week: a pair of researchers (one at the University of California, Santa Barbara and one at a biotech company focused on sniffing for COVID-19) examined how well dogs can detect the coronavirus. This was also a review paper, including 29 studies and 31,000 COVID-19 test samples. Overall, the dogs performed with similar accuracy to PCR tests, researchers found. “We believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during pandemics,” one of the authors said in a statement.
- Monoclonal antibody to protect babies from RSV: Finally, a bit of good news for combatting another common respiratory virus: the FDA has approved a new monoclonal antibody treatment to protect infants and young children against RSV. The therapy is likely to be recommended by the CDC and manufactured in time for respiratory virus season this fall. In clinical trials, it lowered the risk of an RSV infection requiring medical care by about 76%—which is a big deal for a disease that leads to more babies in hospitals than any other in the U.S., reports Helen Branswell at STAT.
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COVID-19 Data Dispatch 
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