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Many of us found it hard to keep up with official restrictions as the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on. We experienced pandemic fatigue. And this fatigue led to wide-spread political discontent in Western democracies, according to a new study from Aarhus University, which has now been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Prior research has found that small groups of people have been radicalised and that pandemic fatigue has proven a health challenge, but our new study shows that we are facing challenges far beyond the domain of health or the radicalisation of some groups,” says Michael Bang Petersen, professor of political science at Aarhus University and one of the researchers behind the study.
For instance, broad segments of the public respond that they support protests against the government’s policies, that they are concerned about their own democratic rights or that they believe the government is hiding important information from the public about the coronavirus.
Such political discontent is closely linked with the feeling of pandemic fatigue, according to the study.
“Based on our research method, we can be quite confident that there is not just a correlation between pandemic fatigue and political discontent. Rather, fatigue is a direct cause of political discontent,” says Frederik Jørgensen, assistant professor of political science at Aarhus University and the lead author of the study.
Political and academic debate on ‘fatigue’
During the pandemic, both researchers and authorities have discussed the concept of pandemic fatigue and whether it exists in populations. For one thing, the British government was met with criticism for delaying their lockdown during the first wave of the pandemic based on the exact argument that restrictions could generate fatigue.

By measuring immune cells in the cerebrospinal fluid when diagnosing ALS, it is possible to predict how fast the disease may progress according to a study from Karolinska Institutet published in Nature Communications.
ALS is a rare, but fatal disease that affects the nerve cells and leads to paralysis of voluntary muscles and death. In a new study, researchers from Karolinska Institutet have discovered a way to predict the course of the disease in ALS patients.
Between March 2016 and March 2020, researchers collected fresh blood and cerebrospinal fluid from 89 patients in Stockholm who had recently been diagnosed with ALS. The patients were followed until October 2020.
The study shows that a high proportion of so-called effector T cells are associated with a low survival rate. At the same time, a high proportion of activated regulatory T cells indicate a protective role against the rapid disease progression. The findings provide new evidence for the involvement of T cells in the course of the disease and show that certain types of effector T cells accumulate in the cerebrospinal fluid of ALS patients.
“The study could contribute to the development of new treatments that target immune cells to slow down the course of the disease,” says Solmaz Yazdani, a doctoral student at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institutet and first author of the study.
The next step in her research is to study how T cells contribute to the course of the disease.
“We have plans to collect samples from these individuals to study changes in the immune cells over time. In addition, we want to study effector T cells in more detail to understand their role in ALS.”
The study was funded by the Ulla-Carin Lindquist Foundation for ALS Research, Neuro, King Gustaf V’s and Queen Victoria’s Masonic Foundation, among others.
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Adults with persistent asthma may be at increased risk of heart attack or stroke because of excess plaque buildup in the carotid arteries, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access, peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association. People in the study had more plaque buildup in the carotid arteries, large arteries on the left and right side of the neck that carry blood to the brain, compared to people without asthma.
Asthma is a respiratory condition that causes a person’s airways to become inflamed — often due to allergic reactions — making it difficult to breathe. Chronic inflammation over time is known to contribute to artery plaque buildup known as atherosclerosis and is associated with a higher risk of plaques rupturing, triggering a heart attack or stroke.
“Many physicians and patients don’t realize that asthmatic airway inflammation may affect the arteries, so for people with persistent asthma, addressing risk factors for cardiovascular disease may be really helpful,” said lead study author Matthew C. Tattersall, D.O., M.S., assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “The presence and burden of carotid artery plaque is a strong predictor of future cardiovascular events.”
For this analysis, researchers used data from participants enrolled in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) study to examine the potential association between asthma and carotid artery plaque. MESA is a research study of nearly 7,000 adults that began in 2000 and is still following participants today in six locations across the United States: Baltimore; Chicago; New York; Los Angeles County, California; Forsyth County, North Carolina; and St. Paul, Minnesota. At the time of enrollment, all participants in MESA were free from cardiovascular disease.
The researchers reviewed health data for 5,029 adults, average age of 61, who had baseline risk factors for cardiovascular disease and for whom there was carotid ultrasound data. The participant group is diverse: 26% of adults self-identified as African American, 23% self-identified as Hispanic and 12% self-identified as Chinese. Additionally, more than half of the group (53%) was female.
The participants in this analysis’s cohort were categorized as having persistent asthma, intermittent asthma or not having asthma. The subgroup with persistent asthma, defined as using daily controller medications to control asthma symptoms, consisted of 109 participants; the subgroup with intermittent asthma, defined as a history of asthma, but not using daily medications to control asthma symptoms, consisted of 388 participants; and the remaining participants did not have asthma.

Sometimes healthcare professionals treat patients with opioids such as morphine to relieve symptoms, but there has been a lack of evidence as to whether this helps with severe chronic breathlessness. A randomised Phase 3 study conducted by Swedish and Australian researchers now finds that morphine does not reduce worst breathlessness.
The study is published in JAMA.
Long term shortness of breath is a common cause of ongoing suffering that often occurs with advanced serious illness and at the end of life. COPD can cause breathlessness by damaging the lungs and airways and for seriously ill people with severe long term breathlessness, physical activity is often a challenge.
“Many people live with shortness of breath. It is distressing that no better treatment exists, but based on the results we’ve seen, we cannot generally recommend giving morphine to people with chronic breathlessness,” says Magnus Ekström, a researcher in Palliative Medicine and Pulmonary Medicine at Lund University in Sweden and Chief Physician in Pulmonary Medicine at Blekinge Hospital.
The researchers included 156 patients, each for three weeks, with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who suffered from severe long term breathlessness. In the first week, the participants were randomised into three groups, two to regular low doses of once daily morphine (8 milligrams daily or 16 milligrams daily), and a third control group that received a placebo.
During the subsequent two weeks, participants were randomized to receive either an additional 8 milligrams of morphine or placebo, in addition to the previous treatment. This was done to investigate the efficacy of the treatment and the risk of side effects resulting from an increased dose of morphine. The treatment was ‘double-blind’, which means the participants and those who treated them didn’t know what treatment each group was receiving.
“Given the prevalence of long term breathlessness across the world, it is crucial that we find ways that safely and predictably reduce the suffering that this causes people, often for years,” says David Currow, a palliative medicine physician at the University of Wollongong in Australia whose team worked on the study as a part of a national program to improve symptom control of people with advanced, life-limiting illnesses.
The researchers then compared the groups to see how they rated their experience of shortness of breath. With the help of motion sensors, the researchers also measured the participants’ physical activity during the study.
“Some probably expected that the study would show that regular, low dose morphine may allow people to be more physically active. Unfortunately, across all participants, we did not see this. We didn’t see any improvements in terms of the worst breathlessness that participants experienced,” says Magnus Ekström.
According to Ekström, the use of regular low dose morphine for severe long term breathlessness should not be widely used in healthcare as a treatment for groups that experience chronic, activity-limiting shortness of breath.
“However, the study should not be interpreted as that morphine does not provide any relief to patients with severe shortness of breath at rest, or in palliative care at the end of life. We didn’t investigate that in the study. In most cases, our patients did not have shortness of breath at rest. Clinical experience shows that at the end of life and in crisis situations, morphine treatment can help,” says Magnus Ekström.
The next step will be to investigate in greater detail whether certain groups respond better to morphine, as well as which ones are at a higher risk of experiencing side effects.
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Are the currently approved antibody therapies used to treat individuals at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease also effective against currently circulating viral variants? A recent study by researchers at the German Primate Center (DPZ) — Leibniz Institute for Primate Research and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg shows that the Omicron sub-lineage BQ.1.1, currently on the rise worldwide, is resistant to all approved antibody therapies (The Lancet Infectious Diseases).
As a result of an infection with the SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) or a COVID-19 vaccination, an immune response is triggered that entails the formation of neutralizing antibodies that help protect against (re)infection with SARS-CoV-2 or a severe course of the disease. Neutralizing antibodies protect by binding to the viral spike protein, which prevents the virus from entering cells. However, due to mutations in the spike protein, some SARS-CoV-2 variants, particularly the Omicron variant, evade neutralizing antibodies and cause symptomatic infections even in vaccinated or convalescent persons. This is referred to as immune evasion and threatens high-risk groups such as the elderly and people with weakened immune systems, for example, due to illness or medication. They often fail to develop an immune response sufficient for protection from severe disease, even after full vaccination. To protect high-risk patients, biotechnologically produced antibodies are administered as a preventive measure or as an early therapy upon confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Mutations in the spike protein of different SARS-CoV-2 variants confer resistance to individual antibody therapies. Therefore, it is important to regularly monitor whether therapeutic antibodies continue to be effective against currently circulating viral variants.
A team of researchers from the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center -Leibniz Institute for Primate Research and the Division of Molecular Immunology at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg has investigated how efficiently approved antibody therapies inhibit the currently circulating Omicron subvariants. The researchers found that the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1, which is on the rise worldwide, is resistant to all available antibody therapies. “For our studies, we mixed non-propagating viral particles carrying the spike protein of selected viral variants with different dilutions of the antibodies to be tested and subsequently measured the amount of antibody needed to inhibit infection of cell cultures. In total, we tested twelve individual antibodies, six of which are approved for clinical use in Europe, and four antibody cocktails” explains Prerna Arora, lead author of the study. The researchers found that the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 could not be neutralized by either individual antibodies or antibody cocktails. In contrast, the currently predominant Omicron subvariant BA.5 was still neutralized by one approved antibody and two approved antibody cocktails. “With high-risk patients in mind, we are very concerned about the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 being resistant to all approved antibody therapies. Particularly in regions where BQ.1.1 is widespread, physicians should not rely on antibody therapies alone when treating infected high-risk patients, but should also consider administering other drugs such as paxlovid or molnupiravir,” comments study leader Markus Hoffmann on the results of the study.
The finding that the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 is already resistant to a new antibody therapy that is about to be approved in the U.S. highlights the importance of developing new antibody therapies against COVID-19. “The ever-increasing development of antibody resistance of SARS-CoV-2 variants calls for the development of new antibody therapies that are specifically targeted to currently circulating and future viral variants. Ideally, they should target regions in the spike protein that have little potential for escape mutations,” concludes Stefan Pöhlmann, head of Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research.
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One in four retired Olympians reported a diagnosis of osteoarthritis, the form of arthritis that causes changes in the joint and can lead to discomfort, pain and disability, the research found.
Elite retired sportspeople who had experienced a sports-related injury had a higher chance of knee and hip osteoarthritis when compared with the general population.
The athletes — who had competed at an Olympic level in 57 sports including athletics, rowing and skiing — also had an increased risk of lower back pain overall, and shoulder osteoarthritis after a shoulder injury.
Researchers hope the findings will help develop new approaches in injury prevention for the benefit of athletes now and in retirement.
The study — led by a University of Edinburgh based researcher — is the largest international survey of its kind, and the first to observe the consequences of osteoarthritis and pain in different joints from retired elite athletes across different summer and winter Olympic sports.
Researchers quizzed 3,357 retired Olympians aged around 45 on injuries and the health of their bones, joints, muscles and spine. They were also asked if they were currently experiencing joint pain, and if they had an osteoarthritis diagnosis.

A new study assesses the number of lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia and introduces a novel methodology that will help to get a clearer view of pandemics in the future.
Calculating how many lives have been lost in the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for future epidemiological and policy decisions. Getting a reliable estimate is however easier said than done due to incomplete or inadequate registration data, difficulties in determining the primary cause of death, or challenges in tracking down indirect effects.
This is especially the case in Russia, where mortality estimates from COVID-19 showed a high degree of uncertainty, with varying estimates reported by different studies within and outside of Russia. The country has also received international attention due to the especially high reported mortality compared to other parts of the world. To improve estimates on the human cost of the pandemic in Russia, in a study published recently in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by IIASA conducted the most detailed analysis on pandemic mortality in the country to date.
“While national figures show that excess mortality in Russia is perhaps among the highest in the world, there is a wide degree of regional variation that deserves further analysis,” says Stuart Gietel-Basten, a researcher at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a coauthor of the study. “Such variation is key to devising better public health strategies to mitigate both the ongoing impact of COVID-19, and to rebuild and reshape health systems after the pandemic is over.”
The researchers used the concept of ‘excess mortality’ that looks at the difference between the actual number of deaths and what would have been expected if there was no pandemic. Unlike other measures, excess mortality includes deaths that may have stemmed from lockdowns, restriction on movement, postponed operations, and so on, giving a much more comprehensive and reliable estimate.
The team used the latest data released from the Russian Federal State Statistics Service and calculated excess mortality for Russia and its regions for 2020 and 2021, and for 2020 also assessing mortality by age, sex, and rural-urban residence. During the two years, the researchers estimated that the pandemic has cost over one million Russian lives.
“A number of researchers within Russia and outside had more or less similar estimates,” says Sergei Scherbov, lead author of the study and a researcher in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program. “However, due to the advanced population projection methodology and software that we have developed at IIASA, we were able to make population projections for all regions, subdividing urban and rural populations, as well as gender and age groups. This allowed us to produce a very detailed estimate of excess mortality from Covid-19 in Russia and its regions.”
One of the study’s main findings was that different regions within the country differed greatly in mortality. In 2021, excess deaths expressed as a percentage of expected deaths at the regional level ranged from 27% to 52%, with urban regions generally faring worse. The researchers suggested that apart from population density, socio-cultural, economic and, perhaps, geographic differentials could have contributed to the differences.
“Regions of the Northern Caucasus reporting high excess mortality are known for their tradition of elderly living in larger households of extended families together with their children and descendants,” explains Dalkhat Ediev, study coauthor and researcher in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program. Such a tradition might have contributed to higher social exposure and, hence, higher losses.”
The study also introduced a new measure called the Mean Remaining Life Expectancy of the Deceased, showing how many years on average those whose death was among the excess deaths lost. They found that for Russia as a whole, an average person who died due to the pandemic in 2020 would have otherwise lived on average for a further 14 years.
“This finding disproves the widely held view that excess mortality during the pandemic period was concentrated among those with few years of life remaining — especially for females,” notes Scherbov.
The new and improved estimates will not only help policymakers in case of future decisions on mitigation strategies, but also take a major methodological step forward, helping us get a clearer view of pandemics in the future.

Published2 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Victoria BrownworthBy Rachel SchraerHealth and disinformation reporter”Seven days, 18 hours, 39 minutes ago my beloved… died suddenly of cardiac arrest”. When Victoria Brownworth logged onto Twitter to post these words about her partner of 23 years, she didn’t know that two of them in particular would provoke a storm of online harassment. Because, as Victoria waited at her home in Philadelphia on Sunday night for her wife’s ashes to be delivered, a video titled Died Suddenly was about to drop. In an hour and eight minutes of dramatic music and out-of-context news reports, the film tells a fictitious story of a dangerous vaccine killing off swathes of young people – all part of an imagined plot to depopulate the earth. It landed on niche video-sharing platform Rumble on Monday and began to spread. By Wednesday morning it had been viewed more than 4 million times on Rumble and at least 1.5 million times on Twitter. The claims made in the video quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Vast amounts of evidence from different independent scientists all over the world, as well as the experiences of billions of people, have shown that serious Covid vaccine side effects are rare. Social media battles Plandemic conspiracy videoBut its call for people to look at any reported deaths through a lens of suspicion had made Victoria fair game – and as the phrase “died suddenly” started to trend, people flocked to her memorial thread. “How long’s it been since she got the jab?”, hundreds of people began to reply. Victoria’s wife, Madelaine Gold – a painter and design professor – had an advanced stage of cancer, though she had been doing better just before she died. There is no suggestion the vaccine had anything to do with her death.When she began to hit back, Victoria was told she was lying.”She did die suddenly… We didn’t have time to say goodbye, I didn’t have time to give her a last kiss. I will never get to talk to her again.””They were trolling her obituary, literally.”So what was it about this film that led people online to deny Victoria’s reality?Image source, TwitterThe film flashes through dozens of upsetting news reports and images of people collapsing.One headline reads: “My kind, compassionate son died unexpectedly.” Another clip shows a young athlete dramatically keeling over. Together, this can easily be used to paint an alarming picture of something suspicious going on.Yet just a couple more clicks would reveal the son in question died in a car crash. And the athlete, college basketball player Keyontae Johnson, collapsed in December 2020 before he could even have had a Covid vaccine. He didn’t die suddenly as the title suggests – he returned to the court last week. Other people featured are also still alive. And several of the genuine deaths are explained by an alternative cause within the very news reports used as evidence by the film makers.Image source, RumblePart of the film’s power is that it takes scraps of truth but distorts them to tell a misleading story.There have been a small number of deaths from the vaccines – I’ve spoken to people affected – but these cases are rare and their causes are established through extensive monitoring, complex medical testing and statistical analysis. It’s not possible to measure vaccine side effects by simply Googling news reports. As Dr Frank Han, a US cardiologist it can, “give you pieces of the puzzle, but actual medical training is necessary to link all the pieces of how the body works together”. Long stretches of the film involve gruesome images of clots being pulled out of bodies, designed to suggest Covid vaccines are having alarming effects. When people feel afraid or disgusted they might be more likely to leap to conclusions. But these images can’t tell us anything on their own. Firstly, they are mostly based on the testimony of one embalmer with no indication this is a wider concern. And, Dr Han explains, it’s “insufficient to establish why the clots are there”.Blood clots are commonly found in dead bodies and are caused by a range of things from smoking to being bed-bound to Covid-19. When unusual clotting was identified in rare cases after the AstraZeneca vaccine – not used in the US – it was quickly investigated and vaccine recommendations changed, after which the cases pretty much disappeared. Emotional stories, backed up by official numbers make a powerful persuasive tool. But it’s important to understand where the numbers actually come from and whether they are being fairly represented – something many people won’t have the time or resources to investigate.A graph in the film shows stillbirths shooting up around 2021, making the unsupported suggestion Covid vaccines are causing miscarriages, looks shocking. The film-makers don’t provide a source, though.This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Although the voiceover claims the data is from Waterloo, Canada, genuine data from Ontario, the province Waterloo is part of, has not seen any increase in stillbirths, according to Dr Victoria Male, a reproductive immunologist. Pregnant targeted with false Covid vaccine claimsThe vaccine fertility myths that just won’t go awayStillbirth risk may increase with CovidIn fact, a large study found a “lower (not higher) rate of stillbirth among those vaccinated in pregnancy, compared to those who were not,” she said.This is supported by dozens of studies involving tens of thousands of people produced by different independent teams around the world. The tactics used in this video have been seen before and this isn’t the first time misleading health information has been spread by verified accounts. What’s new this time is the main account spreading the film on Twitter has bought verification – the blue tick which is supposed to be a mark of credibility, something experts have warned could help misinformation spread.Twitter confirms users’ fee to buy verificationTwitter drama continues with blue-tick confusion”Since Elon Musk took over he’s just, you know, let it be the Wild West again,” Victoria believes.Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. If you have a story you can contact Rachel rachel.schraer@bbc.co.uk or follow her on Twitter

The company OpenSensors uses small, inexpensive sensors to monitor air quality and other conditions in offices. The timing couldn’t be better.This article is part of Upstart, a series about companies that are harnessing new science and technology to solve challenges in their industries.Yodit Bekele Stanton worried about her daughter’s debilitating asthma. As a software developer in London, she knew data often held answers that were otherwise unnoticed or unseen, so she put a sensor in her backyard and began monitoring the air quality in her neighborhood, mapping the data against her daughter’s asthma attacks. The results were inconclusive, but Ms. Stanton was convinced that such sensors could be used to improve the places where people live, learn and work.“Thankfully my daughter has grown out of her severe asthma, but air quality is now a passion project,” she said.In 2015, Ms. Stanton founded OpenSensors, which uses small, inexpensive, battery-operated sensors to monitor foot traffic, occupancy levels and air quality in the spaces we inhabit — particularly offices.Seven years later, after the global pandemic has changed the way we treat indoor spaces, the existence of this technology could not be better timed. Monitoring indoor air quality has become a critical tool in keeping people safe from Covid-19 and other airborne illnesses — particularly now that companies are encouraging workers to return to the office. Studies have shown that office occupancy levels affect indoor air quality and viral transmission.Other recent studies have shown that the Covid-19 virus can spread through respiratory aerosols. In fact, airborne transmission may be the dominant form of transmission for several respiratory pathogens, including the Covid virus. In confined spaces, like offices, contaminated aerosols can build up over time, increasing the risk of transmission.OpenSensor’s devices measure carbon dioxide using internet of things, or IoT, technology, in which sensors publish real-time data over a network. Respiration produces CO2, which is exhaled along with aerosols, so the sensors can be used to measure the buildup of exhaled air within a space — and therefore the potential level of pathogens. (Essentially, CO2 serves as a proxy for potentially high levels of pathogens.) This, in turn, allows building managers to monitor and adjust air quality as necessary.CO2 levels build up through the day, often reaching peak levels of 2,000 parts per million late in the afternoon. To keep employees healthy, CO2 levels must be monitored throughout the day, not just once, as is the case with most organizations today, if they monitor CO2 at all.OpenSensors uses a low-power, wide-area technology that transmits data over an unlicensed spectrum, similar to that used by radio-controlled cars. The sensors are extremely power efficient, so batteries don’t need to be changed any more frequently than they would for a wristwatch.The sensor signals are received by a router that transmits them back to an OpenSensors’ server over a cellular network. The company collates the data into a web-based dashboard or sends the data back to the customer’s own systems through an application. There are no cables involved. Companies plug in the router, called a gateway, and stick sensors where needed.“OpenSensors is an overlay service that can be deployed separate from whoever’s handling the building management,” said Matt Hatton, a technology industry analyst focused on IoT, artificial intelligence and digital transformation, so tenants don’t need a landlord’s or building owner’s permission to use the technology.Three of OpenSensor’s devices at the company’s London office. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMr. Hatton believes that the market for indoor air quality monitoring is expected to grow by 20 times between now and 2030. “We’re still very early days,” he said. Other companies in the field include Microshare, Capgemini, Honeywell and Johnson Controls. But OpenSensors, using various types of hardware based on clients’ needs, provides a managed service that focuses on optimizing the number of people necessary to deploy the system. Each sensor takes less than 10 seconds to install, enabling small teams of four people to deploy thousands of sensors over a weekend.There are other benefits to the technology. For example, air quality can affect productivity. A recent Harvard study found that office air quality could have significant effects on employees’ cognitive function, including response times and ability to focus. (CO2 buildup is one reason that workers become sleepy late in the day.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that adverse health and productivity effects from poor indoor air quality cost companies between $13 billion and $32 billion annually.“A minority of buildings have this monitoring capability now,” Mr. Hatton said. “Over the coming 10 years, we will see much more rapid adoption.”In November, a task force under the Lancet, the peer-reviewed medical journal, proposed new minimum standards for indoor ventilation that can help reduce respiratory disease risk. The journal’s task force found that current standards are too low to prevent the transmission of airborne infectious diseases.Ms. Stanton spent time with building managers, learning about the commercial real estate sector and reviewing data. “I came to realize that we have enough real estate already in big cities,” she said. “We don’t need to build more buildings; we need to use them better.”The company’s technology is also being used to improve workplace efficiency, including the use of space as offices switch to hot-desk systems, in which employees are not assigned to specific desks but rather cluster as necessary. It can be used to reserve desks or conference rooms, to reduce energy consumption by controlling lighting or heating and air-conditioning, and even to monitor water flow to detect leaks. Many companies using the technology have found that they can reduce their real estate footprint by 20 percent or more, according to Ms. Stanton.Among OpenSensors’ customers are Zaha Hadid Architects, which has used the company’s technology as a general aid in creating simulated design models, and the University of Utah’s ARUP Laboratories, which used OpenSensors to monitor bat populations in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. (Bats are considered an indicator species, reflecting the general health of the natural environment.)As Bryon BeMiller, who markets smart building technology for Semtech, a semiconductor supplier, said: “It provides a lot of very useful data for companies in terms of, are they dedicating the space that they have leased efficiently? Do they need more desks, less desks? Do they need more common spaces, less common spaces?”But these days, keeping workers healthy is perhaps the most important use of the technology. In a recent paper on the airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, researchers found that the optimal indoor CO2 level for preventing disease was 700-800 parts per million with a minimum ventilation rate of four to six air changes per hour.A recent article in Science on combating indoor respiratory infections notes that governments have invested heavily in food safety, sanitation and drinking water for public health purposes but that airborne pathogens and respiratory infections, whether seasonal influenza or Covid-19, have been largely ignored.“We spend 70, 80 percent of our time indoors,” Ms. Stanton said, “so air filtration matters a lot, especially from a productivity perspective.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said the administration was optimistic that “we’re not going to see a repeat of what we saw last year,” when the Omicron variant swept through the country.Federal health officials expressed optimism on Tuesday that the nation was better prepared to weather a surge of Covid-19 infections this winter compared with a year earlier, and they renewed their pleas for Americans to get an updated booster shot ahead of the holidays.While the trajectory of the virus remains uncertain, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said the administration was hopeful that the combination of infections and vaccinations had created “enough community protection that we’re not going to see a repeat of what we saw last year at this time” when a brand-new variant, Omicron, emerged seemingly out of the blue.As families gather for Thanksgiving, the coronavirus appears to be less of a threat to most Americans than it was a year ago, when Omicron began spreading infection at an alarming rate. At the time, Mr. Biden banned travel from eight African nations and warned Americans not to panic, and he later dispatched military medical workers to hospitals that officials feared would be overrun with patients.Now, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said he was confident about the holiday season as long as Americans continued to get vaccinated and boosted. “Nothing I have seen in the subvariants makes me believe that we can’t manage our way through it effectively, especially if people step up and get their vaccine,” he said at a White House briefing.That could be a significant caveat. Weary of two years of repeated vaccination campaigns, Americans have been reluctant to embrace the updated booster shots that the administration rolled out in September. Thus far, only 35 million people have received one of the revised shots from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. The administration bought enough doses for nearly five times as many people.An average of roughly 300 Americans a day are still dying of Covid-19, even though federal health officials say nearly every Covid death is now preventable through vaccination and treatment. Other respiratory illnesses, including the flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., are also resurging after two years of low levels of infection.And where the coronavirus is headed remains a mystery. Federal officials have been watching a new subvariant of Omicron called XBB with some trepidation. The new subvariant accounts for only a tiny percentage of cases in the United States so far, but it is showing up in testing of travelers at the nation’s major international airports and has taken hold in India and Singapore.Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicLong Covid: People who took the antiviral drug Paxlovid within a few days after being infected with the coronavirus were less likely to experience long Covid months later, a study found.Updated Boosters: New findings show that updated boosters by Pfizer and Moderna are better than their predecessors at increasing antibody levels against the most common version of the virus now circulating.Calls for a New Strategy: Covid boosters can help vulnerable Americans dodge serious illness or death, but some experts believe the shots must be improved to prevent new waves.Future Vaccines: Financial and bureaucratic barriers in the United States mean that the next generation of Covid vaccines may well be designed here, but used elsewhere.Dr. Fauci said that XBB appeared exceptionally agile at evading the antibodies that are created by prior infection or vaccination and that form the body’s first line of defense against the virus. But vaccine experts have long said that other parts of the immune system can kick in to ward off severe disease if antibodies fail to block the virus.And Dr. Fauci said he and others were encouraged by data showing that countries like Singapore where XBB led to a jump in infections did not report a commensurate rise in hospitalizations.Dr. Fauci, who became a household name during the pandemic and is retiring from government service at the end of the year, made what was most likely his last appearance in the White House briefing room and used the opportunity to urge Americans to get the updated booster shots.“My message and my final message — maybe the final message I give you from this podium — is that, please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated Covid-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible,” Dr. Fauci said.The administration is making a renewed push for the new boosters over the next six weeks. It announced $475 million in spending to expand vaccination efforts at community health centers and other locations, and officials are hoping to reach more Americans by airing advertising during the World Cup. The government also warned that nursing homes must offer the updated shots to residents or face enforcement actions by regulators.The push comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention delivered what some experts described as encouraging news about the effectiveness of the new shots.A major new study released by the agency showed that the updated shots bolstered protection against symptomatic disease among adults by 28 to 56 percent, depending on a person’s age and how much time had passed since the previous shot. The researchers studied people who received a dose of the revised boosters anywhere from two months to more than eight months after their last vaccine dose, and they found greater benefits among those who waited longer.“Is this a home run? No, but it’s a good base hit,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, who pushed for development of the new booster shots.The study, the first one published that examined the real-world effectiveness of the new shots, looked at 360,000 adults who reported Covid-19 symptoms between mid-September and mid-November. Its significance is limited by the fact that the Omicron subvariant that accounted for the largest number of infections during that period, BA.5, has receded and now accounts for only a quarter of cases in the United States.“The variants in the real world have already moved on,” said Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who has conducted laboratory studies of the updated boosters both independently and in collaboration with Pfizer-BioNTech.Dr. Shi also said it was difficult to measure how well the updated boosters were working because so many people now had some immunity from earlier infections, including people who were never vaccinated or boosted. That can make estimates of the effectiveness of the updated shots look artificially low, he said.Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the C.D.C. study showed that the revised boosters were “clearly worth getting.”Some other experts were more skeptical, saying that the new shots appeared to provide only moderate protection against symptomatic disease and that while such protection would help in the short term, it was unclear how long it would last.John P. Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, said the researchers did not show whether the updated boosters worked better than the original boosters they replaced — a swap that came at a substantial cost to the federal government. “Personally, I doubt there would have been much, if any, difference, but we may never know,” he said.While Americans’ shift indoors over the winter and the succession of holiday gatherings are expected to drive up cases, federal officials are not alone in their cautious optimism. Dr. Bhattacharyya said he did not expect the virus to cause as much suffering and death this winter as it did a year ago because “we’re a more immune population.”Another study released by the C.D.C. on Tuesday underscored the effectiveness of Paxlovid, an antiviral medication recommended for adults with mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19 who have a higher risk of severe illness.Adults diagnosed with Covid who were prescribed Paxlovid had a 51 percent lower hospitalization rate within 30 days of their diagnosis than those who were not prescribed the medication, the study found. Researchers compared nearly 200,000 adults who received Paxlovid within five days of their diagnosis with more than 500,000 people who did not receive it during a five-month period ending in August.The study found that only 28 percent of those eligible for Paxlovid were prescribed it. The researchers said the medication should be offered to everyone eligible, especially older adults and people with multiple underlying health conditions. The study did not address how often Covid symptoms rebounded after people finished the five-day treatment, a question that some providers say makes them wonder if the course of treatment is long enough.Kody Kinsley, the top health official in North Carolina, said he hoped that the new study would coax some doctors and patients into using the medication. He said that roughly two-thirds of adults in his state were at high risk of severe disease from the coronavirus, but for reasons that were unclear, doctors were reluctant to prescribe Paxlovid to them.“This has been a perennial issue and something we’ve been pretty vocal about,” he said, adding, “What we hear from people is: ‘I talk to my doctor and my doctor says: “Well, your symptoms are mild, so wait it out. And I don’t know if you need it.”’”In fact, he said, the decision whether to take Paxlovid should depend on how vulnerable a patient is to a serious case of Covid-19, not on the severity of symptoms.Zolan Kanno-Youngs