A new mathematical model for predicting infectious disease outbreaks incorporates fear—both of disease and of vaccines—to better understand how pandemics can occur in multiple waves of infections, like those we are seeing with COVID-19.

Children who develop symptoms of COVID-19 typically get better after six days and the number who experience symptoms beyond four weeks is low (4.4%, 77/1,734), a large UK study published today in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal has confirmed. The study, based on data reported through a smartphone app by parents and carers, provides the first detailed description of COVID-19 illness in symptomatic school-aged children and provides reassurance that long-term symptoms are rare.

Fewer than one in 20 children with symptomatic COVID-19 experienced symptoms lasting longer than 4 weeks, and almost all children have fully recovered by 8 weeks, a new study has found.

A new study analyzed online music streaming data for top songs for two years in 60 countries, as well as COVID-19 case and lockdown statistics and daily mobility data, to determine the nature of those changes. The study found that the pandemic significantly reduced the consumption of audio music streaming in many countries.

New insight on the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide has been published in the open-access eLife journal.

Australian cancer patients kept up their pharmaceutical treatments during last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns, a big data study from UNSW Sydney shows. The findings come as a relief following early concerns that cancer patients would decrease, or even stop, potentially life-saving treatments during the pandemic.

Spanish-Dutch research has revealed two new mutations in the TLR7 gene in healthy young men who became seriously ill with severe Covid-19. It’s becoming increasingly plausible that such mutations undermine a sufficient immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the researchers write in Frontiers in Immunology.

Instead of relying on countries’ published COVID-19 death rates, Israeli8-German team creates World Mortality Dataset, the largest existing collection of overall mortality data, to uncover the true rate of COVID-19 deaths in more than 100 countries.

A new study may alleviate concerns about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnancy, as researchers found no increases in preterm births or stillbirths during the first year of the pandemic. The large study of more than 2.4 million births in Ontario is published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.210081.

During the height of the pandemic, as scientists worldwide raced to develop a vaccine, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) emerged as a flashpoint of controversy. Now, a new study published in the journal DNA Repair shows, for the first time, HCQ’s genotoxicity in mammalian cells. The study, led by Ahmad Besaratinia, PhD, professor of research in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, demonstrates conclusively that HCQ exhibits DNA-damaging and mutagenic effects at a clinically achievable dose. The study underscores the need for carefully measuring the risks and benefits of its use, especially in the context of clinical trials.

A rise in cases of short-sightedness (myopia) among children in Hong Kong may be linked to a significant decrease in the time they have been able to spend outdoors and a sharp rise in screen time during the coronavirus pandemic, suggests research published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

A team of researchers at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, led by Glyn Elwyn, MD, PhD, MSc, and Marie-Anne Durand, PhD, has received a $6.2 million funding award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to test approaches that may increase confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine among those working in long-term care facilities.