In our live blog you can read the most important news about the corona virus, the lockdown and the consequences of the corona crisis every day.
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This is the most important news of Wednesday, April 7:
6.22 am – Corona vaccine via nasal spray ready for human testing
A corona vaccine developed by Intravacc in Bilthoven has passed the initial testing phase and is ready to be tested in humans. The vaccine that works via a nasal spray provides very good protection against the virus in laboratory animals, Trouw reports.
This means that the company can prepare for the next phase: testing for safety and efficacy in humans. It is expected that this can start at the end of this year.
Twelve vaccines are now fully or partially authorized worldwide and more than a hundred are in that clinical phase. Yet Dinja Oosterhoff, program director at Intravacc, is not worried that her vaccine comes like mustard after a meal. The world is far from getting rid of the corona virus. Oosterhoff is convinced that a second generation of vaccines is needed.
6.15 am – European regulator EMA comes with judgment of AstraZeneca vaccine
Is there indeed a link between AstraZeneca’s corona vaccine and a rare combination of blood clots (thrombosis) and low platelet count (thrombocytopenia)? A safety committee of the European vaccine regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), has been reviewing this in recent days. The experts will deliver their verdict on Wednesday, or perhaps Thursday.
A few dozen people in Europe have developed this rare combination of complaints shortly after they received the AstraZeneca vaccine. Five reports are known in the Netherlands. In three of them, the blood clots ended up in the lungs. A woman died of such an embolism. Another woman also suffered a brain haemorrhage.
6.02 am – Tanning salons will hear from a judge on Wednesday whether they are allowed to open
The solar studio industry will hear from the judge in The Hague on Wednesday whether it can open again. The sector had demanded this in preliminary relief proceedings against the State. Sector association Samenwerking Verantwoord Zonnen (SVZ) compared itself with the contact professions, such as hairdressers, which were allowed to open. According to SVZ, the sector has simply been overlooked. Moreover, in tanning salons there is hardly any contact between staff and customers and they can therefore be opened safely.
The State objected that a conscious choice had been made to open certain types of shops and services and to keep others closed. The government did this because the situation surrounding the corona virus actually did not offer room for relaxation. Social pressure ensured that the government nevertheless opted for a few reopenings, and emphasis was placed on this.
4.22 am – One third of corona patients have mental and neurological complaints
Six months later, one-third of patients who survive Covid-19 have demonstrable mental or neurological problems, scientists say. The research, which was published Wednesday in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, is the largest so far into the mental damage of so-called ‘long Covid’, in which complaints persist for a longer period of time.
According to the authors of the study, they have shown that the risk of brain damage is significantly higher with Covid-19 than with other respiratory infections. After examining 230,000 patient records, the researchers concluded that 34 percent had been diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition six months later.
Of these, anxiety disorders (17 percent of all patients) were the most common, followed by problematic mood swings (14 percent). For 13 percent of the patients, it was the first diagnosis of a mental illness.
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