Lockdown spillovers.

Lockdowns imposed to fight the Covid-19 pandemic have cross-border effects. In this paper, we estimate the empirical magnitude of lockdown spillovers in a set of panel local projections. We use daily indicators of economic activity such as stock returns, effective exchange rates, NO2 emissions, mobility and maritime container trade. Lockdown shocks originating in the most important trading partners have a strong and significant adverse effect on economic activity in the home economy. For stock prices and exports, the spillovers can even be larger than the effect of domestic lockdown shocks. The results are robust with respect to alternative country weights used to construct foreign shocks, i.e. weights based on foreign direct investment or the connectedness through value chains. We find that lockdown spillovers have been particularly strong during the first wave of the pandemic. Countries with a higher export share are particularly exposed to lockdown spillovers.

First clinical study using HCV protease inhibitor danoprevir to treat COVID-19 patients.

INTRODUCTION: As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak globally, repurposing approved drugs is emerging as important therapeutic options. Danoprevir boosted by ritonavir (Ganovo) is a potent hepatitis C virus (HCV) protease (NS3/4A) inhibitor, which was approved and marketed in China since 2018 to treat chronic hepatitis C patients. METHODS: This is an open-label, single arm study evaluating the effects of danoprevir boosted by ritonavir on treatment naïve and experienced COVID-19 patients for the first time. Patients received danoprevir boosted by ritonavir (100 mg/100 mg, twice per day). The primary endpoint was the rate of composite adverse outcomes and efficacy was also evaluated. RESULTS: The data showed that danoprevir boosted by ritonavir is safe and well tolerated in all patients. No patient had composite adverse outcomes during this study. After initiation of danoprevir/ritonavir treatment, the first negative reverse real-time PCR (RT-PCR) test occurred at a median of 2 days, ranging from 1 to 8 days, and the obvious absorption in CT scans occurred at a median 3 days, ranging from 2 to 4 days. After 4 to 12-day treatment of danoprevir boosted by ritonavir, all enrolled 11 patients were discharged from the hospital. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that repurposing danoprevir for COVID-19 is a promising therapeutic option.

Rapid identification of COVID-19 severity in CT scans through classification of deep features.

BACKGROUND: Chest CT is used for the assessment of the severity of patients infected with novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). We collected chest CT scans of 202 patients diagnosed with the COVID-19, and try to develop a rapid, accurate and automatic tool for severity screening follow-up therapeutic treatment. METHODS: A total of 729 2D axial plan slices with 246 severe cases and 483 non-severe cases were employed in this study. By taking the advantages of the pre-trained deep neural network, four pre-trained off-the-shelf deep models (Inception-V3, ResNet-50, ResNet-101, DenseNet-201) were exploited to extract the features from these CT scans. These features are then fed to multiple classifiers (linear discriminant, linear SVM, cubic SVM, KNN and Adaboost decision tree) to identify the severe and non-severe COVID-19 cases. Three validation strategies (holdout validation, tenfold cross-validation and leave-one-out) are employed to validate the feasibility of proposed pipelines. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The experimental results demonstrate that classification of the features from pre-trained deep models shows the promising application in COVID-19 severity screening, whereas the DenseNet-201 with cubic SVM model achieved the best performance. Specifically, it achieved the highest severity classification accuracy of 95.20% and 95.34% for tenfold cross-validation and leave-one-out, respectively. The established pipeline was able to achieve a rapid and accurate identification of the severity of COVID-19. This may assist the physicians to make more efficient and reliable decisions.

A comparative study on the time to achieve negative nucleic acid testing and hospital stays between danoprevir and lopinavir/ritonavir in the treatment of patients with COVID-19.

In late December 2019, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) first broke out in Wuhan, China, and has now become a global pandemic. However, there is no specific antiviral treatment for COVID-19. This study enrolled 33 COVID-19 patients in the nineth hospital of Nanchang from 27th January to 24th February 2020. Clinical indexes of patients upon admission/discharge were examined. Patients were divided into two groups according to different treatment plans (danoprevir and lopinavir/ritonavir). The days to achieve negative nucleic acid testing and the days of hospital stays were counted and statistically analyzed. COVID-19 patients treated with danoprevir or lopinavir/ritonavir were all improved and discharged. Indexes like blood routine, inflammation and immune-related indexes were significantly recovered after treatment. Additionally, under the circumstance that there was no significant difference in patients' general information between the two groups, we found that the mean time to achieve both negative nucleic acid testing and hospital stays of patients treated with danoprevir were significantly shorter than those of patients with lopinavir/ritonavir. Collectively, applying danoprevir is a good treatment plan for COVID-19 patients.