Can a face mask protect me from

coronavirus? Covid-19 myths busted

The truth about how you can catch coronavirus, who is most
vulnerable and what you can do to avoid infection

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How do I know if I have coronavirus and what happens next? – video explainer

Claim: ‘Face masks don’t work’

Wearing a face mask is certainly not an iron-clad guarantee that you won’t
get sick – viruses can also transmit through the eyes and tiny viral
particles, known as aerosols, can penetrate masks. However, masks are
effective at capturing droplets, which is a main transmission route of
coronavirus, and some studies have estimated a roughly fivefold
protection versus no barrier alone (although others have found lower
levels of effectiveness).

If you are likely to be in close contact with someone infected, a mask cuts
the chance of the disease being passed on. If you’re showing symptoms of
coronavirus, or have been diagnosed, wearing a mask can also protect
others. So masks are crucial for health and social care workers looking
after patients and are also recommended for family members who need to
care for someone who is ill – ideally both the patient and carer should
have a mask.

However, masks will probably make little difference if you’re just walking
around town or taking a bus so there is no need to bulk-buy a huge supply.

Claim: ‘It is mutating into a more deadly

strain’
All viruses accumulate mutations over time and the virus that causes
Covid-19 is no different. How widespread different strains of a virus
become depends on natural selection – the versions that can propagate
quickest and replicate effectively in the body will be the most
“successful”. This doesn’t necessarily mean most dangerous for people
though, as viruses that kill people rapidly or make them so sick that
they are incapacitated may be less likely to be transmitted.
Genetic analysis by Chinese scientists of 103 samples of the virus,
taken from patients in Wuhan and other cities, suggests that early on
two main strains emerged, designated L and S. Although the L strain
appeared to be more prevalent than the S strain (about 70% of the
samples belonged to the former), the S branch of the virus was found
to be the ancestral version.

The team behind this research suggested that this may indicate the L
strain is more “aggressive”, either transmitting more easily or
replicating faster inside the body. However, this theory is speculative at
this stage – there haven’t yet been direct comparisons to see whether
people who catch one version of the virus are more likely to pass it on
or suffer more severe symptoms.

Claim: ‘It is no more dangerous than winter

flu’
Many individuals who get coronavirus will experience nothing worse
than seasonal flu symptoms, but the overall profile of the disease,
including its mortality rate, looks more serious. At the start of an
outbreak the apparent mortality rate can be an overestimate if a lot of
mild cases are being missed. But Bruce Aylward, a WHO expert, who
led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and the
country’s response, said this has not been the case with Covid-19. The
evidence did not suggest that we were only seeing the tip of the
iceberg. If borne out by further testing, this could mean that current
estimates of a roughly 1% fatality rate are accurate. This would make
Covid-19 about 10 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which is
estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.

Claim: ‘It only kills the elderly, so younger

people can relax’
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Most people who are not elderly and do not have underlying health
conditions will not become critically ill from Covid-19. But the illness
still has a higher chance of leading to serious respiratory symptoms
than seasonal flu and there are other at-risk groups – health workers,
for instance, are more vulnerable because they are likely to have
higher exposure to the virus. The actions that young, healthy people
take, including reporting symptoms and following quarantine
 instructions, will have an important role in protecting the most
vulnerable in society and in shaping the overall trajectory of the
outbreak.

Claim: ‘You need to be with an infected

person for 10 minutes’
For flu, some hospital guidelines define exposure as being within six
feet of an infected person who sneezes or coughs for 10 minutes or
longer. However, it is possible to be infected with shorter interactions
or even by picking the virus up from contaminated surfaces, although
this is thought to be a less common route of transmission.

Claim: ‘A vaccine could be ready within a

few months’
Scientists were quick out of the gates in beginning development of a
vaccine for the new coronavirus, helped by the early release of the
genetic sequence by Chinese researchers. The development of a viable
vaccine continues apace, with several teams now testing candidates in
animal experiments. However, the incremental trials required before a
commercial vaccine could be rolled out are still a lengthy undertaking –
and an essential one to ensure that even rare side-effects are spotted.
A commercially available vaccine within a year would be quick.’

 Due to the unprecedented and ongoing nature of the coronavirus

outbreak, this article is being regularly updated to ensure that it
reflects the current situation at the date of publication. Any significant
corrections made to this or previous versions of the article will continue
to be footnoted in line with Guardian editorial policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/can-a-face-mask-
protect-me-from-coronavirus-covid-19-myths-busted

difficult words:

- Vulnerable  kwetsbaar

- Certainly  zeker

- Aerosols  aërosolen
 - Droplets  druppels

- Accumulate  ophopen

- Ancestral  voorouderlijke

- Speculative  onzeker

- Comparisons  vergelijkingen

- Mortality  sterfte

- Sequence  volgorde

Summary:

This newspaper is about the coronavirus. The virus is really contagious.

This newspaper answers the most claims about the coronavirus like: a face
mask does not work, it is mutating into a more deadly strain, it is no more
dangerous than a winter flu and some other claims. The answers on the
claims do you find in the newspaper.

One World: Together at Home

review – locked-down stars lift
the spirits
There are stirring performances aplenty in the Lady Gaga-hosted
singathon, but it’s the glimpses of celebs’ homes that are the real treat
Lady Gaga in One World: Together at Home. The global broadcast and digital special was held to
support healthcare workers and the Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund. Photograph: Mohammed
Badra/EPA

With Together at Home, Lady Gaga brought together music stars from
around the world to give everyone something they so desperately need at
this time of acute crisis: a chance to judge the interior design choices of
the rich and famous.

As you watch this compilation of live performances recorded in stars’

homes while they, like everyone else, self-isolate due to coronavirus, it’s a
bit like going round a house with an estate agent: you’re pretending to
listen to what they’re saying, but you’re actually trying to check out their
bookshelves and thinking, my God, those kitchen units are divine/awful.
Lady Gaga’s home performance space is full of chaotic energy, featuring
gold dumbbells and a suitcase pasted with sheet music. On the plus side,
Mick Jagger’s taste in floral curtains is rather chic, and John Legend’s
house has the desert-modernism aesthetic down pat. In an act of elite-
level passive aggression, Elton John has plonked a piano in the middle of
his outdoor basketball court, presumably to stop his kids driving him mad
during lockdown with endless attempts at three-pointers.

All this ogling is not really in the spirit of the event, which is a deeply
earnest appreciation from the stars for essential workers, their
performances interspersed with coverage of the fight against the virus,
and shows of support from Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and others.

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It begins with six hours of online livestreamed performances along with calls to donate to the
WHO’s Solidarity Response Fund, before the star wattage intensifies for the TV broadcast
and the tone changes. “Put your wallets away,” Gaga says. “It’s our love letter to the world –
the incredible artists we’ve got lined up for you, they’re all here to say thank-you, to celebrate
you, to give back a little bit of kindness that you’ve given to us.” For the UK, there’s a
tweaked version of the package, featuring a higher proportion of Brits including Paul
McCartney and Tom Jones, plus social media montages of stars including the athletes Mo
Farah and Jessica Ennis-Hill.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Elton John in his basketball court. Photograph: Global Citizen/PA
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There is of course a rather luvvie-ish tendency on show here, that the world will be soothed
with the divine gift of song; the weariest health workers watching might have preferred a
donation of funds for PPE rather than pop power couple Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello
thinking to themselves what a wonderful world it is, no matter how gorgeous and gorgeously
harmonised they are.

But these performances are often beautiful and display rare gifts. Stevie Wonder’s medley of
Bill Withers’ Lean on Me with his own Love’s in Need of Love Today is a robust double-
helix of solidarity. The Rolling Stones’ rendition of You Can’t Always Get What You Want is
superbly intimate, Jagger’s big-hearted vocals juxtaposing perfectly with Keith Richards’
Tom Waits-esque murmurs: stoicism and caution in a brotherly duet. Jennifer Lopez isn’t
generally thought of as a balladeer, but her performance of Barbra Streisand’s People is
Broadway-powerful, and its subject matter – humility in crisis – makes it perfectly chosen.
Elton’s performance of I’m Still Standing is less good, delivered in the clipped “club style” of
Shooting Stars.

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Clockwise from top left: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood
performing on One World: Together at Home. Photograph: Getty Images/Getty Images for
Global Citizen

Among the new generation, Billie Eilish is typically spellbinding. She picks out Sunny by
Bobby Hebb, an infectiously joyful tune, but while the lyrics face forward into brightness and
joy, the way Eilish performs it – using her sensual, high-frequency vibrato – acknowledges
the pain that came before. Burna Boy’s song African Giant – “Tell em Africa we done dying”
– deftly rebuts the narrative of desperate African strife that has dominated all-star benefit
shows in the past, and Taylor Swift’s moving performance of Soon You’ll Get Better,
originally written for her unwell mother, will no doubt have powerfully resonated with those
whose family members are currently stricken. The line “This won’t go back to normal, if it
ever was”, takes on a quiet political edge, too.

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US student Abby Campbell works on homework via remote learning as she watches US
singer Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell perform Photograph: Matt
Campbell/EPA
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The BBC’s package of the material slots it into a shiny-floor studio format ably presented by
Clara Amfo, Claudia Winkleman and Dermot O’Leary, the latter dressed to audition for a
porn parody of the Steve Jobs documentary. The music takes a more soundtracking role with
plenty of heartwarming montages of British health workers, bin men and more. There’s also a
wonderful sequence where Skip Marley plays his grandfather Bob’s I Wanna Love You as a
surprise first dance song for an NHS nurse who had her wedding cancelled because of the
crisis – Richard E Grant plays best man, with Nadiya Hussain as cake provider.

Paul McCartney’s Lady Madonna is jazzily interpreted almost to the point of incoherence, but
he and Tom Jones give evocative personal tributes to the NHS, with Jones remembering his
own isolation at the hands of tuberculosis as a child. Michael Bublé – whose young son was
treated for cancer in 2016 – delivers a rightly sentimental take on God Only Knows for health
workers, but it’s Little Mix who are the best of the Beeb exclusives with a perfectly
harmonised version of Touch. Their melancholic take on a track that’s about being ragingly
horny hints at a painful side of self-isolation that only a pop song could address in this family-
friendly format.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Taylor Swift performs Soon You’ll Get Better. Photograph: Global Citizen

There are striking moments across the six-hour preamble, too. Ellie Goulding’s admission – “I
can get quite socially anxious, so you’d think [lockdown] would be a breeze for me, but
actually I’m finding it really hard” – is a moment of bracing candour amid the peace-and-love
bromides, and the husk that develops around her voice as she pushes it into the red is one of
pop’s loveliest sounds. Kesha’s ferocious-sounding cat sounds like it’s keeping someone off
camera well over two metres away; South African rapper Sho Madjozi flips her Good Over
Here with lyrics castigating people breaking lockdown, and is one of the few moments of
genuine fun.

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K-pop super-boyband SuperM are charming, indulging in lockdown pursuits like exercising,
drawing, building a model ship and cooking some rubbish-looking bruschetta as they sing; the
comment feed duly explodes into heart emojis. But it’s Italian star Zucchero who steals the
show, covering Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometimes on piano. The Korgis’ song is about the
loss of innocence at realising the sheer power of love, but in this context is charged with
something even deeper: the pain of grief and the inevitability of death.

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Neighbours in Arlington, Virginia watch Eddie Vedder perform on One World: Together at
Home. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Although it’s celebrating the work of the WHO, no one comes out to denounce Donald
Trump’s defunding of the organisation; Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder edited out the government-
bashing lyrics in his otherwise extremely powerful rendition of River Cross. Perhaps there is
reticence to be seen to be politicising the crisis, despite it being so profoundly political. A
cynical reading is that these performances are merely good PR, which of course they are; a
more pointed criticism might be that for all the talk of it bringing people together, music is
actually quite impotent in the face of such a devastating disease, and that awareness hardly
needed to be raised about it. The situation is so grave for some that art will seem facile, even
indulgent.

But Gaga et al’s intentions are ultimately noble, the performers are sincere, and their song
choices channel poignancy, acknowledge tenacity and invite self-reflection. They also,
meanwhile, show that the chief interior lighting choice for celebrities is the soulful application
of candles.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/19/together-at-home-review-locked-down-
stars-lift-the-spirits

Difficult words:

- Stirring  roerend
- Broadcast uitzending
- Desperately  wanhapig
- Bookshelves  boekenplanken
- Dumbbells  halters
- Floral  bloemen
- Interspersed  gestrooid
- Wattage  vermogen
- Proportion  aandeel
- Rare  zeldzaam

Summary:

This newspaper is about a home concert organized by Lady Gaga, it was called One World:
Together at Home. Famous artits performed at home like Lady Gaga herself ofcourse, also
Elton John, Sam Smith, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift and much more famous artits. Also, during
the house concert, money could be donated against the coronavirus.
 Coronavirus outbreak

Coronavirus vaccine: when will

we have one?
While the official 12- to 18-month timeframe still stands, experimental
Covid-19 inoculations for high-risk groups could be rolled out much earlier

 Coronavirus – latest updates

 See all our coronavirus coverage

Laura Spinney

Sun 19 Apr 2020 08.49 BST

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A researcher conducts tests at the Moderna labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph:

Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images

When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Public-facing scientists such as the

UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and his US counterpart,
Anthony Fauci, keep repeating that it won’t be before 12 to 18 months.
But other voices – including some of those in the race to create a vaccine
themselves – have suggested that it could be as early as June. Who is
right?

The former, probably, but it’s complicated because this pandemic is

forcing change at almost every step in the process by which a new vaccine
arrives at a needle near us.

“It really depends on what you mean by ‘having a vaccine’,” says

Marian Wentworth, president and CEO of Management Sciences for
Health, a Massachusetts-based global not-for-profit organisation that
seeks to build resilient health systems, and a long-time observer of
vaccine development. “If you mean one that can be used in a mass
vaccination campaign, allowing us all to get on with our lives, then 12
to 18 months is probably right.”

But in terms of an experimental vaccine that is deemed safe and

effective enough to be rolled out in a more limited way – to high-risk
groups such as health workers, say – that could be ready within weeks
or months, under emergency rules developed by drug regulatory
agencies and the World Health Organization in the context of the recent
Ebola epidemics in Africa.

When the University of Oxford’s Adrian Hill told the Guardian that his
group’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate could be ready by the summer, it
was this kind of readiness to which he was probably referring. The
group, led by Sarah Gilbert, has since stated that a vaccine shown to be
effective in phase-3 clinical trials that could be manufactured in large
quantities won’t be ready before the autumn even in a best-case
scenario. And that scenario is “highly ambitious and subject to change”.

Normally, a vaccine is developed in the lab before being tested on

animals. If it proves safe and generates a promising immune response
in this pre-clinical phase, it enters human or clinical trials. These are
divided into three phases, each of which takes longer and involves
more people than the previous one. Phase 1 establishes the vaccine’s
safety in a small group of healthy individuals, with the goal of ruling out
debilitating side effects. Phases 2 and 3 test efficacy, and in an
outbreak like the present one they are conducted in places where the
disease is prevalent. In parallel with these later phases, production
capacity for the candidate vaccine is gradually built up, so that
factories are capable of producing it on a large scale if and when
regulatory agencies judge that it should be licensed.
In an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine on 30
March, representatives of the Oslo-based not-for-profit Coalition for
Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which is helping to finance
and coordinate Covid-19 vaccine development, laid out an accelerated
version of this process that they believe is more suited to a pandemic.
This “pandemic paradigm” implements certain steps in parallel, such as
animal and phase-1 clinical testing. It also involves scaling up
production capacity before sufficient safety and efficacy data are
available – a financially risky step, given that that may never
materialise, and one that requires governments and not-for-profit
organisations such as Cepi to share that extra financial risk with
pharmaceutical companies if they want them to engage. Mass
production is critical in a pandemic, when hundreds of millions if not
billions of doses are needed – and many countries are now scrambling
to build new vaccine production facilities.

“People now appreciate that the lengthy process of conventional

licensing of vaccines is not going to be helpful in the context of an
epidemic,” says Beate Kampmann, who heads the vaccine centre at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Bringing a new vaccine to the clinic has taken 10 to 20 years in

the past
Prudently, Cepi did not attach a timeline to its accelerated paradigm,
but the 12- to 18-month estimate already takes it into account. Bringing
a new vaccine to the clinic has taken 10 to 20 years in the past.
Nevertheless, the accelerated paradigm is being implemented now. A
Boston-based biotech firm, Moderna, saw its experimental Covid-19
vaccine enter human trials on 16 March, just 10 weeks after the first
genetic sequences of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes the disease –
were released. Others will follow soon.

“We’re getting to candidates much more quickly,” says Kampmann,

who puts this progress down to advances made in the fight against
Ebola. “The step-up in technology that we have seen in the last five
years has really made a difference.”

There are many hurdles ahead, though. Most of the 70-odd Covid-19
vaccine candidates being developed and tested will not make it to the
licensing stage, and those that have been fastest out of the blocks may
still encounter problems later on. Moderna’s innovative technology
allowed it to generate a candidate quickly, but no vaccine using this
platform has been licensed to date.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris are working on a vaccine that piggybacks on a
licensed measles vaccine, speeding up the testing, licensing and production process.
Photograph: François Mori/AP
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At the Pasteur Institute in Paris, on the other hand, a Covid-19 vaccine
candidate is still in pre-clinical development, but because it piggybacks
on established technology – a licensed measles vaccine – the testing
and licensing processes will go faster. And this kind of vaccine can
already be produced in large quantities.

While there can be no shortcuts to establishing safety and efficacy,

proposals have been put forward for how these experimental vaccines
might be tested more rapidly without sacrificing scientific rigour. In
February, for example, the WHO published a draft protocol for phase 2
and 3 trials that would test a number of candidates simultaneously, in
multi-country trials according to standardised criteria.

Another proposal is to conduct controlled human challenge trials, in

which healthy volunteers are given a candidate vaccine and then
infected with Sars-CoV-2. These are ethically questionable, especially
before scientists understand why young and otherwise healthy people
are ending up on ventilators. A similar approach, being implemented by
the London-based clinical research group Hvivo, invites volunteers to
be infected with a milder coronavirus – but how applicable its findings
will be to Sars-CoV-2 is not clear.
 There are still many unknowns with respect to Covid-19, including for
how long any vaccine will provide protection. A strong indication of this
will be whether people who have recovered from the disease can catch
it again. There have been anecdotal reports of re-infection, but the
phenomenon is not well understood. “If our own body can’t prevent us
from getting it again, that would be one pretty damning signal,” says
Wentworth.

Once a vaccine is licensed, there will still be political obstacles to

getting it to where it’s needed, because each country or public health
jurisdiction has to make its own decision to roll it out. There will also be
issues of prioritisation – who should get it first, if supplies are limited –
which authorities are discussing now.

A vaccine that is approved a year from now may arrive after the end of
the current pandemic, but if so it won’t be wasted – first because Covid-
19 may recur seasonally, and second because the vaccine could itself
be repurposed in the event of an outbreak of a different coronavirus.
That will be no consolation to victims of this pandemic, or their
relatives, but it does mean that humanity will be better protected in
future. As Wentworth says: “That learning, we won’t unlearn.”

 Due to the unprecedented and ongoing nature of the coronavirus

outbreak, this article is being regularly updated to ensure that it
reflects the current situation as best as possible. Any significant
corrections made to this or previous versions of the article will continue
to be footnoted in line with Guardian editorial policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/coronavirus-vaccine-
when-will-we-have-one

Difficult words:

- Repeating  herhalende
- Suggested  voorgesteld
- Forcing  dwingen
- Global  globale
- Resilient  veerkrachtig
- Deemed  geacht
- Manufactured  vervaardigd
- Efficacy  werkzaamheid
- Agencies  agentschappen
- Pharmaceutical  Farmaceutische (uit de apotheek)

Summary:
This newspaper is also about the coronavirus. It is about a vaccine against the coronavirus, but
when do we have a vaccine against the coronavirus? How long does it take? Why does it
mostly take 10-20 years to have a vaccine and why are we now so close by a vaccine against
the coronavirus in such a short time? The answers on this questions, you will find them in this
newspaper article