World Health Organization Scientific Brief regarding “ Immunity Passports” for Covid-19 April 24, 2020. The WHO has stepped into the controversy  regarding the usefulness of individual serologic tests for Covid-19.   This Scientific Brief appears to be prompted by recent efforts to expand   immunologic testing on the population, and utilize such test results to determine who is immune.  The WHO strongly disagrees with that approach.

The emergence of COVID-19 during the winter months has caused scientists re-examine the mechanisms underlying the seasonal nature of respiratory viral infections in order to determine actionable steps to limit SARS-CoV-2 infections. The importance of temperature and humidity are highlighted in this article as factors which modulate intrinsic, innate and adaptive immune responses to viral URIs. This article provides an in-depth look at the immunology of seasonal viral infections and provides potential behavioral steps aimed at potentially mitigating COVID-19 and other seasonal upper respiratory viruses.

It is well known that viruses mutate over time in large part because the replication process does not always lead to a perfect copy of the genes being replicated.  While single nucleotide variants (SNVs) are abundant in SARS-CoV-2, until this publication no mutation has been directly linked to functional changes in SARS-CoV-2 that would affect the virus’ pathogenicity.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was the last time the world felt biologic devastation similar to what we are now experiencing with Covid-19. US cities then chose to confront the epidemic utilizing non pharmacologic interventions, (NPI) in distinct ways, with significantly different outcomes. In National Geographic’s most recent publication, Strochli and Champine catalogue these different approaches, and illustrate how these varying approaches at the known onset of the disease, significantly impacted the degree of devastation that ensued.

This model provides a comprehensive epidemiology modeling and forecasting of the current COVID-19 pandemic as it pertains to hospital bed stays, ICU-days, ventilator days and deaths by US states over the next 4 months.