|  | - India on Tuesday reported 4,417 Covid cases and 23 fatalities. The cumulative caseload is 4,44,66,862 (52,336 active cases) and 5,28,030 fatalities
- Worldwide: Over 605 million cases and over 6.50 million fatalities.
- Vaccination in India: Over 2.13 billion doses. Worldwide: Over 12.17 billion doses.
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| | TODAY’S TAKE | | A smartphone app can detect Covid from your voice |  | - A new research shows that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect Covid-19 infection in people’s voices by means of a mobile phone app.
- The AI model used in this research is more accurate than lateral flow/rapid antigen tests and is cheap, quick and easy to use, which means it can be used in low-income countries where PCR tests are expensive and/or difficult to distribute.
- The study used data from the University of Cambridge’s crowd-sourcing Covid-19 Sounds App that contains 893 audio samples from 4,352 healthy and non-healthy participants, 308 of whom had tested positive for Covid-19.
- How: The app is installed on the user’s mobile phone, the participants are asked to record some respiratory sounds. These include coughing three times, breathing deeply through their mouth three to five times, and reading a short sentence on the screen three times.
- The researchers used a voice analysis technique called Mel-spectrogram analysis, which identifies different voice features such as loudness, power and variation over time.
- How accurate: The researchers at The Netherlands’ Institute of Data Science, Maastricht University, said the AI model was found to be accurate 89% of the time. The accuracy of lateral flow tests varied widely depending on the brand. Also, lateral flow tests were considerably less accurate at detecting Covid infection in people who showed no symptoms.
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| | TELL ME ONE THING | | Low testosterone in men means greater Covid risk |  | - Men with Covid-19 who had low testosterone levels are likelier to suffer from acute illness and require hospitalisation than those with normal levels, shows a new research jointly conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis and Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
- The study was conducted on 723 individuals who tested positive for Covid-19, largely in 2020 before vaccinations were available. The data show that low testosterone, like diabetes, heart disease, and chronic lung disease, is an independent risk factor for Covid-19 hospitalisation.
- The findings suggest that Covid-19-positive men with low testosterone were 2.4 times more likely to need hospitalisation than COVID-19-positive men with hormone levels within the normal range.
- Published in JAMA Network Open, the study indicates that treating low testosterone in men may help shield them from serious illness and lessen the strain on hospitals during Covid-19 waves.
- The study found that 427 men with normal testosterone levels, 116 with low levels, and 180 who had previously had low levels but were successfully treated. These men were receiving hormone replacement therapy, and their testosterone levels were within the normal range at the time they developed Coid-19.
- Sexual dysfunction, low mood, irritability, memory loss, exhaustion, loss of muscle mass, and a generalised decreased sense of well-being are all symptoms of low testosterone in men.
- Additionally, men whose testosterone levels had historically tested within the normal range but who had undergone successful hormone replacement therapy were not any more likely to be hospitalised for Covid-19 than were men whose testosterone levels had consistently tested within the normal range.
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| Written by: Rakesh Rai, Sushmita Choudhury, Jayanta Kalita, Prabhash K Dutta
Research: Rajesh Sharma
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