Coronavirus News (148)

America is losing the stomach to fight Covid-19 The country is now on the verge of leaving the battlefield before the war is over .........   It is an odd moment to surrender to coronavirus. ....... Downgrading the fight now would be like George Washington taking a vacation after crossing the Delaware. ........  Mission accomplished only works when there is a vaccine, which is at least a year away. Yet large parts of the country, including Donald Trump, are taking victory laps. ........  The White House has lost any interest in prosecuting the war, which is now the preserve of the states. .......... the US had prevented 60m infections by taking early lockdown measures. That is roughly 250,000 deaths that did not happen. The period the scientists analysed was up to April 6 ............  Forget war. Going for the jackpot is a more fitting metaphor for America’s coming pandemic summer. ............. Covid-19 does not distinguish between decent people and white nationalists. In a deeply polarised nation, ideology beats science. ........... The most likely outcome is a second coronavirus wave in the coming months. Many assume the virus goes quiet when the temperature rises. There is no scientific consensus on this. ..........   One of America’s fastest-rising infection rates is in Arizona, where temperatures have not dropped below 90F in two weeks. India, which is approaching monsoon, has one of the world’s fastest rising infection rates. On Sunday 136,000 new people were infected worldwide, which was a record for one day. .............  The voice of science is the last thing the president wants to hear. ...........   Having the world’s best laboratories will come to naught if Americans refuse to fight side-by-side in the same war.

Here's What the CDC Says Should Happen for Schools to Safely Reopen As schools begin to plan for the next school year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidelines for the safest possible measures. Here's the breakdown. ...........   After months of social distancing and virtual schooling, parents across the country are anxiously waiting for September so kids can return to school and life, hopefully, can return to normal. ............  has many people wondering if a return in the fall will even be possible. .......  It covers everything from face coverings to communal spaces like cafeterias and playgrounds and it is thorough. The guidelines are broken down into multiple sections and cover every conceivable aspect of daily operations. ...........  Children can expect big changes in the fall. .........   The biggest changes for school adults will be related to the cleaning and disinfection of pretty much everything all the time.  

CDC: Considerations for Schools  

THREE COVID-19 VACCINES ARE READY FOR FINAL STAGE OF TESTING "THERE'S A LOT OF OPTIMISM IN OUR COMMUNITY THAT A VACCINE SHOULD BE POSSIBLE." ..........  Over the course of the summer, the federal government plans to fund three phase III clinical trials for experimental coronavirus vaccines. ...............  Each of the three vaccines will undergo this final phase of testing on about 30,000 human participants ............ The vaccine developed by Moderna Inc will begin its phase III trial in July, followed soon after by those developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Normally, reaching this point can take years, but coronavirus vaccines have been developed and tested on a vastly-accelerated timeline. ...............  Phase 0 studies how the human body processes a drug. Phase I identifies dangerous side effects and other safety concerns, and phase II trials measure whether the drug actually treats the condition it’s supposed to. ........... Finally, there’s phase III: large-scale tests that compare the drug or vaccine against a placebo. Many drugs don’t ever reach this final stage of the process, so the fact that three COVID-19 vaccines are already there is a promising sign for the fight to end this pandemic.  

RESEARCH: CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWNS PREVENTED MILLIONS OF INFECTIONS GOOD JOB! BY STAYING HOME, YOU SAVED COUNTLESS LIVES. .........  had the U.S. not enacted stay-at-home orders, 4.8 million more people would have likely caught the coronavirus by April 6 .........  China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France, and the U.S. ......... Preventative measures across all six countries likely prevented around 62 million cases altogether. .........  “The shelter in place was kind of a bold experiment that appears to have been dramatically successful”

BAD NEWS: ANOTHER DEADLY VIRUS IS SPREADING IN THE US EVEN IF YOU SURVIVE, THE NEUROLOGICAL IMPAIRMENTS ARE DEVASTATING..........  Since it was first discovered in humans in 1938, there have been less than 100 cases in the US

14 states and Puerto Rico hit highest seven-day average of new coronavirus infections  parts of the country that had previously avoided being hit hard by the outbreak are now tallying record-high new infections. ............ Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began ........... Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. ...........   The increase of coronavirus cases in counties with fewer than 60,000 people is part of the trend of new infections surging across the rural United States. ............ residents in states such as Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are living under only minor-to-moderate restrictions — even as their average daily infection rate is rising.  

As nursing home residents died, new covid-19 protections shielded companies from lawsuits. Families say that hides the truth. At a Connecticut home that lost one in three residents to covid-19, a daughter searches for answers ............  “We are not going to let health-care heroes emerge from this crisis facing a tidal wave of medical malpractice lawsuits so that trial lawyers can line their pockets” ........... Since the start of the pandemic, more than 30,000 nursing home residents have died of covid-19 .......... “The industry seized on this crisis to try to get a get-out-of-jail-free card” .......... immunity would encourage “maximum participation” from health-care workers during the pandemic. .........   the order does not protect nursing homes from the most egregious allegations, those involving gross negligence, criminal activity or willful misconduct. ..........   “I don’t even know if they were neglectful, but I do know my father is dead because of covid, and he wasn’t walking around that facility picking it up by himself,” James-Brown said. “I want a clear picture of what really went on there.” .............   So far, 120 residents at Kimberly Hall North have been infected, according to the home. So have 43 of 157 employees. ............  Although nursing homes have ranked among the deadliest of all group settings during the pandemic, the disparity in coronavirus cases is still a medical mystery .........  “If we had not done this, we never would have had enough front-line health-care workers working and taking care of patients” .......... Since the pandemic began, about 20 states have approved immunity orders, most shielding both companies and employees. ............. The protection comes as the industry continues to lobby for federal aid, with the government recently agreeing to release nearly $5 billion in relief funding to the country’s 15,000 Medicare-certified nursing homes. .................  82 percent of homes had been cited over a five-year period for lapses in infection control and prevention. ..........  For decades, nursing homes have lobbied to set legal limits for damage payments and to compel nursing home residents to forgo the courts and take their cases to arbitration, where homes more easily prevail .............  “My mother could have beat covid. I know it in my heart of hearts,” she said, adding: “No one cared or paid much attention. I just feel like someone should be held accountable.”

Doctors keep discovering new ways the coronavirus attacks the body Damage to the kidneys, heart, brain — even ‘covid toes’ — prompts reassessment of the disease and how to treat it ...........  one more patient with a strange constellation of symptoms that physicians are racing to recognize, explain and treat. ........    there is widespread recognition that the novel coronavirus is far more unpredictable than a simple respiratory virus. Often it attacks the lungs, but it can also strike anywhere from the brain to the toes ...........  The World Health Organization’s database already lists more than 14,600 papers on covid-19. Even the world’s premier public health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have constantly altered their advice to keep pace with new developments. ........  “Bottom line, this is just so new that there’s a lot we don’t know.” ..........  It attacks the heart, weakening its muscles and disrupting its critical rhythm. It savages kidneys so badly some hospitals have run short of dialysis equipment. It crawls along the nervous system, destroying taste and smell and occasionally reaching the brain. It creates blood clots that can kill with sudden efficiency and inflames blood vessels throughout the body. ...........  It can begin with a few symptoms or none at all, then days later, squeeze the air out of the lungs without warning. It picks on the elderly, people weakened by previous disease, and, disproportionately, the obese. .......... It mostly spares the young. Until it doesn’t .........    SARS-CoV-2, the bad seed of the coronavirus family, is the seventh. It has managed to combine the infectiousness of its cold-causing cousins with some of the lethality of SARS and MERS. It can spread before people show symptoms of disease, making it difficult to control, especially without widespread and accurate testing. At the moment, social distancing is the only effective countermeasure. ............    Experts say it will be years until it is understood how the disease damages organs and how medications, genetics, diets, lifestyles and distancing impact its course. ......... “We had to rapidly learn how this virus impacts the human body and identify ways to treat it literally in a time-scale of weeks. With many other diseases, we have had decades.” ............  “Our hypothesis is that covid-19 begins as a respiratory virus and kills as a cardiovascular virus.” .........   ACE2 receptors, which help regulate blood pressure, are plentiful in the lungs, kidneys and intestines — organs hit hard by the pathogen in many patients. 

Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes Doctors sound alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated or dead. Some didn’t even know they were infected. .......... The patient’s chart appeared unremarkable at first glance. He took no medications and had no history of chronic conditions. He had been feeling fine, hanging out at home during the lockdown like the rest of the country, when suddenly, he had trouble talking and moving the right side of his body. Imaging showed a large blockage on the left side of his head. Oxley gasped when he got to the patient’s age and covid-19 status: 44, positive. ..............  As Oxley, an interventional neurologist, began the procedure to remove the clot, he observed something he had never seen before. On the monitors, the brain typically shows up as a tangle of black squiggles — “like a can of spaghetti,” he said — that provide a map of blood vessels. A clot shows up as a blank spot. As he used a needlelike device to pull out the clot, he saw new clots forming in real-time around it. “This is crazy,” he remembers telling his boss. ............  Reports of strokes in the young and middle-aged — not just at Mount Sinai, but also in many other hospitals in communities hit hard by the novel coronavirus — are the latest twist in our evolving understanding of the disease it causes. ............  Once thought to be a pathogen that primarily attacks the lungs, it has turned out to be a much more formidable foe — impacting nearly every major organ system in the body. .............   The analyses suggest coronavirus patients are mostly experiencing the deadliest type of stroke. Known as large vessel occlusions, or LVOs, they can obliterate large parts of the brain responsible for movement, speech and decision-making in one blow because they are in the main blood-supplying arteries. ..............  Clots that form on vessel walls fly upward. One that started in the calves might migrate to the lungs, causing a blockage called a pulmonary embolism that arrests breathing — a known cause of death in covid-19 patients. Clots in or near the heart might lead to a heart attack, another common cause of death. Anything above that would probably go to the brain, leading to a stroke. ............  the New York City Fire Department was picking up four times as many people who died at home as normal during the peak of infection that some of the dead had suffered sudden strokes. ............  “We are used to thinking of 60 as a young patient when it comes to large vessel occlusions,” Raz said of the deadliest strokes. “We have never seen so many in their 50s, 40s and late 30s.” ............   Raz wondered whether they are seeing more young patients because they are more resistant than the elderly to the respiratory distress caused by covid-19: “So they survive the lung side, and in time develop other issues.” ............  Some patients are also developing more than one large clot in their heads, which is highly unusual. ..........  The first wave of the pandemic has hit the elderly and those with heart disease, diabetes, obesity or other preexisting conditions disproportionately. The covid-19 patients treated for stroke at Mount Sinai were younger and mostly without risk factors. ...........  The victims’ ages are 33, 37, 39, 44 and 49, and they were all home when they began to experience sudden symptoms, including slurred speech, confusion, drooping on one side of the face and a dead feeling in one arm. .............  one striking aspect of the cases is how long many waited before seeking emergency care.    

Tesla defied county orders so it could restart production. Days later, workers tested positive for the coronavirus. Chief executive Elon Musk defied a public health order so his company could resume building cars in Fremont, Calif., last month. ............  Tesla and Alameda County came to an agreement in May allowing the company to restart production if it adhered to strict social distancing and took extra precautions to avoid exposing workers to the illness. The plant employs about 10,000 workers, who are spread out among multiple shifts and are now required to wear masks and limit contact with others in break rooms, for example, while keeping ample space between one another as they work with heavy machinery to produce electric cars. ..............   As part of the agreement struck allowing Tesla to reopen on May 18, Tesla would have to report all positive cases to the Alameda County Public Health Department. ........  He followed that up by publicly defying the order and opening the plant, daring officials to arrest him and eventually winning the support of President Trump. ..............    As far as social distancing, the worker said, management “don’t say anything to the associates [because] they’re not doing it either.” ...........  As for the changes: “It’s like nothing but with a mask on,” the worker said.