Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 06June 2020

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

The news posted last week for the coronavirus 2019-nCoV (aka SARS-CoV-2), which produces COVID-19 disease, has been surveyed and some important articles are summarized here. The articles are more or less organized with general virus news and anecdotes first, then stories from around the US, followed by news from other countries around the globe. This week we have increased coverage of overseas hotspots, especially Brazil. Economic news related to COVID-19 is found here.

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The safety problem for restaurants isn’t the dining room. It’s the kitchen. WaPo – Restaurants across the country are starting to reopen – some tentatively and some, like C&C Coffee and Kitchen in Castle Rock, Colo., with viral enthusiasm. As customers head back out to eat, most of the public discussion about safety is focusing on the front of the house – where customers sit. Some restaurants are rearranging dining rooms. A few are coming up with adorable, slightly creepy ways to enforce social distancing at tables: The Inn at Little Washington, the D.C. area’s only three-Michelin-starred restaurant, is planning to fill seats with mannequins. Everything will be fine, it seems, as long as patrons stay six feet apart. But in the back of the house, the part that most customers never see, a very different conversation is taking place. Chefs and other kitchen staff are quietly raising the alarm about the prospect of returning to what once passed for normal: chaotic, overcrowded, poorly ventilated kitchens where everyone is shouting, everyone is touching multiple surfaces and nobody has time for safety precautions when the front of the house gets slammed. “We’re touching food. We’re in close contact. There’s no social distancing,” says Michelle DeChesser, 52, a 20-year kitchen veteran who has worked as a chef at upscale restaurants from Portland, Ore., to Lancaster, Pa. Independent chef-owners, who work alongside their staff, are torn between giving customers something approximating a normal restaurant experience and keeping themselves and their employees safe. “It’s crazy for people to think they can run old-school-style table service – and I say ‘old school’ meaning, like, two months ago,” says Eric Rivera, 38, the chef and owner of Addo in Seattle. Like a lot of the independent chef-owners I talked to, Rivera is completely reconfiguring his restaurant, including the kitchen, to keep both the front and back of the house safe. “Our dining room now looks like a warehouse,” says Rivera, who is offering only takeout and delivery for now. “We have metro shelving. It’s like a grocery store.”

People Who Test Positive for COVID-19 After Recovering Aren’t Infectious -Around the world, there have been several cases of people recovering from COVID-19 only to later test positive again and appear to have another infection. Such cases have had doctors and researchers puzzling over whether recovered people continue to be contagious, and if they could get a second infection.Now, new research published by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that recovered COVID-19 patients who test positive again aren’t infectious.The study also found that most patients who recover have neutralizing antibodies – the type of antibody that confers immunity and protects people from getting sick again.”This study addresses the question of whether patients who have recovered from COVID-19 are still infectious, and which is a question that has been troubling us for some time,” said Dr. Heidi J. Zapata, a Yale Medicine infectious disease doctor. “This study suggests that patients that are recovered are no longer contagious.”The Viral Material in Re-Positive Cases Isn’t InfectiousThe Korean study examined 285 patients who tested positive again for the new coronavirus after they recovered from COVID-19, which had been confirmed via a negative test result.The researchers swabbed the patients and examined the viral material to determine whether it was still actively infectious.The team was unable to isolate live viral material, indicating that the positive diagnostic tests were picking up dead virus particles.”[This] may speak for the fact that the virus may be dead or not be fit enough to grow – therefore the virus may not be fit enough to infect a new host,” said Dr. Andres Romero, an infectious disease specialist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California.The researchers also tested 790 people who’d been in close contact with the “re-positive” patients. Of the 27 who tested positive, no cases appeared to be caused from exposure to someone who appeared to have a reinfection.The report also found that the vast majority of recovered patients (96 percent) had neutralizing antibodies, indicating that they conferred immunity. “Whether this is indicative of a completely protective response remains to be proven. If this study holds true, then people who have recovered can get back to work,” Zapata said.

Coronavirus: The mystery of ‘silent spreaders’ As the crisis has unfolded, scientists have discovered more evidence about a strange and worrying feature of the coronavirus. While many people who become infected develop a cough, fever and loss of taste and smell, others have no symptoms at all and never realise they’re carrying Covid-19. Researchers say it’s vital to understand how many are affected this way and whether “silent spreaders” are fuelling the pandemic. When people gathered at a church in Singapore on 19 January, no-one could have realised that the event would have global implications for the spread of coronavirus. It was a Sunday and, as usual, one of the services was being conducted in Mandarin. Among the congregation at The Life Church and Missions, on the ground floor of an office building, was a couple, both aged 56, who’d arrived that morning from China. As they took their seats, they seemed perfectly healthy so there was no reason to think they might be carrying the virus. At that time, a persistent cough was understood to be the most distinctive feature of Covid-19 and it was seen as the most likely way to transmit it. Having no symptoms of the disease should have meant having no chance of spreading it. The couple left as soon as the service was over. But shortly afterwards, things took a turn for the worse, and in a wholly confusing way. The wife started to become ill on January 22, followed by her husband two days later. Because they had flown in from Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, that was no big surprise. But over the following week, three local people also came down with the disease for no obvious reason, leading to one of Singapore’s first and most baffling coronavirus cases. Working out what had happened would lead to a new and disturbing insight into how the virus was so successfully finding new victims.

The Finnish COVID dogs’ nose knows! – According to the preliminary tests, trained scent detection dogs seem to be quick in performing the new task and might even be more sensitive than many of the tests that are now on the market. The extremely sensitive olfactory sense of dogs might prove to become a groundbreaking new tool in the fight against the COVID-19. These trained medical scent detection dogs have previously worked with identifying different types of cancers. Researchers at the veterinary and human medicine faculties at the University of Helsinki have now joined forces to identify COVID-19 infected individuals using canine scent detection. The first dogs that now have been trained, have succeeded in differentiating COVID-19 patient’s urine samples from urine samples of healthy individuals. “We have solid experience in training disease related scent detection dogs. It was fantastic to see how fast the dogs took to the new smell”, says research and DogRisk-group leader Anna Hielm-Bjorkman. The researchers are now starting a large collection of patient samples to ascertain the first observations and to be able to continue training more dogs. The researchers also need to clarify what the dogs are identifying in the patient samples and how long the smell stays after the infection has passed.

Doctor’s Note: Does a high viral load make coronavirus worse? – According to a study from the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom, one-fifth of hospital doctors are off work sick or in quarantine due to COVID-19. Even more concerning are the hundreds of healthcare professionals that have died from COVID-19, with the toll reaching at least 630 according to Medscape. One of the theories as to why many otherwise healthy front-line healthcare workers are dying from the coronavirus is that they are exposed to higher amounts of COVID-19 particles while treating patients. This is known as the viral load, which is the number of viral particles carried by an infected person that they then shed into their environment. Doctors have to get very close to patients in order to carry out procedures like taking samples from them or performing intubation and extubation (putting in and taking out breathing tubes), so it is assumed that more viral particles will be transferred to them. If you have a high viral load you are more likely to infect other people, but questions are also being asked about whether a high viral load could make your outcome from a COVID-19 infection worse. With infections like the middle eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which are coronaviruses that share some similarities to COVID-19, there is a correlation. In the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, it was found that patients with higher initial viral loads had worse outcomes, and it was suggested that viral load should be taken into consideration in addition to age and comorbidities when predicting the prognosis of patients infected with SARS. There was also a similar finding in influenza studies. In one study, healthy participants were given escalating doses (known as a human challenge) of influenza type A, and it was documented that the number and severity of symptoms correlated well with viral load. However, with COVID-19 the results thus far have been less conclusive.

Can You Catch COVID-19 Through Your Eyes? –Virologist Joseph Fair, PhD, an NBC News contributor, raised that concern when he became critically ill with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. From a hospital bed in his hometown of New Orleans, he told the network that he had flown on a crowded plane where flight attendants weren’t wearing masks. He wore a mask and gloves, but no eye protection.”My best guess,” he told the interviewer, “was that it came through the eye route.” While Fair is convinced that eye protection helps, other experts aren’t sure.. Some research has begun pointing in that direction, according to Elia Duh, MD, a researcher and professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.The clear tissue that covers the white of the eye and lines the inside of the eyelid, known as the conjunctiva, “can be infected by other viruses, such as adenoviruses associated with the common cold and the herpes simplex virus,” he says. There’s the same chance of infection with SARS-CoV-2, says Duh. To study whether SARS-CoV-2 could infect the eyes, Duh and fellow researchers at Johns Hopkins looked at whether the eye’s surface cells had key things that made the virus more likely to enter and infect them.In their study, which is now being peer-reviewed, the team examined 10 post-mortem eyes and five surgical samples of conjunctiva from patients who did not have the coronavirus. They wanted to see whether the eyes’ surface cells produced the key receptor for coronavirus, the ACE2 receptor.In order for SARS-CoV-2 to enter a cell, “the cell has to have ACE2 on its surface so that the coronavirus can latch onto it and gain entry into the cell,” Duh says.Not much research existed on ACE2 and the eye’s surface cells, he says. With the team’s findings, “We were really struck that ACE2 was clearly present in the surface cells of all of the specimens.” In addition, the researchers found that the eye’s surface cells also produce TMPRSS2, an enzyme that helps the virus enter the cell.More research is needed for a definitive answer, Duh says. But “all of this evidence together seems to suggest that there’s a good likelihood that the ocular surface cells are susceptible to infection by coronavirus.”

Distance, masks and eye protection are highly effective in limiting spread of virus, review finds — A new review of coronavirus transmission studies funded by the World Health Organization determined that physical distancing and face coverings, including tightfitting masks and goggles, are effective in preventing the spread of the virus.The review, published Monday in the Lancet medical journal, was based on evidence gathered in a wide array of studies focused on the transmission of coronaviruses that cause covid-19, SARS and MERS. People who maintained a distance of at least one meter, about three feet, from one another in “health-care and community settings” dramatically reduced their risk of contraction, and that protection increased if more distance was maintained, the review found.”The risk for infection is highly dependent on distance to the individual infected and the type of face mask and eye protection worn,” the report said. “From a policy and public health perspective, current policies of at least [one meter] physical distancing seem to be strongly associated with a large protective effect, and distances of [two meters] could be more effective.” The researchers also found that respirators are more effective than surgical masks but that surgical masks offer more protection than single-layer masks. Eye coverings “might also add substantial protection,” the researchers found. The report noted that more research is still needed, particularly on covid-19, but that the findings can inform official guidelines on protective gear, which remain inconsistent.

Protestors Urged to Wear Masks, Wash Hands and Get Tested for COVID-19 – The nationwide horror at the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police has triggered protests in 75 cities. People are demonstrating against the systemic racism that has made people of color targets of lethal actions by law enforcement. In response, elected officials and public health experts are walking a fine line of affirming the rights of protestors while simultaneously worrying that the protests will lead to a new wave of coronavirus infections. “All things considered, there’s little doubt that these protests will translate into increased risk of transmission for COVID-19,” said Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, to The Atlantic. The protests over the injustice of police officers disproportionately killing people of color have coincided with how COVID-19 deaths disproportionately hit racial minority communities. That phenomenon exposed huge disparities in resources and access to care in a country without universal healthcare. As The Atlantic noted, the pandemic and unrest together have trapped the country in a bind. The demonstrations oppose police brutality. But peaceful, masked protesters – and the journalists covering them – have sometimes been met with an overly aggressive police response. Yet, the demonstrations and the aggressive response by police are likely to exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus. The scenes of protestors holding hands, or shouting in the face of police, or singing in close quarters has raised concern that the protests will act as super spreaders.”If you were out protesting last night, you probably need to go get a COVID test this week,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms at a news briefing Sunday, as NBC News reported. “[B]ecause there’s still a pandemic in America that’s killing black and brown people at higher numbers.”The Atlantic noted the aspects of the protests and the police response that may contribute to a spread of the coronavirus. “The virus seems to spread the most when people yell (such as to chant a slogan), sneeze (to expel pepper spray), or cough (after inhaling tear gas). It is transmitted most efficiently in crowds and large gatherings, and research has found that just a few contagious people can infect hundreds of susceptible people around them. The virus can spread especially easily in small, cramped places, such as police vans and jails.”

What makes a Covid-19 patient a ‘superspreader’? | Advisory Board Daily Briefing – Scientists around the globe are tracking so-called “superspreading events” in which a single person infected with the new coronavirus triggers a larger outbreak – and they’re beginning to learn why some infected patients are more likely to be superspreaders than others, Kai Kupferschmidt reports for Science Magazine. Scientists tracking the new coronavirus’ spread have generally focused on two numbers, Kupferschmidt reports. The first is called the reproduction number (R), which represents the average number of new infections caused by a single infected person. The second is called the dispersion factor (k), a number indicating the likelihood that a particular disease will spread in clusters. Without any social distancing, the new coronavirus’ R-number is around three, Kupferschmidt reports. But Jamie Lloyd-Smith, who has studied the spread of pathogens at the University of California-Los Angeles, said the vast majority of infected individuals don’t spread the virus at all. “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero,” he said. “Most people do not transmit.” This is why scientists also look at the dispersion factor (k); the lower the k number, the more likely it is the virus is spread by small group of people. So far, estimates of the k number for SARS-CoV-2, which is the name of the new coronavirus, have varied, Kupferschmidt reports. One estimate from researchers at the University of Bern concluded the k number for the new coronavirus is higher than the k numbers for SARS and MERS.However, a recent research article by Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimated that k for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski said. Experts explain that these numbers are important because it allows policymakers to target social distancing policies at the types of gatherings where superspreading is likely to occur. “If you can predict what circumstances are giving rise to these events, the math shows you can really, very quickly curtail the ability of the disease to spread,” Lloyd-Smith said.

Why Americans Are Tiring of Social Distancing and Hand-Washing – 2 Behavioral Scientists Explain – States are beginning to open up their economies after successfully slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Much of the credit for that goes to Americans dutifully following prescribed behavior. People have been washing their hands frequently, maintaining physical distance from others,wearing face masks, sanitizing door knobs and even disinfecting food and packages brought into the house.But in order to continue to contain the spread of the virus, we’ll still need to sustain these behaviors for weeks and maybe months to come. Will people be able to maintain their vigilance over time?As scholars who study health-related behavior change, we’re skeptical. While continuing to wash your hands and stay six feet away from others doesn’t seem so hard for an individual, the problem is that people are unable to “see” the benefits of their actions – and thus often don’t recognize just how important they are. As a result, adherence to these protective behaviors could wane over time without policies designed to sustain them. It is, in fact, remarkable to us that efforts to promote hygiene measures have been as successful as they have been. That’s because they are almost the embodiment of the types of protective measures that people are especially bad at taking.The most obvious reasons are that maintaining physical distances and constantly washing hands are inconvenient and require constant vigilance. The costs of these behaviors are immediate, but the benefits are delayed.A more subtle and equally important reason, however, is that the benefits are intangible: You can’t touch, taste, feel or see the benefits of, for example, wiping off your door knob.One reason the benefits are intangible is that people tend to be insensitive to even dramatic changes in probabilities – such as from one-in-a-thousand chance to one-in-a-million chance – when it comes to small probability events such as the chance of contracting coronavirus. This is true unless the change in probability leads to certainty that the event will not occur, which is why people are not eager to engage in preventive behaviors unless they completely eliminate the risk, as research by psychologists has shown.

Resident physicians should have a say in their working conditions – In Chicago’s South Loop, the nightly salutation to health care workers begins at 8 p.m., first with a few flashing lights from old holiday decorations, followed by a cacophony of car horns, boomboxes, and metal railings being transformed into percussion sets. The nightly celebration has become a source of comfort for us, two oncology fellows, as we nervously watch Chicago’s daily Covid-19 numbers. As thoughtful as the ritual is, though, it feels inadequate. Nurses, physicians, and other hospital workers are dying, including resident physicians working on the frontlines. All are suffering new emotional traumas, creating fresh wounds in places where scar tissue hasn’t yet formed.As fellows, we join resident physicians, or residents as they are more commonly known, in the community of graduate medical education trainees. We are doctors who have finished medical school and are completing supervised training to become board certified, independently practicing physicians. Residents and fellows do much of the work in teaching hospitals, yet have little or no say about their working conditions and lack the bargaining power to improve them. The power imbalance between trainees and their hospitals has become even more lopsided in the Covid-19 pandemic. Across the United States, health care workers, including residents and fellows, have experienced lack of access to adequate personal protective equipment, inadequate supervision in taking care of critically ill patients with Covid-19, and punitive measures when speaking out about their struggles caring for patients. The nearly 35,000 resident physicians in the United States frequently work more than 80 hours a week for an average of $61,200 a year while carrying an average debt burden of more than $190,000. While pay and hours have improved somewhat over the past 40 years, residents endure three to seven years of this experiential learning to eventually gain their employment. Throughout that time, they meaningfully contribute to patient care and their hospitals’ bottom lines at every step.

Doctors Aren’t Just Fighting a Pandemic, but Also an ‘Infodemic’ – With more than 1.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 100,000 deaths from the virus, physicians face unprecedented challenges in their efforts to keep Americans safe.They also encounter what some call an “infodemic,” an outbreak of misinformation that’s making it more difficult to treat patients.”The most prevailing theme regardless of misinformation on a website or someone sharing a Facebook post is eroding trust. Medical experts and doctors who are trying to help patients, whether in general or in the office, [are seeing] the doctor-patient relationship being broken down over time and especially during this pandemic,”Dr. David Stukus, associate professor of pediatrics in the division of allergy and immunology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, told Healthline.Stukus says people are having a hard time trying to understand what information is reliable and what information they can trust.”Oftentimes their personal doctor may give them information that contradicts what they heard online or from someone else, and that really puts the patient in a tough position as they try to determine the best path forward for their own health,” he said.While misinformation online has been around for a while, Stukus says it has increased during the pandemic.”Previously, there were different focuses of misinformation, such as anti-vaccine groups or conspiracy theorists or unsubstantiated claims about supplements. Now all those different areas are focused on one area, and that’s COVID-19,” he said.

Should I Take Vitamin D to Protect Myself from COVID-19? – It’s summertime, and as we head outside to enjoy the weather, there’s an added benefit: The sunlight will prompt our skin to make vitamin D, which may help us fight COVID-19. But don’t think I’m promoting sunbathing – there’s more to the story. Recent research indicates that healthy vitamin D levels may make infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus less likely and reduce the body’s inflammatory response to the virus helping to limit severe complications. And there’s research to suggest that boosting our vitamin D levels may offer greater protection. A study conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic showed vitamin D supplements were safe and protective against respiratory infections. Of the study’s participants, those with the lowest vitamin D levels going into the study experienced the most significant drops in infection rates while on the supplements. Clinical trials are in place to give us information about the impact of vitamin D supplements on the COVID-19 infection specifically. At this time, we don’t know if taking moderate or high doses of vitamin D will prevent COVID-19 or reduce the rates of severe complications. Even though there’s still much we don’t know about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we do have reason to believe that vitamin D will help your body fight it.

Summer Heat Won’t Kill the Coronavirus, New Study Says – Researchers have found that warm temperatures in the U.S. this summer are unlikely to stop the coronavirus that causes the infectious disease COVID-19, according to a new study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease.The findings of the scientists refute President Trump’s claim in March that “when it gets a little warmer [the virus] miraculously goes away.” It also refutes his insistence in April, when he cited Department of Homeland Security data, that summer heat will kill the virus, which led him to wonder about shining a UV light inside the body or injecting disinfectant into the bloodstream, both of which are extremely dangerous. While the flu is seasonal, researchers who have tested the coronavirus in the lab found that the coronavirus is sensitive to heat and light, but those are at extremes. Summer temperatures may account for a slight decline in cases, but nothing that will allow us to return to normal or kill the virus, as Newsweek reported.”There is an association between temperature and rate of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus which may result in modest decline in the community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 with warmer weather,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion, according to Newsweek. “This effect is modest, however, and is unlikely to slow down disease spread if containment measures are relaxed.”Higher humidity and warmer temperatures seem to make the virus less stable. In warmer temperatures, the small virus-bearing droplets sent into the air by a cough or sneeze are more likely to attract water vapor, become heavier and drop out of the air before infecting someone. The opposite happens during colder, drier conditions when the droplets are lighter and stay airborne for longer, as WPIX in New York reported. Co-author Dr. Shiv T. Sehra, assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement, according to Newsweek: “While the rate of virus transmission may slow down as the maximum daily temperature rises to around 50 degrees [Farenheit], the effects of temperature rise beyond that don’t seem to be significant.”Based on our analysis, the modest association suggests that it is unlikely that disease transmission will slow dramatically in the summer months from the increase in temperature alone.”

Russia Developing Coronavirus Treatment That Disinfects the Body With UV Light From Inside — Scientists in Russia are developing a treatment for coronavirus that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to disinfect the body from the inside, Andrei Goverdovsky, from state nuclear agency Rosatom, has said.In an interview with Country Rosatom, the agency’s newsletter, Goverdovsky said physicists at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (IPPE) are currently developing methods to combat viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. He said they have called the project “luminous gas.””So far, no one has managed to hold UV disinfection inside a person,” he said. “We figured out how to do this. We select molecules and gas components that when inhaled remain activated and emit ultraviolet light directly in the lungs. We hope that in addition to coronavirus, our method [can be used to] treat tuberculosis, oncology and other diseases.” Further details on how the technique works and what tests had been carried out as part of the project were not available. The idea of putting UV light inside the body to treat coronavirus was highlighted by President Donald Trump during a press conference where he made a number of controversial remarks regarding possible COVID-19 therapies. At the briefing, on April 23, Trump asked if there was something that could be done to use disinfectant to kill the virus “by injection.”

ICUs Become A ‘Delirium Factory’ For COVID Patients –Doctors are fighting not only to save lives from COVID-19, but also to protect patients’ brains.Although COVID-19 is best known for damaging the lungs, it also increases the risk of life-threatening brain injuries – from mental confusion to hallucinations, seizures, coma, stroke and paralysis. The virus may invade the brain, as well as starve the organ of oxygen by damaging the lungs. To fight the infection, the immune system sometimes overreacts, battering the brain and other organs it normally protects.Yet the pandemic has severely limited the ability of doctors and nurses to prevent and treat neurological complications. The severity of the disease and the heightened risk of infection have forced medical teams to abandon many of the practices that help them protect patients from delirium, a common side effect of mechanical ventilators and intensive care.And while COVID-19 increases the risk of strokes, the pandemic has made it harder to diagnose them.When doctors suspect a stroke, they usually order a brain MRI – a sophisticated type of scan. But many patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are too sick or unstable to be wheeled across the hospital to a scanner, said Dr. Kevin Sheth, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Yale School of Medicine.Many doctors also hesitate to request MRIs for fear that patients will contaminate the scanner and infect other patients and staff members.”Our hands are much more tied right now than before the pandemic,” said Dr. Sherry Chou, an associate professor of critical care medicine, neurology and neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.In many cases, doctors can’t even examine patients’ reflexes and coordination because patients are so heavily sedated.”We may not know if they’ve had a stroke,” Sheth said.

Nearly half a million health care workers worldwide infected with coronavirus – A report issued Wednesday by the International Council of Nurses (ICN) finds that more than 600 nurses worldwide have died in the coronavirus epidemic, and that an estimated 450,000 health care workers of all kinds have been infected.The death toll among nurses is more than double the 260 reported on May 6 by the ICN, partly from more countries issuing reports but mainly from the ongoing impact of the pandemic, which has now hit 6.5 million people globally, with more than 380,000 dead.The Geneva-based nursing association said there was no actual count of the number of health care workers infected because so many countries’ health agencies were not tracking deaths and infections by occupation. The ICN has accumulated statistics from some countries and anecdotal reports from others to produce a low-end figure of 230,000 health care workers infected. The higher estimate of 450,000 is based on the finding that 7 percent of all those contracting COVID-19 are health care workers and then taking 7 percent of the 6.5 million total cases reported. Infection rates among health care workers are particularly high in Latin America, while 30 percent of all cases in Ireland are health care workers. In other countries, including Spain and Germany, the infection and fatality rates for health care workers are much lower. The United States seems to be at the higher end of the range – initial estimates had health care workers comprising 10 to 20 percent of those infected – but there are no current figures that cover all 50 states.The ICN renewed its appeal for national governments to both keep comprehensive records and step up the provision of Personal Protective Equipment and other measures to protect nurses on the front line of the struggle against the pandemic.”For weeks now we have been asking for data about infections and deaths among nurses to be collected,” the statement declares. “We need a central database of reliable, standardised, comparable data on all infections, periods of quarantine and deaths that are directly or indirectly related to COVID-19 … Without this data we do not know the true cost of COVID-19, and that will make us less able to tackle other pandemics in the future.”The ICN report also notes “disproportionate deaths among black, Asian and minority ethnic HCWs (health care workers),” specifically Filipino workers in Britain.The alarming report from the nurses’ group came as the global total of infections rose by more than 100,000 for the fifth straight day, an unprecedented rise that is concentrated in the Western hemisphere: Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico, as well as the United States. World Health Organization Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “For several weeks, the number of cases reported each day in the Americas has been more than the rest of the world put together.”

These Athletes Had the Coronavirus. Will They Ever Be the Same? –NYT – The coronavirus has infected millions of people around the world. Athletes tend to view themselves as perhaps better equipped than the general population to avoid the worst consequences of the disease the virus causes, Covid-19.Yet interviews with athletes who have contracted the virus – from professionals to college athletes to weekend hobbyists – revealed their surprise at the potency of its symptoms, struggles to reestablish workout regimens, lingering battles with lung issues and muscle weakness, and unsettling bouts of anxiety about whether they would be able to match their physical peaks. And with sports leagues around the world scrambling to restart play, more athletes could soon be taking on a significant amount of risk.”It definitely shook me up a bit – it was very surreal, you know?” Von Miller, a linebacker for the Denver Broncos who contracted the virus, said in an interview. “My biggest takeaway from this experience is that no matter how great of shape you are in physically, no matter what your age is, that you’re not immune from things like this.” Experts warn that the virus does not discriminate.That was the lesson Andrew Boselli, an offensive lineman at Florida State, learned as members of his family – including his father, Tony, 47, a former N.F.L. lineman – began showing symptoms in March.”I knew I was young and healthy,” said Boselli, 22, who moved home to Jacksonville, Fla., after the university closed its doors. “I play Division 1 football, and I’ve been training my butt off all winter and spring. I thought I had no worries. I wasn’t going to get it.”That bullish attitude faded days later, when he awoke feeling sluggish and short of breath. That night, his body temperature climbed to 104. “It was the sickest I’ve ever felt,” said Boselli, who continued to feel shortness of breath and fatigue for about week and a half.In Italy, Paulo Dybala, an Argentine player with Juventus, described his own unnerving experience dealing with respiratory symptoms. “I would try to train and was short of breath after five or 10 minutes,” Dybala said in an interview with the Argentine Football Association, “and we realized something was not right.”Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonary physician and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, said that, like much about the disease, the long-term consequences for athletes who contract it are not fully understood.

Novel coronavirus losing potency, top Italian doctor says The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday. “In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak. “The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television. Italy has the third-highest death toll in the world fromCOVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, with 33,415 people dying since the outbreak came to light on February 21. It has the sixth-highest global number of cases at 233,019. Shops, cafes reopen as Italy lifts coronavirus restrictions (3:01) However, new infections and fatalities have fallen steadily in May and the country is unwinding some of the most rigid lockdown restrictions introduced anywhere in Europe. Zangrillo said some experts were too alarmist about the prospect of a second wave of infections and politicians needed to take into account the new reality. “We’ve got to get back to being a normal country,” he said. “Someone has to take responsibility for terrorising the country.” The government urged caution, saying it was far too soon to claim victory. “Pending scientific evidence to support the thesis that the virus has disappeared…I would invite those who say they are sure of it not to confuse Italians,” Sandra Zampa, an under-secretary at the health ministry, said in a statement. “We should instead invite Italians to maintain the maximum caution, maintain physical distancing, avoid large groups, to frequently wash their hands and to wear masks.” A second doctor from northern Italy told the national ANSA news agency that he was also seeing the coronavirus weaken. “The strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today,” said Matteo Bassetti, head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in the city of Genoa. “It is clear that today the COVID-19 disease is different.”

Experts dispute reports that coronavirus is becoming less lethal – Has the novel coronavirus in Italy changed in some significant way? That was the suggestion of a top doctor in northern Italy who reports that patients to his hospital have been showing up with lower levels of the virus in their upper respiratory tracts compared with those two months ago. Alberto Zangrillo, head of San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, roiled the global public health community on Sunday when he told RAI, the national TV station, that “the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” with patients showing minute amounts of virus in nasal swabs. Zangrillo theorized in a follow-up interview with The Washington Post that something different may be occurring “in the interaction between the virus and the human airway receptors.”He added, “We cannot demonstrate that the virus has mutated, but we cannot ignore that our clinical findings have dramatically improved.” The comments, which received widespread attention following a Reuters report, prompted vigorous pushback from Michael Ryan, a top official with the World Health Organization, who said Monday during an online news conference that “we need to be exceptionally careful not to create a sense that all of a sudden the virus by its own volition has now decided to be less pathogenic. That is not the case at all.” The consensus among other experts interviewed Monday is that the clinical findings in Italy likely do not reflect any change in the virus itself. Zangrillo’s clinical observations are more likely a reflection of the fact that with the peak of the outbreak long past, there is less virus in circulation, and people may be less likely to be exposed to high doses of it. In addition, only severely sick people were likely to be tested early on, compared with the situation now when even those with mild symptoms are more likely to get swabbed, experts said. The pandemic is evolving rapidly, with the rate of new cases declining in some hard-hit areas of the world, including northern Italy and New York City, while rising dramatically in Brazil, Peru and India. The virus, however, is mutating at a slow rate, experts say. Some strains of the virus have become more dominant, but there is no firm evidence yet that any of them are more contagious or deadly, according to scientists who have reviewed recent genetic studies.

Two ‘Unusual’ COVID-19 Features Convincing Scientists It Was Man-Made – Two unique features of SARS-CoV-2 are convincing a growing number of scientists that it was man-made, and not the result of natural evolution, according to the Daily Telegraph. First, the virus binds more strongly to human ACE2 enzymes than any other species, including bats. Second, SARS-CoV-2 has a “furin cleavage site” missing in its closes bat-coronavirus relative, RaTG-13, which makes it significantly more infectious – a finding we reported in late February. According to Israeli geneticist, Dr. Ronen Shemesh, the Furin site is the most unusual finding. “I believe that the most important issue about the differences between ALL coronavirus types is the insertion of a Furin protease cleavage site at the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2,” he said. “Such an insertion is very rare in evolution, the addition of such 4 Amino acids alone in the course of only 20 years is very unlikely.” Shamesh, who is working on a treatment for COVID-19, believes the novel coronavirus was most likely created in a lab, and did not evolve in nature.”There are many reasons to believe that the COVID-19 generating SARS-CoV-2 was generated in a lab. Most probably by methods of genetic engineering,” he said, adding “I believe that this is the only way an insertion like the FURIN protease cleavage site could have been introduced directly at the right place and become effective.” Dr Shemesh, who has a PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and over 21 years of experience in the field of drug discovery and development, said it is even “more unlikely” that this insertion happened in exactly the right place of the cleavage site of the spike protein – which is where it would need to occur to make the virus more infectious. –Daily Telegraph “What makes it even more suspicious is that fact that this insertion not only occurred on the right place and in the right time, but also turned the cleavage site from an Serine protease cleavage site to a FURIN cleavage site,” he added.

More than 25,000 nursing home residents and 400 staff have died during pandemic, federal report shows — More than 25,000 residents died and 60,000 were infected as the coronavirus swept through U.S. nursing homes in recent months, particularly affecting facilities with a history of low marks for staffing and patient care, the federal government reported Monday.The virus also infected 34,000 staff and took the lives of more than 400, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees the nation’s nursing homes.The numbers represent the first official national accounting of fatalities in the 15,000 nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding. The tally, however, is incomplete. Only about 80 percent of the nation’s nursing homes reported data to the federal government, and they were required only to include cases since early May.CMS officials nevertheless said they were confident the figures offer a reliable snapshot of the pandemic in the nation’s hard-hit nursing homes.”This represents a good picture of where we’ve been,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a call with reporters Monday afternoon.A Washington Post accounting of cases and deaths in nursing homes shows a higher toll and that tally rounds up data from less than half of the states. Based on reports from 21 states since the beginning of the pandemic, The Post found that more than 28,000 residents have died. Of the homes that reported data to CMS, 1 in 5 recorded at least one death from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and 1 in 4 had at least one positive case. In the District of Columbia and three states – New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts – more than 1 in 10 nursing home residents died, according to the data collected so far by CMS.An early analysis by CMS showed that nursing homes that have received poor marks for nurse staffing and patient care were more likely to see higher case counts than those with stronger track records.Statistical analyses touted by the industry, by contrast, suggest that the outbreaks have little to do with the quality of nursing homes. Instead, studies indicate that a home’s location and size are better predictors of an outbreak.

Coronavirus: California cases surpass 111,000 amid protests – As mass protests and looting in cities throughout California gripped much of the public’s attention Sunday, the death toll from COVID-19 and the number of people infected with the virus continued to rise. According to data compiled by this news organization, California had 111,904 confirmed coronavirus cases and 4,172 deaths as of Sunday evening.The state recorded 2,039 new cases, a seven-day average of 2,527 per day – the highest daily average since the start of the pandemic. There also were 29 new deaths recorded, though the average number of daily fatalities has declined slowly since May 21, when there was an average of 78 new deaths. In the Bay Area, the number of people with COVID-19 reached 14,156 Sunday, with 219 new reported cases. The seven-day average of new cases in the 10 counties also was 219, a notable increase from an average of 146 new cases from two weeks earlier.The total number of fatalities also grew in the Bay Area to 445, with two deaths recorded Sunday. The deaths were in Alameda and San Francisco counties. But the specter of COVID-19 didn’t stop thousands of people from spilling into the streets of cities throughout California to protest police brutality, following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The state currently is under a state of emergency due to the pandemic. Many protesters paid some mind to COVID-19 by donning masks and by appearing to avoid clustering too closely. People involved in looting also wore masks, though that may also be because they didn’t want to be identified by police. The looters also tended to move in groups, with little apparent concern about social distancing. In either case, crowds filling city and suburban centers has raised concerns among political leaders, physicians and public health officials about the possibility of new coronavirus outbreaks, just as the state begins reopening after weeks of stay-at-home orders, the New York Times reported. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti warned that the protests could become “super-spreader events,” referring to the types of gatherings that can lead to an explosion of secondary infections, the New York Times reported. Some infectious disease experts told the New York Times that they at least were reassured that the protests took place outdoors, explaining that the open-air settings could mitigate the risk of transmission. But another expert, medical historian Howard Markel, told the Times that parades and other large gatherings that took place in the midst of the 1918 influenza pandemic were sometimes followed by spikes in influenza cases.

Washington, DC area begins reopening as coronavirus infections top 100,000 – Public officials throughout the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are rushing to reopen the region’s businesses, even as medical experts warn of the dangers of resuming normal economic activity. As of Friday, the Washington, D.C. region, which consists of the District of Columbia and its outlying suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, had recorded 100,000 COVID-19 infections. Last week, the D.C. area was cited by top White House coronavirus task force members as one of the United States’ main centers for the infectious disease. As of Monday, the state of Maryland reported having 52,778 cases with 2,532 dead; Virginia on Friday had 44,607 cases and 1,375 deaths; Washington, DC had 8,801 cases and 466 deaths. Throughout the course of the week ending Friday, the region added over 10,000 new COVID-19 cases. Despite this, officials throughout the region all gave pronouncements that it was time for the areas hardest hit to reopen. On Friday, the heavily infected Northern Virginia suburbs began “phase one,” with restaurants, nonessential retail, childcare and places of worship resuming. In the days following Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s announcement last week, the state posted records for new infections. The Washington Post reported the previous week’s daily average to be 1,028 cases on Wednesday, over 100 cases more per day than in mid-May. Virginia may begin phase two as early as next week. In Maryland, officials in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties are planning to reopen this week. The two counties, which lie on the immediate borders of the District of Columbia, have by far produced the highest numbers of infections in the state, with Prince George’s County having over 15,000 cases and Montgomery County over 11,000. As of Wednesday, Montgomery County had met only two of its nine basic metrics for reopening. Perhaps most absurd was the decision by Washington, D.C.’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, to begin reopening on Friday. Earlier in the week, the city government announced that, despite increased COVID-19 infections last weekend, the city was “back on track” to meeting its goals of seeing 14 days of lowered infections. Following another decrease last Monday, Bowser “reset” the countdown to day 11. The infection rate for the Northern Virginia D.C. suburbs averaged about 20 percent. In Maryland and Washington, DC the rates were 12.5 percent and 17.2 percent last week. In Maryland’s Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, the rates were much higher, standing at 14.4 percent and 19.4 percent, respectively.

Coronavirus dashboard for June 2: the US has settled into a depressing status quo – The US seems to have settled into a status quo where it accepts 20,000 new coronavirus infections and 1,500 deaths each day. This is what I forecast about a month ago, as lockdown regimens were abandoned in much if not most of the country: periods of waxing and waning waves of infection because there simply isn’t the political or social willpower to “crush the curve.” Meanwhile Vietnam, a developing country with a 90,000,000 population, which immediately went on a regimen of testing and tracing per the WHO recommendations, and has nearly universal wearing of masks, has not recorded a single coronavirus death. Below I show cases, because there are no deaths in Vietnam to show!: Domestically, it continues to be the case that only Oregon, with a population of about 4.5 million, in addition to several rural States and the island State of Hawaii, has “crushed the curve”: States that had early outbreaks, like NY, have seen dramatic reductions, but as the graph below shows, even with a -87% decline in new infections, NY still has more new infections even on a per capita basis than half of all the States, as shown in the below graph of new infections in the bottom 25 States plus NY: Here is a map showing new cases and deaths per capita for all 50 States, from Conor Kelly, who continues to do great graphic work: Here is his graphic overview of deaths, new cases, testing, and the % of positive tests: In the past 14 days, the 7 day average of new cases in the US has only declined by 1,624 cases, from 22,918/day to 21,294/day. Of that, 767 have been in NYS, in which they have declined from 2,045/day to 1,278/day. What about in States that have most egregiously ended restrictions? While the individual State data is noisy, and in some notorious cases (FL and GA) very unreliable, the below graph (again from Conor Kelly) for the Confederacy as a whole, shows that new cases started to increase as of April 28, while deaths have only increased after May 26, a 4 week lag: Between some very bad social behavior over Memorial Day weekend and the civil unrest of the past week, I would expect new cases to increase in many areas in the next 14 days, and deaths to follow a week or two after that.

Native American Tribes’ Pandemic Response Is Hindered by Inequities — The SARS-CoV-2 virus is novel, but pandemic threats to indigenous peoples are anything but new. Diseases like measles, smallpox and the Spanish flu have decimated Native American communities ever since the arrival of the first European colonizers. Now COVID-19 is having similarly devastating impacts in Indian country. Some reservations are reporting infection rates many times higher than those observed in the general U.S. population. Many face long-standing food and water inequities that are further complicated by this pandemic.On the Navajo reservation, which covers more than 27,000 square miles in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, 76% of households already have trouble affording enough healthy food, and the nearest grocery store is often hours away. COVID-related restrictions have further curtailed access to food supplies. Clean water for basic sanitary measures like hand-washing is also scarce. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack indoor plumbing than whites in the U.S. Nearly one-third of Navajo households lack access to running water. Many health issues that can increase COVID-19 mortality rates occur at high levels among Native Americans. These underlying and preexisting conditions – things like hypertension, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease – are linked to diet and stem from disruption and replacement of Indigenous food systems. These factors have clear health impacts. On the Navajo reservation, for instance, through May 27, 2020,4,944 people out of a population of 173,000 had tested positive for COVID-19, and 159 had died. This infection rate per capita exceeds those in hot spots such as New York and New Jersey. Many tribal members rely on the federal government’s Indian Health Service for health care. But lack of capacity at the agency has hampered its response. Budget shortfalls, inaccurate data, the challenges of providing rural health care and ongoing personnel shortages in IHS clinics are compounded by staff beingpulled away to fight the virus in large cities.And while many states have raised frustrations with the Trump administration’s unwillingness to distribute protective supplies from the dwindling national stockpile, IHS and tribal health care authorities never had access to the stockpile at all. Although the federal government has begun distributing relief funds to IHS agencies, there have been serious problems with the accompanying supplies. The Navajo Nation has received faulty masks, and a Seattle Native health center asked for tests but received body bags instead.

“A W-Shaped Epidemic Is Now Emerging As Our Expected Case Forecast” — Here’s our weekly update on pandemic numbers in Italy and the US. In general, Italy continues to come in at expectations. However, new cases have picked up, running almost double expectations of a week ago. We had noted the difficulties of forecasting the ultimate taper of new cases. Reducing these will take longer than expected, and our model suggests that new cases in Italy will not fall below 100 until June 22nd, 14 days later than our expectations of just one week ago. And this could easily be pushed out again. The US continues to underperform badly in some areas. Total confirmed cases have reached 1.75 million. Deaths at 103,000 continue to run just about at expectations, as they have for weeks. The death rate continues to come in just below expectations. New confirmed cases continue to look terrible. We projected 11,300 cases for May 30; the actual was 25,300, 125% above forecast over just a week’s horizon. US containment efforts are visibly failing. As a result, the forecast date for new cases coming in below 1000 has been pushed back an alarming 40 days to July 29th. The forecast for new cases below 100 has been pushed out 56 days to August 28th. The US may enter the new flu season beginning in late September with new cases still in the thousands. Thus, there will be limited lifting of social distancing practices and very possibly a resumption of tighter lockdowns in the fall as a new outbreak flares. A “W”-shaped epidemic is now emerging as our expected case forecast, with the economic and social consequences implied.

JPMorgan Is “Counting The Days” Until The Second Covid Wave – As governments ease lockdown restrictions, attention is focused on the risk of a second wave of COVID-19 infections. And, as JPMorgan writes, “the message from most people is: so far, so good, although as everyone also recognizes the lags with COVID-19 are long, so that three-to-four weeks need to pass in order to see how easing restrictions will impact new infections.” Encouragingly, as JPM economist David Mackie points out, we have passed that point for a number of European countries. For example, Denmark started to ease lockdown restrictions 49 days ago without any sign of a second wave of infection. But, in JPM’s view, “this way of counting the days is misleading, and it will take a while longer before we know whether restrictions have been eased too much or not.” In a report titled “Counting the days: risks of a COVID-19 second wave”, Mackie writes that the collapse in mobility when lockdown restrictions were imposed played a key role in driving the reproduction number (R-naught) below one. But, mobility has not been the only development weighing on the reproduction number, with JPM claiming that a number of other developments, including the buildup of immunity in the population, the reduced susceptibility of young people, the prospect of self-isolation of vulnerable individuals, the impact of weather and the impact of wearing masks and increased hygiene, all exert downward pressure on the reproduction number as mobility increases. The bank’s analysis suggested that only when mobility increases more than halfway back from full-lockdown levels to pre-lockdown levels is there a risk of the reproduction number moving back above one. This suggests that, in assessing the risk of a second wave (or counting down the days to one), we should start counting the days from the moment that mobility in each country returns to the halfway mark. This is what the JPM strategist has done in the table below, and it presents a much more cautious picture. As Mackie writes, “if we assume that it takes up to 28 days before we will see clear signs of a second wave, then only Norway and Denmark are close to that point. For the rest of Western Europe, we need to wait a while longer. Indeed, although mobility has increased in the United Kingdom and Italy since the lockdowns were eased, neither country has seen it return to the halfway mark.”

Global Coronavirus Cases Top 6 Million as Lockdown Measures Ease – The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases passed six million Sunday, even as many countries begin to emerge from strict lockdowns. As of Monday morning, the total global tally of cases was at 6,172,448, with 372,136 deaths, according toJohns Hopkins University. The U.S. still leads the world for both caseloads and deaths, with nearly 1.8 million cases and 104,383 fatalities. Brazil now has the second-highest number of cases, at 514,849. Combatting the outbreak has become a charged political issue in Brazil, The Guardian reported, as governors and mayors impose lockdown measures while rightwing President Jair Bolsonaro rails against the “tyranny of total quarantine.” The country’s health ministry said it had no idea when the outbreak would peak, and experts say its caseload could be much higher than reported because there has not been widespread testing. Meanwhile, U. S. President Donald Trump announced Saturday that the G7 meeting he had wanted to host in Washington, DC in late June would be postponed until September, The Guardian reported further. The decision reverses an intention laid out in a May 20 tweet. “Now that our Country is ‘Transitioning back to Greatness’, I am considering rescheduling the G-7, on the same or similar date, in Washington, D.C., at the legendary Camp David. The other members are also beginning their COMEBACK. It would be a great sign to all – normalization!” he wrote. His reversal came days after German Chancellor Angela Merkel told him in a phone call that she thought holding the summit was a health risk. Her office said on Saturday she would not attend the meeting unless the coronavirus situation had changed substantially, The Associated Press reported.

‘The price you pay’: Sweden struggles with ‘herd immunity’ experiment – Unlike its Nordic neighbors, Sweden decided early on in the pandemic to forgo lockdown in the hope of achieving broad immunity to the coronavirus. While social distancing was promoted, the government allowed bars, restaurants, salons, gyms and schools to stay open. Initially, Sweden saw death rates from COVID-19 that were similar to other European nations that had closed down their economies. Sweden’s 7-day rolling average of daily confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million, while declining from highs in late April, is the highest in Europe, according to online publication Our World in Data. Using the 7-day average as a benchmark, the ratio of Sweden deaths to U.S. deaths is 3 to 2.”I’d say it hasn’t worked out so well,” said Dr. George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “I think the mortality in Norway is something like ten-fold lower. That’s the real comparator.” (Norway’s 7-day rolling average death rate is less than .01 per 1 million people.)”If you let this go or don’t try very hard or go about it in somewhat of a more restrained way rather than we have here, this is the price you pay,” Rutherford said. “Maybe it didn’t hurt businesses, but you have twice the mortality rate of the United States. All those people who died were part of families and they were citizens and part of the fabric of Swedish society. And now they’re gone because of a policy that hasn’t worked out quite the way they thought it would.” Scientists estimate herd immunity for the coronavirus is reached when 70-90% of the population becomes immune to a virus, either by becoming infected or getting a protective vaccine. Despite its relaxed response, Sweden is nowhere near to hitting that goal. Tests on 1,118 Stockholm residents carried out by Sweden’s Public Health Agency over one week in late April showed that only 7.3% had developed the antibodies needed to stave off the disease.

Man Behind Sweden’s Controversial Virus Strategy Admits Mistakes – Sweden’s top epidemiologist has admitted his strategy to fight Covid-19 resulted in too many deaths, after persuading his country to avoid a strict lockdown. “If we were to encounter the same illness with the same knowledge that we have today, I think our response would land somewhere in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Anders Tegnell said in an interview with Swedish Radio. Tegnell is the brains behind Sweden’s controversial approach to fighting the virus, and the government of Stefan Lofven has deferred to the epidemiologist in its official response to the pandemic. Gatherings of more than 50 people continue to be banned, but throughout the crisis Swedes have been able to visit restaurants, go shopping, attend gyms and send children under 16 to school. The laxer approach to containing the virus has drawn both praise and condemnation from across the globe. What is beyond debate, however, is the effect the strategy has had on the country’s death toll. At 43 deaths per 100,000, Sweden’s mortality rate is among the highest globally and far exceeds that of neighboring Denmark and Norway, which imposed much tougher lockdowns at the onset of the pandemic. “Clearly, there is potential for improvement in what we have done in Sweden,” Tegnell said. The comments appeared to frustrate some members of the government. Sweden’s minister of health and social affairs, Lena Hallengren, said Tegnell “still can’t give an exact answer on what other measures should have been taken. That question remains, I think,” the minister said, according to Dagens Nyheter. Until now, Tegnell had argued that the long-term nature of the Covid-19 pandemic required a more sustainable response than severe and sudden lockdowns. Despite criticism from abroad, Tegnell’s strategy enjoyed widespread support in Sweden. But with many other European Union countries now rolling back their lockdowns after appearing to bring Covid-19 under control, there are signs that Sweden may be left behind. That includes the freedom of movement of its citizens, as some EU countries restrict access to people coming from what are deemed high-risk Covid zones. What’s more, there’s so far limited evidence that Sweden’s decision to leave much of its society open will support the economy. Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson recently warned that Sweden is facing its worst economic crisis since World War II, with GDP set to slump 7% in 2020, roughly as much as the rest of the EU.

Nearly 65,000 COVID-19 deaths in UK according to Financial Times – There have been at least 64,500 deaths in the UK linked to coronavirus, according to modelling by the Financial Times. Its figures were based on those released Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS found that deaths registered in England and Wales with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 reached 44,401 by May 22. When figures for Northern Ireland are added, the total reaches just over 50,000. On Tuesday, the government announced a further 324 deaths, meaning that even its own heavily manipulated death toll calculation has reached almost 40,000 (39,369). These are the highest number of COVID-19 deaths of any country except the United States. The data used by the Johnson government to compile its daily figures only includes people who died with positive test results confirmed by a Public Health or National Health Service laboratory. They do not, it states, include “deaths of people who had COVID-19 but had not been tested, people who were tested positive only via a non-NHS or Public Health laboratory, or people who had been tested negative and subsequently caught the virus and died.” Financial Times economics editor Chris Giles tweeted of the ONS data, “Following today’s official excess deaths figures and hospital data, a cautious estimate for the total UK excess deaths during the coronavirus pandemic up to 2 June is 64,500. Of these 61,920 have happened, the rest are estimates.” The FT’s modelling follows an extensive survey of 19 countries carried out by the newspaper last week. It found that the UK was only behind Spain in its COVID-19 deaths in Europe, according to “excess mortality figures.” The UK’s death rate from the disease was 891 deaths per million, while Spain’s was 921 per million. In each country the figure was based on the number of “excess deaths” since the week ending March 20. The UK was in first place internationally until May 21, when Spain revised sharply upwards its mortality estimates, adding 12,000 to its toll of excess deaths, taking them to 43,000. Excess deaths are defined as the number of deaths in a certain period compared to a five-year average. The FT noted, “The data were compiled from national statistical agencies for 19 countries for which sufficient information exists to make robust comparisons. The figures include all of the European countries hit hard by coronavirus.” The excess deaths method of compiling figures for COVID-19 is internationally recognised as the best. The Heath Foundation explains, “Excess deaths is a better measure than the COVID-19 deaths of the pandemic’s total mortality. It measures the additional deaths in a given time period compared to the number usually expected and does not depend on how COVID-19 deaths are recorded.”

British lawmaker admits government’s widely mocked sex ban is ‘ridiculous’ – The British government altered its coronavirus rules on Monday, making it illegal for two or more people from different households to meet up indoors or spend the night in private with one another, sparking widespread mockery on social media.Appearing on “Good Morning Britain” the next day, Conservative Party lawmaker Tobias Ellwood came under pressure from anchor Piers Morgan to admit his true feelings about the lockdown sex ban.”I’m happy to say it’s ridiculous,” he said, adding he did not want to spend time talking about a story he had not had the chance to read up on.Those caught spending the night in another household can be prosecuted and fined up to $125 if found to be breaking the rules. Couples who do not live together are, however, allowed to spend time together outside – although intercourse outdoors is also illegal in Britain.On Tuesday morning, the hashtag #SexBan was trending in Britain, as many mocked the government for its attempt at keeping people apart to prevent transmission of the virus.Simon Clarke, a junior housing minister, told LBC radio the new measures are designed to make sure “we don’t have people staying away from home at night.”The amendment to the rules prompted many Britons to recall the recent scandal of Neil Ferguson, a key science adviser to the British government, who wascaught breaking lockdown rules by allowing a woman described as his “married lover” to visit him at his home. He had been a driving force behind the government’s strict lockdown rules.

Brazil passes Italy’s coronavirus death toll with another daily record – Brazil registered a record 1,473 more coronavirus-related fatalities in the 24 hours to Thursday, its health ministry reported, with the country’s death toll now at 34,021. The new fatalities push Brazil’s toll past that of Italy, which has reported 33,689 deaths so far, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tally. Brazil now has the third-highest death toll worldwide, behind the United States and the United Kingdom.The health ministry also said it registered 30,925 new coronavirus cases over the previous 24 hours, increasing the nationwide total to 614,941.Senior health ministry official Eduardo Macflrio acknowledged that the country is facing difficulties even measuring the extent of coronavirus contagion. “The government has been working to reduce under-reporting, expanding the testing capacity,” he said at a press conference.

Hundreds of schools in South Korea reopened, only to close again as the country sought to avoid a spike in coronavirus cases — An uptick in coronavirus cases forced South Korea to close hundreds of schools that had reopened only days earlier, and delay others from welcoming back students. Some schools resumed classes last week with multiple precautions in place to reduce the infection’s rate of spread. The schools were disinfected and students underwent temperature checks, wore face masks, and maintained social distance. Plastic barriers also separated students while they ate and studied, according to the Korea Times. More schools were scheduled to accept students starting Wednesday. But the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reported 79 new cases on Thursday. Of those, 69 were reported at a distribution center in Bucheon, the Yonhap News Agency reported. This news prompted 838 schools of the nation’s 20,902 to postpone reopening and stick with remote learning, the Korea Times said. South Korea has been heralded as one of the few countries to get its coronavirus response right due to widespread testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and lockdown. As of Saturday, the country had reported 11,441 cases and 269 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. But this new setback forced the government to reinstate restrictions. Parks, galleries, museums, and theaters in the Seoul metropolitan area have been shuttered for two weeks, CNN reported. Internet cafes have also been urged to close through June 14, and people have been asked to remain indoors and to avoid hosting gatherings for two weeks. Events organized by the government have been postponed, too.

Indian government abandons lockdown measures as coronavirus infections soar – Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government yesterday initiated phase one of their so-called “unlockdown,” under which all remaining closures and restrictions on gatherings to halt the spread of the highly contagious and potentially lethal virus are to be lifted. Even as COVID-19 infections soar across India, Modi’s Hindu-supremacist government is making clear that it is abandoning any concerted effort to fight the pandemic’s spread. Yesterday, with confirmed COVID-19 cases reaching 190,535, India displaced France to become the country with the seventh highest number of novel coronavirus infections in the world. Just in the past week alone, India recorded more than 50,000 new cases. Monday saw yet another daily record for new cases, with 8,392 registered. India’s official COVID-19 death total now stands at 5,164, with more than 2,000 deaths reported in the past 12 days. Under the “unlockdown,” the government is accelerating the process launched in late April of lifting the sweeping lockdown measures Modi imposed, with just a few hours’ notice, on March 25. A Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) statement issued on the weekend announced the removal, as of Monday, of all central government restrictions on intra- and interstate travel and the reopening of places of worships, hotels, restaurants and shopping malls beginning June 8, outside specially designated containment areas. Under phase two of the “unlockdown” set for July, decisions on reopening schools and other educational institutions will be taken “after consultations with States and Union territories’ administrations.” Metro (subway) systems, cinemas, gymnasiums, bars and meeting halls are to remain closed until the third phases of the “unlockdown.” International air travel also remains suspended. In line with the central government’s reckless push to reopen the economy, even India’s worst-hit states – like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan – have announced their own “conditional easing” of restrictions.

Antibodies Testing in Karachi Reveals COVID19 Exposure Runs in Double Digits – Riaz Haq – Antibodies testing of 7,000 adults in Karachi reveals that as many as 15% of them have already been exposed to COVID19 without experiencing symptoms, according to a study by Dr. Wajiha Javed of Getz Pharma in Pakistan. It takes at least 40% of the population to be exposed to build herd immunity. This may be the only way to normalcy unless there is a vaccine available sooner. Human body naturally produces antibodies to fight viruses of various kinds, including the coronavirus. Presence of antibodies in a person confirms that he or she has been exposed to a virus regardless of symptoms. It can even detect body’s immune response to a low-level viral load. Such an immune response also occurs to a vaccine which does not make you sick but helps build immunity. More low level exposure to viruses in large numbers of people is in fact a good thing because it helps build herd immunity. It takes at least 40% of the population to be exposed to build herd immunity. Getz Pharma’s Dr. Wajiha Javed told me in the latest update on her ongoing work that serology tests have so far been administered to 7,000 adults aged 18-65 over the last 6 weeks in Karachi. 15% of them have tested positive for antibodies. People tested included those working for banks, restaurants, textile mills, factories, media and health care workers. Antibody testing kits detect the response of the body rather than the virus or antigen itself. These tests do not have the issue of low viral load. Antibody tests can detect exposure to Covid-19 even in asymptomatic cases. Generally, antibody testing kits have a high level of accuracy, especially on sequential testing. The kit Getz Pharma has been using has a sensitivity (the ability to correctly detect positive cases) of 95.3% and specificity (the ability to correctly detect negative cases) of 98.7% for IgG, and the sensitivity is 86.48% and specificity is 95.18% for IgM, according to Dr. Wajiha Javed.

Iran warns of another ‘dangerous peak’ over a month after easing lockdown – Iran reported nearly 3,000 new coronavirus cases on Monday, the highest daily rise in two months, as the country’s health minister warned that Iranians are facing another wave.”The outbreak is not over yet, and at any moment it may come back stronger than before,” Health Minister Saeed Namaki said in a televised news conference,Reuters reported. “If our people fail to respect the health protocols … we must prepare ourselves for the worst situation.”Iran was one of the countries worst-hit by the virus in the region, even amid allegations that the government was covering up the true extent of infections and deaths. Nonetheless, as official fatalities began to drop in April, authorities began easing lockdown measures. The country hit a near-two-month low in deaths on May 2, Agence France-Presse reported.Now, over a month later, cases are surging again. Iranian authorities have attributed the increase in part to the government’s accelerated testing efforts.But Namaki also criticized Iranians who have not been maintaining social distancing and other virus-related measures.”There is still a long way ahead of us in our fight against this virus,” he said. “All the health protocols should be respected.” He cited the provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan, Kermanshah and Hormozgan as areas with quickly increasing infection rates.From Asia to Europe, countries have struggled in recent weeks to contain new virus flare-ups as they have lifted restrictions on movement and economic activities.

COVID-19 pandemic exposes a rapidly developing global health crisis – The World Health Organization (WHO) press briefing on Monday focused their report, not on the break in their relationship with the United States or the protests that are seeing the tattered social threads unravel quickly. Instead, they emphasized their concerns over the state of global health that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The globe continues to see daily cases of COVID-19 exceed 100,000 per day, with close to 6.4 million cumulative cases. Total deaths are approaching 380,000 as the pandemic is settling in the Americas for the present moment. In response to a question as to whether the virulence of the virus seems to be waning, both Drs. Michael Ryan and Maria Van Kerkhove rejected such claims. The genetic studies do not support such a mutational shift. Instead, they attribute the change in the numbers to public health measures that have thus far been employed. However, with lockdowns and travel restrictions making the delivery of critical medical supplies to the much-needed developing world difficult, the WHO warned that if these disruptions are not soon overcome, communities across the globe could be facing health consequences on a massive scale. Last month they noted that the world could expect 500,000 more deaths from AIDS in the coming year. They also estimated that 1.4 million people could succumb to tuberculosis if access to vital medications is not available. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) Based on these concerns, WHO conducted a survey in May – a rapid assessment of service delivery for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular and chronic respiratory diseases – with 155 countries submitting. These NCD illnesses, which kill more than 41 million people each year (equivalent to 71 percent of all deaths globally), make these populations more vulnerable to becoming severely ill and at risk for succumbing to infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus). According to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “Many people who need treatment for diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes have not been receiving the health services and medicines they need since the COVID-19 pandemic began.”Low-income countries have been most severely impacted in services for NCDs. More than half the reporting countries have reported that such services have been partially or entirely disrupted, while at least two-thirds said rehabilitation services had been affected. Almost unanimously, every country stated that health workers had been reassigned, wholly or partially, to support COVID-19 response. Screening for breast and cervical cancer has been postponed in more than half of the countries. Of note, in 2018, 627,000 women died from breast cancer and 300,000 from cervical cancer.

Mass reopenings worldwide have accelerated the coronavirus pandemic – The mass economic re-openings in the Americas, Europe and Asia that began in May have paved the way for a massive spread of the coronavirus pandemic internationally. According to data aggregated by Worldometer, the average number of new cases has been more than 115,000 since May 27, a number which has been steadily rising since May 12. The accelerating spread is also reflected in the number of new deaths each day. Starting in April, the number of new deaths had begun to decrease, a result of the physical distancing taken up by hundreds of millions of workers, toilers and youth around the world. The rate of new deaths, however, has now stabilized at an average of 3,770, as those people have been steadily forced back to work, and it is poised to climb in the wake of the hundreds of thousands of new infections. As of this writing, there have been nearly 6.7 million officially confirmed cases and more than 390,000 deaths caused by COVID-19 worldwide. A plurality of cases are in the US and Brazil, which have totals of 1.9 million and 610,000 cases, respectively, along with 110,000 and 33,000 deaths. The governments of both countries have also whipped workers back into factories and plants under threat of economic destitution if they don’t return. In Brazil, meatpacking plants were opened on May 20, while auto production started resuming the previous week. Hundreds of workers in these facilities have already become infected, spreading it to their homes and their communities. Despite this, President Jair Bolsonaro is storming ahead with the full reopening of the country, overseen by local mayors and regional governors. Factories in the United States began opening even earlier. Some states, including Oklahoma, North Dakota and Nebraska, never had stay-at-home orders, while states such as Georgia began reopening the last week of April. Certain industries, such as auto, waited until the second or third week in May to fully resume manufacturing their products, but these were only shut down in the first place as a result of wildcat strikes that erupted in mid-March, after reports emerged of infections spreading in the auto plants. The spread is in every state. While states such as New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Connecticut report a 14-day decrease in the number of new daily cases, nearly half of states have an increase in new cases, particularly in areas where the pandemic did not initially widely infect the population. Florida, for example, yesterday saw its highest new case count yet, bringing its total of cases above 60,000. The state’s death toll stands at more than 2,600. Mexico has also emerged as a new hotspot for outbreaks of the pandemic. It is now on par with the United States and Brazil for the number of new deaths each day, and is the fourteenth country to exceed 100,000 cases and the seventh to breach 10,000 deaths. Hundreds of these were caused by the premature reopening of the country’s maquiladora sweatshops, which are used by US auto and other manufacturing companies to produce cheap parts.Similarly in India, large sections of industry were ordered to resume production in mid-May, particularly parts and car companies. Even then, the number of cases in the country was still increasing, largely a result of the haphazard lockdown implemented by the Modi government in April that trapped millions of migrant workers in the already crowded and unsanitary slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and other cities. The Modi government’s actions have caused India’s official case and death counts to soar. They currently stand at 226,000 and 6,309, respectively, and are increasing exponentially.

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