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 an increased number of items from other countries around the globe. New US cases have been slowing over the last week (now up <18% from a week ago). US deaths increased by 32%, growth increasing sharply. Elsewhere, new cases continue rising in parts of Europe and globally, but more slowly. Global covid deaths have now topped 11,000 for 4 straight days…that pace would make covid-19 the third leading cause of death worldwide, following heart disease and stroke. Economic news related to COVID-19 is found here.
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Summary:
We again had records for new US infections and hospitalizations, and a 6 month high for covid deaths. Growth in the 7 day moving average of new cases has been slowing all week and is now less than 18% greater than a week ago. However, Covid-19 deaths jumped mid-week to a 2,000 per day average over the last three days of the week and as a result the week over week increase in US covid deaths has risen to 32%.
I hadn’t been watching the global totals but checking now i see that new infections rose to a record 665,668 on Friday (over 200,000 of those were in the US). But the weekly growth rate for global cases has slowed to less than 5% over the past three weeks and would be tapering off if not for the sharp US increases. Meanwhile, global covid deaths have now topped 11,000 for 4 straight days. That pace would make covid-19 the third leading cause of death worldwide, following heart disease and stroke.
The chart below from WorldoMeter shows the daily number of new cases for the US, updated through 14 November.
New cases globally were around 5% higher than the prior week. (See Johns Hopkins graph below.) The growth rate has visibly slowed in the past week.
Also, Johns Hopkins has a graph for global deaths (below) that shows a record 11,801 deaths on Friday, the third reord of the week. Deaths globally were ass of Friday wre up 31% week-over-week. This is distorted by Friday November 14 being abnormally low (8,990 deaths).
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Calculated Risk tracks the daily testing rate and results. The 21 November graphic:
The rate of increase in testing is picking up while the percent positive has turned down slightly.
Of course, Steven Hansen summarizes and links the latest news related to the pandemic every day, 7 days a week, plus displays over a dozen important graphics updated at least daily. The most recent article at the time this is published: 14 November 2020 Coronavirus Charts and News: New Cases Continue to Grow. Trump Calls For More Stimulus. COVID Reinfections Concerning On Many Levels.
This article leads the daily newsletter from Global Economic Intersection every day. Newsletter subscription is free.
Here are the rest of the articles for the past week reviewed and summarized:
Study: Respiratory failure in COVID-19 usually not driven by cytokine storm -The turning point for people with COVID-19 typically comes in the second week of symptoms. As most people begin to recover, a few others find it increasingly difficult to breathe and wind up in the hospital. It has been theorized that those whose lungs begin to fail are victims of their own overactive immune systems. A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., however, suggests that an out-of-control immune response is not the main problem for the vast majority of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Only 4% of patients in the study had the sky-high levels of immune molecules that signify a so-called “cytokine storm.” The rest had inflammation, but not a remarkably high amount for people fighting infection. If anything, the COVID-19 patients had less inflammation than a comparable group of influenza patients. The findings, published Nov. 13 in Science Advances, help explain why anti-inflammatory medications such as dexamethasone benefit only a fraction of people with severe COVID-19, and suggest that more research is needed to identify the causes of respiratory failure in COVID-19 patients. “One of the very first papers published on COVID-19 patients in China reported high levels of cytokines in people in intensive care, what we might call a cytokine storm,” said co-senior author Philip Mudd, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of emergency medicine who sees patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “We wanted to have a better idea of what this cytokine storm looked like, so we began looking for it in our patients, and we were very surprised when we didn’t find it. We found that cytokine storm does happen, but it’s relatively rare, even in the COVID-19 patients that go on to have respiratory failure and require a ventilator. But now this idea has gotten established that respiratory failure in COVID-19 is driven by cytokine storm, and lots of unproven anti-inflammatory treatments are being given to critically ill COVID-19 patients in an attempt to suppress the cytokine storm. That worries me because such treatments are unlikely to help most people with COVID-19.”
Doctors Apply Covid-19 Lessons Learned as U.S. Cases Surge – WSJ – When a man in his 40s with Covid-19 and low oxygen saturation arrived at the Boston hospital where Brittany Bankhead-Kendall treated patients in April, he was quickly put on a ventilator, a standard first response at many American hospitals at the time.She relied on WhatsApp messages and video calls from doctors overseas, who were also using trial and error to treat a spreading virus few knew much about. “We were really flying blind,” she said. In West Texas, the conditions of her Covid-19 patients seven months later are similar to what she had seen back in Boston, yet she treats them differently. When a woman in her mid-40s showed low blood-oxygen levels, Dr. Bankhead-Kendall gave her high-flow oxygen therapy rather than putting her on a ventilator, avoiding the invasive risks of ventilation.The two patients spent a similar amount of time in intensive-care units, but the woman in Texas was able to avoid sedation and pain medication, with less pressure on her lungs from the treatment. “We’ve got better data now,” Dr. Bankhead-Kendall said. Memories of work earlier in the year, when she feared for her health during 12- to-14-hour shifts and rewrote her will, are fresh. Doctors who have been treating coronavirus patients from the pandemic’s earliest days in the U.S. said they are now better equipped to face a new rise in hospitalizations, with evidence on drugs that work to combat Covid-19 symptoms, research on treatments, and their own patient experiences through the months. The virus’s resurgence across the country is testing whether what they have learned so far will lead to shorter hospital stays and fewer deaths. Several doctors said they now think of Covid-19 as a two-phase disease. First they aim to combat the virus itself with antiviral drugs, and then address the cascade of problems caused by the usually outsize immune response. The doctors also said they were learning how to tailor treatments for each patient. “We’ve stopped throwing the kitchen sink at everybody,” said Roger Shapiro, an associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has treated coronavirus patients throughout the pandemic. He helped craft Covid-19 response guidelines at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston in the early days of the pandemic, when evidence-based treatment strategies didn’t yet exist. Early treatment protocols at many hospitals included giving patients the antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which was later found not to be beneficial, Dr. Shapiro said. Other steps included using anticoagulants to help patients avoid blood clots. Doctors are now informed by peer-reviewed papers from around the world, clinical trials and the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency clearance of some treatments. Promising treatments for hospitalized patients include the antiviral remdesivir and convalescent plasma. Steroids such as dexamethasone have been shown in testing to be effective at tamping down the immune-system overdrive. On Nov. 9, the FDA authorized the use of an antibody drug developed by Eli Lilly & Co. to treat people with Covid-19 in its earlier stages, filling a gap in treatment for patients who aren’t hospitalized. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 in the U.S. and its territories reached a record high of 73,014 on Monday. With the virus spreading in swaths of the U.S., including less-populated areas with fewer and more remote hospitals, some doctors fear emergency rooms and intensive-care facilities will soon become overwhelmed again.
Asymptomatic Covid-19 Cases Show Need for Wider Surveillance Testing, Study Suggests – WSJ — A study of Covid-19 testing among nearly 2,000 young adults found symptom monitoring missed nearly all cases of infection, suggesting regular, widespread surveillance testing is needed for both asymptomatic and symptomatic people to get the coronavirus crisis under control.The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, was among the largest to look at asymptomatic transmission of the coronavirus. The study looked at 1,848 U.S. Marine Corps recruits between the ages of 18 and 31, who had been required to quarantine at home before arriving at the Citadel military college in Charleston, S.C., where they underwent a second 14-day on-campus supervised quarantine before beginning training.At Citadel, they were monitored every day for symptoms and were scheduled to be tested three times – once within the first two days of arrival, then on day seven and again on day 14. By the 14th day, 51 of the study participants had tested positive for the coronavirus.What was surprising to researchers: All 51 cases of Covid-19 were picked up by the prescheduled tests. None was detected as a result of additional tests given to individuals who reported symptoms.The findings come as coronavirus infections are surging, with the U.S. recently reporting arecord 136,000 new Covid-19 cases in a single day. Daily caseloads have hit record levels in several states, and hospitalizations are at their highest level since the pandemic began. The total confirmed Covid-19 case tally in the U.S. has now surpassed 10.3 million.Only five people of the 51 who tested positive reported having any symptoms, according to the study. Their symptoms likely didn’t meet the threshold for getting referred for an additional test, researchers said.Although recruits slept two to a room, used shared bathroom facilities and ate in shared dining facilities, they were required to wear double-layered cloth masks at all times, indoors and outdoors, except when eating or sleeping. They also practiced social distancing at least 6 feet from others and weren’t allowed to leave campus. Six supervisors were assigned to each platoon, working in eight-hour shifts to enforce the quarantine measures.Despite the stringent measures and initial testing, the virus still slipped through the cracksand spread among recruits, the researchers said. They ran genetic analyses on some of the infected volunteers’ samples and found six clusters of volunteers where the viral genomes shared a high degree of similarity. The people with similar-looking virus genomes likely transmitted the virus to each other, the researchers said. “This shows that even in the setting of very strictly enforced public-health measures put in place to mitigate spread, if you want to find the individuals who are infected with SARS-CoV-2, you really have to augment those public-health mitigation strategies with additional surveillance testing,”
Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine is 94.5% effective, according to company data – The Moderna vaccine is 94.5% effective against coronavirus, according to early data released Monday by the company, making it the second vaccine in the United States to have a stunningly high success rate. “These are obviously very exciting results,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor. “It’s just as good as it gets — 94.5% is truly outstanding.” Moderna heard its results on a call Sunday afternoon with members of the Data Safety and Monitoring Board, an independent panel analyzing Moderna’s clinical trial data. Vaccinations could begin in the second half of December, Fauci said. Vaccinations are expected to begin with high-risk groups and to be available for the rest of the population next spring. Last week, Pfizer announced that early data show its vaccine is more than 90% effective against the disease. In Moderna’s trial, 15,000 study participants were given a placebo, which is a shot of saline that has no effect. Over several months, 90 of them developed Covid-19, with 11 developing severe forms of the disease. Another 15,000 participants were given the vaccine, and only five of them developed Covid-19. None of the five became severely ill. The company says its vaccine did not have any serious side effects. A small percentage of those who received it experienced symptoms such as body aches and headaches. Fauci says he expects the first Covid-19 vaccinations to begin “towards the latter part of December, rather than the early part of December.” Initially, there won’t be enough vaccine for everyone. The highest priority groups, which include health care workers, the elderly, and people with underlying medical conditions, will get the vaccine first. “I think that everybody else will start to get vaccinated towards the end of April,” Fauci said. “And that will go into May, June, July. It will take a couple of months to do.” Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines have similar results because they use the same technique to activate the body’s immune system. The vaccines deliver messenger RNA, or mRNA, which is a genetic recipe for making the spikes that sit atop the coronavirus. Once injected, the body’s immune system makes antibodies to the spikes. If a vaccinated person is later exposed to the coronavirus, those antibodies should stand at the ready to attack the virus. Both vaccines are given in two doses several weeks apart. Pfizer’s vaccine has to be kept at minus 75 degrees Celsius. No other vaccine in the US needs to be kept that cold, and doctors’ offices and pharmacies do not have freezers that go that low. Moderna’s vaccine can be kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius. Other vaccines, such as the one against chickenpox, need to be kept at that temperature. That means Moderna’s vaccine can be kept in “a readily available freezer that is available in most doctors’ offices and pharmacies,” Zacks said. “We leverage infrastructure that already exists for other marketed vaccines.”
Pfizer announces its COVID vaccine is 95% effective, plans to seek emergency authorization ‘within days’ — While over 11 million people in the U.S. battle cases of coronavirus, researchers have been hard at work in securing a vaccine to ward off the deadly effects of COVID-19, and as of Wednesday, Pfizer and its partner company BioNTech have announced success in this regard. According to ABC News, the companies say their coronavirus vaccine is more than 95% effective in the final analysis of its massive Phase 3 trial and has reached a critical safety milestone that will allow the company to apply for Food and Drug Administration authorization “within days.”If the FDA approves the vaccine, Pfizer is set to become the first company with an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine. The company says as soon as it has government approval, it plans to begin delivering millions of doses of the vaccine to the most vulnerable patients, possibly before the end of 2020. Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech announced their vaccine was more than 90% effective, according to a preliminary analysis based on the first 94 patients to develop symptomatic COVID-19 in a trial of more than 43,000 volunteers.But, ABC News reports, with the pandemic mushrooming in the United States and across the globe, it wasn’t long before even more volunteers became infected. This resutled in bringing Pfizer’s trial to 170 COVID-positive cases, thereby exceeding the threshold needed for a ‘final’ analysis on the vaccine’s effectiveness.In a press release that was issued before the stock market opened, Pfizer announced that among the 170 volunteers to develop COVID-19 in the clinical trial, 162 had been given placebo shots, while only eight volunteers to become infected were given the real vaccine.This means Pfizer’s vaccine is roughly 95% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19.The updated data on the potentially life-saving drug’s effectiveness follows news from competitor Moderna, which announced earlier this week that its vaccine was 94.5% effective in its own preliminary analysis.It’s not known yet what level of immunity or how long the immunity lasts after receiving the vaccines. Trial volunteers will be followed for two years to answer questions like durability of protection.
Government-Funded Scientists Laid the Groundwork for Billion-Dollar Vaccines – When he started researching a troublesome childhood infection nearly four decades ago, virologist Dr. Barney Graham, then at Vanderbilt University, had no inkling his federally funded work might be key to deliverance from a global pandemic. Yet nearly all the vaccines advancing toward possible FDA approval this fall or winter are based on a design developed by Graham and his colleagues, a concept that emerged from a scientific quest to understand a disastrous 1966 vaccine trial. Basic research conducted by Graham and others at the National Institutes of Health, Defense Department and federally funded academic laboratories has been the essential ingredient in the rapid development of vaccines in response to COVID-19. The government has poured an additional $10.5 billion into vaccine companies since the pandemic began to accelerate the delivery of their products. The Moderna vaccine, whose remarkable effectiveness in a late-stage trial was announced Monday morning, emerged directly out of a partnership between Moderna and Graham’s NIH laboratory. Coronavirus vaccines are likely to be worth billions to the drug industry if they prove safe and effective. As many as 14 billion vaccines would be required to immunize everyone in the world against COVID-19. If, as many scientists anticipate, vaccine-produced immunity wanes, billions more doses could be sold as booster shots in years to come. And the technology and production laboratories seeded with the help of all this federal largesse could give rise to other profitable vaccines and drugs. The vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which are likely to be the first to win FDA approval, in particular rely heavily on two fundamental discoveries that emerged from federally funded research: the viral protein designed by Graham and his colleagues, and the concept of RNA modification, first developed by Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, Moderna’s founders in 2010 named the company after this concept: “Modified” + “RNA” = Moderna, according to co-founder Robert Langer. “This is the people’s vaccine,” said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity.” Moderna, through spokesperson Ray Jordan, acknowledged its partnership with NIH throughout the COVID-19 development process and earlier. Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts noted the company had not received development and manufacturing support from the U.S. government, unlike Moderna and other companies.
Next Stop for Covid-19 Vaccines: FDA Review – WSJ – The Food and Drug Administration is days away from beginning its evaluation of Covid-19 vaccines for emergency use – a process that could lead to vaccine distributions by year’s end to limited groups such as health-care workers and the elderly. Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE plan to submit their vaccine testing data to the FDA within days, followed closely by Moderna Inc. That will set off a process in which FDA scientists will begin to assess the accuracy of company data, which is likely to take two to three weeks. As part of that review, FDA scientists are expected to look at data from individual patients, such as for indications of any troubling side effects. After the FDA staff review, an independent panel of doctors from major U.S. academic centers will meet to advise the FDA on the vaccines’ efficacy – likely in early December. The advisory panel will consider questions such as whether the vaccine has been shown safe and effective in certain racial, ethnic and age groups. The panel will likely be asked to recommend whether the vaccine should be authorized for use and in which populations. Pfizer, which said Wednesday it is on the verge of seeking FDA review, has reported that its vaccine is more than 94% effective in adults over 65. It said that about 42% of its trial participants represent racial or ethnic minority groups. After the review, the FDA then will decide whether to grant an “emergency use authorization,” a quicker version of the normal FDA approval.If the FDA authorizes a vaccine, it “could in theory start rolling off the assembly line into the arms of the American public by the end of December,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine expert from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who is on the FDA’s advisory vaccine panel. Even after the FDA authorizes a vaccine, it will be several months before the general public is able to get vaccinated at their local pharmacies. The U.S. government has contracted to purchase at least 100 million doses each of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but most of the doses won’t be ready until next year.
Vaccines – Too Little, Too Late? – We’re being assured by Pfizer and Moderna that their Covid vaccines are 95% effective and are safe enough to be injected into hundreds of millions of people. Before accepting these extremely consequential claims, let’s look at the actual testing process and results. In the Pfizer trial, half of the 44,000 volunteers received the vaccine and the other half got a placebo shot. Then the researchers waited around to see how many of the volunteers randomly came down with Covid. Pfizer reported that out of 170 cases of Covid, 162 were in the placebo group and eight were in the vaccine group. So a total of 0.386% of the 44,000 volunteers came down with Covid by means unknown, and this tiny sample is the foundation of grandiose claims of 95% effectiveness? Note the incredibly small sample size. If even 3% of the test group had contracted Covid, the sample size would be 1,320 people–still a small number but considerably more persuasive than 1/3rd of 1% (170). These results tell us very little about what we really need to know. Allow me to propose a test protocol that would tell us what we need to know. Take 100 politicians, authorities and Big Pharma executives, give them two doses of vaccine and then have them serve 4-hour shifts in a crowded ward of severely ill Covid patients for a week, without any masks or protective gear. In other words, expose them to sustained, intimate contact with patients with severe cases of Covid, spending hours every day in a soup of virus. If 100 people took the measles vaccine, would they hesitate to expose themselves to measles patients? No, because the measles vaccine is close to 100% effective. If the politicians and Big Pharma executives refused to participate in this trial, that would tell us all we really need to know about the effectiveness of their Covid vaccine. But the trial isn’t finished–not by a long shot. We need to know if the vaccinated people can still transmit the virus to unvaccinated people. So at the end of their shift, the 100 politicians, authorities and Big Pharma execs clean up and then crowd into a poorly ventilated bar with 100 unvaccinated volunteers, singing, dancing and breathing the same fetid air for two hours every night. Next, repeat this trial protocol with another 100 people, 50 of whom have chronic conditions such as hypertension, metabolic disorders or COPD, and 50 who are 65 years of age or older. The only way we’ll really know if the vaccine is effective for at-risk people is to do a rigorous test like this. Third, repeat the trial protocol with 100 people who have autoimmune disorders or family histories of autoimmune disorders. There is no other way to discover the potentially harmful consequences of the vaccine on those with a propensity for autoimmune disorders other than a rigorous test of the vaccine, i.e. sustained exposure to the virus over extended periods of time. Lastly, monitor all the volunteers daily for six months for any side effects of the vaccine. It will take years to really know what side effects may manifest, but six months would at least establish a baseline of safety. The results of these trials would tell us what we absolutely need to know before we blindly inject tens of millions of people with these vaccines:
New Strains Of COVID Could Render Vaccines Completely Useless, And 2 Dangerous Mutations Are Already Spreading – When Pfizer announced that they had developed a successful vaccine for COVID, the world cheered. And then when Moderna announced that they had developed a successful vaccine for COVID, the world cheered even more. But COVID has been mutating, and scientists assure us that it will keep mutating. So what happens if the vaccines that are being developed end up being completely useless against new mutant strains of the virus? Would that put us all the way back to square one (or even worse)? . Most people simply assume that a “flu shot” will provide them with complete protection against “the flu”, but that is actually not true at all. In some years the match between the flu vaccine and the variations of the flu that are running around is pretty good, and some years that is definitely not the case. The following comes from the official CDC website… During years when the flu vaccine is not well matched to circulating influenza viruses, it is possible that little or no benefit from flu vaccination may be observed. At this point, Pfizer and Moderna both seem convinced that their vaccines will be effective against the dominant strain of COVID that is currently sweeping across the globe But what if a new strain becomes dominant? In Denmark, a new strain of COVID that is being passed to humans from minks was considered to be so dangerous that the government actually announced that they would kill all 17 million minks in the entire nation… Thankfully, after a tremendous uproar the Danish government decided not to kill all the minks. But this strain is still spreading, and as the quote above noted, this new strain “could effectively render the current COVID-19 vaccine candidates useless”. In other words, if this Denmark strain becomes dominant it may force the vaccine companies to go back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, we just learned that “a fast-spreading new strain of COVID-19″ has popped up in Australia…South Australia is battling a fast-spreading new strain of COVID-19 as it prepares for a six-day lockdown to attempt to contain the virus.A COVID-19 cluster in Adelaide’s north grew to 22 on Wednesday as thousands of people continued to flock to testing stations. The reason why authorities decided to lock down all of South Australia for six days is because this new strain appears to be far more contagious than previous strains…
Rapid Testing Is Less Accurate Than the Government Wants to Admit -The promise of antigen tests emerged like a miracle this summer. With repeated use, the theory went, these rapid and cheap coronavirus tests would identify highly infectious people while giving healthy Americans a green light to return to offices, schools and restaurants. The idea of on-the-spot tests with near-instant results was an appealing alternative to the slow, lab-based testing that couldn’t meet public demand.By September, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had purchased more than 150 million tests for nursing homes and schools, spending more than $760 million. But it soon became clear that antigen testing – named for the viral proteins, or antigens, that the test detects – posed a new set of problems. Unlike lab-based, molecular PCR tests, which detect snippets of the virus’s genetic material, antigen tests are less sensitive because they can only detect samples with a higher viral load. The tests were prone to more false negatives and false positives. As problems emerged, officials were slow to acknowledge the evidence.With the benefit of hindsight, experts said the Trump administration should have released antigen tests primarily to communities with outbreaks instead of expecting them to work just as well in large groups of asymptomatic people. Understanding they can produce false results, the government could have ensured that clinics had enough for repeat testing to reduce false negatives and access to more precise PCR tests to weed out false positives. Government agencies, which were aware of the tests’ limitations, could have built up trust by being more transparent about them and how to interpret results, scientists said.When health care workers in Nevada and Vermont reported false positives, HHS defended the tests and threatened Nevada with unspecified sanctions until state officials agreed to continue using them in nursing homes. It took several more weeks for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue an alert on Nov. 3 that confirmed what Nevada had experienced: Antigen tests were prone to giving false positives, the FDA warned.“Part of the problem is this administration has continuously played catch-up,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, a physician at Harvard Medical School. It was criticized for not ensuring enough PCR tests at the beginning, and when antigen tests became available, it shoved them at the states without a coordinated plan, he said. If you tested the same group of people once a week without fail, with adequate double-checking, then a positive test could be the canary in the coal mine, said Dr. Mark Levine, commissioner of Vermont’s Health Department. “Unfortunately the government didn’t really advertise it that way or prescribe it” with much clarity, so some people lost faith.
FDA Clears First Covid-19 Test Performed Fully at Home – WSJ – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared the first Covid-19 test that people can take at home by themselves and get results without the help of a lab, a long-awaited step. The single-use, disposable test from Lucira Health Inc. uses nasal swabs and can be self-administered by anyone with a doctor’s prescription ages 14 years or older. The test searches for the genetic material of the new coronavirus and can give results in 30 minutes or less, the company said. Some Covid-19 tests have been previously authorized for at-home collection, but Lucira’s is the first that can be fully self-performed and provide results at home minutes later. Public-health experts have been clamoring for fast, easy-to-use at-home Covid-19 testing, especially as the virus is spreading at increasing rates around the U.S. If made widely available and cost-effective, at-home testing could also become a valuable tool in helping people to safely return to schools and workplaces and beat back the pandemic before widespread vaccination. The test, which the FDA cleared late Tuesday, is expected to be first available at Sutter Health in Northern California and at Cleveland Clinic Florida in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, followed by a national rollout by early spring 2021. Lucira said it expects its test to cost around $50 apiece. “Being able to quickly determine if a person is infected or not has been a global problem,” said John Chou, a physician affiliated with Sutter Health who helped lead the study of the test. “We believe this highly mobile test can make a big difference by providing lab-quality results expeditiously and conveniently.” Lucira said the test can correctly flag an infection 94.1% of the time and identify a negative result 98% of the time, when compared with a PCR test. If a sample has high levels of virus, the test is 100% sensitive, the company said. Health authorities consider laboratory-based PCR tests to be the gold standard for assessing test accuracy. PCR tests also search for genetic material of the virus. They are nearly 100% accurate when administered and processed correctly, but they are expensive to conduct and can take days or longer to produce results. Antigen tests, which look for viral proteins, can identify the virus 84% to 97.6% of the time compared with PCR tests when used within five to seven days after a person develops symptoms, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health care workers most at risk for COVID-19 — Health care workers — particularly nurses — have a higher prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection than non-health care workers, according to researchers at Rutgers, which released baseline results from a large prospective study of participants at Rutgers and affiliated hospitals recruited during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, published in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases, found that in early spring, the participants most likely to test positive for COVID-19 were nurses, workers taking care of multiple patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 and those who worked in a hospital with a higher proportion of infected patients.As of Nov. 15, 2020, according to the CDC, there were more than 216,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases among health care workers in the United States, leading to at least 799 deaths. The Rutgers study evaluated 546 health care workers with direct patient exposure at two New Jersey hospitals and 283 non-health care workers with no direct patient contact. At the start of the study in March, 40 health care workers and one non-health care worker tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Among all participants enrolled, more than 7 percent of health care workers were found to be positive for the novel coronavirus as compared to the very low rates of positive testing among non-health care workers. Also, consistent with disparities observed in the general public, Black and Hispanic participants had more positive test results.Health care workers who reported caring for five or more patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 and those who spent a greater proportion of their time in patients’ rooms were more likely to test positive for the infection themselves.
Traveling for Thanksgiving? Health Officials Say Stay at Home – WSJ – Around 50 million Americans are expected to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday next week. Public-health officials are begging them to stay home. As the pandemic enters its ninth month in the U.S., many families are grappling with whether to meet up with friends or family for traditional celebrations. But the holiday comes at a particularly precarious time in the current virus surge, and doctors and government officials say even gathering with one other household is too much of a risk. The U.S. has reported an average of 157,318 new cases a day over the past week, more than double the number of daily cases reported at the height of the summertime surge.Hospitalizations are continuing to hit record highs, taxing health-care systems in Minnesota, Montana, Wisconsin and elsewhere. The warning has taken on a more urgent tone in recent weeks, shifting from officials discouraging travel and large gatherings to outright pleading with the public to stay put and stay away from others.Leaders in states including New York, New Jersey and Michigan have put limits on the size of gatherings in recent days, identifying one culprit of the latest surge as small, seemingly innocuous get-togethers. As community spread becomes prevalent, though, even those more muted festivities, like a baby shower or brunch, are potentially fatal. “Getting together with your family via Zoom to ensure your loved ones stay safe is the right thing to do,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said in a video message posted online Tuesday. In the message, Mr. Beshear joined six Republican and Democrat Midwestern governors to emphasize the current threat and urge people to take precautions. Last year, around 55 million Americans traveled for Thanksgiving. AAA forecast a 10% decline in holiday travel this year, to 50.6 million. Air travel is expected to drop by half – but that still means about 2.4 million people making their way through airports.
Restaurants are setting up tents and temporary structures to extend outdoor dining during the winter. But they come with their own hazards, and in some cases, could be riskier than eating indoors.–As the temperature drops in many parts of the US, restaurants are coming up with creative solutions to allow for outdoor dining. But in some cases, these solutions may increase diners’ coronavirus risk. Since the onset of the pandemic, outdoor dining has allowed restaurants and bars to stay open while offering customers a way to continue eating, drinking, and socializing in a low-risk environment. Outdoor dining has become so popular and lucrative that it’s becoming a more permanent fixture everywhere fromMilwaukee to Boston. But as we head into the winter months, restaurants will be hard-pressed to convince diners to sit outdoors, exposed to chilly temperatures, wind, and possibly even snow. City and state governments across the country seem somewhat split on what types of structures are safe. In Chicago, for example, the city mandates that temporary outdoor structures must have 50% of the sides open in order to ensure air flow. New York City has the same rule, but will allow fully enclosed structures – they’ll just be regulated like indoor dining and capped at 25% capacity. Cities inConnecticut and Colorado have similar mandates. State and local laws aside, however, infectious disease experts saythis type of dining comes with clear risks that customers should take into account before dining in one of these structures. Jaimie Meyer, an infectious disease physician at Yale Medicine and associate professor at Yale School of Medicine, told Business Insider that while she applauds businesses for thinking creatively about how to prolong outdoor dining, some are going too far and essentially creating an indoor space.”When you’re making those outdoor spaces look a lot more like indoor spaces – so if they have, all of a sudden, three-and-a-half walls, or the air flow’s not great, or there’s lots of people still at a table, then you kind of get rid of all of the potential benefits of outside,” Meyer said. Meyer said the two keys to safe outdoor dining are the ability to physically distance and airflow. But structures like four-sided tents lack air circulation that restaurants have – businesses aren’t installing ventilation systems in a temporary curbside hut, meaning dining in an enclosed space like that could be even riskier than sitting inside at a restaurant, Meyer said.
Covid cases, and deaths, continue to soar in Erie County – buffalonews.com – Erie County on Sunday led the state in the most dire of Covid-19 statistics: highest number of deaths of New York’s 62 counties. The nine Covid-infected people who died in the county on Sunday was more than double the four who died from the virus in all of New York City. The “yellow zone” area of most of Erie County over the last seven days had a rolling average Covid positivity rate of 7.32%, the worst of 12 specially designated zones with high numbers of the virus. When just considering Covid positive tests for Sunday, the rate was 6.36%. Moreover, as it has many times over the past couple of months, the positive rate in all Western New York counties combined was the highest in the state on Sunday at 5.2%. The next highest positivity rate of the nine regions of the state was found in the Finger Lakes, at 4.3%. New York City, where the pandemic hit the worst last spring, was at 2.3% on Sunday. The ongoing troublesome numbers for the region, as well as the state, were released Monday afternoon by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. “This is not an upstate or downstate issue. All New Yorkers, regardless of where they live, have cause for concern,” Cuomo said in a written statement.Statewide, the positive rate for Covid tests processed on Sunday was 2.80%. Hospitalizations of Covid-infected people increased by another 123 on Sunday statewide to 1,968. That is up from 483 people precisely two months ago. Across New York on Sunday, 25 Covid-infected people died – a total of 26,159 since the pandemic began last spring. The New York Times has put the total death number at more than 33,000 in the state, which includes people who died from home and were presumed to have had Covid. In all statewide, 3,490 new cases of Covid were confirmed on Sunday. Erie County had 272 newly confirmed cases. The 6.36% positivity rate in the “yellow zone” area of Erie County on Sunday was 50% higher than the rate when all of the specially designated Covid hot spots are calculated.
The Real Story of COVID-19 and the Cook County Jail – Over 2,500 Officers at the Cook County Department of Corrections have been victims of Sheriff Tom Dart’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak at the Cook County Jail. By failing to provide PPE and adhere to CDC guidelines at the beginning of the outbreak, Sheriff Dart caused 500+ jail staff to become infected with COVID-19; to date five CCDOC Officers have died due to COVID-19. Sheriff Dart’s reign of abuse has led to a higher infection rate among Corrections Officers than jail detainees. Additionally, policies like home checks and frequent mandatory overtime shifts cripple Officers’ recovery time and weaken the immune systems of Officers still at work. A recent spike in COVID-19 cases that began in September and continues into November show the Sheriff still does not have a handle on COVID-19 at the jail while he continues to abuse his staff. The Cook County Department of Corrections has been one of the biggest single spreaders of COVID-19 in the United States. Officers reported the appalling conditions in mid-March as incoming jail detainees were brought in standing shoulder to shoulder in close proximity as they were processed and admitted to the jail. Sheriff Dart did not even provide gloves or require masks for his staff that were handling disposable thermometers fresh out of inmates’ mouths. The first CCDOC Officer testing positive for COVID-19 was reported on March 22nd, and over the next four weeks over 300 more staff would test positive for COVID-19 due to the slow and negligent response by Sheriff Dart. On June 4th, a study conducted by Health Affairs, found that 1-in-6 cases of COVID-19 in Illinois originated from the Cook County Jail. It is no coincidence that the trajectory of COVID-19 positive cases in the State of Illinois and the Cook County Department of Corrections from March-April mirror one another. When confronted about being responsible for the site that became one of the largest single-spreaders of COVID-19 in America, Sheriff Dart falsely claimed that was because he “was the only one testing anybody” and that he always took a scientific approach, yet when asked about the Health Affairs study, he calls it “phony”, offering no proof to back up his claim.
Prisoners load bodies into mobile morgues in El Paso, Texas as COVID-19 infections skyrocket – El Paso, Texas, which is still being slammed by a flood of COVID-19 cases, pushing its hospital systems to overcapacity, is now being strained by the gruesome overflow of bodies awaiting autopsy. According to Channel 9 KTSM, a local affiliate of NBC, El Paso County Jail inmates are being used to assist in loading bodies into the 10 mobile overflow morgues that stand outside the medical examiner’s office. The inmates are being paid $2 per hour in 8-hour shifts on a voluntary basis to help move bodies under the careful watch of a sheriff’s deputy and two detention officers. A video posted on social media shows men in black and white striped prison uniforms and personal protective equipment carting a body and placing it on a rack in the back of a refrigerated trailer. The grim scene is reminiscent of the disaster which unfolded in New York City in the spring when refrigerated trailers were parked outside hospitals to hold bodies and a mass grave was dug on Hart Island. El Paso County has recorded 762 COVID-19-related deaths, the majority coming since September.While there is no sign that the situation is easing, businesses in the county began to reopen Friday after an appeals court ruled that the county’s one-month-long shutdown of nonessential businesses violated state-wide reopening orders issued by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who had joined a group of restaurant owners in challenging the temporary shutdown, hailed the ruling and denounced El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego as a “tyrant” for implementing basic public health measures aimed at controlling the spread of the virus. “I will not let rogue political subdivisions try to kill small businesses and holiday gatherings through unlawful executive orders,” Paxton crowed on Twitter. For communities across the United States, attempts to return to a form of normalcy – whether it be college football games in giant stadiums packed with spectators rushing the field, celebrating weddings that have been scheduled months in advance, or clandestine homecoming celebrations – have led to outbreaks and super-spreader events. Despite the repeat of horrific scenes of the initial wave of the pandemic, local governments continue to subordinate public health to the profit interests of big businesses and the stock market, as demonstrated by their continued rejection of lockdown measures and preference to blame people for their irresponsible behaviors.
South Dakota emergency-room nurse says some patients insist COVID-19 isn’t real even as they’re dying from it – A South Dakota nurse took to Twitter on Sunday to highlight a tragic feature of the coronavirus pandemic: patients who rail against health-care workers because they don’t believe COVID-19 is real. Jodi Doering, an emergency-room registered nurse, described the phenomenon in an interview on CNN on Monday, after her Twitter posts attracted wide attention: “It’s not one particular patient; it’s just a culmination of so many people and their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening, it’s not real.’ “And when they should be spending time FaceTime-ing their families, they’re just filled with anger and hatred. I just can’t believe those are their last words,” she said. Some patients are so convinced the virus does not exist that, when they test positive, they insist it must be flu, pneumonia or even lung cancer, said Doering. Nurses, for their part, are watching patients get sick in the same ways, receive the same hospital treatment and then die in the same way – and then the nurses come back the next day as the cycle repeats. “It’s like a movie where the credits never roll,” Doering said. The Dakotas are currently the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic with the fastest moving per capita case numbers, according to data tracked by Johns Hopkins University and the states’ own health departments. Experts says the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which took place with the encouragement of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem in August, was likely a superspreader event, as about half a million bikers are reported to have attended and many gathered closely in bars and restaurants without wearing face masks. North Dakota has had 63,802 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to a New York Times tracker, and least 742 people have died. North Dakota’s hospital system is at full capacity, according to Gov. Doug Burgum, who said last week that health-care workers who test positive will be allowed to treat COVID patients at least temporarily, because of chronic staff shortages. South Dakota has had 65,381 confirmed cases and at least 644 deaths, the tracker shows. Its hospital system is at 64% capacity, according to its health department, while ICU beds are at 67% capacity.
Covid-19 Hits Rural Nursing Homes, Which Are Among Those Least Equipped to Fight It – WSJ Covid-19 deaths among vulnerable nursing-home residents are surging again, with the virus increasingly spreading to rural facilities that are struggling with staff shortages and other challenges.Nursing homes reported more than 1,900 resident deaths from Covid-19 in the last week of October, as well as more than 32,000 confirmed and suspected cases among staff and residents, according to newly released federal data analyzed by The Wall Street Journal. Those nationwide totals at the facilities were the highest since early August, when states including Texas and Florida were seeing increases. This time, the virus is infiltrating a far-flung range of facilities, with a growing share of the deaths occurring in rural and small-town communities in states such as Wisconsin, North Dakota and Montana, where case counts have climbed rapidly. The pattern tracks how the virus is spreading more broadly throughout the U.S., hitting regions that had been largely spared earlier in the pandemic. “Nursing homes are not isolated from what happens in the community,” said Carrie Henning-Smith, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “We’re seeing this run rampant through rural communities.”Facilities in rural counties reported 18% of nursing-home Covid-19 deaths in the week ending Nov. 1, though they housed only 10% of the overall population, according to the Journal’s analysis of weekly survey data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Small-town counties saw 17% of the nursing-home deaths, though facilities there have only 12% of the total residents.At Lutheran Sunset Home, a 91-bed facility in Grafton, N.D., 55 residents and 46 staffers have been infected since an outbreak started in late October, after Covid-19 infections hit a high rate in the surrounding county. Five residents infected with the coronavirus have died. Staffers following recommended precautions, but “it still spread like wildfire,” said Trevor Tompkins, the administrator of the nonprofit facility. “To put it bluntly, we’re in hell.”
‘Our Worst Fears Have Come True’: With No Sign of Federal Relief, Nursing Home Industry Study Shows Surge in Covid-19 –Calling on federal lawmakers to take responsibility for the wellbeing of Americans living in nursing homes amid the current surge in coronavirus cases, the nation’s top organization of long-term care providers demanded urgent action as they released a report Tuesday showing that the recent spike across the country has corresponded with rising cases in nursing homes. “Our worst fears have come true as Covid runs rampant among the general population, and long-term care facilities are powerless to fully prevent it from entering due to its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread,” stated Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL), the industry groups that produced the new findings. “Our health are heroes are doing everything they can to prevent it from spreading further,” Parkinson added, “but this level of Covid nationwide puts serious strain on our workforce, supplies, and testing capacity.” The new AHCA/NCAL study (pdf) shows that weekly Covid-19 cases in nursing homes have reached record numbers this month and traces the spike to community spread outside the facilities. According to Johns Hopkins University, weekly new cases of Covid-19 rose 140% in the first week of November, with more than 572,000 Americans infected. That same week, more than 10,000 people living in long-term care facilities tested positive, and nearly half of those cases were in Midwestern states with huge spikes in community transmission, including North Dakota and Minnesota. Since mid-September, northern states in the Midwest have seen a 200% weekly increase in nursing home cases. While White House officials including Dr. Scott Atlas, a top coronavirus adviser to President Donald Trump, have pushed a “herd immunity” strategy in which relatively young and healthy people would be urged to go about their daily routines without wearing face masks or social distancing, while nursing home residents and other medically vulnerable people would be quarantined, the AHCA/NCAL study demonstrates the impossibility of such an approach – as medical experts have warned for months. “Trying to protect nursing home residents without controlling community spread is a losing battle,” Tamara Konetzka, an expert on long-term care at the University of Chicago, told the Associated Press earlier this month. “Someone has to care for vulnerable nursing home residents, and those caregivers move in and out of the nursing home daily, providing an easy pathway for the virus to enter.”
Many Nursing Homes Shun Free Covid-19 Testing Equipment – WSJ – Thousands of Covid-19 rapid-testing devices are sitting idle in nursing homes around the country, even as some of the facilities face delays in getting results from outside labs, according to federal data.
An average of 1,100 Americans are dying every day from COVID-19 as the death rate quickly climbs, heading towards summer and spring levels — On average, 1,100 Americans are dying every day from COVID-19 as the death rate quickly climbs, according to The COVID Tracking Project. The daily death count was 1,321 on Saturday, reaching a 7-day average of 1,100. The Project reported that since early May, the only day with a higher daily death average was August 4.Cases and hospitalizations continue to rise rapidly as well, breaking records most days and outpacing the rise in the number of tests being administered. On Saturday, The Project reported 163,473 new cases and 69,455 current hospitalizations, setting another all-time high as hospitals are once again being overwhelmed by the latest surges, health experts say.The US has been consistently breaking the record for the number of new cases per day, as states and cities across the US are experiencing a surge.”We see the same patterns we’ve seen for the past couple weeks,” The Project said in a tweet. “Tests are rising, but cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are rising much faster.” On Saturday, at least 38 states reported more than 1,000 new cases, while many set records for the number of detected cases, The Project reported. Many states have enacted new mask mandates, statewide lockdowns, and travel restrictions to try and slow the spread as the country heads into the winter and holiday season.Nearly 237,000 people have died in the US from coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. The CDC predicts that number could reach 282,000 by December 5. Nearly 237,000 people have died in the US from coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. The CDC predicts that number could reach 282,000 by December 5.
November 16 COVID-19 Test Results; Record Hospitalizations – The US is now averaging over 1 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be well under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US still needs to increase the number of tests per day significantly (or take actions to push down the number of new infections).There were 1,251,892 test results reported over the last 24 hours.There were 148,532 positive tests. Highest for a Monday.Almost 16,000 US deaths have been reported so far in November. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here. This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.
The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 11.9% (red line is 7 day average). The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by the sum of negative and positive results (I don’t include pending). And check out COVID Exit Strategy to see how each state is doing.The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations.The dashed line is the previous hospitalization maximum.Note that there were very few tests available in March and April, and many cases were missed, so the hospitalizations was higher relative to the 7-day average of positive tests in July. 7-day average cases are at a new record. Record Hospitalizations.
Coronavirus Dashboard for November 16: raging out of control – Total US infections: 11,036,935*
- Average last 7 days: 148,725/day (new record high)
- Total US deaths: 246,214
- Average last 7 days: 1,103/day
*confirmed cases only: I suspect the total number is on the order of 16 million, or close to 5% of the total US population. Back in August, when summer’s 2nd wave of new infections was near its peak, I devised my own rating system as to how each State was doing, as follows:
- Deep Red (general alarm out-of-control fire): 200+ infections per million, 5+ deaths per million.
- Red (3 alarm fire): 100-200 infections, 2-5 deaths
- Orange (2 alarm fire): 60-100 infections, 1-2 deaths
- Yellow (1 alarm fire):40-60 infections, 0.5-1 deaths
- Blue (smoldering/1 alarm fire): 20-40 infections, 0.2-0.5 deaths
- Green (embers): 0-20 infections, 0-0.2 deaths
As to infections, most of the States (33) were in the “Red” or “Orange” categories.At the high extreme, there were 5 States in the “Deep Red” category for infections: MS, ND, GA, TN, and AL.At the other end of the scale, there were 6 States in the “Yellow” range: OR, DE, CO, WV, PA, and MAThere were only 3 in the “Blue” range: CT, NJ, and NYThere were another 3 in the “Green” range: ME, NH, VT By contrast, how bad is the situation now? Only 4 States would *NOT* be in the “Deep Red” category: VA, ME, VT, and WI, plus DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Island. Of those, only Hawaii and the two territorial island chains would be less than “Red”: It is so bad that nearly 10% of the entire populations of North and South Dakota have already had *confirmed* infections, with several other States not far behind:They, along with the other hardest hit States, look like they are recklessly heading towards “herd immunity,” probably by the end of the winter, with death rates in excess of 1% of the entire States’ populations by then. As to deaths, in August most of the States (33) were also in the “Red” or “Orange” categories. 8 States were in the worst, “Deep Red” category: MS, LA, GA, TX, NV, FL, AZ, and SC.At the other end of the scale, there were only 4 States in the “Yellow” range: KS, HI, CO, and NHAnother 4 were in the “Blue” category: NY, NJ, ME, and CT One – VT – was “Green.”By contrast, 16 States are currently in the “Deep Red” category: ND, SC, WI, MT, WY, IL, NM, IA, MN, WV, TN, MI, ID, IN, NE, and MO: At the other end, Only NY is in the “Yellow” category. Only HI and VT are in the “Blue” category. And only the two island territories of the Virgin and Northern Mariana Islands are in the “Green” category: Keep in mind that deaths follow confirmed infections by 4 weeks or more, so there is every likelihood that many more States are going to move into the “Deep Red” category shortly. In fact, I could only find 2 States – VA and HI – where currently there is not a big upswing in cases or deaths. All the other States, including NY, ME, and VT, are showing rapidly increasing cases. Against all of this horrendous failure, the only other “good” news, as was widely reported this morning, is that a 2nd vaccine, with a 94% success rate at preventing infections, and without the necessity for heroic precautions in transport and storage, is on the verge of approval. Hopefully, the generally responsible States of the Northeast and West Coast will take the necessary heroic steps to keep their populations safe until the vaccine(s) arrive next spring or summer.
North Dakota records world’s highest COVID-19 mortality rate North Dakota’s coronavirus mortality rate is the highest of any U.S. state or country, according to an analysis of data from last week conducted by the Federation of American Scientists.The analysis, first reported by HuffPost, shows that North Dakota has a rate of 18.2 deaths per 1 million people. South Dakota, meanwhile, has 17.4 deaths per million, the third-worst rate in the world. The states have a total population of under 2 million.The two states have taken disparate approaches to the rising number of cases. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) imposed a new series of restrictions on businesses last week and imposed a new mandate in certain settings. “Our situation has changed, and we must change with it,” he said.“We believe in North Dakotans. We believe in the power of individual responsibility. And we need individual responsibility now more than ever to slow the spread of COVID-19,” Burgum added.However, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), a close ally of President Trump’s, has vocally opposed mask mandates and questioned the efficacy of masks as a safeguard against the spread of the virus.Modeling by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projected that continuing under current conditions would lead to deaths in both states more than doubling by March 1. This would mean topping more than 3,000 fatalities. On Monday, North Dakota’s Department of Health reported 1,089 new positive cases of the virus and a rolling 14-day positivity rate of 15.9 percent. South Dakota reported 821 new confirmed cases and 18,139 active cases overall.
Michigan reports 7,458 new COVID-19 cases, 79 deaths – Michigan reported 7,458 new cases of COVID-19 and 79 new deaths Tuesday, according to an update from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.The state now has 8,128 confirmed deaths and 272,034 confirmed cases since March.Michigan had a positivity rate of 14.25% Monday, reporting that 8,178 out of 57,379 diagnostic test results returned were positive. Michigan has a fatality rate of 3.0% among known cases.The state has reported 383 probable COVID-19 deaths and 24,806 probable cases.The probable cases combined with the confirmed cases make for a cumulative total of 8,511 deaths and 296,840 cases.
Many States Grapple With Handling of Virus as Cases Surge Nationwide – In response to what is being called the third wave of Covid-19 infections, governors and health-care professionals are taking targeted and partial measures in hopes of curbing the spread of the pathogen as the U.S. continues to top 100,000 cases a day. While the seven-day moving average of new cases is outpacing the 14-day average in all 50 states, a number of states is being hit particularly hard. Ohio on Tuesday reported a record 6,508 new positive infections over the past 24 hours, with an additional 386 people hospitalized and 23 deaths. Gov. Mike DeWine, who called the latest data “alarming” in a post on Twitter, plans to deliver a prime-time address Wednesday regarding the state’s fight against Covid-19. Wisconsin continues to hover at record numbers, with over 7,000 new confirmed cases Tuesday and a 36% positivity rate – or the percentage of tests taken that are returning with a positive result. Arizona on Tuesday reported 3,434 new cases, a figure not seen since late July when the state was in the midst of a difficult surge in infections. Neighboring New Mexico, where daily cases had never before exceeded 1,000, logged a record 1,408 new confirmed cases on Monday. In California, which reported more than 8,000 new infections on Monday, 11 counties were being put under more restrictive guidelines because of rising cases, state Secretary of Health and Human Services Mark Ghaly said Tuesday. The counties include some of the state’s more populated areas, including Sacramento and San Diego. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed said the city would no longer allow indoor dining, citing a doubling in cases over three weeks. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Tuesday signed a new proclamation extending the state of emergency for an additional 30 days. The proclamation also requires anyone over the age of 2 years old to wear a mask when attending a gathering of more than 25 people indoors or 100 people outdoors. “Like so many states, we’ve reached a point of serious community spread, and we can no longer pinpoint one age group or any type of activity that’s driving it,” said Ms. Reynolds, a Republican. Iowa last week reported more than 21,000 new cases with a positivity rate of more than 19%, according to the governor. The nation’s test positivity level has doubled since Oct. 5, from 4.2% to 8.3%. Mark Dworkin, professor and associate director of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he believes the rise in new confirmed cases is due to a lack of compliance with health directives. “We know what slows spread. Spreading out, correctly worn masking and contact tracing are a big part of control,” Dr. Dworkin said. “While many people do spread out and mask correctly, many don’t. And it’s my understanding that contact tracing has not kept up with the volume of cases.”
U.S. Covid-19 Hospitalizations Set New Record – WSJ.com – Coronavirus hospitalizations in the U.S. reached a record high Tuesday and are expected to continue their climb, health-care disaster preparedness experts said, a trajectory already straining hospitals across several cities and states.The number of Covid-19 patients in U.S. hospitals Tuesday reached 61,964, according to the Covid Tracking Project, passing the prior record of 59,940 set April 15 as critically ill patients flooded hospitals in the pandemic’s earliest hotspots of New York, New Jersey and California.Now, hospitals in Oklahoma, Minnesota and Texas are grappling with crowded intensive-care units and a stream of critically ill coronavirus patients, as cases surge nationally and across more rural regions of the U.S.The Billings Clinic in Billings, Mont., has added 60 beds to its 290-bed hospital by leasing a building from a nearby nursing home and tucking patients into offices and a physical-therapy gym, said Laurie Smith, its chief nursing officer.Federal teams of health-care workers and temporary agencies have boosted hospital staff, but it isn’t enough. Recruiting the additional 60 skilled workers needed is hard as demand grows nationally, she said. “All are in high demand right now.”Meantime, Montana’s cases continue to climb, and Billings Clinic is planning to make more space for more patients, she said.Many Montana hospitals operate in rural communities with 25 beds or fewer, sending more complex and critical patients to a smaller number of large hospitals.”There’s always a ceiling on what the capacity is,” said Clint Seger, the chief medical officer for a network of 14 small hospitals affiliated with the Billings Clinic. “What we don’t know is how much more the numbers are going to continue to go up.”Health-care experts said the numbers are likely to rise with recent record-setting numbers of new Covid-19 cases. “The current hospitalization surge is likely a prelude to an even greater surge in the coming weeks given the record-breaking number of cases each of the last few days,” said Thomas Tsai, an assistant professor of surgery and health policy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Record Covid-19 Hospitalizations Strain System Again – WSJ – Hospitals across the nation face an even bigger capacity problem from the resurgent spread of Covid-19 than they did during the virus’s earlier surges this year, pandemic preparedness experts said, as the number of U.S. hospitalizations hit a new high Wednesday. The number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients reached 65,368, according to the Covid Tracking Project, passing the record set Tuesday for the highest number of hospitalizations since April. A spring surge in the Northeast pushed hospitalizations near 60,000. Hospitalizations hit a nearly identical peak again in late July, as the pandemic’s grip spread across the South and West. Epidemiologists said the record is likely to be swiftly replaced by another as Covid-19 cases soar nationally. “We already know this is going to go far north,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. The U.S. set single-day records for coronavirus cases three of the last seven days, reaching about 136,000 Tuesday, Johns Hopkins University data show. Demand for health-care workers is of heightened concern in the latest surge, said hospital and disaster-response officials. Cases are more geographically widespread, reaching more remote regions than the spring and summer. Federal and private pools of health-care workers typically draw from one state to help another. New hospitalizations usually follow new cases by a few weeks. More widespread testing is finding more people with the virus, but that cannot fully account for surging cases, epidemiologists said. More young people are among those newly infected, and they are less likely to need hospital care than the elderly. But as infections rise among the young, so does transmission to high-risk older co-workers and family, said Jennifer Nuzzo, lead epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Testing Insights Initiative. “It doesn’t stay in one age group,” Dr. Nuzzo said. Pandemic fatigue is fueling transmission as people frustrated with months of restrictions have started to gather, public health officials said. “What we are finding is the disease is being spread in gatherings; family gatherings, weddings, holidays, and is being spread by people who know each other,” said Randall W. Williams, director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.“Lives are at stake,”. “When hospitals cannot accommodate all the patients, people die.”Despite improved treatments, hospitals have only so much capacity, doctors and health-care experts said. Overrun hospitals in New York in the spring scrambled to find ventilators and enough staff. Swamped hospitals in Arizona and California in the summer struggled to find nurses and frantically sought to transfer patients to hospitals with more capacity. “The medical system can only save so many people, and fortunately, things ebbed before things really got out of hand” during the spring and summer surges, said Charles Branas, chairman of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “There is a capacity limit here.”
Covid: US records quarter of a million deaths from coronavirus – BBC News – The US has recorded more than 250,000 deaths from Covid-19, a bleak marker as cases soar once again across the country. According to Johns Hopkins University, the country has now reported 250,029 deaths and nearly 11.5 million cases. It has more reported infections and a higher death toll than any other country worldwide. And cases have once again started to soar throughout the US, hitting new daily highs in the last week. Speaking to the BBC on Wednesday, top US infectious diseases Dr Anthony Fauci said the country was “going in the wrong direction at a very precarious time”, with people more likely to gather inside as the weather gets colder. New York City – the epicentre of the US outbreak in the spring – has ordered the closure of its schools from Thursday, amid a spike in cases. The decision to close the US’s largest public school system came as positive test rates for the virus surpassed the 3% threshold, officials say. It will affect some 300,000 children. In an interview on the BBC News channel, Dr Fauci warned about the new surge in cases leading to more deaths. “It’s a very serious situation because there are lagging indicators,” he said. “So when you see the massive increase in cases as we’re seeing now particularly as more and more people are doing things inside, we’re in a very difficult situation.” He repeated his call for people to “double down” on public health measures, such as wearing face coverings, physical distancing and avoiding crowds.”They sound so simple and we know they can work. But there’s a degree of Covid fatigue – people just are worn out with these restrictions,” Dr Fauci said.He urged people to “hold out for just a little longer because help is on the way” in the form of vaccines.At the end of March – when the US had recorded 2,200 deaths – Dr Fauci predicted the pandemic could kill up to 200,000 Americans and infect millions more.
U.S. COVID-19 deaths surpass 250,000 mark as infections surge (Reuters) – The number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States crossed 250,000 on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally, as a third coronavirus wave brings a fresh surge in infections and puts immense strain on the healthcare system. The number of people hospitalized with the virus rose to at least 78,630 by Wednesday afternoon, the highest ever for a single day during the pandemic. Governors and local officials have brought in a range of measures in recent days to try to damp down the surge. Cleveland asked residents to stay home, mask mandates were passed in places that had previously resisted them, and New York City’s school district, the largest in the United States, is halting in-person learning from Thursday. Over a seven-day average, the United States is reporting 1,176 daily deaths, more than the daily average deaths in India and Brazil combined – the two countries next most affected. The United States has reported a total of about 11.4 million cases since the start of the pandemic and remains the only country to have reported more than 10 million cases. With nearly 158,000 cases per day, it accounts for one in every 26 infections reported worldwide, according to a Reuters tally. The Midwest is currently the hardest-hit region, based on the number of cases per capita. North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska are the top five worst-affected U.S. states.
U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Tops 250,000 – WSJ.com – Amid a third and significant wave of new coronavirus cases, the U.S. has added 50,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 in the past 60 days, pushing the death toll to 250,029 on Wednesday. The number of deaths has remained above 1,000 a day for eight of the past nine days, according to a seven-day average of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The last time deaths were above 1,000 in the country was in late August, during the tail end of the country’s second surge of infections. In April and May, when the pandemic first hit the Northeast, daily death tolls rose above 2,000 a day as the virus spread inside assisted-living facilities and densely populated regions in New York and New Jersey. New confirmed cases have gone from 40,000 a day to 150,000 over the course of six weeks, and daily deaths have steadily increased over the same period. The rise in deaths, while still climbing, hasn’t been as sharp as previous surges. Epidemiologists and public-health leaders say many factors have contributed to a lower mortality rate than in previous months, including earlier detection due to increased testing availability, more younger people becoming infected, and better treatments and therapeutics to combat the virus. Nevertheless, daily death tolls are hitting record numbers in some states, and high hospitalizations continue to put a significant strain on local hospitals and their staff. Wisconsin, which became an early hot spot for the latest surge, broke its record for deaths this week, with over 100 in one day — a record set just a week ago. New Mexico, Arkansas, Kentucky and Iowa also all reported a record number of daily deaths this week. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson warned that if the state continued at its current pace, an additional 1,000 residents would die of Covid-19 between now and Christmas. In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear urged people to take action. “The house is on fire at this point,” Mr. Beshear, a Democrat, said Tuesday. “And we need everybody not to close their eyes, close their ears, and sit in the house while it burns in on them. We need everybody to join the bucket brigade and to do what it takes to address the crisis.” The U.S. reported 161,934 new cases on Tuesday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins, the 11th day in a row that newly reported cases have been above 130,000. The number has been higher than 100,000 since Nov. 3, Johns Hopkins data show. Three states — California, Texas and Illinois — recorded more than 10,000 new infections. Hospitalizations continue to surge, straining health-care systems in some places. There were 76,823 people admitted as of Tuesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a record and the eighth consecutive day above 60,000.
Covid-19 has killed 250,000 people in the US. That’s 10 times the deaths from car crashes in a year – In less than 10 months, Covid-19 has killed more people than strokes, suicides and car crashes typically do in a full year — combined. The victims include an elderly father and his grown daughter who died within moments of each other. Two parents who died before their son’s 5th birthday. In rare cases, even children with no known prior health conditions.Health experts say if Americans don’t get more serious about wearing masks and avoiding careless socializing, the rate of deaths will keep soaring this fall and winter.Here’s a look at how deadly Covid-19 is, compared with several other causes of death in the US. To get a more balanced picture, we took the five-year annual average ending in 2018, the latest available year of data for most causes.Coronavirus has killed 250,000 people in the US in less than 10 months, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.On average, 24,166 people die each year in car crashes, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (The number includes drivers or passengers killed in car crashes, not others such as bicyclists or pedestrians who were killed as the result of car crashes.)That means at least 10 times more people have died from Covid-19 so far this year than car crashes typically do over an entire year.An average of 42,200 people died from the flu each year from 2014 through 2018, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.So in less than 10 months, Covid-19 deaths have reached more than five times the average number of annual flu deaths.The new coronavirus isn’t just deadlier than the flu — it’s also much more contagious than the flu. The number of Covid-19 deaths is now five times higher than deaths by suicide each year.On average, 45,439 people died by suicide from 2014 through 2018, according to CDC data.Researchers from New York University are concerned the number of suicides will be higher in 2020 due to pandemic stress.Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. An average of 670,595 people die from heart disease each year, according to CDC data.While Covid-19 isn’t expected to surpass heart disease in the number of deaths over an entire year, the daily death toll from Covid-19 could soon outpace the daily death rate from heart disease, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of tropical medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine.He cited the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which has projected Covid-19 will kill 2,500 people in the US a day in January.”What that means, practically speaking, is that Covid-19 could be the single leading cause of death in the United States on a daily basis,” Hotez said.
Number of children diagnosed with COVID-19 in the US surpasses 1 million – A new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics found 1.04 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 among children as of November 12, accounting for 11.5 percent of all infections in the United States. Of these cases, 112,000 infections came in the week before the report was published, the highest amount in a week for the entire pandemic. On August 20, around the time that many K-12 schools were returning for classes, child cases totaled 442,785 – 9.3 percent of the 4.76 million total cases for all ages. By November 12, the number of total cases had risen by 87.5 percent to over 9 million. Child cases, in turn, had risen by 135 percent to 1.04 million. An increasing number of children who have been infected with COVID-19 are being diagnosed with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), a condition that causes severe inflammation in human organs like the kidney, lungs, brains, skin and, most commonly, the heart. So far, nearly 1,200 children have been diagnosed with MIS-C and 20 have died. Of these cases around 50 percent experienced shock or very low blood pressure, and 40-50 percent experienced decreased heart function, also called “squeeze of the heart.” This severe loss in heart function has occurred in roughly half of all MIS-C cases related to COVID-19 hospitalizations, where the average length of stay is five days. With infections continuing to rise among children, the number of children affected and hospitalized due to MIS-C is expected to double in the coming weeks, according to Dr. Jason Lake, a pediatric infectious disease specialist. While there are effective treatments for MIS-C, the state of the medical system in the United States poses a dire threat to the lives of these children. MIS-C is a serious disease that requires medical treatment in a hospital, but this cannot be done if hospital beds are overrun with coronavirus patients. Just as the overwhelming of hospitals will lead to more COVID-19 deaths, it will also result in more deaths among children from MIS-C. Additionally, MIS-C takes about four weeks after the infection of COVID-19 to develop, meaning that the effects of recent mass infections are still to be seen. Given the current rate of children who are becoming infected, it is possible that thousands of children with MIS-C will require treatment throughout the winter if nothing is done to stop the spread of the virus. This is a serious health risk to millions of children who could suffer long-term health damage. Children who suffer from MIS-C can face permanent scarring of the heart, which can lead to serious health complications like arrhythmic heartbeat. Potential long-term health effects of COVID-19 in children are still unknown. Several diseases, such as West Nile poliomyelitis and Shingles, are the result of a viral infection that produces an illness years into the future.
Second wave of coronavirus pandemic hits New York and New Jersey – The coronavirus pandemic is resurging in New York and New Jersey, which were the global epicenter of the pandemic for much of the spring, prompting totally inadequate responses from their state governments. Cases, test positivity rates, hospitalizations and deaths have begun rising in both states after months of relatively low numbers, even while the rest of the country experienced worsening conditions. The most recent testing data for New York show that more than 3 percent of COVID-19 tests came back positive on Nov. 16 – the first time since May that such a benchmark had been met. The seven-day rolling average was 2.9 percent, indicating that community transmission is steadily growing out of control. The Mid-Hudson region and Central New York have more than 4 percent test positivity; Western New York was at 6.5 percent on Monday. Raw case numbers are likewise growing to levels not seen since the spring, recently reaching over 4,000 per day (and over 5,000 on Tuesday) compared to 600 – 700 daily during the summer. Nearly 2,000 New Yorkers are hospitalized, a level also not seen since May. In the past month alone hospitalizations have doubled. Deaths are also beginning to climb; on Nov. 16 COVID-19 killed 36 people, bringing the state’s total deaths over 34,000, an underestimate given dismal testing in the early stages of the pandemic. The situation is similar in New Jersey, which was even worse hit on a per capita basis than New York earlier in the year. New cases have risen to over 4,000, with 4,026 cases Nov. 16. The test positivity rate has also risen substantially, hitting 12.1 percent on Nov. 17, a level not seen since May. COVID-19 killed 20 people in New Jersey on Nov. 16. Both states are experiencing a rate of reproduction of greater than 1, meaning that each sick person will pass along COVID-19 to more than just a single person on average. Rt.live, which estimates the reproduction rate based on data from the COVID Tracking Project, estimates New Jersey’s rate at 1.24 and New York’s at 1.23, both toward the high end of the spectrum of US states despite the large case numbers in other states. These reproduction rates mean that if the pandemic is not curbed immediately, both states will see cases in the tens of thousands daily again, overwhelming the health care system and heralding a return of the scenes of the spring: mass graves, bodies stacked in portable morgues and health care workers pushed past the brink. Given the scale of the disaster approaching – with the disastrous first wave fresh in millions of minds and the present scenes from across the country playing out in the news – the response of the state governments has been nothing short of criminal.
El Paso COVID-19 crisis: County seeks morgue workers to move bodies – El Paso County put out a call Thursday night for the immediate hiring of morgue attendants to help with the growing number of COVID-19 dead.Temporary workers are needed to move bodies amid the growing pandemic death toll, county officials said.”Not only is this assignment physically taxing, but it may be emotionally taxing as well,” a county announcement stated. On Thursday, the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office had 247 bodies at the morgue and inside nine refrigerated trailers serving as mobile morgues, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said in news release. El Paso County has recorded 67 deaths from COVID-19 since Sunday, including 19 on Thursday. Public health data shows that there are 435 deaths under investigation awaiting determination for COVID-19. County Commissioners Court on Thursday authorized the hiring of several morgue attendants, officials said. The application process is now open to the public and will be closed when full. Morgue workers will be provided personal protective equipment and will receive a COVID-19 test prior to starting. Attendants must be able to lift between 100 to 400 lbs. with assistance, stated a county news release. The county hopes to hire enough workers to be able to rotate staff in shifts on weekdays and weekends because of the growing number of COVID-19 dead, officials said. Samaniego has been meeting with funeral home directors, emergency management and health officials and business groups to help strategize how to best deal with the crisis. With half of all hospitalizations linked to COVID-19, El Paso is “absolutely nowhere close to being out of the woods,” Samaniego added.
Coronavirus: Five signs that show how bad El Paso’s outbreak is – BBC News – The US had just over nine million Covid-19 cases when November began – now, just weeks later, the country is topping 11 million. And one west Texas county has emerged as the latest American epicentre.Right on the border with Mexico, El Paso in Texas is known for its desert landscape, military complexes and plentiful sunshine. Now, it’s making a name as one of the worst hit regions in the nation. Covid-19 patients account for more than half of all hospital admissions in the county of El Paso, and the case count continues to trend upwards. With cases going up by more than a thousand every day in El Paso, some 76,000 people have now been infected. That’s about the same number of confirmed cases as in the whole of Greece or Libya.Data shows 1,120 El Paso residents are currently in hospital with the virus, and this number is expected to rise. That means that of all the Covid patients in hospital across the state of Texas, one in six is in El Paso, according to the latest figures. A total of 782 people are known to have died.As officials race to keep up with the rapidly increasing number of sick people, El Paso city’s convention centre was recently converted into a makeshift hospital to provide extra beds. Some facilities are so overrun that patients are being airlifted to other cities in the state.As hospitals grapple with too many patients, El Paso’s morgue has been unable to keep up with the county’s rising death toll. As a result, officials are turning to refrigerated trailers. Ten of these mobile morgues have been requested in recent weeks.The mobile facilities are set up outside the county’s medical examiner’s office, which has been handling more than 150 bodies in the last week.Even the county’s funeral homes are feeling the strain. One manager, Jorge Ortiz, told KERA News he has had to convert the home’s chapel into a makeshift cooler. Mr Ortiz said the peak back in the summer is “nothing compared to what we’re living right now”.The city continues to face a shortage of staff, and officials have faced criticism for turning to local prisons for help.Inmates have been pictured handling the bodies of Covid victims at the medical examiner’s office, helping load them into the mobile morgues.A sheriff’s office spokesman said the inmates – who are minor offenders in minimum security prisons – are being compensated $2 (£1.5) an hour.In the last six months, one El Paso woman has lost six of her family members to the virus as the outbreak worsens.Bonnie Soria Najera told Good Morning America that her uncle was the last to pass away on Sunday. She has also had to bury her parents, two aunts and a cousin.”They were all being very careful,” she said. “They did things that they had to do: grocery stores, went to doctor’s appointments.”Despite the worries of many El Pasoans, there’s no lockdown in sight for the west Texas county.On Friday, a state appeals court overturned a stay-at-home order after local restaurant owners and the state attorney general sued Judge Samaniego for shutting down the city.A panel of judges ruled 2-1 that the order to close nonessential businesses until December went against the Texas governor’s 7 October reopening guidance. Some businesses resumed operations almost immediately, local media reported.
One In Five US Hospitals Are On The Verge Of A Staffing Crisis –As COVID-19 cases surge pushing hospitalizations to levels unseen since the start of the pandemic, hospitals around the country are facing a staffing crisis. According to Bloomberg, 1 in 5 American hospitals anticipates a “critical staffing shortage” within a week’s time, according to DHHS. Midwestern states like Missouri, Wisconsin and North Dakota have reported the highest share of hospitals worried about staffing shortages as deaths and hospitalizations soar. In a phrase that’s reminiscent of coverage from back in the spring, when hospital workers in some of NYC’s most unloved neighborhoods were wearing trash bags instead of PPE, Bloomberg warned that a dearth of doctors and nurses could risk pushing the mortality rate even higher. Frontline workers are “vulnerable to the consequences of overwork”, Bloomberg reported. In an example of just how bad it can get, readers might remember a rash of doctor suicides in NYC, and in other places as well. What’s more, given the staffing issues, hospitals around the country are bracing for a “holiday spike”, forcing health care workers to spend yet another holiday away from their families. The biggest problem this time around is that rural areas in the Midwest and elsewhere that were largely spared earlier in the year are now seeing outbreaks in their communities, which have in some cases badly strained the more threadbare facilities available in these areas.Here’s an example: Sprawling, sparsely populated Siskiyou County along California’s northern border hit a milestone this week. After months of dodging a major COVID-19 outbreak, seven people were hospitalized with coronavirus infections and the number of available ICU beds in the county briefly dropped to zero, which sent local public health officials into a full-blown panic. Management at the hospital pleaded with the townspeople to wear their masks and wash their hands, advising that more infections would inevitably lead to a surge in deaths. So far, hospitalizations and deaths have climbed more or less in lockstep, trailing new cases.
“The wolf is at the door”: Missouri hospital heads plead for state action to stem the pandemic – Missouri hospital leaders have continued to plead with the governor for action in the weeks since an October 29 conference call in which they raised the dangers of runaway infection rates and hospitals being overwhelmed. Since then, Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services have reported 65,503 new COVID-19 infections, including 5,843 new cases on Wednesday. Hospitals in the St. Louis area are reporting in the range of 120 to 140 new COVID-19 patients daily. On November 13, the Missouri Hospital Association (MHA) sent a letter to Republican Governor Mike Parson again raising the desperate need for a statewide mask mandate to limit the spread of the deadly pandemic. Parson, who along with his wife was diagnosed with COVID-19 earlier this year, firmly opposed taking the most basic mitigation steps, like mandating masks, closing bars and restaurants and moving schools to remote learning to stop the spread. This murderous policy has resulted in 97 percent of the state being declared a COVID-19 “red zone.” In the letter to the governor, MHA President and CEO Herb Kuhn wrote, “the virus is unbowed. It continues its silent and ceaseless replication wherever it finds opportunity. Unfortunately, it is finding ample targets and spreading quickly. By many metrics, conditions are far worse than they were this spring.” The letter closed with the dire warning: “The wolf is at the door. Missouri’s hospitals urge you to issue a statewide masking mandate. A mask mandate may be unappealing to some, but it has become necessary. We urge your immediate action on this issue.” Dr. Alex Garza of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force also called on the governor to take decisive action, saying: “COVID-19 is spreading much too quickly and sending far too many people to our hospitals and intensive care units. We are now at a tipping point. The actions that we take today will determine what the next weeks and months will look like.”
Illinois Reports 14,612 New Coronavirus Cases as State Sees Deadliest Day Since May – NBC Chicago – Illinois health officials reported 14,612 new confirmed and probable coronavirus cases on Thursday and 168 additional deaths, making it the state’s deadliest day since mid-May. Thursday’s data from the Illinois Department of Public Health also marked the second-highest daily case total on record for the state. The newly reported figures brought the total number of cases in the state to 621,383 since the pandemic began and lifted the death toll to 11,178, IDPH said. A total of 113,447 new tests were performed over the last 24 hours, according to state health officials. In all, 9,472,674 tests have been performed during the pandemic. The state’s rolling seven-day average positivity rate rose back up to 12% after falling Wednesday to 11.9%. The positivity rate was 12.5% on Tuesday and Monday, which was down from 12.8% on Sunday. The rate was 12.6% on Saturday, 13.2% on Friday, 12.6% on Thursday, 12.4% on Nov. 11 and 12% on Nov. 10. It was 11.4% the previous day and 10.6% on Nov. 8. The state saw its hospitalization numbers increase again Thursday, with 6,037 residents currently in hospitals due to coronavirus-like illnesses, an increase of more than 80 patients in the last 24 hours. Of those patients, 1,192 are currently in intensive care units, and 587 are on ventilators. Thursday’s update comes one day before all of Illinois enter Tier 3 coronavirus mitigations under the state’s plan. Beginning Friday, new guidelines will be in place for retailers, gyms, hotels, restaurants, bars and more, according to state officials. “To stop this spread and preserve some semblance of the holidays, all of us need to do more than just wear our masks now – though masks are mandatory throughout the state. The simple fact is that COVID-19 is spreading so quickly and so widely, and our hospitals are beginning to experience real strain and at the current infection rate they will be overwhelmed. So whenever possible, we need you to stay home,” Pritzker said in a statement.
US passes 2,000 coronavirus deaths in a day for first time since May – The United States on Thursday recorded 2,015 new coronavirus deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, marking the first time the country has hit more than 2,000 deaths since May.Experts have warned that the death toll will keep climbing in the coming months as cold weather drives more people indoors, CNN notes. According to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, more than 2,300 people could end up losing their lives per day due to the virus. The group also predicts that 471,000 Americans could die from the virus by March 1.The U.S. also set a new record on hospitalizations on Thursday. According to COVID Tracking Project, 80,698 people are currently hospitalized. In addition, more than 187,000 new cases were reported across the country, according to CNN. Several states have imposed new mask mandates and coronavirus restrictions in an attempt to limit the spread ahead of the expected surge.On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that people avoid traveling and gathering for the Thanksgiving holiday, saying that the holiday should only be spent with people living in a household together. More than 11 million people have contracted the virus in the U.S. since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 252,000 have died.
Sturgis rally blamed for COVID-19 spread in Minnesota – A South Dakota motorcycle rally attended by nearly half a million people earlier this year resulted in at least 86 cases of COVID-19 among residents of Minnesota, including one death, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, which looked to find the impact of the rally on a neighboring state, found that of the 86 identified cases among Minnesotans, 35 had not gone to the event but were contacts of people who did. About one-third of Minnesota counties had a case associated with Sturgis rally, which took place over a 10-day period in August with no social distancing or mask requirements. The findings show the importance of wearing masks and following social distancing rules and other recommendations from public health officials in stopping the spread of COVID-19, the authors of the report wrote. “These findings highlight the far-reaching effects that gatherings in one area might have on another area,” the authors wrote. “The motorcycle rally was held in a neighboring state that did not have policies regarding event size and mask use, underscoring the implications of policies within and across jurisdictions.” The authors noted that the number of cases among Minnesotans is likely an undercount because some people may not have been tested or did not participate in interviews with public health officials. The report did not look at how many people in South Dakota became sick. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), who still does not mandate masks in her state, supported the rally taking place. South Dakota now has one of the largest and deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country relative to population size.
California daily COVID cases reach record-breaking 13,005 new cases in single day – -California reported more than 13,000 new COVID-19 cases Friday, shattering the previous record for the highest number of virus cases reported in a single day in the state.With 13,005 new cases, California now has 1,072,272 coronavirus cases and a seven-day positivity rate of 5.9%. The previous record was reported on July 21 with 12,807 cases.Another 60 people died of the virus, the state reported Friday, marking 18,557 deaths across California since the pandemic began.This comes one day after Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for non-essential activities in counties that are in the purple tier of the state’s reopening tier system. Earlier this week, state health officials announced 41 of the 58 California counties were in the purple tier due to rising COVID-19 cases. That includes Fresno, Merced, Madera, Tulare, and Kings counties.Since then, coronavirus cases have continued to climb, right as we prepare to enter the Thanksgiving holiday. State health officials have advised people not to gather with those outside their households to help stop COVID-19 from spreading. On Thursday, the CDC recommended that people not travel for Thanksgivingas cases of the virus also continue to spike across the U.S.
Michigan sets one-day record with 9,779 new coronavirus cases – Michigan’s health department announced 9,779 new coronavirus cases and 53 new COVID-19 deaths during its afternoon update Friday, Nov. 20. The case increase was the largest one-day total reported to date, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. Over the past seven days, the state has averaged 7,205 confirmed cases and 64 deaths per day. One week ago, Michigan averaged 6,167 cases and 59 deaths per day. Michigan also reported a one-day high in testing with 84,223 diagnostic tests processed Thursday. Of those, 11,586 tests — or 13.76% — came back positive for COVID-19. That rate has been above 10% since Nov. 1. Health experts recommend waiting for the positive test rate to drop below 5% before reopening schools and economies.
Ohio sets new daily coronavirus record, with thousands of cases pending – The state of Ohio has set a new daily virus case record, and thousands of additional cases are pending. The Ohio Health Department reported 8,808 additional cases Friday, the state’s highest 24-hour total since the start of the pandemic. Friday’s daily total eclipses the state’s previous record of 8,071 set last week. Ohio now has seen 335,423 total cases of the virus. Sixty-five additional deaths were reported Friday, bringing the state’s total to 5,955. State health officials said 398 additional hospitalizations were reported across the state: 42 of those cases required admittance to intensive care units. The record comes as thousands of cases are pending. Gov. Mike DeWine says the number is a gross understatement as a large number of antigen tests are starting to slow down reporting because Ohio is “double checking” those positives. As a result, around 12,000 cases have been backlogged since Monday. Earlier Thursday, DeWine for the first time designated one of the state’s most populous areas, Franklin County, home to Columbus, as a purple zone on the state’s color-coded alert system. The designation is the highest on the state’s system and shows the area was flagged for hitting six indicators, including sustained increases in cases and in coronavirus-related hospital admissions. “This is a sign that we are starting to see a sustained and unprecedented impact on our hospital systems and staff in this area,” DeWine said during his briefing. Over the past two weeks, the rolling average number of daily new cases in Ohio increased by 107%, according to the COVID Tracking Project. In the past week, one in every 227 people in the state tested positive. An average of about 7,350 cases have been confirmed per day in the state over the past seven days.
Cuyahoga County suburbs hit another record high, with 750 new coronavirus cases reported on Friday – – Coronavirus cases among suburban Cuyahoga County residents reached another record high on Friday, when the Board of Health recorded 750 new daily cases, according to county Health Commissioner Terry Allan. Allan spoke in dire tones during Friday’s briefing, which came two days after the the county and Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson issued a stay-at-home advisory. “I beg you, implore you, everyone, to follow the personal protective measures we all know well,” to reduce the spread, Allan said. Allan and County Executive Armond Budish also reiterated the recommendation they made last week, that residents celebrate Thanksgiving only with household members. The rapid spread of the virus means that Board of Health and state contract tracers are not able to as quickly contact everyone who may have been exposed to an infected person. That means anyone who tests positive should take contact-tracing into their own hands: *Immediately notify anyone with whom the infected person spent 15 minutes or more, within six feet of distance. (Even if both people were masked.) *Such close contacts should quarantine for 14 days, and notify their health-care provider if they develop symptoms. As of Friday, 81% of intensive-care unit beds at hospitals in Cuyahoga County were occupied, 74% of regular hospital beds were occupied, and 37% of ventilators were in use, according to board data. Such numbers do not reflect the staffing required to treat patients in local hospitals.
Indiana Reports Nearly 7,000 New Coronavirus Cases, 40 Additional Deaths Saturday – Health officials in Indiana say that nearly 7,000 new cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the last 24 hours, along with 40 deaths as cases continue to rise in the state. According to data from the Indiana State Department of Health, a total of 6,983 new cases of the virus have been confirmed in the last day, bringing the state’s total number of coronavirus cases to 289,183 since the pandemic began.Saturday’s 40 additional deaths brings the statewide total to 4,992 fatalities related to the virus, with another 254 deaths listed as “probable” COVID-19 fatalities. A total of 61,234 new tests were administered in the state over the last 24 hours, with 22,907 Indiana residents tested in all. According to the latest data available from ISDH, a total of 2,053,143 individuals have been tested, with 3,846,380 tests administered during the pandemic. The positivity rate on all tests conducted in the state over the last seven days currently sits at 12.2%, while the positivity rate for unique individuals is at 23.5%. Hospitalizations continued their staggering rise on Saturday, with 3,168 patients currently receiving care for coronavirus-like illnesses. Of those patients, 2,610 have officially been diagnosed with coronavirus, a record high for the state. As of Saturday, 43% of the intensive care unit beds statewide are currently in use by coronavirus patients, with 10.4% of the state’s ventilators currently in use by COVID-19 patients. While many areas of the state are seeing massive surges in cases, numerous northern Indiana counties are experiencing large influxes of COVID-19 diagnoses. In Lake County, 770 new cases are popping up per 100,000 residents every seven days, with a seven-day positivity rate of 15.81%. In nearby Porter County, 869 new cases per 100,000 residents are being reported, along with a 16.35% positivity rate.
November 21 COVID-19 Test Results; Record Hospitalizations – Note: Week-over-week case growth is slowing, so maybe cases per day will peak soon (A virtual Thanksgiving is recommended by the CDC). Stay Safe!!!The US is now averaging over 1 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be well under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US still needs to increase the number of tests per day significantly (or take actions to push down the number of new infections).There were 1,604,859 test results reported over the last 24 hours.There were 178,309 positive tests.Almost 25,000 US deaths have been reported so far in November. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here. This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 11.1% (red line is 7 day average). The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by the sum of negative and positive results (I don’t include pending).And check out COVID Exit Strategy to see how each state is doing.The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations. The dashed line is the previous hospitalization maximum.Note that there were very few tests available in March and April, and many cases were missed, so the hospitalizations was higher relative to the 7-day average of positive tests in July.
• 7-day average cases are at a new record.
• 7-day average deaths at highest level since May.
• Record Hospitalizations.
“We Need A Full Investigation”: WaPo Questions COVID Origins 10 Months After ZeroHedge Twitter Ban For Doing Same – About 10 months after Zero Hedge was suspended from Twitter and ridiculed by those peddling the “official” narrative about Covid-19 for an article we published asking critical questions about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, the “mainstream” media finally appears to be asking those very same questions. In the latest example of one of our “conspiracy theories” potentially turning into “conspiracy fact”, the Washington Post published an op-ed by its Editorial Board on Saturday called “The coronavirus’s origins are still a mystery. We need a full investigation.” Just about 300 days late, guys. Good thing time isn’t of the essence, we guess. “After so much death and illness, a mystery from the first days of the novel coronavirus has yet to be solved. We still don’t understand its origins or how it became a global killer. The answers lie in China, and quite possibly beyond. The world needs a credible, impartial investigation to better prepare for future pandemics,” the op-ed opens by saying. The op-ed also notes that “no samples were taken that might prove a virus connection” from the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after the outbreak began. “The data are insufficient to settle whether the market was the contamination source, or whether it served to amplify the virus for human-to-human transmission, or both, or neither.” “The identity of the animal intermediary – if there is one – remains a puzzle,” the op-ed says. Wait – if there is one? We thought the signed, sealed and delivered “official” explanation was pangolins already. What happened? Then, to WaPo’s credit, they talk about China silencing the doctors who were alarmed by the virus at first – something we wrote about and talked about extensively, as it was happening: Last December, when the outbreak began in Wuhan, China silenced eight doctors who were alarmed by the mysterious illness that was spreading fast. Then, during critical weeks in January, provincial and central governments kept the lid on public information as the virus spread. These early coverups were telltale symptoms of China’s authoritarian party-state in action. The secrecy has left legitimate questions about whether China will ever be open about the virus origin. And then there’s the coup de grace; WaPo “goes full Zero Hedge” and asks the very same question we asked almost an entire year ago: was the Wuhan Institute of Virology involved? Beyond the blame game, there are troubling questions in China that must be examined, including whether the coronavirus was inadvertently spread in an accident or spill from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had previously carried out research on bat coronaviruses.
France appears to have ‘passed the peak’ of second surge, health minister says – France has passed the worst of its second wave of coronavirus infections, its top health minister declared Sunday. In an interview published in France 24, Minister of Health Olivier Véran said that the number of new infections had decreased in the country for 10 consecutive days, and added that test positivity rates were dropping as well. “Thanks to the lockdown, just like back in March, the virus has started to circulate less,” said Véran. “For 10 consecutive days now, the number of new COVID-19 cases, positive test rates and incident rates are decreasing. Everything leads us to believe that we have passed the peak of the epidemic.” Despite the success, he added that it is “too early to claim victory and relax our efforts,” and said that France’s anti-coronavirus measures will continue.His remarks come as France’s rate of new COVID-19 cases has dropped significantly in recent days. The county reported just over 27,000 new cases on Sunday, down from a high of more than 86,000 in one day earlier in November. Numerous countries including the U.S. have seen another surge of cases with the fall weather and have moved to implement tougher restrictions as a result. Michigan moved over the weekend to suspend in-person learning for schools and indoor dining at restaurants, while Washington state is shutting down indoor dining as well as gyms, museums and theaters. The U.S. continues to have the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 infections of any country, and on Sunday passed 11 million total cases after health officials registered more than 1 million new cases over the past week.
Record daily coronavirus death tolls in Italy and Spain since September – The coronavirus is continuing to spiral out of control in Italy, which is now experiencing the largest number of deaths of any country in Europe. On Tuesday, another 731 people died, and on Wednesday, 753 people, the highest tolls since the peak of the first wave from March 21 – 31. The total number of COVID-19 deaths in the country, according to the official underestimated figures, is now 47,217, second only to the UK in Europe. More than 1.2 million cases have been detected. The number of daily new cases hit a record of 40,896 last Friday and has continued to average more than 30,000 in the days since. On Tuesday, Spain also recorded its largest daily death toll since September, with 435 people killed. Spain surpassed one million cases on October 21, and in the space of just 20 days, the case total increased by 50 percent, to more than 1.5 million. According to the official death count, there have now been 41,668 deaths in Spain. But this is a significant underestimate of the real toll. A report published Tuesday by El Diario detailed the increase in the national mortality rate associated with the two waves of the pandemic. Since 1975, there had never been more than 12,000 deaths in the country recorded in a single week. For three consecutive weeks from March 23 to April 12, the weekly death rate exceeded 18,000. From March to April alone, there were 43,000 more deaths than the historical average. Since September, the total number of excess deaths has exceeded 15,000, giving a total estimated COVID-19 death toll of more than 58,000. In Italy, the healthcare system is already on the verge of collapse. Across the country, 42 percent of ICU patients are being treated for coronavirus, significantly above the emergency threshold of 30 percent indicated by the government as the point at which hospitals would be overwhelmed. Ambulances are queueing up due to a lack of available beds. A video widely shared on social media posted by a health worker at the San Giovanni Rotondo hospital in the province of Foggia, in southern Italy, shows more than six ambulances queued waiting to be able to deliver their patients. “This is total chaos,” the health worker says into the video. While in March and April the pandemic had been largely confined to the northern regions around Lombardy, the virus is now overwhelming hospitals in the poorer south. On November 11, a video taken inside the bathroom at Cardarelli Hospital in Naples went viral. A man is seen lying under the bathroom sink of the hospital ward, as the phone operator states, “This man is dead.” Pointing at another motionless patient lying on a bed, they add, “This one we don’t know whether he is alive or dead.”
Tokyo to raise alert as Japan sets daily record with 2,000-plus COVID-19 cases – Japan Times -Japan set a daily record with more than 2,000 new COVID-19 cases – including a new high of 493 in the capital – on Wednesday, following reports Tokyo was expected to raise its virus alert to the highest level Thursday amid an ongoing surge of infections.Prior to Wednesday, record nationwide tallies had been reported for three consecutive days through Saturday, with the figure hitting 1,737 on that day. While the final figure for Wednesday was yet to be confirmed, local media tallies showed the figure had risen above the 2,000 threshold.But much of the focus has been on the capital and the surge in cases there. While raising the virus alert level, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government may also call on businesses to close early, according to local media reports.Much like the “Tokyo Alert” activated by Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike in June, the capital’s four-point alert system is largely symbolic. The alert level, which is changed based on input from experts, is meant to warn residents to exercise further caution but can also signal the announcement of additional virus countermeasures.Koike is expected to make the announcement during a meeting on Thursday.The fourth level indicates that “infections are spreading” – a step up from the third level, which means Tokyo believes “infections appear to be spreading.” Tokyo lowered its alert status to the second-highest level on Sept. 10, but new cases in the capital over the past several weeks have apparently forced officials to raise it once again.Koike has so far made no mention to the media or public that the city will be put into lockdown – in this case a “soft lockdown,” as Japan’s virus laws don’t permit compulsory or punitive measures – or that residents will be asked to avoid nonessential travel within or outside city limits. The last and only time Koike issued voluntary business closure requests was in April, when the central government declared a state of emergency in seven prefectures, including Tokyo, extending it 10 days later to the rest of the country. The state of emergency was lifted in late May.
Far Deadlier Strain Of Coronavirus Discovered In South Australia – As researchers struggle to understand what makes infection with COVID-19 so mild in some cases, and so deadly in others, we have kept a close eye out for any new links between symptoms different strains of the virus. And on Wednesday we noticed new comments from South Australia’s top health official who warned that a particularly deadly strain of SARS-CoV-2 is circulating in the state.Chief Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier explained that the reason for the recently imposed six-day lockdown is the fact that “this particular strain has had certain characteristics” she said. The State of South Australia, which became home to this dramatic scene yesterday, is also bracing for the risk that this new strain could spread more quickly, in addition to being more deadly. Professor Spurrier said a typical generation, or stage, of the virus was only about three days.“We also know, because of that characteristic, that what we call a generation, is only about three days and a generation is when one case is passing it on to the next level, and then that (next) level, so if they pass it on to two people, they will pass it on to another lot of people, and that is your third generation,” she said.Already, the virus has progressed to the fifth generation, she said.“At the moment in SA we have done contact tracing to the fourth generation but the fifth generation is out there in our community and at the moment we are contact tracing to get on to that generation and that is the Woodville pizza bar.”Authorities have traced the local outbreak to a pizza shop in Parafield. The cluster began with a worker at Peppers Warmouth, which is being used as a quarantine hotel, was infected with the virus.By tracing the spread of certain strains of the virus, researchers in the US have hypothesized that the virus was spread to New York from Europe, before moving to the rest of the country east of the Mississippi, while other strains colonized China and the west. Though SA’s infection rate remains muted, officials have reported two new cases today, taking the total to 22, while another 12 people are still under investigation. But as residents rush to get tested, we can’t help but wonder if public health officials might be playing up the strain angle to coax people into obeying the state’s six day lockdown.
Developing Nations Push for Covid-19 Vaccines Without the Patents – WSJ – A group of developing countries, led by South Africa and India, say they will press at the World Trade Organization this week to free Covid-19 vaccines from patent protections so they can be more accessible and affordable for poor countries. The pandemic requires a temporary suspension of the world’s usual intellectual property system, the countries say they will argue at a WTO council meeting this Friday. If poorer countries aren’t given special access to the vaccines, which are expected to hit the market by the start of next year, the group of developing nations say they will argue, they will continue to be devastated by the coronavirus even as it is stopped in the West.The proposed waiver pits the developing nations against the U.S., the European Union, Japan and other wealthier countries, as well as Western pharmaceutical companies, which say respecting intellectual property rights is key to promoting the rapid development of the vaccines. Developed nations have already struck deals with Western pharmaceutical companies to buy up enough vaccines to tie up most of the world’s production capacity until the end of 2021. If the developed nations don’t relent, South Africa is prepared to try to force the issue through a rare contested vote at the trade organization, said Mustaqeem De Gama, counselor at the South African mission to the WTO. Decisions made at the trade organization are usually done on consensus. “I don’t understand how governments of the world are able to outsource their responsibility for public health to a few companies that are able to hold them all ransom,” Mr. De Gama said. The countries asking for a waiver from WTO members say there is unused manufacturing capacity in developing nations that could be harnessed to copy vaccines. Existing exemptions in trade law aren’t adequate to quickly allow countries to copy the vaccines or distribute them to other poor countries that have no manufacturing capacity, they say. The most developed countries, which have fought for decades for better patent protection for pharmaceuticals, say the potential profits are an important driver of research and development, and ignoring patents could damage the engine of innovation that has helped develop vaccines so quickly. The European Union says intellectual property “is part of the solution rather than an obstacle,” while the U.K. also says it isn’t clear that patents are a barrier to supply, calling the proposal “an extreme measure to address an unproven problem.” “Confiscating the intellectual property of innovators will only undermine our efforts to combat Covid-19,” said Brian Newell, a spokesman for BIO, a biotechnology industry association, which includes members developing Covid-19 vaccines.
Mexico becomes just fourth country to surpass 100,000 coronavirus deaths – Mexico this week surpassed 100,000 fatalities from COVID-19, becoming only the fourth country in the world to reach the grim milestone.José Luis Alom’a Zegarra, Mexico’s director of epidemiology, announced on Thursday that the country had 100,104 confirmed deaths from COVID-19, The Associated Press reported, following only the United States, Brazil and India worldwide.Mexico last week confirmed 1 million cases of COVID-19 in the country. However, officials have warned that the number could be higher due to low levels of testing, according to the AP.Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell criticized reporters when asked about Mexico reaching 100,000 fatalities, the outlet reported.“The epidemic is terrible in itself, you don’t have to add drama to it,” López-Gatell said, accusing the media of “being alarmist.”“Putting statistics on the front page doesn’t, in my view, help much,” he said.Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been criticized by some for downplaying the spread of the virus and his handling of the pandemic, according to multiple reports.Mexico has performed approximately 2.5 million COVID-19 tests, the AP reported. The country’s capital, Mexico City, has been hit hardest amid the ongoing pandemic, documenting more than 183,200 COVID-19 cases.Nuevo León, Sonora and other areas in the country have also documented tens of thousands of cases.
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