D.C.-area restaurants were able to reopen to limited outdoor dining over the weekend. The weather cooperated and patrons came and so did the protesters.
Founding Farmers
Geoff Tracy
Nick Freshman
Geoff Tracy
D.C.-area restaurants were able to reopen to limited outdoor dining over the weekend. The weather cooperated and patrons came. And, so did protesters.
Several downtown D.C. restaurants were vandalized, including Farmers & Distillers in Mount Vernon Square, which opened its new patio to diners over the weekend.
We were so excited to have guests dining, and to have staff happy to be back at work, but that is mixed in with the complexity of the new COVID world operational requirements, and then of course, superseding all of that is the incredibly important message of the protests, said Founding Farmers owner Dan Simons.
It added to our complexity that we had some property damage and some fearful moments last night, but my team and I support the message of the protesters, he said.
Simons said a lot of alcohol was stolen and TVs were smashed, but he reported no fire or significant interior damage at Farmers & Distillers.
Restaurant owners and staff werent sure what to expect when they opened their doors over the weekend, but patrons came and restaurants reported that diners mostly stuck to the rules.
I didnt know what they would do with their masks. Everybody who showed up to the restaurant had a mask. And once they got seated, they took off their masks. The staff keeps their masks and gloves on, but it was nice to see peoples faces, said Geoff Tracy, whose Chef Geoffs restaurant patio opened Friday.
Tracy said, counting takeout and patio dining, sales doubled compared to previous weekends.
Overall, it went well. Our staff felt safe, and customers were generally adhering to the guidelines, said Spider Kellys owner Nick Freshman, of his patios reopening in Arlington, Virginia.
For the most part, our customers just seemed thrilled to have somewhere to go, and they were very grateful to the staff, Freshman said.
For Tracy, diners seemed more comfortable than he expected.
I didnt think anybody would go into a restaurant restroom, but the first customers who sat down both got up, a man and a woman, one went into the mens room, one went into the womens room. Of the first 10 customers, half of them used the restroom, so we set up a bathroom attendant. We made the bathrooms one person at a time, and we cleaned them after each use, Tracy said.
Patrons were also generous with tips, including one bill at Founding Farmers Reston location that included a $900 tip to be shared by the reopening day team.
Overall, the patios have been lovely, the guests have been lovely and generous, and Im hopeful it is the first step on a safe path back to having a real business that people can enjoy, Simons said.
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Russia has approved an anti-influenza drug, Aviifavir, to treat Covid-19 and will start delivering it to hospitals this month, according to Russia's sovereign wealth fund.
The fund, RDIF, has provided money for Russia's development and production of the drug which is based on favipiravir, an anti-influenza drug developed in Japan under the name Avigan, in a 50-50 joint venture with Russian pharmaceutical firm ChemRar.
Preliminary trials appeared to show that it could shorten recovery times for patients with Covid-19.The final stage of Avifavir clinical trials involving 330 patients are ongoing, RDIF and ChemRar said Monday, but Russia's Ministry of Health on Saturday already temporarily approved the use of the drug as a coronavirus treatment.
"It's a major, major step forward," RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev told CNBC on Monday.
"We believe there are now only two antiviral drugs against the virus that are really effective, those are remdesivir, done by the U.S., and this favipiravir, which also has significant promise," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe."
RDIF and the ChemRar Group said Monday they will deliver 60,000 courses of Avifavir to Russian hospitals in June, promoting it as among the world's first coronavirus treatments to be approved.
"Avifavir is Russia's first Covid-19 drug and has shown high efficacy in treating patients with coronavirus during clinical trials. Avifavir has received a registration certificate from the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation. Thus, Avifavir has become the first Favipiravir-based drug in the world approved for the treatment of Covid-19," they said in the statement.
According to data received from an earlier clinical trial of the drug, 65% of the 40 patients tested negative for coronavirus after five days of treatment, which was two times higher than in the standard therapy group,RDIF and ChemRar said last month.
Russia has the third highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, with 405,843, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University. The official death toll remains low, however, at 4,693.
The U.K. is due to host a virtual Global Vaccine Summit on June 4 with the aim of increasing international investment in vaccine research and development. However, cooperation when it comes to global health provision is facing a big challenge after President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. is withdrawing from the World Health Organization, which has tried to lead a global approach to combating the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking about the need to put political differences aside, Dmitriev emphasized the importance of global cooperation in the fight against Covid-19. He said RDIF and ChemRar had taken a "major risk" to invest in the drug and production facilities before it was approved. He said Russia should be looked at "as a positive player for the world."
"I think it's important for many countries to cooperate. ... There's no doubt that we were able to succeed only by sharing our information with other countries, receiving our information from other countries. Japan has been a great partner, and only by working together we can really address this issue."
"It's very negative that lots of people are trying to be competitive with other nations and I think it's very important with coronavirus to put political differences aside. I expect many articles saying, 'Russia is claiming this about this drug'. We are not claiming, we are sharing very positive news that the world needs to come together, and the world, everybody, should share positive information, useful information to fight the virus."
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reports the state currently has 6,109 active COVID-19 cases. That means 64% or 11,838 have recovered after contracting the virus.
In its latest daily data report update, three more patients have died; bringing the states total deaths to 595. The state also saw a lower than normal amount of test processedof the 3,632 tests processed, 140 more cases of COVID-19 were confirmed. Thats means 3.9% of all tests in the last 24 hours were positive.
To date, in central and north central Wisconsin Adams, Iron, Marathon, Waupaca and Wood counties have reported one death. Two deaths have been reported in Forest County. Four deaths have been reported in Clark County.
The state now has 56 labs processing tests. DHS also reported 31 more labs are being on boarded for future testing.
The percentage of hospitalized stayed the same day-to-day from Sunday. That means 14% of COVID patients were hospitalized for a total of 2,603.
As of Thursday, 253,595 have tested negative for COVID-19 and 18,543 have tested positive.
County case numbersCounties with new cases and/or deaths are in bold.
WisconsinAdams - 4 cases (1 death)Ashland - 2 casesBarron - 20 cases (+3)Bayfield - 3 cases (1 death)Brown - 2,320 cases (+1) (37 deaths)Buffalo - 6 cases (1 death)Burnett - 1 cases (1 death)Calumet - 77 cases (+1) (1 death)Chippewa - 56 casesClark - 33 cases (+1) (4 deaths)Columbia - 44 cases (1 death)Crawford - 26 casesDane - 735 cases (+5) (29 deaths)Dodge - 228 cases (+7) (2 death)Door - 38 cases (3 deaths)Douglas - 19 casesDunn - 24 casesEau Claire - 113 cases (+5)Florence - 2 casesFond du Lac - 214 cases (+1) (5 deaths)Forest - 29 cases (2 deaths)Grant - 96 cases (+1) (12 deaths)Green - 66 casesGreen Lake - 20 casesIowa - 16 casesIron - 2 cases (1 death)Jackson - 17 cases (1 death)Jefferson - 107 cases (+1) (3 deaths)Juneau 23 cases (1 death)Kenosha - 1,178 cases (+10) (30 deaths)Kewaunee - 35 cases (1 death)La Crosse - 53 casesLafayette - 27 casesLanglade - 3 casesLincoln - 7 casesManitowoc - 36 cases (1 death)Marathon - 50 cases (1 death)Marinette - 33 cases (2 deaths)Marquette - 4 cases (1 death)Menominee - 3 casesMilwaukee 7,799 cases (+44) (299 deaths)Monroe - 17 cases (1 death)Oconto - 37 casesOneida - 9 casesOutagamie - 230 cases (+3) (8 deaths)Ozaukee - 165 cases (+3) (12 deaths)Pepin - 1 casePierce - 45 casesPolk - 19 cases (1 death)Portage - 12 cases (+1)Price - 2 casesRacine - 1,733 cases (+11) (40 deaths) (+3)Richland - 14 cases (4 deaths)Rock - 639 cases (+3) (19 deaths)Rusk - 5 casesSauk - 78 cases (3 deaths)Sawyer - 8 casesShawano - 48 cases (+1)Sheboygan - 90 cases (3 deaths)St. Croix - 92 cases (+6)Taylor - 2 casesTrempealeau - 25 casesVernon - 21 casesVilas - 8 cases (+1)Walworth - 397 cases (+2) (17 deaths)Washburn - 2 casesWashington - 257 cases (+5) (7 deaths)Waukesha - 709 cases (+13) (30 deaths)Waupaca - 42 cases (+1) (1 death)Waushara - 8 casesWinnebago - 249 cases (+5) (7 deaths)Wood - 10 cases (1 death)
An image from the PA Department of Health lab in Exton
New COVID-19 diagnoses sank to their lowest level since late March today, with the state health department reporting fewer than 400 cases.
The PA Department of Health reported 356 new positive cases for the period ending at midnight.
This marks 22 days straight with new case numbers below 1,000 in Pennsylvania. With the additional cases, 72,282 Pennsylvanians have now been diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Cases peaked in early April at nearly 2,000 daily new cases. Since then, cases have shown a gradual, relatively steady decline, despite increasingly greater testing levels for the virus.
New case and fatality data has tended to be lower on weekends due to less reporting to the state health department.
Of the new cases reported today, 59 are in residents of nursing and personal care homes.
Locally, total diagnosed cases are as follows:
Overall, 15.6 percent of PA residents tested have shown to be positive for the virus.
The health department also reported another 12 fatalities, meaning that 5,567 Pennsylvanians have died from the disease since March. Not all of these deaths necessarily occurred in the past 24 hours, as the health department constantly updates its data.
Of the newly reported fatalities, most were residents of nursing or personal care homes.
Around central PA, the COVID-19 fatality data now stands as follows:
Statewide, Philadelphia County continues to have the most confirmed cases with 18,517 cases, followed by Montgomery County with 7,093 cases. The two counties also have reported the most deaths statewide from the disease: 1,320 and 686, respectively.
As Pennsylvania continues to move forward in the process to reopen, we need to remember that the threat from COVID-19 has not gone away, health Secretary Rachel Levine said.
So far, the state has moved 57 of Pennsylvanias 67 counties into the less restrictive yellow phase, including all of the Harrisburg area except Lancaster County. By June 5, the remainder of the state will exit from the red phase.
Nursing homes and personal care facilities have been particularly hard hit by the virus. Of total deaths, 3,557, or 63.9 percent, have occurred in residents from nursing or personal care facilities, according to the health department.
In nursing and personal care homes, there are 15,545 resident cases of COVID-19, and 2,663 cases among employees, for a total of 18,208 at 608 distinct facilities in 44 counties, according to the health department.
In addition, about 5,463 of total cases in PA are in health care workers.
Statewide, 461,713 coronavirus tests have been performed, with 389,431 people testing negative, according to the state health department. Yesterday, the state reported that 455,037 people had been tested for the virus.
Of the patients who have tested positive to date, the age breakdown is as follows, according to the health department:
Most of the patients hospitalized are 65 or older, as are most of the reported deaths, according to the state.
Levine continued to emphasize that Pennsylvanians should do the following:
As counties move into the yellow and green phases, we must take personal responsibility to protect others, Levine said. Wearing a mask, continuing to maintain social distancing, and washing your hands frequently are all steps we can take to help protect others, including our most vulnerable Pennsylvanians, our essential workers and our healthcare system.
For more information, visit the PA Department of HealthsCOVID-19 website.
In mid-May, just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Yemen, funding for UNFPAs life-saving reproductive health services dried up. The agency has been forced to suspend the provision of reproductive healthcare in 140 out of the 180 health facilities, it supports, meaning only 40 now remain.
When Noopur Rajes husband fell critically ill with Covid-19 in mid-March, she did not suspect that she too was infected with the virus.
Raje, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, had been caring for her sick husband for a week before driving him to an emergency centre with a persistently high fever. But after she herself had a diagnostic PCR test which looks for traces of the Sars-CoV-2 virus DNA in saliva she was astounded to find that the result was positive.
My husband ended up very sick, she says. He was in intensive care for a day, and in hospital for 10 days. But while I was also infected, I had no symptoms at all. I have no idea why we responded so differently.
It took two months for Rajes husband to recover. Repeated tests, done every five days, showed that Raje remained infected for the same length of time, all while remaining completely asymptomatic. In some ways it is unsurprising that the virus persisted in her body for so long, given that it appears her body did not even mount a detectable immune response against the infection.
When they both took an antibody test earlier this month, Rajes husband showed a high level of antibodies to the virus, while Raje appeared to have no response at all, something she found hard to comprehend.
Its mind-blowing, she says. Some people are able to be colonised with the virus and not be symptomatic, while others end up with pretty severe illness. I think its something to do with differences in immune regulation, but we still havent figured out exactly how this is happening.
Epidemiological studies are now revealing that the number of individuals who carry and can pass on the infection, yet remain completely asymptomatic, is larger than originally thought. Scientists believe these people have contributed to the spread of the virus in care homes, and they are central in the debate regarding face mask policies, as health officials attempt to avoid new waves of infections while societies reopen.
You dont need to be coughing to transmit a respiratory infection: talking, singing, even blowing a vuvuzela
But the realisation that asymptomatic people can spread an infection is not completely surprising. For starters, there is the famous early 20th century case of Typhoid Mary, a cook who infected 53 people in various households in the US with typhoid fever despite displaying no symptoms herself. In fact, all bacterial, viral and parasitic infections ranging from malaria to HIV have a certain proportion of asymptomatic carriers. Research has even shown that at any one time, all of us are infected with between eight and 12 viruses, without showing any symptoms.
From the microbes perspective, this makes perfect evolutionary sense. For any virus or bacteria, making people infectious but not ill is an excellent way to spread and persist in populations, says Rein Houben, an infectious diseases researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine.
However, when Covid-19 was identified at the start of the year, many public health officials both in the UK and around the world failed to account for the threat posed by asymptomatic transmission. This is largely because they were working on models based on influenza, where some estimates suggest that only 5% of people infected are asymptomatic. As a result, the large scale diagnostic testing regimes required to pick up asymptomatic Covid-19 cases were not in place until too late.
I warned on 24 January to consider asymptomatic cases as a transmission vehicle for Covid-19, but this was ignored at the time, says Bill Keevil, professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton. Since then, many countries have reported asymptomatic cases, never showing obvious symptoms, but shedding virus.
The first identified case of asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 occurred in early January, when a traveller from Wuhan passed on the virus to five family members in different parts of the city of Anyang. After testing positive, she then remained asymptomatic for the entire 21-day follow-up period.
While scientists still dont know whether asymptomatic people are as contagious as those who display symptoms, there are still many ways in which they can pass on Covid-19. We know that you dont need to be coughing to transmit a respiratory infection like Sars-CoV-2, says Houben. Talking, singing, even blowing instruments like a vuvuzela in the past all of those have been shown to transmit respiratory viruses in some way.
Since January, the race has been on to try and identify just how many asymptomatic cases are out there, with varying findings. One study in the Italian town of Vo reported that 43% of the towns cases of Covid-19 were asymptomatic, while initial reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation into the spread of Covid-19 on the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier in March, suggest that as many as 58% of cases were asymptomatic. Some 48% of the 1,046 cases of Covid-19 on the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier proved to be asymptomatic while, of the 712 people who tested positive for Covid-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, 46% had no symptoms.
Almost all evidence seems to point to a proportion of asymptomatic infections of around 40%, with a wide range, says Houben. The proportion is also highly variable with age. Nearly all infected children seem to remain asymptomatic, whereas the reverse seems to hold for the elderly.
Houben points out that, because most asymptomatic people have no idea they are infected, they are unlikely to be self-isolating, and studies have shown this has contributed to the rampant spread of the virus in facilities such as homeless shelters and care homes. He says this means there is a need for regular diagnostic testing of almost all people in such closed environments, including prisons and psychiatric facilities.
When it comes to controlling Covid-19, this really shows that we cannot rely on self-isolation of symptomatic cases only, he says. Going forwards we need trace and test approaches to account for individuals who are not reporting any symptoms.
Since February, the country that has arguably had the greatest success in suppressing asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 is South Korea. Armed with a rigorous contact tracing and diagnostic testing regime, which involved dozens of drive-through testing centres across major cities enabling tests to be carried out at a rate of one every 10 minutes, they put specific policies in place to offset the threat of asymptomatic carriers from the moment the virus began to spread out of control in Daegu.
Once identified, all asymptomatic people are asked to self quarantine in their house until they test negative, with health service officials checking on them twice daily, and monitoring their symptoms, says Eunha Shim, an epidemiologist at Soongsil University in Seoul.
As Korea attempts to prevent a second wave of infections while reopening schools and allowing people to return to offices, preventing asymptomatic spread is one of their main priorities. This is being done by a mass public health campaign advocating the wearing of masks at all times outside the home. In Seoul, it is not possible to access the subway without a mask.
Many scientists are increasingly calling for this policy to be officially introduced in the UK, especially as more and more people resume commuting in the coming months. Keevil says: There is a strong case to be made for the public wearing appropriate face covers in confined areas such as stations, trains, metro carriages and buses, where it is extremely difficult to maintain the two-metre gap, considered essential to allow respiratory droplets from infected people to fall down before making contact with other people.
The argument is that face covers may not protect the wearer, but might significantly reduce transmission of virus particles to adjacent people in the closed environment. If there is any benefit to be gained, then everyone should wear a mask, which is why some countries are fining people who do not wear a mask and preventing them travelling.
Some have argued that masks may pose a risk of harm to the wearer because of their potential to become an infectious surface, but Keevil says this can be avoided through proper cleaning.
There would need to be policies such as, when arriving at work, place the mask immediately in a plastic bag and wash your hands, he says. And then, when returning home, carefully take off the mask and place it immediately in a washing machine for a 60C wash and wash your hands.
It remains to be seen whether the UK government endorses this as an official recommendation, but a recent study across Barts NHS Trust hospitals in London has illustrated how regular testing and social distancing combined with use of facial protection in this case PPE can prevent asymptomatic spread of the virus. Researchers James Moon and Charlotte Manisty said they found that the rate of asymptomatic infection among hospital staff fell from 7% to 1% between the end of March and early May.
For Raje, understanding why asymptomatic patients like her respond the way they do to the virus, will have some critical implications for all of us over the coming months, for example in determining whether vaccines turn out to be effective.
The big question I have after my experience, is whether a vaccine will really work in all people, she says. The vaccination approach is to create an immune response, which then protects you. But if asymptomatic people are not producing a normal antibody response to the virus, what does that mean? Because its these people who are the vectors and the carriers of this virus, I think we cant get away from social distancing until we have some of these answers out there.
Traditional Din medicine practitioner Jeneda Benally, pictured here with her daughter Dahi, is trying to preserve cultural wisdom in danger of being lost during the pandemic. Laurel Morales/KJZZ hide caption
Traditional Din medicine practitioner Jeneda Benally, pictured here with her daughter Dahi, is trying to preserve cultural wisdom in danger of being lost during the pandemic.
In Navajo culture to speak of death is taboo. But since the tribe's coronavirus infection rate has become the highest in the country, they can't help but talk about it.
"It's killing every day," says medicine man Ty Davis, who knows at least five traditional practitioners who have died from COVID-19.
"It put me into shock," he says. "What do we do now? How do we retrieve that knowledge that these elders once knew now that they have died with those ceremonies? How do we get those back?"
Each medicine person specializes in different ceremonies. So when someone dies they take that knowledge with them. Over the last several decades the tribe has gone from a thousand Din or Navajo medicine people to just 300. The coronavirus threatens the few who remain.
Medicine man Avery Denny is attempting to change that trajectory by taking on apprentices where he teaches at Din College on the Navajo Nation.
Professor Avery Denny sings the the Journey Song to college graduates.
"I have great great concerns," Denny says.
Denny says he's up against centuries of colonialism when it comes to preserving Navajo culture and tradition. The federal government forced tribes to relocate, sent Native children to boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their language for singing their songs.
"Young people are acculturated, assimilated, dominated. They're losing their language and their culture," Denny says.
Denny says white missionaries are also to blame for replacing Navajo religion.
"Christianity is the belief that our people turned to even our leadership so there's no guidance," Denny says. "There's no leader that says, 'OK we'll turn to Navajo values and Navajo Din medicine.'"
For instance, the Navajo president begins each meeting with a Christian prayer even though he also addresses his community in Navajo.
The loss of traditional practitioners is not just a cultural loss but also a personal one for people such as Jeneda Benally, whose aunt recently died from COVID-19.
"I am really emotional about this because it's so painful to lose so many loved ones," she says.
Benally is a traditional practitioner who works alongside her father who was the first medicine man to practice in a Western hospital.
"I felt very early on during this pandemic that I needed to protect my father so that way he can continue to help people in order to protect our future generations," Benally says.
One way she is doing that is working with her brother Clayson to produce youtube videos to share Navajo cultural practices like how to dry farm and how to shear sheep.
The Benallys hope their videos will encourage tribal members to reconnect with their culture, especially now while tribal members are spending a lot of time at home during during the coronavirus pandemic.
"We've got this technology," Jeneda Benally says. "How are we going to find hope in this technology? How are we going to find the continuation of our culture where we can connect our elders to our youth?"
The dilemma is figuring out what parts of Navajo culture they can share publicly and what parts are too sacred and can only be passed down from one Navajo to another.
U.S. pandemic researchers and responders were caught flat-footed by COVID-19, but the intelligence communitys lead research division wants to catch up and be ready for the next viral outbreak.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, issued a broad agency announcement offering seedling funding for early-stage technology and methods that could revolutionize pandemic response. Specifically, the agency wants quick turnaround projects for COVID-19 research topics.
Successful technology solutions will require creative, multidisciplinary methods, paradigm changing thinking, and transformative approaches, the solicitation states. Preference will be given to research with the ability to not only provide rapid capability against the current COVID-19 pandemic, but also enhanced warning and response capacity for future similar events.
The current pandemic has highlighted capability gaps in five areas, according to the solicitation:
Proposals must explicitly address relevance of the technical approach to the current COVID-19 pandemic and extensibility to future pandemics, including a timeline for eventual implementation, the solicitation states. Proposals shall demonstrate that the proposed effort has the potential to make revolutionary, rather than incremental, improvements to current capabilities.
Officials said proposals that will only deliver evolutionary improvement to the existing state of practice will not be considered.
As with other research and development outfits, IARPA takes advantage of staged funding to limit risk in innovative investments. For this project, the program plans to use a two-phase approach. Phase A will last for a maximum of four months, during which teams will work on initial proofs of concept. After evaluations, select teams will be chosen to move on to Phase B, which, by the end, will result in demonstrations that could lead to future funding opportunities.
Phase B is broken into two parts: an initial three-month period, at the end of which teams will be required to present a midterm report to IARPA project managers. Based on those reports, IARPA officials will determine whether the project will continue for the remaining five months of Phase B.
In total, both phases together are expected to take no more than 12 months and cost less than $1 million.
This BAA solicits proposals for short-term, limited scope research in topic areas that are not addressed by emerging or ongoing IARPA programs or other published IARPA solicitations, the solicitation states. It is primarily, but not solely, intended for early stage research that may lead to larger, focused programs through a separate BAA in the future.
IARPA officials plan to make multiple awards in the first round.
The program office plans to use a set of vendors as technical consultants, including reviewing proposals and evaluating progress throughout the project. The program plans to tap Booz Allen Hamilton; Whitney, Bradley & Brown, Inc.; BRTRC Federal Solutions; Patriot Solutions Group; Airlin Technologies; Bluemont Technology and Research; Crimson Phoenix; Northwood Global Solutions; Onts & Quants, Inc.; Quantitative Scientific Solutions; SAIC; and Tarragon Solutions, according to the solicitation.
In an update posted Friday, IARPA pushed the window for submitting proposals to June 5 through 11:59 p.m. June 7.
A day before the first confirmed fatality from coronavirus outside mainland China was reported on 2 February this year, the death of the influential guitarist and musician Andy Gill was announced. The 64-year-old, who fronted the post-punk band Gang of Four, died of pneumonia after two weeks in St Thomas hospital in London.
The trajectory of Gills illness, which took medics looking after him in January by surprise, is now familiar sudden deterioration, low oxygen levels and organ failure. He had fallen sick after his band returned from a trip to China in late November. A short time later, his 26-year-old tour manager was taken to hospital in Leeds with a severe respiratory infection.
As images started rolling in of wards in China and then Italy overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients, Gills widow Catherine Mayer an author and co-founder of the Womens Equality party couldnt shake the suspicion that her partner of nearly 30 years may have been an early victim of the virus.
In a blogpost written last month, Mayer said she emailed Gills thoracic specialist to ask the question. His response winded me, she wrote. The consultant said: It seemed to me at the time of Andys illness that we had not fully understood why he deteriorated as he did. Once we learned more about Covid-19, I thought there was a real possibility that Andy had been infected by Sars-Cov-2.
Genetic analyses of the new coronavirus suggest that the virus emerged in humans in China in late November to early December 2019. While Chinas official submission to the World Health Organization (WHO) states the first infection was recorded on 8 December, government data seen by theSouth China Morning Post suggests the first known case was observed on 17 November.
In the UK, the first confirmed cases of coronavirus came on 31 January when two Chinese nationals staying in a hotel in York tested positive. But as the crisis has rolled on, and the viruss range of distinctive symptoms become more widely known, many some in letters to the Guardian have asked themselves if they or their loved ones could have had it earlier.
People are on heightened awareness about any sort of respiratory infection and it is easy to retrofit stories to things, said Dr Stephen Baker at Cambridge Universitys Infectious Diseases Institute. Colds, influenza and even pneumonia are, after all, common in the winter months.
However, without clear information about what was happening in China in the final months of last year, it is hard to know how likely it is to have arrived in the UK earlier than the first confirmed case, he said.
Lets say it was kicking off fairly substantially in Wuhan and people werent being informed: could there have been people travelling to and from China at that point who may have been infected by coronavirus? That is completely possible. Is it then possible that they transmitted the virus to other people when they were in the UK? Yes, of course thats possible.
Earlier last month, the news emerged that a swab taken from a man treated in a hospital near Paris on 27 December for suspected pneumonia tested positive for Covid-19, raising the prospect that the virus arrived in Europe a month earlier than previously thought.
Data gathered through the Covid-19 symptom-tracking app developed at Kings College London also suggests that people were falling ill from coronavirus in the UK from the beginning of January. The reports I am getting are from people who were ill from early January onwards and strongly suggest they had Covid-19 but were not recognised as such, the epidemiologist professor Tim Spector said last month.
Recently released minutes from the meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) show that in January that the group felt unable to plan for the worst casescenario because of the uncertainty around the data coming out of China. On 13 March, over a week before lockdown was introduced, the group concluded there are more cases in the UK than previously thought and we may therefore be further ahead of the epidemic curve.
The WHO has urged countries to investigate any other early suspicious cases, so that the circulation of the virus can be better understood, encouraging doctors to check records for pneumonia cases of unspecified origin in late 2019. Public Health England has also acknowledged that it cannot exclude the possibility that Covid-19 was in the UK in December or early January.
Andrew Soppitt, a retired hospital consultant from West Sussex, is convinced he became infected with coronavirus on a skiing trip to Austria in late January. The ski resorts he visited, St Anton and Bad Hofgastein, were the suspected locus of many subsequent infections. I was really ill. I felt like death. I just couldnt get out of bed. I could barely get up the stairs. I lost my sense of taste and smell. I started having sweats, he said. Soppitt made repeated requests to be tested through the NHS 111 service, but was refused.
Earlier this month, the former intensive care specialist, who is in his mid-50s, got the results back from a privately-bought antibody test, which showed he had had the disease at some point but cant pinpoint when. He says he is certain, though. It absolutely confirms that I had it February after the trip to Austria in January. It is now blindingly obvious that it was about before people admitted it.
But if there were cases in the UK earlier than previously thought, then why did the virus only start to escalate when it did? The answer, says Baker, is that it probably took an influx of infected people before the epidemic really started to grow in the UK.
It was around February half term, people coming back from skiing holidays in northern Italy thats probably what brought back a bulk of the [first] cases. Its really at the point when you get a number of introductions in one go that onward transmission is more likely to happen as soon as you get a certain number of the population infected in one go then you make that expansion of an epidemic [more likely].
Not everybody who has coronavirus is equally infectious and, if there were cases earlier in the year, they may not have had enough contact with others to form significant outbreaks, said Baker. When youre ill, you tend to stay at home, so people may have been self-isolating on the basis that they didnt feel very well.
Another possibility, says Nathalie MacDermott, clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at Kings College London, is that the virus was smouldering under the surface for a long time and we werent necessarily identifying it. If, as some research suggests, a large proportion of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic, then the virus could have been spreading silently and gaining access to more vulnerable sections of the population.
The elderly population, generally speaking, are a little bit less likely in the first place to come into contact with it, because they are not in a workplace where they are having frequent contact with people. They go out, but it might be more limited So maybe it took a while to get to widespread community transmission and to start affecting our older population.
The idea that coronavirus was spreading in Europe as early as December and January has serious public health implications, a fact that has propelled Catherine Mayer to look for answers after her husbands death. She and the specialist who treated Gill hope to be able to do antibody tests on samples from him and his tour manager to establish whether they had the disease.
How many hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths might have been prevented by greater transparency and quicker and better public health responses, and not just in China but elsewhere? wrote Mayer.
Electronic signs along Routes 2 and 32 in the vicinity of Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun alert motorists to the dangers of COVID-19.
DONT GAMBLE w/COVID AVOID LG. INDOOR GATHERINGS, the signs say.
The state apparently activated the signs today, the day the casinos reopened to the public after shutting down March 17 because of the coronavirus outbreak. Gov. Ned Lamont had said last week that he would deployelectronic signage if the casinos failed to post advisories that sufficiently outlined the risks associated with the coronavirus disease.
Were going to take a good hard look at that and see how strict it is, he said Friday, referring to the advisories. Ive told people over the age of 65 to stay safe, stay home ... anybody with a pre-existing condition ... stay safe, stay home. I want that to be clear to anybody thats thinking about going to the casino. And if its not made clear through the advisory, well have some electronic signage that reminds people of the risk theyre taking.
The Route 2 signs are placed within a mile of Foxwoods, one east of the casino in North Stonington, and one west of the casino in Preston.
Mohegan Sun, which opened at 8 this morning, an hour before Foxwoods, posted sandwich-board signs bearing COVID-19 warnings inside its entrances.
Mohegan Sun has implemented new health and safety measures for your protection due to a contagious virus that causes COVID-19, a potentially fatal disease, the signs say. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has determined that older adults and people who have serious underlying medical conditions are at higher risk for COVID-19. There is always an inherent risk of COVID-19 exposure at any public location. By visiting Mohegan Sun you voluntarily assume the risks related to COVID-19.
The advisory recommends thatthose over the age of 65 or under 21 refrain from visiting the property.
Signage throughout Foxwoods warns of COVID-19 and outlines the precautions people should take, including social distancing.
All employees and patrons observed in the casinos this morning were wearing masks.
b.hallenbeck@theday.com
