Fitbits activity-tracking wearable devices are already being used by a number of academic institutions to determine if they might be able to contribute to the early detection of COVID-19 and the flu, and now Fitbit itself is launching its own dedicated Fitbit COVID-19 Study, which users can sign up for from within their Fitbit mobile app.
The study will help the company figure out if it can successfully develop an algorithm to accurately detect a COVID-19 infection before the onset of systems. In order to gather the data needed to see if they can do this, Fitbit is asking users in either the U.S. or Canada who have either had or currently have a confirmed case of COVID-19, or flu-like symptoms that might be an indicator of an undiagnosed case, to answer some questions in order to contribute to its research.
The answer to these questions from participants will be paired with data gathered via their Fitbit to help identify any patterns that could potentially provide an early warning about someone falling ill. Pre-symptomatic detection could have a number of benefits, most obviously in ensuring that an individual is then able to self-isolate more quickly and prevent them from infecting others.
Early detection could also have advantages in terms of treatment, allowing health practitioners to intervene earlier and potentially prevent the worst of the symptoms of the infection. Depending on what treatments ultimately emerge, early detection could have a big impact on their efficacy.
Fitbit is asking those who would take part in the study to answer questions about whether or not they have or have not experienced COVID-19 or the flu, or its symptoms, as well as other demographic and medical history info. Participation in the study is voluntary, in case youre not comfortable sharing that info, and once in, participants can decided to withdraw whenever they want.
COVID-19 early detection could be a big help in any safe, actually practical return-to-work strategy for reopening the economy. It could also serve as a means of expanding diagnosis in combination with testing, depending on how accurate its found to be across these studies, and with what devices. A confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis doesnt actually have to mean a test result; it could be a physicians assessment based on a number of factors, including biometric data and symptom expression. Depending on what a comprehensive mitigation strategy ends up looking like, that could play a much bigger role in assessing the scale and spread of COVID-19 in the future, especially as we learn more about it.
Responding to Donald Trumps pandemic antics last week, Hu Xijin, editor of Chinas state-controlled Global Times, accused the US president of trying to distract attention from his failure to prevent the deaths of nearly 100,000 Americans. If it were in China, the White House would have been burned down by angry people, he tweeted.
Given Beijings dislike for protests of any kind, that seems unlikely. Yet Hu raised a question relevant to all countries ravaged by Covid-19. Where is the fury, the public outrage? Faced by the inability of incompetent governments to protect them, why have the people not risen up, erected figurative scaffolds and guillotines, and set a torch to the established political order?
In other words, when does the revolution begin? Furloughed workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your supply chains.
Given the history of the past century or so, todays politicians, democratic or authoritarian, left or right, may count themselves fortunate not to be experiencing a fiercer backlash. This may be brewing, once people regain their nerve. Many countries have seen small-scale Covid-related protests. Yet by and large, insurrection has not gone viral yet.
Thats despite a consensus among business leaders, scientists and pundits that the world will never be the same again. A watershed has been reached, they say. Mostly older people are suffering now, but millions among the younger generations may have their lives forcibly upended for years to come. Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning.
So the real question is not whether but what manner of revolution is coming. Will it be of the uncontrollable, ideological 20th-century variety associated with the likes of Marx, Mao, Guevara and Castro? Or will it take the form of a non-violent but nonetheless rapid and profound shift in the way a more consciously interdependent world works? An awful lot rests on how the pandemics shockwaves and after-effects are directed and shaped.
The main elements of political revolutions have not changed much since Aristotle identified them more than 2,300 years ago. Whatever the objective, he wrote in Book V of The Politics, inequality is the chief cause of revolution. Justice and equality are the fundamental basis of any state, and inequality, being a kind of injustice, is potent grounds for challenging that state. The lesser rebel in order to be equal, the equal in order to be greater. These then are conditions predisposing to revolution, Aristotle declared.
Amid epidemic uncertainty, two things are clear. First, the virus is universal and ubiquitous a threat to all humankind. Second, its impacts are deeply unequal, decisively determined by social class, race, ethnicity, income, nutrition, education, living conditions and geographical location as well as by gender and age.
If you dont have a situation where people have opportunity youre threatening the existence of the system
It follows that the large, unjust societal inequalities found both within and between wealthy and developing countries and ruthlessly exposed by the virus are just as powerfully insurrectionary in nature today as when Aristotle first pondered them or when Marie-Antoinette told starving peasants to eat cake.
The danger that entrenched inequality poses to hopes of weathering the Covid storm without chaotic upheavals was recently debated by the tsars of modern American capitalism. This is our chance to do the right thing, by reducing income disparities, said top investor Mark Cuban. Ray Dalio, a hedge-fund billionaire, described inequality as a national emergency.
If you dont have a situation where people have opportunity, youre not only failing to tap all the potential that exists, which is uneconomic, youre threatening the existence of the system, Dalio said. JP Morgans chief executive, Jamie Dimon, called the pandemic a wake-up call for business and government to think, act and invest for the common good. This sounds almost socialistic.
A revolutionary agenda for the post-pandemic world also includes meaningful steps to address poverty and the north-south wealth gap, more urgent approaches to linked climate, energy, water and mass extinction crises and, for example, the adoption of so-called doughnut economics that measures prosperity by counting shared social, health and environmental benefits, not GDP growth.
It may seem like pie in the sky. But so too did the idea of millions working from home, and halting road and air travel, until it happened almost overnight. Whether recognised as such or not, this is a revolutionary manifesto that, if it is pursued as a growing body of opinion believes it must be will demand the utter transformation of current political behaviour and organisation.
In the US, the increasing lawlessness of the Trump plutocracy, coupled with its high-handed pandemic response, has exposed the inadequacy of democratic checks and balances created more than 200 years ago. Whats required now is a second American revolution and a fresh constitutional convention that demolishes anachronisms such as the electoral college, makes democracy work for all, and refocuses on constructive global engagement.
In Britain, centralised, top-down mismanagement of the pandemic has underscored a crisis of representative governance and national cohesion. To survive as a United Kingdom, an insurgent moment akin to the Great Reform Act of 1832 is needed. In Europe, too, the EU ancien regime must remake itself or else risk overthrow by populist-nationalist sans-culottes.
Nor may authoritarian oligarchies such as China and Russia, weaned on violent rebellion, continue on their self-aggrandising, quasi-imperialist path if repeat conflagrations are to be avoided. To forge the necessary consensus for this born-again world, its time to reboot the United Nations, revive the idealism of the 1945 San Francisco founding conference, and rekindle that transformative vision of humankind working in concert to defeat common evils.
As Aristotle might have said, the revolution starts here.
A food processing company in Vancouvers Fruit Valley neighborhood has become the center of one of the Portland metro areas largest cluster of COVID-19 cases to date.
As of 6 p.m. Friday, 38 employees at Firestone Pacific Foods have tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19, according to Marissa Armstrong of Clark County Public Health. She said testing of employees is ongoing and that those numbers are likely to increase.
CEO Josh Hinerfeld said the company had its first confirmed case midday Sunday and learned of two more later that afternoon, according to an interview reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive. Firestone employs 150 people altogether, according to Hinerfeld.
The Vancouver plant shut down Monday, according to Hinerfeld.
Armstrong told The Columbian that more Firestone Pacific Food employees had tested positive during the week as they sought treatment for symptoms from medical providers. As of 9 a.m. Friday, 12 employees had tested positive, 10 of them from Clark County, she said.
That number grew rapidly on Friday as a result of joint rapid testing of all employees in partnership with Firestone Pacific Foods, the Vancouver Clinic and Clark County Public Health. That testing had turned up an additional 26 positive cases as of 6 p.m., according to Armstrong. At that time, she said, tests were still being conducted.
Our staff will be doing interviews with everyone who tested positive, Armstrong said. They have already been instructed on isolating.
She said health workers will continue to follow up over the weekend, though results from additional tests will probably not be reported until Tuesday.
Details were not available on how many of those who tested positive were showing symptoms of the disease, or how many, if any, had been hospitalized. She said 10 of the cases were included in the countys tally of cases, but she added that its not yet clear how many of the additional cases would be reported in Clark County or in another jurisdiction.
The cluster of COVID-19 cases may be the Portland areas biggest workplace outbreak reported thus far, excluding the health care sector, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported Friday.
Food processing facilities have emerged as a major source of infection across the country. There have been workplace outbreaks in Astoria and Albany in Oregon, in eastern Washington near the Tri-Cities and at plants near Boise and in Weiser, Idaho.
Firestone processes frozen fruit including raspberries, mangos, cherries and blueberries, among others. Hinerfeld said the company took steps to protect employees before the outbreak, including social distancing, temperature checks, providing masks to employees and offering expanded sick leave.
As businesses in Oregon and Washington reopen amid a gradual loosening of coronavirus restrictions, Hinerfeld said his companys experience should serve as a cautionary tale. He said he is working with government health and labor authorities to engineer additional safeguards.
We thought we had a pretty good plan in place and boy, it bit us in the rear end, he said. This genie is not back in the bottle.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An 86-year-old woman died after testing positive for COVID-19, Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevio Jr. announced Saturday in a news release.
The woman was a resident of Veranda Nursing Home, according to the release. This brings the total number of deaths related to COVID-19 to 33 in Cameron County.
Additionally, 12 people from Brownsville, Harlingen and San Benito also tested positive for COVID-19; their ages range from a 16-year-old boy to a 61-year-old man.
Nearly all the cases are linked to a previous case, with the exception of four: three cases transmitted through community spread and one being travel related.
The total number of confirmed positive cases for Cameron County is now 698.
Additionally, 18 individuals have recovered from the virus, raising the total of those recovered to 473.
What we discovered is the patients that have been following the quarantine guidelines have been well protected, Nason said. The people at greatest risk, as we expect, are those working on the front line, those exposed to known COVID patients or those who have recently been vacationing or living in those hot spots.
State health officials reported 248 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday as officials tallied the results of more than 9,000 additional tests. Six more South Carolinians have died as a result of the respiratory virus.
Greenwood County recorded three new cases while Saluda County had one.
Statewide, there have been 9,895 cumulative COVID-19 cases reported to date and 425 deaths. The state Department of Health and Environmental Control estimates 85% of those diagnosed with COVID-19 have recovered.
Cumulative case totals for Greenwood and surrounding counties are:
Abbeville 35
Edgefield 48 (2 deaths)
Greenwood 82 (1 death)
Laurens 57 (3 deaths)
McCormick 8 (1 death)
Newberry 44 (1 death)
Saluda 134
DHEC has not released estimates for how many have recovered on a county level. Greenwood County officials think at least 63 county residents have recovered, leaving 18 active confirmed cases.
Statewide, there are 430 hospitalized patients who either tested positive for COVID-19 or are awaiting test results, up from 429 the day before and down from a high of 485 patients on May 6.
The new coronavirus causes mild to moderate symptoms in most patients but some experience serious illness, such as pneumonia, or even death. Those most at risk for serious illness are those who are older or have certain medical problems.
To date, 163,818 COVID-19 tests have been completed on South Carolinians between public and private labs.
The state's health agency estimates there have been 70,679 total cases in the state, including among people who are asymptomatic or are awaiting test results.
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A second Norton Sound Health Corp. employee in Nome has tested positive for COVID-19, the health corporation said Friday, a day after it announced the first case detected among its workers.
Public health officials are still investigating how the coronavirus was transmitted in both cases, said Reba Lean, a public relations manager at the health corporation.
Norton Sound Health Corp. closed its Nome facilities for cleaning Friday after the first employee case was confirmed. The cleaning will take four days, but the emergency room and nurse call lines will remain open.
Both cases were detected through routine testing of employees, Norton Sound Health Corp. said. Out of 500 of its employees in Nome, 150 were tested this week. All staff members will be tested before starting work Tuesday.
Norton Sound Health Corp. began twice-monthly testing of employees on May 18, and said that both patients agreed to disclose their home community of Nome and self-isolated immediately after they learned they tested positive.
The first community case was identified on April 14, and as more tests are completed, NSHC expects to see more positive cases, the health corporation said in the statement.
Nomes city manager, Glenn Steckman, said hes disappointed that its not known how the disease may be spreading there.
Its still unclear how that GCI employee got sick, Steckman said.
Now, almost four to five weeks later, the virus shows up again, he said.
While health officials still need to complete their contact tracing, Steckman said the first Norton Sound employee to test positive did not appear to have traveled recently.
Obviously, everybody is waiting to see if theres another case within a short period of time, and that could change everybodys thinking here, Steckman said Friday afternoon. The second case involving an employee was announced just hours later.
Norton Sound Health Corp. urged everyone in the Nome region to seek testing as a way to detect any asymptomatic spread of the illness. A walk-in testing tent in Nome is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, the health corporation said, and residents of villages in the region can contact their local clinic to arrange for testing.
NSHC has an adequate supply of test kits and urges all members in the community of Nome, especially those who work in close contact with the public, to frequently test, the health corporation said.
Though Alaskas daily statewide COVID-19 numbers are declining, multiple people in remote Alaska communities have recently tested positive for the illness, including a traveler to a Yukon-Kuskokwim-area village and a seafood industry worker in Dillingham who was later moved to Anchorage.
Restrictions on travel from communities in the Nome census area have been lifted, Steckman said, but people coming from other parts of the state still must quarantine upon arrival to Nome.
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Two additional inmates at Maine Correctional Center in Windham have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the number of inmates at the prison to be sickened by the novel coronavirus to four.
Three or more cases of an infectious disease at one location is considered an outbreak by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and this was the first coronavirus outbreak at a prison in Maine.
The two inmates are both men, one in his early 40s and the other in his late 60s, the Maine Department of Corrections said in a statement Saturday evening. Both have been moved to isolation units to prevent further spread of COVID-19, and they do not need to be hospitalized, the department said.
They were tested as part of campuswide testing that started on May 19, the day the first inmate tested positive. Through Saturday, 744 test samples had been collected from all inmates, staff and contracted vendors. All 283 workers at the Windham prison have tested negative, while there have been four positives out of the 461 inmates, the department said.
Corrections officials are currently discussing with the Maine CDC whether to conduct retesting.
The inmate in his 40s has been in Department of Corrections custody since May 2016, while the other has been in prison in Maine since June 1998.
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ovid-19 is natures way of making bad situations worse. From the moment it turned the world upside down, you could have predicted that the Chinese Communist party would have arrested whistleblowers and covered up the threat to humanity. Its what it does best, after all.
You would not have needed mystical powers to divine that Viktor Orbn would have used a pandemic as an excuse to turn Hungary into the European Unions first dictatorship. Nor did it take a modern Nostradamus to foresee that, if you put men who care nothing for competence, complexity, or the difference between truth and falsehood in power, you will live to regret it. Or in the case of tens of thousands who trusted Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, die needless deaths.
No one, however, would have predicted this news item from last week: Covid-19 deaths in Sweden were the highest in Europe per capita in a rolling seven-day average between 12 and 19 May. It confirmed that Swedens state epidemiologist Anders Tegnells mitigation strategy of allowing shops, restaurants, gyms, schools and workplaces to remain open was a deadly folly. It does not even seem to have produced herd immunity. Just 7.3% of Stockholms inhabitants had developed Covid-19 antibodies by the end of April.
All those deaths for so little point. In Sweden of all places. A country where the need to protect society from harm is knitted into the national consensus, and whose supposed moderation produced the spectacularly inoffensive music of Abba and the furniture of Ikea. Swedens position may be graver than the weekly figure implies, Lena Einhorn, a Swedish virologist and author, told me. Recorded cases of Covid-19 follow a bell curve. All severely infected countries, including the UK, are seeing infections fall as they move down the far side of the curve, apart from Trumps America and Sweden. In both instances, they have declined slightly then hit a plateau.
The Swedish sickness is a political as well as a medical disaster. Professor Johan Giesecke, an adviser to the Swedish government alongside Tegnell, became a star of the rightwing web as he lectured other governments on the futility of their tough measures. British Conservative commentators have boomed out claims that Sweden showed there was no need to close the UK economy. Sweden had held its nerve, they gushed, in much the same way communists once gushed about the Soviet Union. They praised Johnson for holding his nerve for a few weeks while he let the virus run amok, but damned him as a scaredy cat and pant-wetter as he U-turned and locked Britain down. Dont be too quick to scoff at pundits who never made it out of the prep-school playground. They may talk like prepubescents but their readers are running and wrecking the country.
The right should not be our first concern, however, and not only because Swedens dead deserve better. The tragedy of the Swedish outbreak is that it is a warning of what happens to countries that trust too much. We are not used to thinking about such dangers of too much deference. Across the world, strongmen have successfully undermined it in country after country. The media are biased against the leader. The civil service is filled with saboteurs. The judges arent impartial. As they suspend parliaments and persuade their supporters that bad news is fake news, they leave them with nothing left to believe in except the leader and his party.
Sweden has resisted the global turn towards demagoguery. Every foreign visitor notices the respect for institutions and the faintly stultifying conformity. Richard Orange, our correspondent in Stockholm, offered me the wonderful word siktskorridoren, opinion corridor: the narrow range of views that respectable people hold. They are not constant. They can pass from social democracy to neoliberal conservatism. But while Swedes are trapped in a corridor, it seems as if they can never change. And then, all of a sudden, and with no debate, they shift to a new corridor and carry on as if nothing has happened. Anyone who has seen Labour switch from Corbynism to Starmerism without blinking an eye will recognise the phenomenon. Swedish journalists tend to see themselves as having a duty to prop up society as well as report on it. Such is their deference that last week, Frode Forland, Norways state epidemiologist, complained that there had been almost no critical media coverage of the high death rate in Sweden. It is with a rare twinge of patriotic pride that I say that no one could level this charge at the British media.
The Swedish public and press have trusted Tegnell. Sticking by him has become a nationalist badge of honour, and not because politicians are urging voters to believe in Swedish exceptionalism. A half-mad tub-thumper, like Trump, or blustering second-rater, like Johnson, does not lead Swedens government. It is a respectable coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals. If Tegnell had said Sweden should have locked down rather than remain open, the politicians and public would have obeyed his orders as faithfully.
Put like this, Sweden sounds like an authoritarian technocracy intolerant of opinions and individuals that dont fit in. But at the start of the pandemic, most countries were as trusting. In South Korea, Germany, Taiwan and New Zealand that trust has been justified. Britain saw a wave of support for a government that frittered it away with its repeated displays of tardiness and ineptitude. If Britain shows the dangers of a weak state and incapable politicians, Sweden shows what happens when you place too much trust in a handful of administrators, without first protecting yourself with a robustly argumentative culture that allows you to question whether they are right.
Swedens loss belongs to the world. If and when the virus returns, no one, not even the Brexit right, will be able to say that Sweden has proved we dont need to wreck the economy and risk mass employment because it has shown a better way. We will just have to endure it. Again.
Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
Two cases of a rare child illness linked to COVID-19 were reported in western Washington. Both patients received treatment at Seattle Childrens.
SEATTLE The Washington State Department of Health (DOH) confirmed two cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) associated with COVID-19 in western Washington.
One child lives in Snohomish County and the other lives in King County. One patient is under the age of 10, and the other is between 10 and 19 years old, the DOH said. Both patients were treated at Seattle Children's hospital.
These are the only cases of MIS-C reported so far in Washington state.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), MIS-C is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. It is unclear what causes MIS-C, but many children with symptoms were previously diagnosed with coronavirus or have been around someone diagnosed with coronavirus.
The syndrome bears a resemblance to a rare illness called Kawasaki disease.
In Washington, we are tracking this issue closely and working with local health departments and providers to learn more, said Dr. Kathy Lofy, health officer for the state Department of Health. Early last week we asked all health care providers in the state to be on the lookout and immediately report possible cases to local health authorities.
Health care workers in the United Kingdom were the first to recognize cases, and other states have reported cases of the illness as well. The illness took the lives of at least two children in New York including a 5-year-old boy and a 7-year-old boy, as well as an 18-year-old woman.
While MIS-C can be deadly, most children diagnosed have recovered.
While the vast majority of children appear to have a mild or asymptomatic infection, its important to remember thatalthough raresome children can develop serious complications like these, said Dr. Chris Spitters, health officer for the Snohomish Health District. Our thoughts are with the young patient, their family, and the care team at Seattle Childrens, and we wish for a speedy recovery.
The DOH said current case definition for MIS-C includes:
Both these illnesses, the COVID-related illness as well as the Kawasaki disease are some sort of inflammatory illness. And we know that Kawasaki Disease, theres some sort of environmental trigger. It might be a virus, and it causes a hyperimmune response in children, said Dr. Michael Portman, a cardiologist at Seattle Childrens and director of the Kawasaki Disease Clinic.
Portman said this illness is still very rare but its important to look out for the signs and symptoms.
If their child has persistent fever for four or five days, they should not assume that its just the COVID or another virus and its going to go away, he explained. Fever persistence for five days, especially if it includes any of those symptoms, needs to be evaluated so we can make sure that nothing more serious is going on.
The CDC sent an alert last week about the inflammatory syndrome to thousands of physicians and other clinics across the country.
