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A Florida county is reminding people to keep onealligator's length away from each other
"I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge."
The IRS has established a special section focused on steps to help taxpayers, businesses and others affected by the coronavirus. This page will be updated as new information is available. For other information about the COVID-19 virus, people should visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (https://www.coronavirus.gov) for health information. Other information about actions being taken by the U.S. government is available at https://www.usa.gov/coronavirus and in Spanish athttps://gobierno.usa.gov/coronavirus. The Department of Treasury also has information available at Coronavirus: Resources, Updates, and What You Should Know.
The distribution of economic impact payments will begin in the next three weeks and will be distributed automatically, with no action required for most people. Social Security beneficiaries who are not typically required to file tax returns will not need to file to receive a payment. Instead, payments will be automatically deposited into their bank accounts. However, some people who typically do not file returns will need to submit a simple tax return to receive the economic impact payment. When more specific details become available, we will update this page.
Illustration by Joo Fazenda
The streets of New York City are so desolate now that you half expect tumbleweed to blow along the pavement where cars and cabs once clustered. There is barely a plane in the sky. You hear the wheeze of an empty bus rounding a corner, the flutter of pigeons on a fire escape, the wail of an ambulance. The sirens are unnervingly frequent. But even on these sunny, early-spring days there are few people in sight. For weeks, as the distancing rules of the pandemic took hold, a gifted saxophone player who stakes his corner outside a dress shop on Broadway every morning was still there, playing My Favorite Things and All the Things You Are. Now he is gone, too.
The spectacle of New York without New Yorkers is the result of a communal pact. We have absented ourselves from the schools and the playgrounds, the ballparks and the bars, the places where we work, because we know that life now depends on our withdrawal from life. The vacancy of our public spaces, though antithetical to the purpose of a great city, which is defined by the constancy and the poetry of its encounters, is needed for its preservation.
And so you stick your head out the window of an apartment that you havent left in days and look down and around. You wait awhile before you see a single scurrying soul, her arms full of groceries. Shes wearing a mask and walking with the urgency of a thief. She crosses Broadway, past blooming magnolias on the traffic divider. She quickens her step and heads toward Amsterdam Avenue. Like all of us, she is trying to outrun the thing she cannot see. You close the window and wash your hands for the fourteenth time that day. Happy birthday to you... Twenty seconds of it. Never less.
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy, E.B. White wrote, in the summer of 1948. But these queer prizes are now a public-health requirement. Because New Yorkers are not medieval monks, we mostly chafe at the imposed solitude. We do our best to overcome it through technologies that White would have had a hard time imagining: We text. We Zoom. We send one another links about virology. (We are all immunologists now.)
We watch televised briefings that are as long as art-house movies. The politicians review the bullet points of the day, nearly all of them ominous. The reporters sit at least six feet apart, when they do not phone in their plaintive questions, asking, in sum: Do we have the medicine, the equipment, the food we need to keep going? When can we go out again? And then you ask yourself if you need more liquid soap. The hours are as long as evening shadows.
But then something happens. Joy comes at seven. (Or is it sheer catharsis?) Every evening, in many neighborhoods across the city, cheering breaks out, the way it would when the Yankees clinched another World Series title. It spills from the stoops and the sidewalks, from apartment windows and rooftops, for all the nurses, orderlies, doctors, E.M.T.severyone who cannot shelter in place and continues to go about healing the people of the city.
We take out our smartphones and record the roar outside: the clapping and the whooping, the tambourines and wind chimes, the vuvuzelas. The guy across the street is a master of the cowbell. Before it all dies down, weve sent off the recording to a loved one who works as an E.R. docand to others who are sick in bed or out of range of our anxious, canyoned citythe city described every minute on cable news as the epicenter.
Whats being applauded at seven is the courage of professionals, many of them working without the protective gear they need. Some have seen their salaries cut; some have fallen ill, others soon will. Were applauding the likes of Anthony Fauci, who must spend nearly as much mental energy trying to finesse the ignorance and the ego of his Commander-in-Chief as he does in assessing the course of the novel coronavirus. Were cheering researchers in labs all over the world who are at work on antivirals and potential vaccines. Were cheering everyone who makes it possible for the city to avoid the myriad conceivable shortfalls and collapses: grocery clerks and ambulance drivers; sanitation workers; pharmacists and mail carriers; truckers, cops, and firemen; the deliveryman who shrugs off the straps of his knapsack and jabs the intercom buzzer with a gloved finger; the community of artists, dancers, d.j.s, musicians, and actors who have lost paychecks and jobs but are posting paintings on Instagram, FaceTiming soliloquies, singing into iPhones. And were thanking those who are providing straight information, lobbying Washington for medical supplies, looking out for the most vulnerable among us, and making critical decisions based on the scientific evidence, no matter how unforgiving. We know the limits of this releasethere is a feeling of helplessness reflected in it, toobut its what we have in a dark time.
And there is no question of the darkness. Last Tuesday, President Trump presided over a two-hour news conference at which he fleetingly appeared to bow before realities that he had airily dismissed for so long and at our collective perilthe most chilling fact being that, even with effective strategies of social distancing, perhaps one or two hundred thousand Americans could die in this pandemic. As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it, Fauci said, as the President stood nearby, seeming, for once in his life, humbled.
These next weeks and months will be demanding in ways that are hard to fathom. If New Yorkers are in hiding, the virus has shown a knack for seeking. But, with time, life will return to the city. Our city and your city. The doors will open and we will leave our homes. We will meet again. We will greet our friends, face to face, at long-delayed Easter services and Passover Seders. Children will attend class with their teachers. Sidewalks and stores and theatres will fill. Remnants of the crisisa box of nitrile gloves, a bag of makeshift masks; containers of drying Clorox wipeswill be tucked away, out of sight and out of mind. Well forget a lot about our citys suspended life. But we will remember what, and who, we lost. Well remember the cost of time squandered. And we will remember the sound of seven oclock.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WHSV) As of Monday, April 6, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) had confirmed 345 cases of COVID-19 across the Mountain State.
According to the department's afternoon update, 21 new coronavirus cases were identified from Sunday to Monday.
For our local area, Hardy County saw its first confirmed case last Tuesday and Pendleton County had its first confirmed case last Wednesday evening.
According to the Hardy County Health Department, a patient who had been traveling has been self-quarantined since arriving home in Hardy County and has followed all proper CDC protocols since that time to protect their community members. No details were provided on the Pendleton County patient, though her daughter identified her on Facebook.
WHSV has repeatedly reached out to the company that community members identified as the Pendleton County patient's employer, but has received no response.
By Thursday, a second positive case was confirmed in Hardy County as well. There are still no confirmed cases in Grant County.
As of Monday morning, 9,940 West Virginia residents had been tested for COVID-19.
There have been 345 positive results, as well as 9,595 negative test results and three confirmed deaths due to the virus.
It comes out to 3.47% of people tested for the virus receiving positive results.
Medical providers in the state are required to report test results to their local health departments, which then provide them to DHHR, which updates their state website at some point during the day.
Some days, the updates come in the afternoon and some days, it comes in the morning.
Private commercial labs also have to send their test results to DHHR. However, state officials say the negative and pending tests from commercial labs are under-reported because some labs cannot electronically submit negative results.
Where are the confirmed cases?
These are the confirmed cases by West Virginia county:
Barbour (2)Berkeley (54)Cabell (7)Greenbrier (3)Hancock (6)Hardy (2)Harrison (25)Jackson (16)Jefferson (22)Kanawha (56)Lewis (1)Logan (6)Marion (17)Marshall (5)Mason (4)Mercer (4)Mineral (2)Monongalia (53)Morgan (3)Ohio (15)Pendleton (1)Pleasants (1)Preston (4)Putnam (8)Raleigh (4)Randolph (3)Roane (2)Taylor (1)Tucker (3)Upshur (1)Wetzel (2)Wirt (1)Wood (11)
The DHHR notes that surveillance at the local health department level may reveal over time that some initial test results in counties were for residents of another county or another state.
The list of symptoms that have been associated with the virus is not a small one. According to the CDC, symptoms such as a dry cough, fatigue, low-grade fever, body aches, nasal congestion and sore throat are the most common with COVID-19. In addition, symptoms such as the loss of the senses of taste and smell, diarrhea and the appearance of conjunctivitis commonly known as pink eye have also been seen.
BRUSSELS If it werent the age of social distancing, people would stop them on the street to take selfies. Instead, they get adoring messages on social media. Others appear on television daily.
The new celebrities emerging across Europe as the coronavirus burns a deadly path through the continent are not actors or singers or politicians. Instead, they are epidemiologists and virologists who have become household names after spending most of their lives in virtual anonymity.
While nurses and doctors treat patients on the front lines, epidemiologists and virologists who have spent careers in lecture halls and laboratories have become the most trusted sources of information in an era of deep uncertainty, diverging policy and raging disinformation.
After a long period of popular backlash against experts and expertise, which underpinned a sweep of political change and set off culture wars in much of the developed world, societies besieged by coronavirus isolation and desperate for facts are turning to these experts for answers, making them national heroes.
During a crisis, heroes come to the forefront because many of our basic human needs are threatened, including our need for certainty, meaning and purpose, self-esteem, and sense of belonging with others, said Elaine Kinsella, a psychology professor at the University of Limerick in Ireland who has researched the role of heroes in society.
Heroes help to fulfill, at least in part, some of these basic human needs, she added.
The scientist-heroes emerging from the coronavirus crisis rarely have the obvious charisma of political leaders, but they show deep expertise and, sometimes, compassion.
In Italy, a nation ravaged by the virus more than any other in the world so far, Dr. Massimo Galli, the director the infectious diseases department at Luigi Sacco University Hospital in Milan, swapped his lab coat for a suit and accepted he would be overexposed in the media in order to set things straight, he told one talk show.
So the avuncular, bespectacled professor quickly became a familiar face on Italian current-affairs TV shows, delivering no-nonsense updates about the unfamiliar foe.
He called social distancing the mother of all battles.
He fretted about the risks that lurk in Italys multigenerational families, a tough message even as he believes home contagions became the No. 1 cause for the spread of the virus in the country.
Between broadcasts, he crept back into his laboratory to help his colleagues with research.
In Greece, which has so far been spared a major outbreak, everyone tunes in when Prof. Sotirios Tsiodras, a slender-framed, gray-haired man, addresses the nation every day at 6 p.m.
His delivery is flat, and he relies heavily on his notes as he updates the country on the latest figures of those confirmed sick, hospitalized or deceased. Occasionally, he offers practical advice, like a solution of four teaspoons of bleach per liter of water can be sprayed on surfaces for disinfection. And he rushes to dispel misinformation: Officials dont know the impact of ibuprofen on those sick from the virus.
The head of the Greek governments medical response to the coronavirus and a churchgoing father of seven with a long career studying infectious diseases at Harvard, M.I.T. and elsewhere, Professor Tsiodras is not one for embellishment.
By being frank, he has rallied the country behind some of the most proactively restrictive measures in Europe, which seem to be working as Greece counts just 68 deaths since the start of the outbreak. By contrast, Belgium, which has a similar population, just over 10 million, has recorded 1,283 deaths.
Professor Tsiodras combines key features that make him appealing to the anxious public, says Theo Anagnostopoulos, the founder of SciCo, a science communications consultancy: He comes across as an ordinary person but with proven expertise, and is empathetic.
Hes one of us, Mr. Anagnostopoulos said. Hes humble, modest and caring, but hes also undeniably a top expert.
Dr. Christian Drosten has emerged as the voice of scientific reason in Germany, where the impact of the virus has been deeply felt despite a relatively low death rate. Long respected for the depth of his knowledge and willingness to share it with peers, he never sought the limelight. Colleagues have described him as an unlikely hero.
For weeks, however, Dr. Drosten, chief virologist at the Charit university research hospital in Berlin, has become one of the most sought-after guests on television talk shows and the star of a daily podcast that started in February. In it, he delivers fact-based assessments of the risks Germany faces based on the science behind SARS viruses, which he has studied for years.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and her health minister, Jens Spahn, have also asked Dr. Drosten to consult on the political response to the crisis, although, as he was quick to point out to the German weekly Die Zeit, Im not a politician, Im a scientist.
Im happy to explain what I know, he said. Scientific findings must be communicated to everyone transparently, so that we all can get an idea of the situation. But Im also honest about what I dont know.
In some countries, certain scientists have been both lionized and vilified. In the United States, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a respected immunologist who is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been catapulted to celebrity status.
But Dr. Fauci, the Trump administrations fiercest advocate of social distancing rules, has also drawn the vitriol of members of the far right, who falsely accuse him of trying to undermine President Trump. The Department of Health and Human Services granted a request by the Justice Department for extra agents to guard him after he received threats.
As with all heroes drawn from the ranks of society during a crisis, some scientists are also painfully vulnerable, becoming sick themselves while carrying out their duties.
In Spain, the worst-hit country in Europe after Italy, Dr. Fernando Simn has cut an endearing scientific hero figure. The director of Spains health emergency center, he has delivered updates and insights into the crisis in a rasping voice, acting as a counselor for anxious citizens, who have peppered him with questions online, including whether people should take off their shoes before entering their homes (they need not, he advised).
Dr. Simn tested positive for the virus in late March, prompting a nationwide outpouring of sympathy and well wishes.
In Britain, Neil Ferguson, a top mathematician and epidemiologist who became known to the broader public seemingly overnight for modeling the spread of the outbreak, contracted the virus in March.
His work spurred the British government to ramp up restrictive measures to contain the illness, having initially taken a more relaxed approach that promoted the idea of helping people develop immunity by exposing a large proportion of the population to the virus.
Unaccustomed to the outsize attention to their every word and action, some of the new national darlings have found themselves on the receiving end of brutal criticism.
Professor Tsiodras was criticized by some in Greece after footage emerged showing him standing at the pulpit of a seemingly empty church, even though the Greek government had demanded that services be suspended because the Greek Orthodox Church would not voluntarily comply with its isolation and social distancing measures.
Dr. Drosten, in Germany, was criticized when he originally challenged the wisdom of closing schools and day care centers views he changed after a deluge of messages, including from colleagues who shared new data with him.
Slip-ups notwithstanding, Professor Kinsella says, these heroes provide clarity during confusing times and that includes the moral kind.
Last month, just as Mr. Trump and other leaders openly debated the wisdom of lockdowns because of their devastating economic costs, Professor Tsiodras tackled the question directly.
After giving the days update, he veered off script, looking nervously down at his clasped hands.
An acquaintance wrote to me that were making too much of a fuss over a bunch of citizens who are elderly and incapacitated by chronic illness, he said. The miracle of medical science in 2020 is the extension of a high-quality life for these people who are our mothers and our fathers, and grandmothers and grandfathers.
His voice then broke as he choked up.
We cannot exist, or have an identity, without them, he said.
Reporting was contributed by Raphael Minder from Madrid, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Melissa Eddy from Berlin and Niki Kitsantonis from Athens.
Read: How the pandemic will end
The governments social-distancing requirements, these pro-Trump talkers insist, are likely more harmful than the virus itself. Ten million people have lost their jobs, Limbaugh announced on April 2. Thats not enough for people like Bill Gates. Thats not enough for people who want to shoot down the entire country. Over the weekend, both Ingraham and Levin circulated a Federalist article headlined Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result In More Coronavirus Deaths. On April 1, Beck urged policy makers to start putting hard dates on some of these [social-distancing] measures because we have got to get back to work A forced economic recession isnt a gamble that I signed up for.
Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck havent criticized Trump personally for acknowledging the severity of the pandemic. But neither are they giving credence to his newly dire estimates of the COVID-19 threat. The reason may be that they have different incentives than he does. Conservative talkers answer to their conservative audience, which, according to polls, remains more skeptical than Democrats of government restrictions on movement. Trump must worry about public opinion as a whole, which strongly favors government-imposed social distancing. Trumps decision to abandon his goal of reopening the country by Easter, according to Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of the Times, came after political advisers described for him polling that showed that voters overwhelmingly preferred to keep containment measures in place over sending people back to work prematurely.
Trump must also balance his habitual suspicion of government experts against the fact that Americans trust those expertsin particular, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Faucifar more than they trust him in the battle against COVID-19. For Trump to reject their advice entirely might hurt his own standing, especially among the Democrats and independents who have helped boost his approval rating since the virus hit Americas shores.
Conservative talk radio, by contrast, is built on distrust of experts. Left-wing populists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites, especially those whom progressives venerate. In recent years, as progressives have championed the scientific consensus that climate change poses a grave danger, many conservatives have come to see scientists as yet another collection of snobs using the veneer of expertise to impose its liberal ideology on the country. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that while a large majority of Democrats believed that scientists were better than other people at making good policy decisions about scientific issues, a large majority of Republicans disagreed.
Over the past week, this populist distrust of scientific experts has suffused conservative talk radios downplaying of the COVID-19 threat. The experts are routinely wrong on issues big and smallon wearing masks, on reusable grocery bags virus modeling and treatments, Ingraham tweeted on April 3. So when experts issue edicts, remember their often spectacular record of failure. On April 1, Beck urged politicians to stop relying on flawed modeling data to make these decisions and instead listen to the people in your local communities. On April 5, Levin warned that the media, experts, and Democrats are trying to make it impossible for the president to even consider rational options for opening parts of the economy. On April 3, Ingraham declared, The experts arent capable of thinking beyond the virus to an even worse death spiral affecting millions of lives here and abroad.
By Vineeth VenugopalApr. 3, 2020 , 4:05 PM
Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Youve probably seen dozens of images of the novel coronavirusnow responsible for 1 million infections and tens of thousands of deaths. Now, scientists have come up with a way for you to hear it: by translating the structure of its famous spike protein into music.
The sounds you hearthe chiming bells, the twanging strings, the lilting flutesall represent different aspects of the spikelike protein (above) that pokes from the virus surface and helps it latch onto unsuspecting cells. Like all proteins, the spikes are made of combinations of amino acids. Using a new technique called sonification, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology assigned each amino acid a unique note in a musical scale, converting the entire protein intoa preliminary musical score.
But in real life, these amino acids tend to curl up into a helix or stretch out into a sheet. Researchers capture these features by altering the duration and volume of the notes. Molecular vibrations due to heat also get their own sounds.
But why would you set a virus to music? The new format can help scientists find sites on the protein where antibodies or drugs might be able to bindsimply by searching for specific musical sequences that correspond to these sites. This, the researchers say, is faster and more intuitive than conventional methods used to study proteins, such as molecular modeling. They add that by comparing the musical sequence of the spike protein to a large database of other sonified proteins, it might be possible to one day find one that can stick to the spikepreventing the virus from infecting a cell.
As for the instruments, they were entirely the researchers choice. In this case, a Japanese koto plays the main notessoothing sounds that might bring some comfort in a time of trouble.
Concerns are being raised that people isolating at home with worsening Covid-19 symptoms may not call for medical help early enough when they enter the second, more severe, phase of the virus, possibly reducing their chances of survival.
The NHS does not have a proper monitoring system for those suspected of having coronavirus, said Dr Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter medical school.
If a patient is developing pneumonia, it can get progressively worse very quickly and hence early admission upon the first signs of difficulty with breathing are very important, he said.
It is important for people recovering at home that there be a monitoring system in place too. Something that we have thus far not introduced.
Symptoms are defined by the NHS as either:
NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms shouldstay at home for at least 7 days.
If you live with other people,they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.
After 14 days, anyone you live with who does not have symptoms can return to their normal routine. But, if anyone in your home gets symptoms, they should stay at home for 7 days from the day their symptoms start.Even if it means they're at home for longer than 14 days.
If you live with someone who is 70 or over, has a long-term condition, is pregnant or has a weakened immune system, try to find somewhere else for them to stay for 14 days.
If you have to stay at home together, try to keep away from each other as much as possible.
After 7 days, if you no longer have a high temperature you can return to your normal routine.
If you still have a high temperature, stay at home until your temperature returns to normal.
If you still have a cough after 7 days, but your temperature is normal, you do not need to continue staying at home. A cough can last for several weeks after the infection has gone.
Staying at home means you should:
You can use your garden, if you have one. You can also leave the house to exercise but stay at least 2 metres away from other people.
If you have symptoms of coronavirus, use theNHS 111 coronavirus serviceto find out what to do.
Source:NHS Englandon 23 March 2020
There is a danger that people will arrive in hospital only when their symptoms are very severe, with more of a risk that they will end up in critical care and possibly die, he said.
The early symptoms of mild disease are a persistent dry cough, a raised temperature and shortness of breath. The advice to anyone with those symptoms is to self-isolate at home. They are not told to inform the health service.
Most people recover within a week, but if their symptoms worsen or they still have a high temperature at the end of that time, the instruction is to fill in a form on the NHS 111 coronavirus website if they can and to call NHS 111 only if they cannot do that. Depending on their answers, they may get a visit from a doctor or be admitted to hospital.
Covid-19 is said to be mild to moderate in 80% of people, but can cause viral pneumonia. In the most serious cases, the immune system fighting the virus overreacts. If that happens, what is known as a cytokine storm attacks their organs. The individual will need ventilation in hospital to take over their breathing and possibly mechanical support for their heart, liver or kidneys.
People with symptoms at home will not get medical help unless they ask for it, unlike in some other countries, which have testing for people with symptoms and monitoring for them while at home.
Health authorities in the southern German city of Heidelberg have introduced a corona taxi service, which allows medical personnel to visit patients with the virus at home and assess their progress. This was introduced after virologists and other doctors recognised that it often comes in two waves and that typically on the eighth day, patients health can take a turn for the worse.
Patients with confirmed infections or suspected to have coronavirus are being called on a regular basis by student doctors manning phone lines, and based on their accounts, a taxi crew can then arrange to visit them.
Four of the taxis small buses usually used for school runs are constantly travelling around the city visiting patients.
These daily phone calls and house visits would totally overwhelm the doctors here, said Uta Merle, a medical director for gastroenterology and infections at Heidelberg University hospital, which is why medical students are being drafted in. Eight hundred have so far volunteered.
Hans-Georg Krusslich, the head of virology at the hospital, told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the visits are necessary because often patients dont have the courage to ring up the clinic and dont actually take their worsening state seriously.
Thanks to the taxis, he said, our colleagues have discovered quite a few patients who they were able to protect from a drastic worsening of their conditions.
Many have been brought into hospital and put on ventilators as a result. That crucial move made just in time is believed to have saved many lives in Germany. The taxi crews have received letters of thanks from patients, crediting them with saving their lives.
Pankhania said people in the UK are no longer going to hospital for conditions other than Covid-19 in the sort of numbers that would be expected. For whatever reason, we have frightened off the patient. Those things we should be seeing are not turning up. These people are soldiering on, he said.
He has himself heard of cases where people were very sick with symptoms resembling those of Covid-19, but did not seek medical help and died at home.
He said it was possible that some people were put off from calling NHS 111 when their symptoms worsened or if they still had a fever after a week which are the first clues that their condition may be becoming severe.
He also does not think it is satisfactory for people with symptoms not to be tested. I dont think that is good enough, he said. I used to be a GP. I would want to know who my patients with Covid-19 were. I would call them and ask them how they were. Unfortunately, that doesnt happen. The GP may or may not be aware of the patient.
The Office for National Statistics has recently begun to include deaths from Covid-19 in the community, including care homes. They show the total was more than 20% higher than the figure for hospital deaths alone.
April 6 numbers: Five more deaths in Utah from COVID-19, with 1,675 confirmed cases KUTV 2News
