In Sign of Progress, Fewer Than 1% of New Yorks Virus Tests Are Positive – The New York Times
September 8, 2020
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The share of virus tests coming back positive in New York State has stayed below 1 percent for 30 straight days, suggesting that the states aggressive approach to containing its outbreak once the most severe in the country has largely worked.
The states positivity rate, announced on Sunday, remained below 1 percent even as parts of the economy gradually reopened, the number of people being tested continued to trend upward, and other states grappled with sharply rising case counts.
But for all the encouragement offered by the monthlong marker, many New Yorkers remain anxious heading into the fall and winter, when case counts could rise as the nations largest public school district and more businesses are preparing to reopen.
Even Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in announcing the figure, took the opportunity to urge not celebration but continued restraint, pointing in a statement to New Yorks approach to reopening slower and more controlled than in most other states as well as its statewide mask mandate.
Caution is a virtue, not a vice, Mr. Cuomo said.
New York State is now averaging slightly more than 700 cases a day, according to a New York Times database up a bit from about 600 in late August, but still a fraction of the 9,000 to 10,000 cases a day it was reporting at the peak in April. The number of people in hospitals because of the virus dropped to 410 on Saturday, the lowest figure since March 16.
The governors announcement came in the middle of a holiday weekend that, like others before it, seemed certain to tempt many to gather socially as the summer wanes. Mr. Cuomo warned that the states gains could be imperiled by any backsliding on precautions like mask wearing and social distancing.
Our actions today determine the rate of infection tomorrow, he said. So as the Labor Day weekend continues, I urge everyone to be smart, so we dont see a spike in the weeks ahead.
A recent outbreak at the State University of New York at Oneonta, a public college in Central New York, showed how quickly new clusters can flare up.
After some students held large parties, more than 500 students there tested positive; officials canceled in-person instruction for the semester less than two weeks after it began, closed the schools dormitories and sent students home. On Sunday, Mr. Cuomo said a state rapid testing team sent to the City of Oneonta had found 91 more cases, largely among college-age adults.
At New York University, more than 20 students have been suspended for violating virus-related rules, the school announced on Twitter on Saturday.
India, home to the worlds fastest-growing coronavirus outbreak, has surpassed Brazil to become the country with the second-highest number of cases.
On Monday, India reported 90,802 new infections, breaking its own record from the day before and taking its total to more than 4.2 million, according to a New York Times database. Brazil is now third with more than 4.1 million cases.
In early July, India surpassed Russia to become the country with the third-highest number of cases. By then, the United States was entrenched at No. 1, where it remains today with more than 6.2 million cases.
Crowded cities, lockdown fatigue and a lack of contact tracing have spread Covid-19 to every corner of this country of 1.3 billion people, The Timess Jeffrey Gettleman and Sameer Yasir reported in late August.
India has recorded 71,642 deaths from the virus, the worlds third-highest toll after the United States and Brazil, though India has a relatively low death rate per capita in a youthful nation.
The countrys surge in cases comes as the government continues to ease lockdown measures in an effort to help the economy. On Monday, the subway system in New Delhi, the capital, began a phased reopening after being shut for more than five months.
The pandemic has been economically devastating for India, which not so long ago dreamed of becoming a global powerhouse. Last week, the government reported a 24 percent contraction in the second quarter, the worst among the worlds top economies.
Britain is stunned by a spike in daily cases.
British health officials on Sunday announced a sharp rise in new infections, prompting warnings that they may need to reconsider the aggressive reopening of the country.
The British Public Health agency reported that 2,998 new cases had been confirmed the highest number since late May, during the British outbreaks peak.
Amid criticism that the government had once again lost control of an outbreak that has already killed more than 41,000 in Britain, government officials signaled that they were prepared to crack down.
Well take whatever action is necessary, said Matt Hancock, the health secretary, declaring that we can use, and we will use, local lockdowns if thats whats necessary.
But noting that as is the case in many parts of the world, the newest outbreak is hitting mostly younger people, Mr. Hancock implored them to think of their grandparents and be vigilant.
The first line of defense is that people should follow social distancing, he said.
There have been almost 350,000 coronavirus cases in Britain, which was initially reluctant to acknowledge the threat posed by the outbreak and act decisively to shut down. It suffered some of the worst losses in Europe in April and May, but gradually cases began to decline after the government moved to lock down.
In August, however, cases began rising again.
With schools newly reopened, some British experts are sounding the alarm over the newest infection numbers.
Theyve lost control of the virus, Gabriel Scally, a former National Health Service official, told The Guardian.
Kamala Harris expresses distrust of any vaccine promoted by President Trump.
Senator Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic nominee for vice president, said she would not trust President Trumps assurances that a coronavirus vaccine was safe, and instead would wait for medical experts to confirm the vaccine was reliable before she received an inoculation.
I will not take his word for it, Ms. Harris said of Mr. Trump on the CNN program State of the Union. (An earlier version of this article misidentified the program as Inside Politics.)
He wants us to inject bleach, she added, referring to remarks in April when the president incomprehensibly suggested a dangerous coronavirus treatment.
Ms. Harriss remarks came after federal officials alerted state and major city public health agencies last week to prepare to distribute a vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November. Given that no vaccine candidates have completed the kind of large-scale human trials that can prove efficacy and safety, that time frame has heightened concerns that the Trump administration is seeking to rush a vaccine rollout ahead of Election Day, Nov. 3.
For months, Ms. Harris and Joseph R. Biden Jr. have assailed Mr. Trump for his handling of the coronavirus crisis. Ms. Harriss comments on Sunday questioning a potential vaccine, as scientists racing for a vaccine report constant pressure from a White House anxious for good news, are likely to further sow skepticism among Americans considering whether to get the vaccine when it becomes available.
With concern about the politicization of vaccines and treatments on the rise, five drug companies are preparing to issue a statement this week pledging to not release a vaccine unless it meets rigorous standards for effectiveness and safety. The companies Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi are aiming to reassure the public that they will not seek premature approval under political pressure.
Ms. Harris on Sunday also said she and Mr. Biden would set a national standard for mask wearing, stopping short of endorsing a mandate.
This is not about punishment. Its not about Big Brother, Ms. Harris said, adding that wearing a mask is a sacrifice in a time of crisis.
Her comments appeared to be a softening of the position she and Mr. Biden have previously staked out.
Last month, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris called for Americans to be required to wear masks, telling reporters after receiving a briefing from public health experts that every American should wear a mask while outside for at least the next three months and that all governors should mandate mask wearing.
Mr. Biden in July suggested that if he were president, he would require mask wearing in public, and, asked if he could use federal leverage to mandate that, said he could, and would from an executive standpoint.
As hope builds over possible frequent at-home testing, experts call the idea a long shot.
Over the past few weeks, a Harvard scientist has made headlines for a bold idea to curb the spread of the virus: rolling out antigen tests, a decades-old underdog in testing technology, to tens of millions of Americans for near-daily, at-home use.
These tests are not very good at picking up low-level infections. But they are cheap and convenient, and return results in minutes. Real-time information, argued Dr. Michael Mina, the Harvard scientist, would be far better than the long delays clogging the testing pipeline.
The fast-and-frequent approach to testing has captured the attention of scientists and journalists around the world, and that of top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services.
But more than a dozen experts said that near-ubiquitous antigen testing, while intriguing in theory, may not be effective in practice. In addition to posing huge logistical hurdles, they said, the plan hinges on broad buy-in and compliance from people who have grown increasingly disillusioned with coronavirus testing. The aim also assumes that rapid tests can achieve their intended purpose.
We are open to thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways to handle this pandemic, said Esther Babady, the director of the clinical microbiology service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But she said antigen tests that could work at home had yet to enter the market.
Also, no rigorous study has shown that fast and frequent testing is better than sensitive but slower in the real world, she said. The data for that is whats missing.
What has been put forth about the approach is largely aspirational, and we need to check it against reality, said Dr. Alexander McAdam, the director of the infectious diseases diagnostic laboratory at Boston Childrens Hospital and an author of a recent report on pandemic testing strategies in The Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
Most of the virus tests to date rely on a laboratory technique called PCR, long considered the gold standard because it can pick up even small amounts of genetic material from germs like the coronavirus.
But sputtering supply chains have compromised efforts to collect, ship and process samples for PCR tests, lengthening turnaround times. And the longer the wait, the less useful the result.
Chinese firms are testing vaccines on their own employees. One executive says its working.
A Chinese pharmaceutical company, which has tested coronavirus vaccines on its own employees, said the workers traveled to countries with large outbreaks without becoming infected.
Zhou Song, the general counsel of the vaccine manufacturer Sinopharm, suggested on Sunday that the vaccines, which are still in the final stages of testing, might be effective in controlling the virus. But it will be months before any final conclusions can be drawn, and the employee data cannot be used to obtain regulatory approvals.
Under an emergency use program approved by the Chinese government in July, a broad array of people considered to be at high risk of virus exposure, including border officials, soldiers, medical personnel and employees of state-owned companies, are allowed to receive unapproved coronavirus vaccines outside of official clinical trials. Chinese vaccine makers are also conducting clinical trials according to normal regulatory processes in Brazil and other countries that unlike China have large, active outbreaks.
Mr. Zhou did not say to which countries the Sinopharm employees had traveled, or specify which vaccine they received. The state-owned company has two vaccines in Phase 3 trials.
It is also unclear whether the employees who received the vaccine had mingled with locals on their trips abroad, increasing their chances of exposure, or had been sequestered to their living quarters. If they avoided infection by keeping to themselves, that would not prove the vaccine works.
In an interview with eastday.com, a Shanghai-based news website, Mr. Zhou said that the absence of infections among inoculated employees was a remarkable thing.
He also said that none of the workers had shown any serious adverse reactions, and that if one is optimistic, the vaccines could be launched by the end of the year.
Separately, Sinovac, a Beijing-based company that also has a coronavirus vaccine in the last stage of testing, said that almost all of its employees and their family members around 3,000 people had been vaccinated on a voluntary basis under the emergency use program, The South China Morning Post reported on Sunday. Yin Weidong, the chief executive of Sinovac, said he expected the vaccine to be approved for use as soon as the end of the year.
Since the coronavirus pandemic started, public health officials in the United States have faced harassment and death threats, and some have even been driven from office. Now a university deeply involved in studying the virus has warned hundreds of its researchers to be on the lookout for dangerous packages.
Last Monday, the University of Washington, based in Seattle, sent an email to about 500 of its researchers telling them to be wary of suspicious packages and saying that virus researchers elsewhere had been targeted.
We have received unfortunate reports from our contacts at the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) that threatening mail has been sent to COVID-19 researchers on the east coast of the United States, said the email, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News on Saturday.
The BuzzFeed News article quoted an F.B.I. spokesman saying that the bureau, along with our local law enforcement partners, responded to a suspicious package sent to a few university researchers and that preliminary testing has indicated there is no threat to public safety in connection with this mailing.
A University of Washington spokeswoman, Susan Gregg, provided a copy of the universitys email to The New York Times and said no suspicious packages had been reported so far.
The email warned researchers to be on the lookout for signs of suspicious mail, including an address with misspelled words, no return address, oily stains, discoloration or a strange odor. Any mail that raised concerns, the email said, should be left unopened and reported to the police by calling 911.
Research at the University of Washington includes 16 clinical studies related to the virus and a prominent but sometimes criticized forecasting model. The model estimated last week that Covid-19 would kill about 410,000 people in the United States by the end of the year, more than double the current death toll, drawing skepticism from experts who said predictions about the course of the pandemic months into the future are too uncertain to be useful.
The report of threats to researchers follows earlier signs of the risks faced by public health officials and others involved in the pandemic response. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of President Trumps virus task force and the nations leading expert on infectious diseases, received additional security in April after threats, and he said the security was also expanded to his daughters. Local and state health officials have also been targeted by those challenging public health measures.
After earlier post-holiday spikes in cases, a warning for Labor Day weekend.
For many Americans, Labor Day is a goodbye to summer before children go back to school and cold weather arrives. But public health experts worry that in the midst of a pandemic, this weekend could result in disaster in the fall.
After the Memorial Day and Fourth of July weekends, cases of Covid-19 surged around the United States after people held family gatherings or congregated in large groups.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the countrys top infectious disease expert, said he wanted people to enjoy Labor Day weekend, but urged precautions.
You dont want to tell people on a holiday weekend that even outdoors is bad they will get completely discouraged, Dr. Fauci said. What we try to say is enjoy outdoors, but you can do it with safe spacing. You can be on a beach, and you dont have to be falling all over each other. You can be six, seven, eight, nine or 10 feet apart. You can go on a hike. You can go on a run. You can go on a picnic with a few people. You dont have to be in a crowd with 30, 40 or 50 people all breathing on each other.
In terms of daily case counts, the United States is in worse shape going into Labor Day weekend than it was for Memorial Day weekend. The nation now averages about 40,000 new confirmed cases per day, up from about 22,000 per day ahead of Memorial Day weekend.
Colleges are struggling to keep students from breaking safety protocols, and many have seen significant outbreaks, as have many college towns. ABC News posted a video on Twitter showing crowds at a sports bar near the University of South Carolina. The university, which disciplined some of its Greek houses last week, has reported more than 1,735 cases since Aug. 1, including 1,461 active cases, according to its Covid-19 dashboard.
Dr. Fauci said that a spike in infections after Labor Day would make it far harder to control the viruss spread in the fall, when cooler temperatures force more people indoors.
Public health experts said it was more challenging to persuade people to curtail their Labor Day weekend plans compared with past holiday weekends, because so many people are feeling pandemic fatigue after six months of restrictions, closures and separation.
People are getting tired of taking these precautions and of having their lives upended, said Eleanor J. Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. Theyre missing their friends and family, and everyone wishes things were back to normal. Thats totally understandable, but unfortunately we dont get a say, really.
Even so, there are signs that one pandemic precaution mask wearing has gained increasing acceptance over the summer. A Pew Research Center survey found that 85 percent of Americans said they wore masks all or most of the time when in stores or businesses, compared with 65 percent in June.
New York plans more post-mortem tests for the coronavirus and the flu to help increase death data accuracy.
With fall fast approaching, symptoms alone will not be useful in distinguishing the coronavirus from similar-looking cases of the flu. That means routinely testing for both viruses will be crucial even, perhaps, after some patients have died.
In New York, officials recently announced a ramp-up in post-mortem testing for the coronavirus as well as for the flu. Deaths linked to respiratory illnesses that were not confirmed before a person died are to be followed up with tests for both viruses within 48 hours, according to the new regulation.
These regulations will ensure we have the most accurate death data possible as we continue to manage Covid-19 while preparing for flu season, Dr. Howard Zucker, the states health commissioner, said in a statement last week.
Updated September 4, 2020
Deceased hospital patients and nursing home residents, as well as bodies in the care of funeral directors or medical examiners, will be among those targeted for follow-up testing.
These tests can help health officials track the prevalence of both types of infections, as well as indicate whether to warn close contacts of the deceased that they may need to quarantine.
People need to know who around them was sick, said Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. If someone cant be tested in life, why not test them soon after death?
Putting regulations in place ahead of time will also encourage counties to bolster their testing readiness ahead of autumn and winter, when seasonal viruses like flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., tend to thrive, said Dr. Mary Fowkes, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
In many parts of the United States, coronavirus cases are still ratcheting up every day and will become more difficult to track when similar sicknesses muddle the picture.
Children, please put on your rain suits.
With a number of schools in the United States opting for outdoor education over the potentially germier confines of their traditional indoor spaces, some outdoor-oriented companies are starting new product lines or repurposing existing ones to capitalize on how the pandemic has changed the education experience.
Demand for waterproof clothing and related gear has been overwhelming, said Sam Taylor, the chief executive of Oaki, a maker of a rain suit based in the Salt Lake City area. Mr. Taylor said demand for Oaki products had increased 60 percent this year.
Theres been a ton of research thats shown how productive being outside is, Mr. Taylor said. Theres no reason a little moisture or rain should stop that. If anything, that should be a positive if youve got the right gear.
Those searching for weatherproof supplies have also turned to Rite in the Rain, a century-old company based in Tacoma, Wash., that sells waterproof products including notebooks and printer paper.
Fifty percent of Rite in the Rains business comes from the government, mostly the military. But aside from pretty decent business with college bookstores, said Ryan McDonald, the companys director of marketing, it hadnt focused much on students until recently, with an increase in orders from elementary and high schools.
The coronavirus has thrived in Mexicos dense capital, Mexico City, which is home to nine million people, half of them poor. But while more than 11,000 have died, analysts say it could have been worse without the interventions of Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum.
Although she is one of President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obradors most trusted confidants, she has been careful to distance herself from him when possible when it comes to the virus. Mr. Lpez Obrador minimized the pandemic early on, questioning the science behind face masks and doing little testing. Seeking to avert economic pain, he has barely restricted travel.
Under his watch, Mexico has the fourth-highest coronavirus death toll worldwide.
As of Saturday, Mexico had recorded 67,326 coronavirus deaths, according to a Times database. But the health ministry also said that the country had recorded 122,765 more deaths than usual from the time the pandemic started until August, suggesting that its true toll could be much higher than reported.
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In Sign of Progress, Fewer Than 1% of New Yorks Virus Tests Are Positive - The New York Times
