Category: Corona Virus

After declining most of the fall, COVID-19 cases are rising again in many parts of the U.S. VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

After declining most of the fall, COVID-19 cases are rising again in many parts of the U.S.

It's a worrying sign for the U.S. ahead of the holiday travel season: coronavirus infections are rising in more than half of all states. Experts warn this could be the start of an extended winter surge.

The rise is a turnaround after cases had steadily declined from mid September to late October. The country is now averaging more than 83,000 cases a day about a 14% increase compared to a week ago, and 12% more than two weeks ago.

"I hate to say it, but I suspect we're at the start of a new winter surge," says Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

Growing outbreaks in the Midwest and Northeast are most responsible for pushing up the national numbers, and that comes after many weeks of high case counts and stress on states in the mountain West where some hospitals are dealing with crisis levels of patients.

"There are still large swaths of the country under-immunized and even among states that are relatively well-vaccinated, like Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Vermont, we're seeing sustained transmission," says Rutherford.

The uptick in cases hasn't yet translated into a national spike in new hospital admissions, which tend to trail a rise in infections by several weeks. However, the grim situation in some parts of the West and upper Midwest offers a concerning picture for other states where cases are now climbing.

"It's a marathon here," says Dr. Kencee Graves at the University of Utah Hospital, in Salt Lake City, Utah, who describes her state, like much of the Mountain West, as stuck in a "high plateau of a surge" where hospitals not only have an ICU full of COVID-19 patients, but also many other kinds of sick patients who need care.

Despite the concerning trends, the expectation among experts who model the pandemic's course is that a surge will not bring the same level of death and severe disease as last year.

"The vast majority of the population has some form of immunity," says Nicholas Reich, a biostatician at UMass Amherst who runs a COVID-19 forecasting model. "That feels really different about this moment there are fewer people to infect."

The growth in cases isn't unexpected, given the patchwork of COVID-19 immunity across the U.S., where about 60% of the population is fully vaccinated.

Americans are moving around like they were before the pandemic, mask wearing is low compared to last year, people are spending more time indoors because of cooler weather, and protection against infection, both from vaccinations and prior infection, is waning, says Ali Mokdad, professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.

"You put all of this together and what you see in Europe where many countries with higher vaccination rates than the United States are seeing a surge of course, it's going to happen," he says.

And unlike last year, the U.S. has to contend with a much more contagious version of the virus "that makes it really hard to snuff out chains of transmission," not to mention "human nature, which is wanting us to get back to pre-pandemic life," says Reich at UMass, Amherst.

Just how bad the situation gets will come down to complex dynamics around immunity. Southern states endured a brutal wave over the summer and that may have built up enough immunity from infection to shield them from another big resurgence this winter. Areas that did not face the same kind of surge, in particular states in the northern half of the country, are now dealing with an increase, but many also have the benefit of higher vaccination coverage.

"The real question is how big will it get and will it really be substantial? And my sense is in New England, it's going to hit a wall of vaccinated people," says Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health.

"I think the Midwest and the Great Plains which have lower vaccination rates but have not seen a big delta surge they may very well end up seeing quite a few infections in the weeks and months ahead."

Even if hospitals see fewer COVID-19 patients overall, it's already clear that many are less prepared to handle the demands of the pandemic compared to last year.

"Every hospital I have talked to in the last month has severe shortages of staff, especially nurses," says Dr. Bruce Siegel, president of America's Essential Hospitals, which represents hundreds of public hospitals in the U.S.

At the University of Utah Hospital, Dr. Graves says their surge ICU was closed down because they couldn't staff it anymore, and last month patients were waiting on average between three to five hours for an ICU bed. "Our resources and our stamina are far less now than a year ago," she says.

In the Southwest, hospitals are also dealing with packed ICUs.

New Mexico has higher vaccination rates than many nearby states, but the state was forced to enact its crisis standards of care plan weeks ago. Some hospitals have activated those plans, but none have moved to the most extreme scenario of deciding who gets care and who doesn't, says Troy Clark, president of the New Mexico Hospital Association.

Starting in the spring, there was a "huge influx of patients that we don't normally see" with other urgent medical needs, Clark says. That has kept hospitals extremely busy heading into winter and with no slack to accommodate the growing number of COVID-19 patients.

It's a similar situation in many states, including Arizona where hospitalizations for COVID-19 are now as high as they've been since February. "We just don't have that extra capacity for a COVID spike," says Ann-Marie Alameddin, president of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.

The upper Midwest now has some of the highest cases per capita in the country. Hospitals leaders in Minnesota are imploring people to take caution so they don't require medical care for COVID or non-COVID emergencies. "This has never been more serious," said Kelly Chandler of Itasca County Public Health, which includes the city of Grand Rapids, in a recent public statement. "We are at crisis levels of 2020, but without the same levels of COVID precautions in place."

As we head into the holidays, COVID risk increases, with more people travelling and socializing indoors. But "we also have some things that are helping, like more vaccines and kids getting vaccinated," says Brown's Ashish Jha. "So we're in a stalemate. I don't expect us to have a horrible surge, but I can certainly imagine parts of the country that see modest-sized surges as people get together and as the weather stays cold."

NPR's Rob Stein contributed to this report.

Excerpt from:

U.S. COVID cases start to rise again as the holidays approach - NPR

Felicia Moore draws a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 while working at the Anchorage School District Education Center vaccine clinic on Nov. 3. (Emily Mesner / ADN)

Alaska reported 1,089 new COVID-19 infections and two additional deaths from Saturday to Monday.

COVID-19 cases in the state started declining recently after weeks of high daily counts. Alaska experienced a surge for much of September and October that squeezed hospital capacity and brought hundreds of deaths.

Cases over the weekend included 427 reported Saturday, 349 on Sunday and 313 Monday.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that Alaska has the fourth highest seven-day rolling case rate in the nation, following Minnesota, New Mexico and North Dakota. Alaska previously led the nation for weeks. The states seven-day case rate of 412 per 100,000 people Monday was still much higher than the national average of 170.

There were 146 people hospitalized with COVID-19 statewide by Monday, a decrease from a high of more than 200 people hospitalized on average since September, though up from the week before, when around 130 people were hospitalized statewide.

Last week, the head of the states hospital association said the situation in Alaskas hospitals was becoming more manageable.

On Monday, Alaska also reported an additional two COVID-19 deaths among two Anchorage women in their 80s or older.

Alaskas most recent surge made September and October the states deadliest stretch of the pandemic, with 255 deaths, roughly 31% of the 803 COVID-19 deaths among residents since the start of the pandemic. The state has also reported an additional 30 COVID-19 deaths among nonresidents.

Around 59% of Alaskans ages 5 and older had received at least their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, while 54% were considered fully vaccinated by Monday.

Original post:

Alaska reports 1,089 new coronavirus infections and two COVID-19 deaths over weekend - Anchorage Daily News

Over the past year, coronavirus vaccines have gone into billions of human arms and into the fuzzy haunches of an arks worth of zoo animals. Jaguars are getting the jab. Bonobos are being dosed. So are orangutans and otters, ferrets and fruit bats, and, of course, lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!).

Largely left behind, however, are two creatures much closer to home: domestic cats and dogs.

Pet owners have noticed.

I get so many questions about this issue, Dr. Elizabeth Lennon, a veterinarian at the University of Pennsylvania, said. Will there be a vaccine? When will there be a vaccine?

Technically, a pet vaccine is feasible. In fact, several research teams say that they have already developed promising cat or dog vaccines; the shots that zoo animals are receiving were initially designed for dogs.

But vaccinating pets is simply not a priority, experts said. Although dogs and cats can catch the virus, a growing body of evidence suggests that Fluffy and Fido play little to no role in its spread and rarely fall ill themselves.

A vaccine is quite unlikely, I think, for dogs and cats, Dr. Will Sander, a veterinarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said. The risk of disease spread and illness in pets is so low that any vaccine would not be worth giving.

In February 2020, a woman in Hong Kong was diagnosed with Covid-19. Two other people in her home soon tested positive for the virus, as did one unexpected member of the household: an elderly Pomeranian. The 17-year-old dog was the first pet known to catch the virus.

But not the last. A German shepherd in Hong Kong soon tested positive, too, as did cats in Hong Kong, Belgium and New York. The cases were exceedingly mild the animals had few or no symptoms and experts concluded that humans had spread the virus to the pets, rather than vice versa.

To date, there hasnt been any documented cases of dogs or cats spreading the virus to people, Dr. Lennon said.

But the prospect of a pet pandemic sparked interested in an animal vaccine. Zoetis, a veterinary pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey, began working on one as soon as they heard about the Hong Kong Pomeranian.

We figured, Wow, this could become serious, so lets start working on a product, Mahesh Kumar, a senior vice president at Zoetis who leads vaccine development, said.

By the fall of 2020, Zoetis had four promising candidates for a vaccine, each of which elicited robust antibody responses in cats and dogs, the company announced. (The studies, which were small, have not been published.)

But as vaccine development progressed, it became increasingly apparent that the infection of pets was unlikely to pose a serious threat to animals or people.

In one study of 76 pets living with people who had the virus, 17.6 percent of cats and 1.7 percent of dogs also tested positive. (Studies have consistently shown that cats are more susceptible to infection than dogs, perhaps for both biological and behavioral reasons.) Of the infected pets, 82.4 percent had no symptoms.

When pets do fall ill, they tend to have mild symptoms, which may include lethargy, coughing, sneezing, runny noses or diarrhea. The animals typically make full recoveries without treatment, although a handful of more severe cases do occur occasionally.

Nov. 16, 2021, 5:15 p.m. ET

Moreover, there is no evidence that cats or dogs spread the virus to humans and there are few signs that they readily transmit it among themselves. Stray cats, for instance, are much less likely to have antibodies to the virus than cats that live with people, suggesting that the animals are largely getting the virus from us, rather than from each other.

It doesnt look like cats or dogs would ever be a reservoir for this virus, Dr. Jeanette OQuin, a veterinarian at Ohio State University, said. We believe that if there werent sick people around them, they would not be able to continue spreading it from animal to animal it would not continue to exist in their population.

Together, these factors convinced experts that a vaccine for pets was not necessary. In November 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates veterinary medicines, said that it was not accepting any applications for cat or dog vaccines because data do not indicate such a vaccine would have value.

But as the pet threat was receding, another problem was coming into focus: mink. The sleek, svelte mammals, which are farmed in large numbers, turned out to be highly susceptible to the virus. And not only were they dying from it, they were spreading it to each other and back to humans.

I think that the situation in mink absolutely warrants a vaccine, Dr. Lennon said.

The U.S.D.A. thought so, too, and in the same November notice in which the agency said it was not considering cat or dog vaccines, it declared itself open to applications for a mink vaccine.

Zoetis pivoted, deciding to repurpose one of its dog vaccines for mink ones. (Several other teams are also developing mink vaccines, and Russia has already approved a shot for all carnivores, including mink, and has reportedly started administering it to animals.)

Studies in mink are ongoing, but when word got out about Zoetiss work, zoos came calling. Some of their animals including gorillas, tigers and snow leopards had already caught the virus, and they wanted to give the mink vaccine a whirl. We got a huge number of requests, Dr. Kumar said.

What to Know About Covid Vaccines and Boosters

Zoetis, which decided to supply the vaccine to zoos on an experimental basis, has now committed to donating 26,000 doses enough to vaccinate 13,000 animals to zoos and animal sanctuaries in 14 countries.

The development means that many zoo-dwelling cats, like lions and tigers, are getting vaccinated, while their domestic cousins are not. In part, thats because these species appear to be more susceptible to the virus; some have died after becoming infected, although the cause of death is often difficult to conclusively determine.

The big cats seem to be getting sicker than the house cats, Dr. Lennon said.

Moreover, zoo animals are exposed to many more people than the average house cat, and many are highly endangered.

I dont want to diminish anybodys pets, Dr. Sander said. I have a cat myself. But I think a lot of those animals are high conservation status. Theyre genetically very valuable. And so they want to try and provide the best protection possible.

Although the evidence so far suggests that the virus is not a major threat to pets, there is a lot left to learn, scientists acknowledge. It is still not clear how frequently infected humans pass the virus to their pets, especially because officials do not recommend routine testing for companion animals, and the virus may have health effects in pets that have not yet been identified.

In a paper published earlier this month, scientists raised the possibility that the Alpha variant, which was first identified in Britain, might cause heart inflammation in dogs and cats. The evidence is circumstantial, but the virus has been linked to the same problem in humans and the connection is worth exploring, experts said.

We need to do more research in this area to find out if this is a real association, Dr. OQuin said.

There may be individual pets who are at especially high risk from the virus. Dr. Lennon and her colleagues recently identified an immunocompromised dog who appeared to become severely ill from the virus. Unlike most infected dogs, this one also shed high levels of the virus for more than a week.

Of course, thats one case, but it really does illustrate that Covid isnt the same in all pets, just like it isnt in all people, Dr. Lennon said.

It is certainly possible that future research or changes in the virus could change the calculus on a pet vaccine. If the virus turns out to be more prevalent, virulent or transmissible in dogs or cats than is currently known, that would make the case for a vaccine more compelling, scientists said. The U.S.D.A. has said that it may re-evaluate its position if more evidence of transmission and clinical disease emerges in a particular species.

If that time comes, Zoetis is prepared to pick up where it left off with its pet vaccines, Dr. Kumar said. He said that if the companys mink vaccine is licensed, veterinarians might be able to use it off-label in the event of an unexpected outbreak in cats or dogs.

Applied DNA Sciences, a New York-based biotech company, has also developed a promising cat vaccine as a just in case, James Hayward, the companys chief executive, said. (Like Zoetis, the company, which is working in partnership with the Italian company Evvivax, is now more focused on a mink vaccine.)

For now, there are steps that pet owners can take to protect their animals. People who test positive for the virus should isolate away from their pets, if possible, or wear a face mask while caring for them.

And, of course, a vaccine for humans is now widely available in the United States. The best way to prevent SARS-CoV-2 in our pets is to prevent the disease in people, Dr. OQuin said. So please get vaccinated.

Continued here:

Why Dont We Have a Covid Vaccine for Pets? - The New York Times

Tag yourself. (Im the one getting COVID-19.) Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Lots of fathers are testifying about their experiences getting COVID these days.

My wife and kids and friends keep phoning to make sure Im still breathing, though secretly Im delighted that I have an ironclad excuse to see nobody, do nothing, go nowhere, wrote Bret Stephens in the New York Times today. He has a mild illness and is at home taking care of that illness! This is a very reasonable and rational response to a health situation.

There are other ways to be, though. Do not try them yourself!

Maybe reading about my mistakes can help you with your decisionmaking, wrote Alexis Madrigal on social media, introducing his recent story in The Atlantic about getting COVID. It certainly has! I am now further committed to hanging out with friends, going to awesome parties, and seeing terrible movies like Eternals, which was really awful, and if I got COVID in that theater, Im going to be so pissed.

Brother Madrigal writes that he went to a wedding, he came home and tested positive, his spouse took up the work of dealing with the kids alone while he isolated, he was mildly ill, then everything was fine, just as the vaccines hath foretold.

And yet he felt bad. He had failed his family by getting ill.I blame no one but myself for this, Madrigal wrote.

Other heterosexual family men are presenting their tales of health infidelity and failure with less blame assigned to themselves because, in their cases, the coronavirus came home via their very young children and the children are always innocent.

T.J. Muehleman, a data technologist in Seattle who also works on COVID projects, recently told his story on Twitter; Will Oremus, a tech writer, told his too but began with a reasonable point: that he hoped it would push parents to get their kids vaccinated and to get booster shots themselves. (Children ages 5 to 11 are strongly encouraged to get vaccinated.)

If we learned nothing from the AIDS pandemic and we did learn maybe a couple things, which made possible a speedier treatment pipeline, for one its that even those of us who are wildly, delightedly promiscuous dont deserve diseases. Yet were still incapable of making sane assessments about risks, fault, cause, and blame.

Every disease has its associations The tubercular is someone consumed by ardor, wrote Susan Sontag in Illness As Metaphor. COVID, it looks like, is mostly associated with incaution. If you were just even a bit more careful, more responsible, then your spouse wouldnt have to pick up the slack while you isolate and your kids would be safer.

But 5 million people didnt die because they werent responsible enough. (I will hear arguments about the relatively small number who had access to vaccines and chose not to get them, however.) Many of them did die because weve made bad decisions about wealth, poverty, global warming, and health care. Why isnt anyone feeling ashamed about that?

Madrigals confessions, at least, make for a real hate-read. A brilliant satire of the widespread COVID psychosis that grips many wealthy American liberals, wrote one of Murdochs Australian wackos, who is, unfortunately, quite rude but correct.

Im not happy about the fact that Im going to get COVID. I love smelling dumb food. Mostly, I hope that when it happens to me, I dont harm any of my immunocompromised friends, because this endless slog is really messing up their lives and its not fair to them. I will absolutely work to protect them, and you all should get your kids vaccinated and get yourself boostered so they can have a fuller life sooner.

But very preliminary data from one state suggests I have a .004 percent chance of dying if I get COVID. Thats about the chance I take of dying every time I eat a hot dog. Maybe I have COVID right now!Just two months ago, I was never going to shake hands again. A friend showed me her move clasp the hands in front of your chest and do a little namaste head nod. This is not a good look for a middle-aged white man, and now I am shaking hands with vigor like Buddy Garrity on Friday Night Lights.

Nearly every member of Americas favorite Evangelical Republican Texan real-estate-broker, milk-consuming family you remember them from last week, when everyone lost their minds because they told CNN they bought 12 gallons of milk a week for their nine children had COVID, save one of the kiddos.

To protect this last of their children from the disease, when the father of the milk-loving pack had extremely severe and extended COVID symptoms not long ago, the family members did what any real American family would do: They simply isolated Dad in their pool house until he was better. No shame there.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Some Ways to Have COVID - New York Magazine

(WXYZ) Health officials from Henry Ford Health System are also sounding the alarm on rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in our community.

We are gravely concerned, said Dr. Adnan Munkarah, Henry Fords Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer during a press update on Tuesday.

Dr. Munkarah said the health system has 330 patients with COVID across their five hospitals, with more awaiting test results. He said thats about a 60% rise from the last week in October.

Our numbers mirror what we are seeing across the state, he said.

On Monday, the state reported 21,034 new COVID cases over a three day period.

Health officials are pushing the COVID vaccination, saying people who are vaccinated are 5 to 6 times less likely to get the infection.

They released a graphic showing a majority of the patients in the ICU and on ventilators are those who are unvaccinated.

We really must act now. Our hospitals have more COVID patients than theyve had since the spring surge, and that should be alarming to all of us, because that is with more overall population vaccinated than before and with the advancements in treatment, said Bob Riney, COO of Henry Ford Health System.

Henry Ford health officials say theyve had to curtail some procedures on some days because of overall volume, but said they are evaluating that on a day-to-day basis.

Additional Coronavirus information and resources:

View a global coronavirus tracker with data from Johns Hopkins University.

See complete coverage on our Coronavirus Continuing Coverage page.

Visit our The Rebound Detroit, a place where we are working to help people impacted financially from the coronavirus. We have all the information on everything available to help you through this crisis and how to access it.

See the rest here:

'We are gravely concerned.' Henry Ford health officials warn of rising COVID hospitalizations - WXYZ

With the advent of the worldwide SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, clinicians and researchers scrambled to find effective therapies for the life threatening complications of COVID-19. Early clinical experience suggested that administering powerful steroids improves outcomes in people with COVID-19 who require oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

However, steroids have adverse side effects, including elevated blood glucose levels. In individuals with and without a history of diabetes, this can result in short- and long-term complications, such as an increased risk of infection or metabolic imbalance.

Researchers released results at the November 2021 Society for Endocrinology meeting after observing a large group of people with COVID-19 receiving treatment with dexamethasone, a steroid that doctors use to treat patients with lung inflammation.

Dr. Victoria Salem, a principal investigator, shared with Medical News Today: Dexamethasone is now standard of care in patients hospitalized with [COVID-19] requiring oxygen based on the RECOVERY trial. We looked at over 2,000 patients hospitalized with [COVID-19] in our London hospital and performed a multivariate analysis of risk factors for death.

Its already known that diabetes is a risk factor for severe COVID. High blood sugars are also a predictor of poor outcomes. Since dexamethasone pushes up blood sugars, we were worried that dexamethasone might have been a double-edged sword for patients with diabetes, but, in fact, it turned out to be just as effective.

To understand dexamethasones effects, researchers looked at the number of ICU admissions, reduced mortality, and steroid-related complications in 2,261 patients admitted to the Imperial College Healthcare National Health Service (NHS) Trust hospitals.

The team divided data from individuals hospitalized with COVID-19 into two groups: wave one and wave two. Wave one consisted of 889 people admitted to the hospital between March and April 2020, when doctors did not routinely prescribe dexamethasone. Wave two comprised 1,372 individuals admitted between November 2020 and January 2021 who took prescription dexamethasone routinely.

The study found that people were less likely to be admitted to the ICU in wave two (18.8%) compared to 27.6% in wave one. There was also a reduction in mortality in wave two, with a 31.8% reduced risk of death. Additional risk factors for ICU admittance and reduced mortality included having high blood pressure, increased frailty, reduced kidney function, and being male.

For Medical News Today, Dr. Salem elaborated:

In wave two, [d]examethasone was used in 68% of patients in our hospital with a diagnosis of [COVID-19], 35% of whom had diabetes.

[O]f the patients treated with dexamethasone for COVID, 19% developed hyperglycemia (high blood sugars) that required additional treatment. [A]nd, of this group, 12% were new diagnoses of diabetes the [r]emainder of patients experienced worsening preexisting diabetes.

[D]r. Salem clarified that this real world figure is much higher than the result that the original RECOVERY study reported.

So, 21 people out of 935 (2%) given dexamethasone for [COVID-19] developed steroid-induced diabetes.

Dexamethasone treatment reduced the risk of death or ICU admission in study participants by 56%. Dr. Salem explained to Medical News Today:

Dexamethasone was independently associated with a decreased risk of death/ICU admission to the same extent in people with [d]iabetes and those without diabetes.

Dexamethasone-induced diabetes often resolves when the treatment is stopped. It adds an extra burden in terms of management and follow-up but [is] worth it given the overall benefits in terms of recovering from [COVID-19]. Given the current obesity epidemic, many of the patients may already have had undiagnosed type 2 diabetes, and this was a wake-up call.

The studys take-home message is that dexamethasone treatment reduced the risk of death and ICU admission. Additionally, patients with diabetes are more likely to develop steroid-induced glucose control complications, but this did not increase death rates.

For live updates on the latest developments regarding the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, click here.

Excerpt from:

Treating severe COVID-19: Study assesses risks of dexamethasone - Medical News Today

Hungry deer feasts on Halloween jack-o'-lanterns

A home security camera captured a deer enjoying a late night snack, digging into a Halloween pumpkin sitting on a porch.

USA TODAY, Storyful

A few Oklahoma deer have recently tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies, a state wildlife official said Friday.

"We really don't know howthey got it," said Dallas Barber, big game biologist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. "A small percentage (of blood tests) did come back positive just for antibodies, meaning they were exposed at some point intime."

But wildlife experts say there is such a low risk of humans catching the coronavirus from a deerthat there is no reason for alarm.

"It's an exceedingly low likelihood that would be a transmission route," said Dwayne Elmore, OSU Extension wildlife specialist.

Elmore has received dozens of inquiries on the topic since NPR published a story Wednesday about the coronavirus being widely spread through deer populations in the United States.

A recent survey of white-tailed deer in the Northeast and Midwestfoundthat 40% of them had antibodies against the coronavirus, according to the NPR report.

'I thought I was going to have a heart attack': How Edmond hunter killed possible Oklahoma state record deer

Elmore said there is no evidence that deer cantransmit the coronavirus to humans.

"The strains that have been detected in deer matchhumans, which indicatesthat it does appear it went from humans to deer,but that doesn't necessarily mean it will go back the other way, but we can't rule thatout," Elmore said.

Even if a deer could transmit the coronavirus to a human, it is much more likely that a person would catch the virus fromclose contact with another person, rather than from a deer walking through aneighborhood, he said.

Oklahoma's most popular hunting season, the deer gun season,opensNov. 20. Both Barber and Elmore recommend hunters take the same precautions when handling a deer carcass they would normally, such as wearing gloves.

Deer in Iowa appear to be catching COVID-19 from humans.Could it happen in other states?

"Wear gloves, don't touch your face, and throw the gloves away," Elmore said.

Wearing gloves always has been a standard health precaution suggested for hunters who are field dressing a deer, even before the coronavirus.

Because the coronavirus triggers a respiratory tract infection, catching it from adeer which is not breathing is highly unlikely, Elmore said.

"The small chance, the way you might could get it from a harvested deer, is if you put your hand in the respiratory tract or on their mouth and then touched your mouth," he said. "Don't ever do that."

Wearing a mask would provide an extra level of precaution for a hunter, he said.

"You could wear a mask while you are handlinga deer, but without the deer respiring there is not likely to be even small droplets circulating," Elmore said.

Elmore said he wasn't surprised to learn the coronavirus has now beenfound in Oklahoma deer because of the high rate of infection in other states.

The fact it is now widespread in deer herds across the country is just more evidence thatthe coronavirus probably willnever be eradicated, he said.

"It's going to gofrom an epidemic, which we have now, to an endemic disease, meaning it's always with us," Elmore said. "However, most epidemiologistshave already said we were there.

"They didn't think we were evergetting rid of this. It's already in cats and dogs and ferrets andprimates and, of course, humans all over the world.

"I think for a long time most disease specialists were leaning toward 'we are going to be stuck with this thing.'Adding it to deer just increases the likelihood of that being the case."

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'We really don't know how they got it': Some Oklahoma deer have coronavirus antibodies - Oklahoman.com

A vaccination center worker inoculates a woman with the Biontech vaccine against Covid-19 in Lower Saxony. Moritz Frankenber/dpa/picture alliance via Getty I hide caption

A vaccination center worker inoculates a woman with the Biontech vaccine against Covid-19 in Lower Saxony.

Another wave of COVID-19 is sweeping across Europe, setting new records in some countries.

Records for daily infections have been shattered in recent days in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. While deaths from COVID-19 are way down from last year in many European countries, Russia with barely a third of its population vaccinated has seen a steady two-month surge and now leads the world in total coronavirus deaths for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

The Netherlands' government announced Friday the country will return to a partial lockdown starting Saturday in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus cases.

The World Health Organization's COVID-19 report for the week ending Nov. 7 showed that Europe, including Russia, was the only region with a rise in deaths from the virus, up 10%. Overall, new coronavirus cases were on the decline in most of the world, but were up 7% in Europe and 3% in Africa.

Last week, the WHO's director for Europe, Dr. Hans Kluge, said the region "is back at the epicenter of the pandemic where we were one year ago."

A virologist at Warwick Medical School in the U.K., Lawrence Young, told Reuters that the latest surge is yet another hard lesson for Europe. "If there's one thing to learn from this it's not to take your eye off the ball," he said.

Vaccine hesitancy, waning immunity among the already inoculated and relaxed restrictions are all considered factors in the new wave, according to Reuters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed the surge in new cases and deaths in there squarely on hesitancy, saying he can't understand why Russians are reluctant to get the country's Sputnik V vaccine.

In Germany, where cases on Thursday surged to a new record of more than 50,000, the country's health minister, Jens Spahn, has said his country must do "everything necessary" to break the latest wave of the disease, Deutsche Welle reported.

"The situation is serious and I recommend that everyone takes it as such," he said. Spahn and the head of Germany's Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, Lothar Wieler, warned that intensive care units across the country were under severe strain from COVID-19 patients, particularly in the states of Saxony, Thuringia and Bavaria.

Spahn said free COVID-19 tests will be offered again starting Saturday.

Olaf Scholz, likely to succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's next chancellor, has called on people either to be vaccinated, recovered or have negative tests to go to work and for stricter rules to enter restaurants and cinemas.

Nearly a third of Germany's population is not yet fully vaccinated, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

By contrast, Portugal and Spain where new cases have been minimal top the European vaccination statistics, with rates in excess of 80%. Infections are also low in France, which has kept restrictions in place since summer, including a requirement to show a vaccine passport to do nearly everything.

Austria which has a vaccination rate similar to Germany's and has also posted record infections in the past week appears to be days away from imposing a lockdown for anyone who is not fully inoculated.

Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg has called a national lockdown for the unvaccinated "probably inevitable," adding that two-thirds of the population should not have to suffer because the other third refused to be vaccinated.

If the federal government approves, Upper Austria will impose restrictions on the unvaccinated beginning Monday. Salzburg is considering similar measures.

Schallenberg said the unvaccinated face an "uncomfortable" winter and Christmas.

In the Netherlands, a three-week partial lockdown was announced Friday, Reuters reported.

During a news conference Friday, caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the country will return to a partial lockdown starting Saturday ordering all bars and restaurants to close at 8 p.m. and sporting events to be held without audiences.

Dutch government officials also recommended that no more than four visitors be allowed in people's homes.

Denmark, which has also seen a recent upswing in cases, this week ordered its people to present a pass in the form of a smartphone app when they enter bars, restaurants and other public places. It is also considering fast-track legislation to require a digital "corona pass" for employers, according to Reuters.

While the United Kingdom saw a similar increase in cases last month, there are signs of a leveling off since then.

NPR's Jonathan Franklin contributed to this report.

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Europe and Russia battle a new wave of COVID-19 - NPR

Good evening. Im Karen Kaplan, and its Friday, Nov. 12. Heres the latest on whats happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.

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Last week, as my colleague Melissa Healy covered a meeting of the expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about vaccines, she caught a brief exchange that pricked up her ears.

It began when Dr. Oliver Brooks, a panel member and chief medical officer of Watts Healthcare in Los Angeles, invited CDC representatives to discuss how rolling out Pfizer and BioNTechs new kid-friendly COVID-19 vaccine to children ages 5 to 11 could bring the country closer to its herd-immunity goal.

At first, Brooks was met with an awkward silence. Then, Dr. Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDCs COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force, spoke up.

Thinking that well be able to achieve some kind of threshold where therell be no more transmission of infections may not be possible, Jones told the CDC panel. The widespread phenomenon of waning immunity among people who survived coronavirus infections as well as those whove been vaccinated has made the adoption of a clear herd-immunity goal very complicated, he added.

Since the pandemics early days, weve been working toward the collective goal of reaching herd immunity. Experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted that once 70% to 85% of the population was vaccinated against COVID-19, the virus would run out of potential hosts to infect and the outbreak would sputter to an end.

Even at the low end of that range, that target has been elusive. As of Friday, only 58.7% of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to the CDCs COVID Data Tracker.

That percentage is sure to rise, but its value will fall.

For starters, the target that was set in the 70%-to-85% range was based in part on the transmissibility of the coronavirus. That ability to jump from person to person has escalated dramatically in the last year, thanks to the rise of the Alpha and Delta variants.

Meanwhile, the protection provided by vaccination or past infection is turning out to be less durable than previously expected. That also affects the accuracy of herd-immunity estimates.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and its repeatedly challenged us, Dr. John Brooks, chief medical officer for the CDCs COVID-19 response, told Healy when she called to follow up on Jones comments. Its impossible to predict what herd immunity will be in a new pathogen until you reach herd immunity.

Thats why the CDC is shifting its focus away from a specific vaccination target that, when met, would presage the end of the pandemic. Instead, officials intend to redefine success in terms of new infections and deaths. (The particular goals havent been selected.)

Dr. Oliver Brooks, center, observes a COVID-19 screening station outside the Watts Health Center in Los Angeles. He fears that without a target for reaching herd immunity, it will be more difficult to motivate people to get vaccinated.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Oliver Brooks, the advisory panel member from Watts, said he could understand where the CDC was coming from. But hes nonetheless concerned that backing off a specific target for herd immunity will cause the nations immunization effort to lose some much-needed steam.

Plus, he said, if health officials stop focusing on the herd, Americans may lose sight of the fact that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 isnt just a way to protect yourself but also a means for protecting the community around you.

Theres some risk involved in changing the goal posts, because it could feed into the idea that the CDCs pronouncements on COVID-19 arent all that credible. The agency has already taken fire for its about-faces on the value of masks and how readily the virus spreads in the air.

Unfortunately, thats just how science works.

We want clean, easy answers, and sometimes they exist, John Brooks said. But on this is one, were still learning.

California cases and deaths as of 4:40 p.m. Friday:

Track Californias coronavirus spread and vaccination efforts including the latest numbers and how they break down with our graphics.

What does it take to encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19? People like Father Francisco Valdovinos.

Valdovinos was a Catholic priest at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mecca, Calif. During the few years he served the congregation in the Coachella Valley, he organized literacy and legal classes for his working-class parishioners and pressed politicians to improve services for the community.

But the 58-year-old immigrant from Mexico really leaned in when the pandemic arrived. He gave out tens of thousands of face masks, celebrated Mass with social distancing, and used the parish as a coronavirus testing site. He encouraged people to take COVID-19 seriously. And even before the first shots were available, he urged people to get vaccinated.

Valdovinos himself never got that chance. He came down with COVID-19 in December and died in January.

At the time, residents of Mecca promised to honor Valdovinos by getting the vaccine. And as my colleague Gustavo Arellano writes, they sure did.

As of Friday, 54.1% of Riverside County residents are fully vaccinated. But in the 92254 ZIP Code that includes Mecca, that figure is 72%, The Times tracker shows.

Thats high enough to put Mecca in the top quartile of California ZIP Codes for which vaccination rates are available, according to data from the states Department of Public Health.

An undated photo of Father Francisco Valdovinos with two of his parishioners.

(Trinity Missions)

When Father Valdovinos died, he awakened the consciousness of the people in our community to go out there and get the shot, Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella) told Arellano. For their health, yes, but also out of respect for his life.

Maria Machuca, a longtime community organizer, added that getting the shots was a way of securing Valdovinos legacy.

He was just building momentum, Machuca said. Its just a big loss we dont know what he couldve done. So we need to continue what he did.

See the latest on Californias vaccination progress with our tracker.

Whats on your wish list for the holidays? Maybe you havent made up your mind yet, but the state of California has and it wants you to get a booster shot.

Health officials are hoping to head off a second fall-and-winter COVID-19 surge by encouraging as many booster-eligible adults to get an extra dose as soon as possible. So far, only 14% of fully vaccinated adults here have done so, including 34% of fully vaccinated senior citizens.

The CDC says adults are eligible for a booster shot if they got their Johnson & Johnson shot at least two months ago or if they got their second Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot at least six months ago and face an increased risk of severe COVID-19 due to age, health status, living conditions or job requirements.

But state and local officials are urging pharmacies, medical centers and vaccine administrators to take a more expansive view. As long as people have met the time requirement, they should not be turned away, according to Dr. Tmas Aragn, the state health officer and public health director.

The CDC recently expanded its list of underlying medical conditions that would qualify someone for a booster. Its now so broad that pretty much everybody is eligible, said Dr. Sara Cody, the health officer for Santa Clara County. We really encourage everyone to get out and get their booster shot.

Back to your holiday wish list: Odds are good that youll be visiting a mall at some point in the coming weeks. The city of Los Angeles wants to make that easier by dropping shopping centers from the list of places that require proof of vaccination to serve people indoors.

The City Council voted 10-0 Friday to request new language for the vaccine ordinance that went into effect Monday. Tweaks suggested by the city attorney will have to be approved in another vote.

Council members didnt say what prompted their request. In earlier debates, there were questions about who would be responsible for enforcing the vaccine-verification rule, since there are so many ways for customers to enter a mall.

Elsewhere in the U.S., a federal judge in Austin has cleared the way for Texas schools to institute mask mandates if they so choose.

The judge ruled Wednesday that Gov. Greg Abbotts controversial ban on mask mandates violated a federal law that protects disabled students who want access to public education. That means the Texas attorney general cant sue school districts for requiring masks in the name of student safety. Fifteen such suits have been filed so far.

Globally, the World Health Organization reported that COVID-19 deaths in the Americas declined by 14% over the last week, and new cases fell by 5%. In Southeast Asia and Africa, deaths fell even more by about one-third.

In Europe, on the other hand, COVID-19 deaths increased by 10% over the last week. New coronavirus cases there also rose by 7%, making Europe the only region in the world where both numbers grew, according to the WHO. It was the sixth-straight week that cases and deaths were up across the continent.

The situation has officials turning to measures that are sure to be unpopular. In some parts of Austria, for instance, people who are unvaccinated will soon be asked to stay home unless they have an essential reason to leave, like going to work or the grocery store. And in the Netherlands, it looks like bars and restaurants will be asked to close early for the next three weeks. Sporting events will ban spectators, too.

Things are especially dire in Eastern Europe, where vaccination rates are generally low. As in the U.S., the people who are becoming seriously ill and dying tend to be ones who have eschewed the vaccine.

Theres another similarity with the U.S.: Breakthrough infections and other signs of waning vaccine immunity are providing ammunition to vaccine resisters.

The situation in Europe is worth watching, since surges there are often followed by surges here. And this time around, the vaccination rate in the U.S. is lower than in Western Europe.

Todays question comes from readers who want to know: Does the Biden administrations new vaccine mandate apply to me?

That depends on if you are employed, whom you work for and how many co-workers you have.

First, a little background. Last week, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration released its long-awaited rules for implementing Bidens vaccine mandate for private employers. The tens of millions of Americans who are subject to the rules have until Jan. 4 to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or else submit to weekly coronavirus testing.

The OSHA rules are separate from an earlier vaccine mandate that covers workers employed by the federal government or one of its contractors. The new rules are also distinct from a vaccine mandate that applies to roughly 17 million people who work at hospitals, outpatient clinics, nursing homes and other facilities that treat Medicare and Medicaid patients.

The new vaccine mandate covers workers whose employers are under OSHAs jurisdiction a broad category that includes almost all private-sector organizations in the U.S., including Puerto Rico and several other U.S. territories. (Exempted from OSHAs scrutiny are people who are self-employed, people who work on their own family farms, and people whose job-safety risks are regulated by another part of the federal government.)

To be subject to the vaccine mandate, your employer must have at least 100 employees. OSHA doesnt care whether those workers are in the same place or spread out among multiple facilities. Also, for this math, part-time and seasonal employees count the same as regular full-time employees.

There are a few exceptions. The mandate does not apply to people who work outdoors all of the time. (If you ride to your job site with co-workers in a company vehicle, that counts as working indoors and the vaccine mandate covers you. However, if you only come indoors to use a restroom, it doesnt.)

If you work from home exclusively, the mandate does not apply to you. Ditto if you are the only one in your workplace and dont interact with customers or colleagues. But youll still count toward toward the 100-employee threshold.

Workers may request an exemption to the vaccine mandate on medical or religious grounds, and employers will have to take reasonable steps to accommodate valid requests and let people get weekly coronavirus testing instead. But if its not possible to work around someones unvaccinated status, failure to get the shots can cost them their jobs.

Not surprisingly, the vaccine mandate has its critics. More than half of the states have challenged the rules in court, and on Saturday, the federal appeals court based in New Orleans granted an emergency stay. Officials in the Biden administration say theyre confident theyll prevail, in part because federal safety rules take precedence over state ones.

In fact, OSHA is already looking into the feasibility of extending the vaccine mandate to companies with fewer than 100 employees.

We want to hear from you. Email us your coronavirus questions, and well do our best to answer them. Wondering if your questions already been answered? Check out our archive here.

MaKensi Kastl greets boyfriend Thierry Coudassot upon his arrival from France at a Newark, N.J., airport on Monday. The couple hadnt seen each other in person for over a year due to pandemic travel restrictions.

(Seth Wenig / Associated Press)

Its been a week for emotional reunions now that the U.S. has lifted the COVID-19 travel restrictions that were in place for more than 20 months.

The rules came down early in the pandemic to keep the coronavirus out of the country. Unfortunately, that kept loved ones out of the country, too. U.S. citizens and permanent residents could return from trips abroad, but foreign citizens were forced to play a waiting game.

That meant this was the week for long-separated spouses to make their way back into each others arms, and for grandparents to embrace toddler grandchildren theyd never met.

Im going to jump into his arms, kiss him, touch him, said Gaye Camara, who lives in France and was making her way through Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to visit her New York-based husband, whom shed last seen in January of 2020.

Dual U.S.-Canadian citizen Traysi Spring and her American husband, Tom Bakken, welcome people heading into Blaine, Wash., from Canada on Monday. The U.S. reopened its land borders to nonessential travel after almost 20 months of COVID-19 restrictions.

(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

Resources

Need a vaccine? Keep in mind that supplies are limited, and getting one can be a challenge. Sign up for email updates, check your eligibility and, if youre eligible, make an appointment where you live: City of Los Angeles | Los Angeles County | Kern County | Orange County | Riverside County | San Bernardino County | San Diego County | San Luis Obispo County | Santa Barbara County | Ventura County

Practice social distancing using these tips, and wear a mask or two.

Watch for symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and loss of taste or smell. Heres what to look for and when.

Need to get tested? Heres where you can in L.A. County and around California.

Americans are hurting in many ways. We have advice for helping kids cope, resources for people experiencing domestic abuse and a newsletter to help you make ends meet.

Weve answered hundreds of readers questions. Explore them in our archive here.

For our most up-to-date coverage, visit our homepage and our Health section, get our breaking news alerts, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

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Coronavirus Today: Shifting the focus from herd immunity - Los Angeles Times

I dont want to sound like Im entering some sort of spy movie, but I dont know what to do, said the 33-year-old researcher. I want to fade back into obscurity.

But first, shed like your attention.

On Tuesday HarperCollins will publish Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, which Chan co-wrote with science writer Matt Ridley, a Conservative member of the UK House of Lords. Building on her paper, which appeared online in May 2020 but hasnt been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal, the book asserts that a growing body of circumstantial evidence supports her hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The book doesnt explicitly blame a lab leak for the pandemic, but Viral does say that scenario has evolved from a conspiracy theory to just barely a possibility, to a plausible hypothesis worthy of a credible investigation. She cites, among other things, the similarity between the new coronavirus and another virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The prevailing view has been that the illness resulted from natural spillover from animals to humans, although no one knows for sure. An investigation by US intelligence agencies this year was inconclusive, which the White House blamed on a lack of cooperation by the Chinese government. The World Health Organization last month announced that a group of international scientists will try again.

Chan says she was reluctant to write the book when Ridley, a veteran journalist who contends the dangers of global warming are exaggerated, approached her last year about collaborating. She says she finally signed a book deal because news reports and posts on Twitter which she uses prolifically to advance her theory and spar with opponents cannot tell the complex story of COVID-19s origins.

It has to be summed up in a book, she said. I hope it will be a bestseller.

She acknowledged that writing and promoting a book seems a bad way to achieve anonymity.

To her critics and there are plenty shes motivated less by the pursuit of knowledge than of riches and notoriety.

In my opinion, she is an intellectually dishonest, manipulative conspiracist with very little subject matter expertise who has offered nothing of value to the search for the origins of COVID-19 and has compensated for her mediocrity by pursuing personal profit, Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said in an e-mail. Her supposed scientific contribution, including this book, is a scam disguised as an honest quest for the truth.

Rasmussen has skewered Chan on Twitter, noting that the Broad researcher is not a virologist or epidemiologist specialists with expertise in viruses and the spread of disease. Chan is a molecular biologist who focuses on gene therapy and cell engineering.

Chan has repeatedly fired back at critics, tweeting in October 2020 that scientists who obscure the origins of the pandemic have a hand in the deaths of millions of people.

Other scientists, however, say Chan deserves credit for challenging the view that the virus almost certainly moved to humans from bats through an intermediary host animal.

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, called her courageous. In March, he signed an open letter along with Chan and other scientists published in the Wall Street Journal and the French publication Le Monde calling for an international forensic investigation of COVIDs origins.

In an interview, Ebright said Chan questioned a false narrative that scientists had ruled out the possibility the virus came from a lab and is putting her reputation and career on the line.

But in an example of the controversys many layers, Ebright said the central argument for a lab leak that Chan made in the 2020 paper wasnt all that compelling. She was right to say the virus could have come from a lab, he says, but for the wrong reasons. Still, Ebright credits her and other scientists with prodding US intelligence agencies to conduct a 90-day inquiry earlier this year into the pandemics origins, although the findings were inconclusive.

At first glance, Chan seems an unlikely figure to provoke an international uproar among seasoned virologists, government officials in multiple countries, and Internet sleuths hunting for evidence of suspicious illnesses in China.

A Canadian citizen who was born in Vancouver and grew up in Singapore, she is a junior scientist who arrived at the Broad in 2018. Chan says she did all her COVID research in her spare time. During interviews, she seemed alternately wounded and amused by the criticism hurled by veteran scientists, exclaiming ouch! and holy cow! when a reporter read aloud Rasmussens scathing e-mail.

Chan works in the field of gene therapy, which involves altering or inserting genes inside human cells to treat diseases. Scientists sometimes use modified viruses to deliver a new gene into the cell, but several experts said that background would not give Chan a deep understanding of coronaviruses.

Its like the difference between a car salesman and a car mechanic, said Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University who believes its far more likely that the coronavirus naturally spread from animals to humans like many other so-called zoonotic viruses. Its a different body of knowledge.

Chan dismisses such criticism, saying her knowledge of how viruses can be genetically modified is relevant and that virologists should be embarrassed for not taking the possibility of a lab leak more seriously.

By her account, Chan began researching that scenario early last year as a result of encouraging reports that the new coronavirus appeared to be mutating very slowly, improving the prospects for developing medicines and vaccines to target it.

As she worked on her laptop at her kitchen counter in Cambridge during the 2020 lockdown, Chan said, she wondered whether the relatively stable virus had somehow pre-adapted to infect humans before the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Could it have adapted to humans while being studied in a lab and then accidentally escaped?

At the time, many experts theorized the virus likely spread from an animal to humans at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, given that two-thirds of the initial 41 people hospitalized with COVID-related pneumonia in early 2020 had direct exposure to the market. Chan had her doubts.

She contacted Shing Hei Zhan, a friend and bioinformatics expert from her days at the University of British Columbia. Together, they began a genetic analysis, comparing the evolution of the new coronavirus with the SARS-CoV virus that caused a far smaller outbreak that began in China in 2002 and disappeared two years later.

In the paper that the two friends wrote with Ben Deverman, Chans boss at the Broad, they concluded that by the time the new coronavirus emerged in December 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission so that it resembled the earlier SARS virus during the latter phase of that outbreak.

They also couldnt rule out that it had come from a lab, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, about 8 miles from the market. The institute acknowledged in early 2020 that it had a virus in its database with a genome sequence that was 96.2 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2, but it dismissed the idea of a leak as a conspiracy theory.

The paper appeared at a time when the politics surrounding the genesis of the pandemic were fraught. President Trump called the coronavirus the Chinese virus. Critics accused him of stirring anti-Asian hatred. The study Chan coauthored swiftly made headlines. Coronavirus did NOT come from animals in Wuhan market, The Daily Mail on Sunday in Britain trumpeted.

The state-backed Chinese newspaper Global Times attacked Chan, saying her filthy behavior and lack of basic academic ethics have also aroused the disgust of many international experts, according to an account she translated for the Globe. Chan said she was accused of being a race traitor because of her Chinese heritage. She said she also received some quite terrifying e-mails and that Broad security guards were put on alert.

Fearing she had committed career suicide, Chan said she apologized to Deverman. He told her he still believed in what I wrote in the study, she recalled.

Deverman, who directs a vector engineering group at the Broad, declined to discuss his communications with Chan but called her fearless. He said he, too, was surprised by the blowback. To him, the study simply reported that no scenarios for COVIDs origin could be ruled out based on known scientific evidence.

Chan shows no signs of retreat in Viral. Indeed, she expands on her arguments and credits Internet detectives who combed online records for gathering important evidence. They include a group of activists called DRASTIC, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, which formed on Twitter and has pushed the lab leak theory.

Among the key evidence she cites is the virus that the Wuhan institute collected in 2013 in Yunnan province that shares 96.2 percent of the genomic identity of the virus that causes COVID. Researchers obtained the virus, known as RaTG13, a year after six workers at a bat-infested copper mine in the province fell ill with severe pneumonia caused by a SARS-like coronavirus. Three of the workers died. In September 2019, she writes, the institute took its pathogen database offline while studying that virus and eight similar ones.

The Wuhan institute has conducted experiments on coronaviruses. But Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese virologist at the lab, has repeatedly denied it was the source of SARS-CoV-2, telling The New York Times in June, How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?

Chan raises the possibility in her book that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon being developed in a lab, but then brushes that aside as a distraction. She writes, If the virus came from a laboratory, it is much more likely that it was a leak from experiments designed to understand viruses that pose potential pandemic threats.

Other scientists say theres a world of difference between two viruses that are 96.2 percent genetically identical.

Its not that close, said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. He noted that researchers recently discovered a virus in bats in Laos that is even more similar to SARS-CoV-2, as reported in September in Nature. The science has moved on, he said.

Worobey signed a second letter with 17 other scientists, including Chan and Deverman, that was published in Science in May that called for further investigation of COVIDs origins. Since then, he has grown more convinced that the virus jumped from animals to humans naturally, he said, most likely spreading from bats to raccoon dogs that researchers found were sold at the market.

Ridley, the coauthor of Viral, says Chan has played a crucial role in the debate. They talked on video calls for months and rewrote each others drafts, he said, but met in person for the first time on Wednesday in Kendall Square. Standing outside the Area Four pizzeria, they opened a box containing the first US edition of their book.

Ridley says he plans to donate half of his advance to charities. Chan says she will donate half of everything she makes on the book. Neither would say how much money they have received.

I felt very strongly about not profiteering, Chan said. It was never about the money for me. ... Its not like I can retire.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.saltzman@globe.com.

Continued here:

Broad Institute researcher wants to fade into obscurity, but first she hopes her COVID book is a bestseller - The Boston Globe