Category: Corona Virus

The global tally for the coronavirus-borne illness climbed above 225.8 million on Wednesday, while the death toll rose to 4.65 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. continues to lead the world with a total of 41.4 million cases and 663,936 deaths. Alaska has joined Idaho in announcing one major hospital is operating under "crisis standards of care," because it is overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, the New York Times reported. In Alabama, all ICU beds are occupied, and hospitals in other southern states are also dangerously low on space. The U.S. is still recording about 1,500 deaths from COVID every day, the most since winter, and cases are averaging more than 152,000. India is second by cases after the U.S. at 33.3 million and has suffered 443,497 deaths. Brazil has second highest death toll at 587,797 and 21 million cases. In Europe, Russia has most fatalities at 191,566, followed by the U.K. at 134,774.

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Coronavirus tally: Global cases of COVID-19 near 226 million and Alaska is latest state to ration care - MarketWatch

WASHINGTONPresident Biden met Wednesday with executives from companies including Walt Disney Co. , Microsoft Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. to advance his Covid-19 vaccination requirements for the private sector.

The White House meeting comes after a plan Mr. Biden announced last week designed to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, which includes vaccine requirements affecting roughly 100 million workers.

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Biden Meets With Top Executives on Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate - The Wall Street Journal

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) COVID-19 testing at a TestUtah site in Salt Lake City on Sept. 9. Nomi Health, which is fighting release of documents in Nebraska, Iowa and Utah, administers the TestUtah program.

| Sep. 12, 2021, 12:44 p.m.

| Updated: 8:43 p.m.

A coronavirus-related lawsuit filed in Nebraska that hinges on trade secrets and involves two Utah companies at the center of Utahs response to the pandemic will proceed.

The public records lawsuit seeks information that validated a diagnostic test provided by Orems Nomi Health for Nebraskas multimillion-dollar COVID-19 testing program.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Salt Lake Tribune board chair Paul Huntsman, seeks an unredacted copy of the validation report maintained by Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. The report affirms the tests process and technical aspects.

A Nebraska district judge ruled Thursday an expert witness can review the report and determine if it includes trade secrets.

Salt Lake City-based Co-Diagnostics, which is not a named party in the lawsuit, supplied the test.

Nomi Health, which partnered with Co-Diagnostics to provide the tests and is listed as an interested party in the litigation, has argued the lawsuit should be dismissed because the requested information contains trade secrets.

The lawsuit was filed against State Epidemiologist Dr. Matthew Donahue and maintains Nebraska, which released a copy of the report that was largely blacked out, has not provided proof of trade secrets that would justify redactions. At trial, which is set for Oct. 19, Nebraska state officials must prove the report includes trade secrets.

Huntsmans team has filed similar lawsuits in Utah and Iowa.

In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox is blocking the release of pandemic-related records, according to the complaint. The litigation in Iowa is centered on communication among state officials and their counterparts in Nebraska, Tennessee and Utah.

In his order, Nebraska District Court Judge Kevin R. McManaman said an expert witness may be called to review the validation report to determine if it includes trade secrets.

The lawsuit, which is funded by a limited liability corporation called Jittai that Huntsman started in March 2021 to obtain public records, stems from questions around Co-Diagnostics test results.

The tests were part of a tech-driven, publicly funded partnership between industry and government to expand testing and, eventually, vaccinations, that is known as TestUtah. Nomi received millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts to run the Utah program, which was then replicated in Nebraska, Iowa and Tennessee.

The tests accuracy has been contested since shortly after the Food and Drug Administration granted the test an emergency use authorization in April 2020. Co-Diagnostics has attracted the attention of federal authorities.

Utah state officials stopped using Co-Diagnostics test last summer, but Nomi is now running almost all of the TestUtah sites throughout the state, which is struggling to keep up with testing demand as the delta variant continues to surge here.

Suzette Rasmussen, a former staff attorney and chief records officer for then-Gov. Gary Herbert who is representing Jittai through her firm All Utah Law, said in an email that the lawsuit in Nebraska and other states have a common theme.

As the COVID pandemic swept across the country, we placed trust in our elected leaders to make decisions that protected our health and safeguarded public funds, she said. We fear that, too often, those elected leaders instead made decisions that enriched private partners, and that those private companies fell short in delivering the products or services they promised. The hard truth is that without record access, the details of these publicprivate deals will never come to light.

Even after record-access litigation is filed, companies who welcomed public funds often fight to hide the details of the deals they secured. The public should not be forced to rely on those companies own representations about the nature of the information theyve kept secret.

Robin Felder, a pathology professor at the University of Virginia, will review the validation report.

David Lopez, an attorney representing Nomi Health, said the lifesaving reliability and validity of Nomi Healths COVID testing platforms have been confirmed numerous times. Attorneys for Nomi Health have argued that release of the report serves no public purpose.

While the out-of-state backers of this litigation claim to be interested in the reliability of public COVID testing platforms, their lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to misappropriate trade secrets under the guise of a public records request, Lopez wrote via email. Any coverage that conflates trade secret protections with accurate COVID testing would be misleading and wrong, at a time when Utahns need those tests more than ever before.

Through a spokeswoman, the Nebraska Attorney Generals Office had no comment. Co-Diagnostics did not respond to a request for comment.

In a written statement, Huntsman, who is funding the multistate effort to release records related to the pandemic, said the courts decision to allow an expert to inspect information that has been withheld from public view strengthens Jittais dedication to shed light on sensitive decisions made by elected officials and their private partners.

Members of our communities have the right to understand how political decisions affect public health, he said, and taxpayers have the right to understand how public funds are spent.

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Coronavirus testing lawsuit inches toward trial, as Utah company tries to block it - Salt Lake Tribune

JERUSALEM More than 150 Israelis suspected of using fake negative coronavirus test results to board flights home after a pilgrimage to Uman, Ukraine, have been summoned for questioning by the Israeli police in accordance with a strict, new government directive.

Offenders could be charged with fraud, forgery and spreading disease in aggravated circumstances, the Ministry of Public Security warned in a statement this weekend criminal offenses that can lead to prison sentences of up to five years.

About 25,000 to 30,000 Israelis, most of them male Hasidic Jews, traveled to Uman to celebrate the Jewish New Year last week with a visit to the burial site of a revered 18th-century rabbi, Nachman of Breslav. Israels Health Ministry reported late last week that dozens of them had arrived back in Israel infected with the virus despite carrying documents indicating that they had tested negative.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennetts office said in a statement that it views with utmost gravity the entry of people with forged documents, willfully spreading a disease, adding that severe action would be taken against offenders.

Israel is one of the worlds most vaccinated countries, but its coronavirus caseload recently spiked to a pandemic high, according to the Our World in Data Project at Oxford University. Cases have dropped sharply over the past 10 days, which officials attribute to their rollout of booster shots to about a third of the population of nine million. Still, deaths have risen to about 42 percent of the countrys highest toll, which was reached in late January.

Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, a senior official in Israels Ministry of Health, told public radio that there were at least 1,500 verified cases among the more than 17,000 pilgrims who returned to from Ukraine on Thursday and Friday. The Ministry of Public Security said on Sunday that at least 154 of the recent arrivals had been summoned by the police for questioning after the end of their 10-day period of home quarantine.

Magen David Adom, Israels ambulance service, had set up two sites in Ukraine in cooperation with the Ukrainian Red Cross to offer rapid molecular tests for the returnees, one at the airport in the capital, Kyiv, and one near the rabbis tomb in Uman,. Negative results would allow them to board flights home.

The problem, Dr. Alroy-Preis said, was that some who tested positive at the sites hid their results, and acquired fraudulent negative PCR test results elsewhere. Some of those travelers, she said, canceled their direct flights back to Israel, aware that Magen David Adom would have passed their names on to the airlines. Instead, they arrived in Israel via connecting flights.

But the names of all those who had tested positive at the two sites in Ukraine were also known to Israels immigration authorities, enabling those travelers to be identified on arrival. Israel in any case does not rely on tests carried out abroad and anybody landing in Israel is tested before leaving the airport.

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Israelis Who Flew Into the Country Using Fake Coronavirus Test Results Under Scrutiny - The New York Times

Coronavirus today update: 35 more dead and more mush from the guv - Arkansas Times

On

Ill update if a daily COVID report surfaces, but here is the open line.

UPDATE:

I watched the governor again today on National TV saying mandates harden resistance and his gentle encouragement is better. Numbers dont lie, but maybe Asa does. We lag in shots because our state is committed to Trump idiocy and Asa, to preserve his viability in the political system, is too cowardly to speak up.

Darkansas!

The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping all aspects of life in Arkansas. We're interested in hearing from doctors, nurses and other health care workers; from patients and their families; from people in longterm care facilities and their families; from parents and students affected by the crisis; from people who have lost their job; from people with knowledge of workplaces or communities that aren't taking appropriate measures to slow the spread of the disease; and more.

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Coronavirus today update: 35 more dead and more mush from the guv - Arkansas Times

Denmark has lifted the last of its coronavirus restrictions, effectively declaring that the virus was no longer a critical threat to society and allowing the country to get back to a semblance of prepandemic normal.

This can only be done because we have come a long way with the vaccination rollout, have a strong epidemic control, and because the entire Danish population has made an enormous effort to get here, Magnus Heunicke, Denmarks health minister, said in a statement on Friday about the lifting of restrictions.

The Danish government announced late last month that it would allow the restrictions to lapse, and pointed to Denmarks high vaccination rates. As of Saturday, about 76 percent of the countrys population had received one dose of a vaccine, and 73 percent had been fully vaccinated, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

While the rules lifted on Friday allow Danes to go more freely about their lives, foreign travelers will still be subject to some restrictions, including presenting a negative coronavirus test upon arrival or possibly even isolating for 10 days, depending on where they are coming from.

The Danish government had been gradually easing its coronavirus restrictions for weeks, including lifting a public transportation mask mandate in mid-August. But the rules lifted this week included the expiration of the coronavirus passport requirement that it had in place for entry into venues like nightclubs.

Mr. Heunicke said that the Danish government would continue to monitor the pandemic, and that it would be ready to act quickly if the situation were to deteriorate.

Denmark was one of the hardest hit countries of Scandinavia, though its northern neighbor Sweden, which shunned hard lockdowns, fared far worse. But cases have fallen in both, and Sweden expects to loosen most of its restrictions starting at the end of the month.

By contrast, Norway, which like Finland had kept cases low through most of the pandemic, is experiencing is worst outbreak to date. However, deaths remain low thanks to Norways high vaccination rates 74 percent of the population have had at least one shot and 64 percent are fully vaccinated.

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Denmark Lifts the Last of Its Pandemic Restrictions - The New York Times

The latest:

Several COVID-19 outbreaks across Canada have marred the first week of back-to-school, prompting school closures and class cancellations.

In P.E.I., Dr. Heather Morrison has made the decision to cancel classes at several Charlottetown schools following six confirmed coronavirus cases among people under the age of 19.

On Saturday, the chief public health officer reported that a student at West Royalty Elementary had tested positive for COVID-19. Four of the new cases announced Sunday are considered close contacts of the case associated with West Royalty School.

"The situation at West Royalty Elementary School is considered an outbreak, the first school outbreak in P.E.I. since the pandemic began," Morrison said Sunday.

"We are erring on the side of caution, assuming the new cases are the highly transmissible delta variant."

Across the ConfederationBridge, Monday classes will be cancelled for Grade 11 students at Sugarloaf Senior High School in Campbellton, N.B., after a student tested positive.

Grade 11 students and their parents will be provided more information about the situation on Sunday, said superintendent Mark Donovan.

In Plaster Rock, N.B., allMonday classes at Donald Fraser Memorial School have been cancelled after two cases were confirmed.

The school says cleaning and contact tracing will be performed, and student should expect to return on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, at least 208 students in the Windsor area have been sent home from exposure to positive COVID-19 cases.

Four schools in the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board (WECDSB) reported cases Friday and one of those reported a second case Sunday. In total, 148 students have been told not to return to class in the last three days.

All schools remain open, according to the WECDSB's website.

Outbreaks have also been reported at several schools in Alberta, where about 2,000 people turned out to a rally in CalgarySunday to protest vaccine mandates and other public health measures.

Four Calgary schools have ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks. Other schools in the province are also affected: In the Medicine Hat school district, every school reported positive cases last week.

As of Sunday, more than224.4million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University's COVID-19 case tracking tool. The reported global death toll stood at 4.6 million.

In Asia,Bangladesh has reopened schools and other educational institutions after 543 days of closure as its virus situation eases and more people are vaccinated.Authorities decided to reopen after almost 97 per centof the country's teachers and staff have been vaccinated, the government says.

In the Americas,Los Angeles County school officials ordered vaccinations for all students aged 12 and over, becoming the largest school district in the United States to take that step.School board members voted unanimously to mandate the shots in the coming weeks, despite angry objections from several parents.

In Africa, schools in Egypt are scheduled to resume in-person classes next week, but rising cases are alarming authorities.Daily cases in the country the Arab world's most populous with 100 million people have been spiking in recent weeks since the more contagious delta variant was detected in the country in July.

In Europe,authorities in Britain have decided not to require vaccine passports for entry into nightclubs and other crowded events in England, Britain's health secretary said Sunday, reversing course amid opposition from some of the Conservative government's supporters in Parliament

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Coronavirus: What's happening in Canada and around the world on Sept. 12 - CBC.ca

Chronic neglect of the NHS, poor pandemic preparedness and flawed government policies have contributed to the appalling impact of the Covid-19 crisis in the UK, according to a damning assessment from the British Medical Association.

More than 130,000 people in the UK have died from coronavirus since the pandemic began, with non-Covid excess deaths up 12,000 last year, making the country one of the hardest hit among comparable nations, the doctors body said.

In a speech on Monday, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the BMAs chair of council, will warn that the country and NHS staff have never faced such a crisis before and urge ministers to take action to ensure the health service is better prepared to respond to pandemics in the future.

We will not accept a return to the old pre-pandemic NHS, which was so patently understaffed and under-resourced, where nine in 10 doctors are afraid of medical errors daily, he is expected to say. We will not accept an NHS running at unsafe bed occupancy and without spare capacity.

Before the pandemic, NHS bed occupancy was regularly above the 85% considered a reasonable safe threshold. While the NHS had 7.3 critical care beds per 100,000 people, Germany had nearly 34 per 100,000 as the crisis unfolded.

Further planning failures left the NHS with inadequate stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline staff, leading to last-minute orders of masks, visors and gowns that in some cases turned out to be unsafe or unusable.

Years of underfunding, inadequate facilities and nearly 90,000 staff vacancies meant the NHS was in crisis before coronavirus emerged, leaving it ill-prepared for the demands of the pandemic, Nagpaul is to argue at the BMAs annual representative meeting.

He will criticise ministers for dismissing calls for a rapid inquiry into the crisis, before the second wave of infections struck last year, meaning that crucial lessons from the previous six months were not learned. He will add that the ministerial mantra of living with Covid belies the reality that thousands of people continue to need hospital care for coronavirus with hundreds dying each week.

Despite warnings from senior doctors at the time, Boris Johnsons decision to lift coronavirus restrictions this summer contributed to almost 40,000 being admitted to hospital and more than 4,000 deaths since so-called freedom day on 19 July, the BMA said.

We will not accept an NHS in crisis every summer, let alone every winter, Nagpaul will add. We will not accept a nation bereft of public health staff, facilities and testing capacity, with ministers then paying billions to private companies who were unable to deliver.

In the past week, ministers announced substantial extra funding for the NHS, including money specifically targeted at easing backlogs in treatment. While welcoming the funds as an important first step, Nagpaul will urge the government to provide realistic projections as to how far the money will stretch and to acknowledge that the amount will not address the drastic shortage of NHS staff. The BMA estimates that the NHS has 50,000 fewer doctors than the EU average.

More than 4 million people were on the NHS waiting list in England in March 2020, the month the country went into its first Covid lockdown. That number has since risen to 5.61 million. The Nuffield Trust has said waiting lists could top 15 million people in four years without a significant increase in NHS trust capacity.

Last week, GPs in England said they were finding it increasingly hard to guarantee safe care for patients, as the shortage of doctors meant they could not keep up with the surge in demand. Prof Martin Marshall, the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), warned of a crisis in primary care after a 4.5% decrease in the number of GPs across England led to a risk of mistakes being made.

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BMA to issue damning critique of government over Covid crisis - The Guardian

Coronavirus today and the open line - Arkansas Times

On

The governor looks for a bright spot as 33 more Arkansans die. And he throws in more of his ineffectual wishful thinking. His approach gives aid and comfort to the likes of the high sheriff of Faulkner County, Tim Ryals, who says he has no intention of protecting his employees and the people they serve by requiring vaccination or testing. Lawman?

The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping all aspects of life in Arkansas. We're interested in hearing from doctors, nurses and other health care workers; from patients and their families; from people in longterm care facilities and their families; from parents and students affected by the crisis; from people who have lost their job; from people with knowledge of workplaces or communities that aren't taking appropriate measures to slow the spread of the disease; and more.

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Coronavirus today and the open line - Arkansas Times

Low-vaccinated communities continue to lead the state in weekly coronavirus case rates, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive found, underscoring how the delta variant is devouring the unvaccinated.

Oregon has seen cases fall from record levels set earlier this month. But new and presumed infections remain high, and the communities hardest hit continue to be almost exclusively in vaccine-resistant southern Oregon.

The ZIP code for Myrtle Creek in Douglas County led all of Oregon in coronavirus case rates for the week ending Wednesday, among ZIP codes with at least 40 new cases.

The area recorded 103 new or presumed infections per 10,000 residents, roughly double the worst rate for a community in the Portland area.

The vaccination rate in the Myrtle Creek ZIP code? A staggeringly small 38.2% among residents of all ages, far below the statewide average of 62.4%.

In fact, 11 of the 12 ZIP codes with the highest weekly case rates are all well below the statewide average for people at least partially vaccinated. Only the ZIP code for Lincoln City, along the Oregon coast, surpassed the statewide vaccination mark.

ZIP codes in southern Oregons Douglas and Josephine counties accounted for eight of the dozen areas with the highest weekly case rates. The ZIP codes generally run along the Interstate 5 corridor, including Roseburg, Grants Pass, Sutherlin and Winston.

Vaccination rates in each of those eight areas is below 50%.

While both ZIP codes for Grants Pass made the list of jurisdictions with the highest case rates, one of those, the 97526 ZIP code, led all of Oregon in total new cases regardless of population. It posted 256 cases for the week ending Wednesday, more than double the highest total from a ZIP code in the Portland area.

The list of ZIP codes with high new cases also skews heavy along I-5 in southern Oregon, including Medford, Roseburg, but it also includes parts of Salem. And it features Bend and Redmond in central Oregon, too.

State health officials for months have been saying the summer surge is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and Oregons record-breaking case counts flooded hospitals. More people with COVID-19 died in August than in all but two other months of the pandemic, and September could be worse.

Officials for the Oregon Health Authority did not respond to a request for comment to the newsrooms analysis comparing case rates with vaccination rates. But Patrick Allen, the agencys director, released a separate statement Thursday about the states mounting death toll, saying it marks a failure of our collective responsibility to take care of each other.

He said Oregonians could prevent more people from dying by taking simple steps to stop COVID-19 from spreading.

The COVID-19 vaccines are extremely safe and effective at preventing serious illness and death from the virus, including the delta variant, he said in the statement. I urge every Oregonian who can to get vaccinated and wear your masks when youre in public places inside and outdoors.

-- Brad Schmidt; bschmidt@oregonian.com; 503-294-7628; @_brad_schmidt

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Coronavirus spread remains stubbornly high in these Oregon ZIP codes - oregonlive.com