Category: Corona Virus

The city of Los Angeles is expanding the number of mobile vaccination clinics in communities hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Thursday.

The city will increase to 10 its number of so-called mobile equity sites: vehicles that go into high-density, low-income communities, staffed to provide vaccinations, Garcetti said. The goal is to have all 10 in the field by the end of March, the city said in a news release.

Were seeing still disproportionately low vaccination rates among many of our Black and Latino populations and communities, a reflection not only of historic distrust and community trauma, but also the structural barriers that stand between too many Angelenos and their access to vaccines, Garcetti said Thursday at a news briefing. We need to tear those barriers down.

The announcement comes after data released earlier in the month by Los Angeles County showed that Black, Latino and Native American residents 65 and overwere receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at a lower ratethan their white, Asian American and Pacific Islander counterparts. The report showed that 17% of white, 18% of Asian and 29% of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander residents 65 and over had received at least one dose, compared with only 14% of Latino, 9% of Native American and 7% of Black residents 65 and older.

Read the full story atLATimes.com.

Original post:

L.A. to expand mobile vaccination clinics in areas hardest hit by coronavirus - KTLA

LONDON In the coming weeks, a small, carefully selected group of volunteers is expected to arrive on the 11th floor of a London hospital to be given what the rest of the worlds 7.8 billion people have been trying to avoid: a coronavirus infection.

They will be administered tiny droplets of the virus into their nostrils as part of a plan authorized by British regulators on Wednesday to deliberately infect unvaccinated volunteers with the coronavirus.

The scientists hope to eventually expose vaccinated people to the virus as a way of comparing the effectiveness of different vaccines. But before that, the projects backers have to expose unvaccinated volunteers in order to determine the lowest dose of the virus that will reliably infect them.

By controlling the amount of the virus people are subjected to and monitoring them from the moment they are infected, scientists hope to discover things about how the immune system responds to the coronavirus that would be impossible outside a lab and to develop ways of directly comparing the efficacy of treatments and vaccines.

We are going to learn an awful lot about the immunology of the virus, Peter Openshaw, an Imperial College London professor involved in the study, said on Wednesday. He added that the study would be able to accelerate not only understanding of diseases caused by infection, but also to accelerate the discovery of new treatments and of vaccines.

The idea of such a study, called a human challenge trial, has been hotly debated since the early months of the pandemic.

In the past, scientists have deliberately exposed volunteers to diseases like typhoid and cholera to test vaccines. But infected people could be cured of those diseases; Covid-19 has no known cure, putting the scientists in charge of the British study in largely uncharted ethical territory.

To try to ensure that participants do not become seriously ill, the British study will be restricted to healthy volunteers in the 18 to 30 age range.

But there have been severe Covid-19 cases even in those types of patients, and the long-term consequences of an infection are also largely unknown. The age restrictions also may make it difficult to translate the findings to older adults or people with pre-existing conditions, whose immune responses might be different and who are the target group for treatments and vaccines.

It will be a limited study, said Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading who is not part of the study. And you could argue that, by definition, its not going to study those in whom its most important to know whats going on.

For now, the only part of the study to be formally authorized by British regulators is the experiment to determine the lowest dose of virus needed to infect people.

After being exposed to the virus, the participants will be isolated for two weeks in the hospital. For that and the years worth of follow-up appointments that are planned, they will be paid 4,500 pounds, or about $6,200. The researchers said that would compensate people for time away from jobs or families without creating too large an economic incentive for people to participate.

Feb. 17, 2021, 10:09 p.m. ET

When the idea of human challenge trials was first floated last year, some scientists saw it as a way of shaving off crucial time in the race to identify a vaccine. Unlike in large clinical trials, in which scientists wait for vaccinated people to encounter the virus in their communities, researchers in this project would eventually purposely infect vaccinated people.

Now that several vaccines have been authorized, the goals of this human challenge trial are somewhat different.

For now, the researchers will expose people to the version of the virus that has been circulating in Britain since last spring, and not the more contagious and potentially deadlier variant that has taken hold more recently. But eventually, they said, they could give people experimental vaccines designed to address the effect of new, worrisome variants and then subject them to those versions of the virus.

They could also directly compare different vaccine doses and dosing intervals for the same vaccine.

And once the pandemic wanes and there are fewer hospitalized patients to enroll in drug trials, the scientists behind the study said that additional such trials where people are directly infected would allow them to continue investigating new treatments.

In the future, we wont have large numbers of people you can do studies on in the field, said Robert Read, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Southampton, who helped design the study.

Infecting unvaccinated people with even low doses of the virus could yield important insights, said Andrew Catchpole, the chief scientific officer at hVIVO, a company specializing in human challenge trials that is involved in the study.

As intensely as the coronavirus has been studied, relatively little is understood about how peoples immune systems react in the immediate aftermath of being infected.

Nor do scientists yet know the specific type or level of immune responses that are necessary to completely protect most people from infection, a clue to how the dozens of vaccines that are still being studied will perform against the virus.

One of the things we dont understand is what is a truly protective response, said Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick Medical School, who is not involved in the study. Its a good way of understanding the host-pathogen interaction, though it does come with a whole heap of ethical issues, obviously.

In the first part of the study, the scientists will administer tiny doses of the virus to a small cohort of volunteers. If they do not become infected, the scientists will give slightly bigger doses to a different group of volunteers, repeating the process in up to 90 participants until they have determined the right dose.

By this spring, the scientists hope to repeat a version of their experiment by exposing vaccinated people to the virus. The British government, which is helping fund the study, will help choose the vaccines. Those and other future stages of the trial would require new regulatory approvals.

There has been no shortage of interest among potential volunteers in these types of trials, with thousands of people around the world registering their interest with 1Day Sooner, a group that advocates human challenge trials as a way of speeding the development of enough vaccines to inoculate people in parts of the world still waiting for doses

It is not clear how drug regulators in Britain or around the world would evaluate results from a human challenge trial, given the age restrictions and the small numbers of people involved.

But Dr. Catchpole said Britains drug regulator had indicated it would take any of the groups findings into consideration as it evaluates future vaccine candidates.

With the virus now acquiring dangerous mutations, one question facing the scientists is whether they will be able to keep up with its evolution.

Just as making new vaccines takes time, so does manufacturing new viral particles to infect people. Dr. Catchpole said that it would take the researchers three or four months to make a new coronavirus variant in a lab before they could begin putting droplets of it into the noses of volunteers.

Read the original post:

U.K. Approves Study That Will Infect Volunteers With Covid - The New York Times

One early feature of reporting on the coronavirus pandemic was the perception that sub-Saharan Africa was largely being spared the skyrocketing infection and death rates that were disrupting nations around the world.

While still seemingly mild, the true toll of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, on the countries of sub-Saharan Africa may be obscured by a tremendous variability in risk factors combined with surveillance challenges, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine by an international team led by Princeton Universityresearchers.

Although reports of the toll of SARS-CoV-2 in sub-Saharan Africa have to date been generally low in comparison to other regions, we must account for the extreme national and subnational variability in drivers of the pandemic across this region, said first author Benjamin Rice, a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton.

Precise projections forsub-Saharan Africancountries remain difficult given a lack of information on the prevalence of risk factorssuch as chronic diseases and access to healthcare, Rice said. But he and his co-authors synthesized a wide range of information on risk factors and trends in infection for sub-Saharan Africa from Feb. 25 to Dec. 20, 2020.

The researchers then developed an interactive online tool that shows the impact that different risk factors such as rates of chronic disease, the local population density of physicians, and the percentage of an urban population living in crowded housing might have on the trajectory of the pandemic.

The researchers also developed a set of simulations to evaluate the role of different drivers of viral spread. Their results showed that climatic variation betweensub-Saharan Africanpopulation centers had little effect on early outbreak trajectories.

That finding is consistent with research that Rices co-authors Rachel Baker, an associate research scholar in Princetons High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), and C. Jessica Metcalf, a Princeton associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and public affairs and associated faculty in HMEI, have published suggesting that climate conditions in the summer and winter would have a minimal effect on coronavirus during the pandemic phase. Baker, Metcalf and many of the current studys authors are affiliated with the HMEI Climate Change and Infectious Disease initiative.

The Nature Medicine paper also found that differences in connectivity, although rarely considered, are likely an important contributor to differences in how the virus has spread across sub-Saharan Africa, said co-author Fidisoa Rasambainarivo, an HMEI postdoctoral research associate based in Madagascar.

These results could allow officials to anticipate what might happen in their countries given the varying contexts of human-movement networks and health across sub-Saharan Africa, Rasambainarivo said.

The researchers developed national and sub-national analyses that indicated specific settings where strengthening coronavirus surveillance could yield the greatest returns, Metcalf said. An urgent focus in sub-Saharan Africa is developing a better understanding of the intersection between the pace of the epidemic and the likelihood of disruptions to local and national health systems, which in many areas are already fragile.

These results underscore the importance of developingtools such as serology to better measure susceptibilityin order to directly evaluate the current situation and landscape of risk, Metcalf said.

Additional Princeton authors on the paper include postdoctoral research associate Marjolein Bruijning and Ph.D. candidates Malavika Rajeev and Ian Miller, all in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

The paper also included authors from the University of Antananarivo and the University of Fianarantsoa in Madagascar, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the University of Southampton, the Research Institute for Development and the University of Paris, Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The paper, Variation in SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks across sub-Saharan Africa was published online Feb. 2 by Nature Medicine. This work was supported by the Cooperative Institute for Modelling the Earth System (CIMES), the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

Read the rest here:

True toll of coronavirus on sub-Saharan Africa may be obscured by tremendous variability in risk factors and surveillance - Princeton University

Orange Countys coronavirus numbers continue to improve, as the county has now met one of the three metrics required to move from the states most restrictive, widespread purple tier for reopening to the less restrictive, substantial red tier.

The Orange County Health Care Agency reports that the countys test positivity rate has fallen to 7.8%. That figure is a seven-day average and comes with a seven-day lag. Counties in the red tier must have a positivity rate between 5% to 8%.

However, the county has a way to go to satisfy the other two requirements: an adjusted daily case rate of four to seven people per 100,000, and a health equity quartile positivity rate of 5.3% to 8%. The health equity quartile measures rates of infection with the virus in the countys most disadvantaged communities.

Orange Countys adjusted daily case rate is 20.7 per 100,000 people, and the health equity quartile rate is 10.7%.

We havent seen any spikes so far from the Super Bowl, so thats good news, Orange County Executive Officer Frank Kim told the City News Service this week.

Kim said the county has one foot in the red tier, and another firmly planted in purple still.

Counties have to meet the requirements for a less restrictive tier for two weeks before moving to that tier. Last fall, Orange County was in the red tier, under which places like movie theaters and gyms can be open indoors with modifications.

The county opened a new COVID-19 vaccination site on Wednesday at Santa Ana College. The appointment-only operation runs Tuesday through Saturday and aims to vaccinate 1,000 people who live in high-risk communities, like Santa Ana and Anaheim, per day.

Qualified individuals living in the identified high-risk communities will receive an appointment, according to a news release.

The healthcare agency reported 27 new deaths due to COVID-19 on Wednesday, bringing the countys overall death toll to 3,644 people. There were 166 daily positive coronavirus tests received, and 243,329 cases countywide have now been recorded to date, including deaths.

There are 719 patients hospitalized, and 235 of those are in intensive-care units.

Here are the latest cumulative coronavirus case counts and COVID-19 deaths for select cities in Orange County:

Here are the case counts by age group, followed by deaths:

Updated figures are posted daily at occovid19.ochealthinfo.com/coronavirus-in-oc. Information on the COVID-19 vaccine in Orange County can be found at occovid19.ochealthinfo.com/covid-19-vaccine-resources.

Support our coverage by becoming a digital subscriber.

Read more:

Red tier could be in sight as Orange County coronavirus metrics improve - Los Angeles Times

Three sailors aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier that was the center of a contentious outbreak last spring, have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Navy officials.

The sailors, who tested positive on Sunday, were not experiencing any symptoms and were placed in isolation on the ship, which remained fully operational, the Navy said in a statement on Monday.

The ship is following an aggressive mitigation strategy in accordance with Navy and C.D.C. guidelines to include mandatory mask wearing, social distancing, and proper hygiene and sanitation practices, the statement said.

Last March, the Theodore Roosevelt docked at the naval base in Guam, an American territory in the Pacific, as it contended with a fast-spreading outbreak among its crew of 4,800. For weeks the warship battled the virus that infected at least 585 crew members, including one who died of complications stemming from the coronavirus.

As the ship struggled with the infections in its close, shared quarters, Capt. Brett E. Crozier, the ships commander at the time, sent a four-page letter to 20 Navy officials pleading for help, criticizing the Navys failures to provide the proper resources to contain the outbreak by moving sailors off the vessel.

In the letter, Captain Crozier pushed for moving nearly the entire crew off the vessel, and then quarantining and testing them while the ship was professionally cleaned.

We are not at war, Captain Crozier wrote. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset our sailors.

After the letter was leaked, Thomas B. Modly, the acting Navy secretary, fired the captain before an investigation was conducted, prompting widespread criticism, including from Navy officials. Videos of the crew cheering and shouting Captain Crozier as he walked off the ship immediately went viral.

Under fire, Mr. Modly later resigned.

More here:

U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt Has New Coronavirus Outbreak - The New York Times

Since December, planes have been taking off and landing at Cancun International Airport every five minutes. It is high season in the Mexican seaside resort on the Caribbean coast. Lufthansa expanded its schedule and added the Mexican tourist hotspot in October despite COVID-19.

Tourists from Europe and North America are flocking to the beaches and standing in line to admire the Mayan pyramids. Hotel and restaurant owners are relieved. It seems the pull of a sandy beach is enough to eclipse alarming press reports about crowded intensive care units and rising infections in Mexico, where 174,000 people have died from COVID-19 so far. According to the latest preliminary statistics from the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), Mexico was Latin America's most visited destination in 2020, moving up to third place worldwide, after Italy and France.

The reasons for this are manifold. Mexico never closed its borders and is still one of the few countries in the world that does not require a negative PCR test upon entry. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has ruled out lockdowns, instead putting the economy first. Another reason is the fact that Mexican migrants came home to visit their families at Christmas time.

But the UNWTO statistics don't necessarily tell the whole story. Michael Hall is the Canadian co-founder of the 10Gates Matrix Inc. consulting firm, which specializes in travel data. He's been advising authorities and entrepreneurs in the industry in Mexico for 30 years, and told DW that they also "included the pre-pandemic months of January to March 2020 that count as high season in Mexico."

Despite ranking third in the UNWTO statistics, the slump was marked in Mexico, too. According to the Inegi statistics institute, 2020 saw almost 48% fewer visitors and 55% less foreign exchange revenue compared to the previous year. The fact that the sector survived is remarkable unlike in Germany, there were no subsidies for foundering airlines and tour operators. In fact the Mexican government closed down the national tourism marketing agency shortly before the pandemic to save money.

But as Hall explains, regional authorities and tourism associations have stepped into the breach. "As early as summer 2020, hotels on the Caribbean coast had certified hygiene concepts, the likes of which we don't even have in Canada," he said, adding that gave travelers confidence. Face masks are a requirement in the state of Quintana Roo, where Cancun is located just a three- to four-hour flight away for Canadians and US citizens, which means the risk of contracting COVID-19 on a flight is lower. According to UNWTO, the majority of foreign visitors came from these two countries.

Mexico was the world's third most visited country in 2020

Many doctors consider the opening risky and blame tourism for the rise in infections in vacation destinations. Official statistics showed rising numbers in February, but infections were still fewer than in the hotspots around Mexico City and in central Mexico.

Domestic tourism was another decisive factor, a lucrative market in a country with 127 million inhabitants. Mexican visitors helped cushion the slump in international business.

Meinolf Koessmeier runs the Mexico Adventures agency in Cuernavaca that organizes motorcycle tours for Mexicans in Europe. In 2020, his business survived because he offered local tours. He hopes business will return to normal in 2022.

"There's a lot of interest in nature-based vacations," he said, adding that motorcycle manufacturers all over the world enjoyed record sales in 2020, and buyers were now just waiting for an opportunity to hit the road.

Hall agreed that consumers are feeling a travel itch and said the survey showed that Americans, in particular, were optimistic again and "hoping to travel in the next 6 months thanks to vaccinations."

All the same, the sector is unlikely to see a quick recovery. Canada and the US have just imposed stricter travel requirements on returnees due to the new virus mutations, including negative PCR tests and stricter quarantine regulations. In response, major Mexican airports immediately offered PCR testing modules, and even some hotels are providing the service.

According to Hall, the pandemic is a chance for Mexico to offer more sustainable tourism. Mass check-ins and city trips are out of the question in the medium term, he said and countries like Mexico, with its vast countryside and natural beauty, may very well benefit in a post-COVID world.

Read the original post:

Coronavirus: Tourism thrives in Mexico against the odds - DW (English)

We're making this important information available without a subscription as a public service. But we depend on reader support to do this work. Please consider supporting independent journalism in Alaska, at just $1.99 for the first month of your subscription.

Visit Healthcare COVID-19 tester Sarah Alexie prepares to take a nasal swab at the Municipality of Anchorage's newest testing site at 4700 Elmore Road that opened on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021. (Bill Roth / ADN)

The latest case count is the lowest it has been since Sept. 7, when 34 infections were reported, and is part of a trend of steadily declining cases over the last few months.

Alaska saw a surge of infections in November and early December that strained hospital capacity before leveling off.

Hospitalizations in Alaska have declined along with cases, and are now less than a quarter of what they were during the peak in November and December. Wednesday marked the first day in more than 230 days that the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage had zero patients with active COVID-19 infections, the hospital said in a statement.

The Alaska Native Medical Center reported on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, its first day with zero patients with active COVID-19 infection in 230 days, since July 3, 2020. (Bill Roth / ADN)

By Wednesday, there were 31 people with COVID-19 in hospitals throughout the state, including two who were on ventilators. Another patient was suspected of having the virus.

The COVID-19 vaccine reached Alaska in mid-December. By Wednesday, 130,997 people nearly 18% of Alaskas total population had received at least their first vaccine shot, according to the states vaccine monitoring dashboard. Thats far above the national average of 11.9%.

Among Alaskans 16 and older, roughly 23% had received at least one dose of vaccine by Thursday, and 58% of Alaskans 65 and older had received a shot. The Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for use for people ages 16 and older, and Modernas has been cleared for use by people 18 and older.

Health care workers and nursing home staff and residents were the first people prioritized to receive the vaccine. Alaskans older than 65 became eligible in early January, and the state further widened eligibility criteria last week to include educators, people 50 and older with a high-risk medical condition, front-line essential workers 50 and older and people living or working in congregate settings like shelters and prisons.

Those eligible to receive the vaccine can visit covidvax.alaska.gov or call 907-646-3322 the number is staffed 9 a.m.-6:30 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. on weekends to sign up and to confirm eligibility.

Despite the lower case numbers, public health officials continue to encourage Alaskans to keep up with personal virus mitigation efforts like hand-washing, mask-wearing and social distancing. A highly contagious variant of the virus reached Alaska in December.

Of the 37 cases reported among Alaska residents on Wednesday, there were nine in Anchorage, 13 in Wasilla, six in Fairbanks, one in Cordova, one in Seward, one in Soldotna, one in North Pole, one in Utqiagvik, and one in Ketchikan.

Among communities with populations under 1,000 not named to protect privacy, there were three in the Kusilvak Census Area.

Three cases were also identified among nonresidents: one in Anchorage and two in Unalaska.

While people might get tested more than once, each case reported by the state health department represents only one person.

The states data doesnt specify whether people testing positive for COVID-19 have symptoms. More than half of the nations infections are transmitted from asymptomatic people, according to CDC estimates.

Of all the tests conducted over the past week, 2.42% came back positive. Health officials have said that a test positivity rate over 5% can indicate not enough testing and high rates of community spread.

View post:

Tracking COVID-19 in Alaska: 40 cases and 1 death reported Wednesday - Anchorage Daily News

An increasing number of COVID-19 patients are dealing with lingering symptoms months after their initial bout with the coronavirus, and Gwyneth Paltrow just revealed shes one of them. In a new post published on Goop, the 48-year-old actress revealed she had been diagnosed with COVID-19 early on.

It left me with some long-tail fatigue and brain fog. In January, I had some tests done that showed really high levels of inflammation in my body, she wrote, adding that she sought help from a functional medicine practitioner. After he saw all my labs, he explained that this was a case where the road to healing was going to be longer than usual.

While many people can expect to recover a within a couple of weeks after falling ill with COVID-19, one preprint study found that about 43% of 233 participants who mainly had a mild case of the virus had symptoms that lasted longer than 30 days, while nearly 25% still had at least one symptom after 90 days.

Studies suggest that people who experience symptoms for 12 weeks or more have what is now known as post-COVID syndrome (but many experts say anyone who has chronic symptoms for at least a month after a coronavirus infection should reach out to their doctor).

These people are commonly referred to as long haulers, and they can experience a vast array of symptoms and side effects, from debilitating fatigue and shortness of breath to memory problems and heart palpitations, according to a survey conducted by Survivor Corps, a Facebook group for coronavirus survivors, and Natalie Lambert, Ph.D., of Indiana Universitys School of Medicine.

Among the reported lingering symptoms, fatigue and brain fog seem to be fairly common. In one preprint study, researchers examined 128 people who had COVID-19 and found that more than half of them experienced persistent fatigue 10 weeks after the initial onset of their symptoms.

Many patients who have post-COVID syndrome also show signs of dysautonomia, or a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (which helps keep your involuntary functions going, like your heart rate and breathing). Dysautonomia affects blood flow, including blood flow to the brain, so it can cause fatigue, headaches, brain fog, and exercise intolerance, Greg Vanichkachorn, M.D., medical director of Mayo Clinics COVID Activity Rehabilitation Program, recently told Prevention.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Researchers also believe that lingering COVID-19 symptoms may be linked to high levels of inflammation in the body, which Paltrow reported having in January. Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo, previously told Prevention that a novel coronavirus infection causes inflammation in multiple organsthe heart, kidneys, gastrointestinal tract, and sometimes the central nervous system. It takes time to recover from that.

Per the recommendation of her practitioner, Paltrow has made a few diet changes, including cutting back on sugar and alcohol and adding certain supplements into her daily routine. (Naturally, she plugged plenty of Goop products in her post.)

But above all, she is simply taking it easy so her body has time to rest. Everything Im doing feels good, like a gift to my body, she wrote. I have energy, Im working out in the mornings, and Im doing an infrared sauna as often as I can, all in service of healing.

Go here to join Prevention Premium (our best value, all-access plan), subscribe to the magazine, or get digital-only access.

FOLLOW PREVENTION ON INSTAGRAM

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Read the rest here:

Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals She Had COVID-19 Early on, and Shes Still Dealing With Symptoms - Prevention.com

What about the cases that appeared before the outbreak in the seafood market?

There was other spread going on outside of Huanan market. There are other patients who have no links to the market, quite a few in December. There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets. We need to do some further work, and then the Chinese colleagues need to do some further work.

When we sat down as a group, the China team and the W.H.O. team on the last full day of work, and said, Lets go through the hypotheses, the one that received the most enthusiastic support was this pathway wildlife, through a domesticated wildlife link, into Wuhan.

What is the next step?

For the animals chain, its straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. Youve got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. Youve got to test them. Youve got to test the community. Youve got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if theyve got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement. If the virus is in those southern border states, its possible that theres been some movement across neighboring countries like Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar. Were finding more and more related viruses now. Theres one in Japan and one in Cambodia, one in Thailand.

For the human side, look for earlier cases, for clusters; look in blood banks for serum, if possible. Anything like this is going to be sensitive in China, and its going to take some persuasion and diplomacy and energy for them to do that because, to be honest, looking for the source of this virus within China is not a great, high priority I think for the Chinese government. Anywhere this virus is shown to emerge is a political issue. Thats one of the problems, and that is clear and obvious to anyone who has been looking at this.

Do you have a particular animal that you suspect right now as an intermediate link, more strongly than others?

Its too up in the air. We dont know if civets were on sale. We know they are very easily infected. We dont know what the situation is with the mink farms in China or the other fur farms, like raccoon dogs, even though theyre normally farmed in a different part of China. That needs to be followed up on, too.

But if you were to say which pathway would you put the most weight on, I think the virus emerging either in Southeast Asia or Southern China from bats, getting into a domesticated wildlife farm. Ive been to many of these, and they often have mixed species civets, ferret badgers, raccoon dogs. Those animals would be able to get infected from bats.

Follow this link:

W.H.O. Researcher Seeking Coronavirus Origins on His Trip to China - The New York Times

(WBNG) -- Broome County Executive Jason Garnar is expected to hold a coronavirus briefing Wednesday afternoon.

In Garnar's briefing on Feb. 17, he said a large portion of deaths in the county occurred in nursing homes. The nursing home with the most deaths in the county is Willow Point. More than 50 people have died from the virus.

The number of active cases in the county has dropped significantly in the past week. According to the Broome County COVID-19 Trackeron Feb. 17, there were 825 active cases, and as of Feb. 16 there were 570 active cases. Active cases have dropped by 255 in the past week.

According to theNew York State COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker,the Southern Tier has received 105,035 total doses (1st and 2nd), administered 99,349 total doses (1st and 2nd), and has administered/received 95% doses (1st and 2nd).

The Broome County rapid testing site it located at New Life Ministries at 201 Hill Ave. in Endicott until Friday, Feb. 19, and is open from 1 to 7 p.m.

Tune in to 12 News tonight at 5, 5:30, and 6 p.m. for the latest and check our website for updates.

Link:

Garnar to hold weekly coronavirus briefing (Feb. 17) - WBNG-TV