Category: Corona Virus

Massachusetts announced Friday that it is issuing a new mandatory travel order effective Aug. 1 requiring all visitors and residents returning to the state from high-risk areas, including students, to quarantine for 14 days or produce a recent negative COVID-19 test result

The fine for violating the order is $500 a day.

You can read the full order below:

Link:

READ THE ORDER: Massachusetts Issues Strict Coronavirus Travel Restrictions - NBC10 Boston

Thousands of Texas prisoners are stuck in limbo during the public health disaster, approved for parole yet still sitting inside disease-prone lockups as the coronavirus rages across the state.

Many have been waiting six months or longer for release. During that time, Texas has seen more state prisoners die with the virus than any other state prison system in America.

Theyve been told theyre still behind bars because theres nowhere to send them, they need to finish a life skills program or they cant leave until the new coronavirus is done and over with, according to prisoners responses to questionnaires sent by advocacy groups. Sometimes the prisoners arent told anything at all, the elation of winning parole morphing into dread as they watch prison coronavirus infections and deaths rise.

Some of these people were eligible [for release] months and months and months ago, and theyre still there, said Jorge Renaud, southwest regional director of policy and advocacy for LatinoJustice, one of the advocacy groups. They are putting these people at risk unnecessarily.

In May, more than 15,000 Texas prisoners had been approved for parole but were not yet released, according to records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Thats about 12% of the state prison population. About 4,300 prisoners had been granted parole at least six months earlier.

Parole releases are never immediate, and its a common requirement for prisoners to first undergo in-prison education or rehabilitation programming before their release. But the coronavirus has delayed some of those classes and also pushed back release for an unknown number of people who have already completed such programming or never needed to take it.

Jon Reynolds, an inmate at the geriatric Pack Unit, where state attorneys say at least 19 men have died with the virus, testified in federal court last week that he finished his board-required programming in May but has remained in the highly infected prison. He said thats because the units parole officer, who approves housing plans, hasnt been there. State attorneys questioned if his delay was instead because his housing plan was not adequate, but Reynolds denied that.

People are still getting sick over and over, the 51-year-old said at a videoconference trial in a case over TDCJs handling of the pandemic. Im not understanding what it is that is keeping TDCJ from letting people go that have already completed their program.

Other inmates whose required programming was unavailable at their prisons had to wait months while transfers between units were stopped to limit the virus spread. And units confirmed to have active infections nearly 3,000 inmates had recently tested positive at dozens of prisons Wednesday are locked down, restricting activity within and halting movement in and out of them, including releases into the free world.

A TDCJ spokesperson said that although the agency cant release inmates during lockdowns, it has started directly releasing inmates at prisons without known infections to family instead of first moving them to a transfer facility. He added that he did not think any prison had been consistently restricted since the virus first hit the prison system in March, saying most cycled on and off lockdown, which allows for some releases. Several units have been on lockdown because of the virus for more than a month at a time, according to agency reports.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, there became more and more issues with the way that we would normally transport folks, spokesperson Jeremy Desel said. We move to process them as quickly as we can, but theyre still going to need to uphold whatever conditions are set.

More than 13,500 of about 130,000 TDCJ inmates have tested positive for the coronavirus as of Wednesday, according to agency reports. At least 94 have died with it, the highest death toll in the country among state prison systems. The virus has also infected nearly 2,900 prison employees and killed 14 people who worked in state lockups.

But despite continued pleas from inmates, their loved ones and advocates for immediate release of those who are granted parole during the public health disaster, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has repeatedly said it has not changed how it makes parole decisions. A board spokesperson said Wednesday that parole approval rates rose in the last year to an average of about 39%, but state data indicates a slight decrease in the average rate since March. The board still sets release dates far in the future or requires monthslong, in-prison programming before an inmate can be released.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who oversees the board, said in March that releasing dangerous criminals wasnt the answer to controlling the virus in prison hot spots and has since remained silent on the issue. A spokesperson has not responded to repeated questions, including on Wednesday, on whether his stance changed as cases and deaths have risen behind prison walls.

Renaud said he and other advocates plan to push in the 2021 legislative session for required parole programming, like drug rehabilitation, to be permitted in the community instead of in prison. For Donald Mickens, that would mean his wife would be home with their children.

Mickens wife, serving a three-year stint out of Galveston County on a probation violation, was approved for parole in October. But the 41-year-old first had to complete a six-month drug rehabilitation program, Mickens said. That meant sending her to another unit, according to Mickens, a move that was delayed for months until June because of a halt in unit transfers as the virus swept through the system.

Now she's there and they're not even doing the classes, they're just giving them paperwork underneath the door, he said, because of a lack of counselors at the unit. ... Shes struggling real bad in there because shes so scared shes going to get [the coronavirus].

For Kambri Crews, programming on the outside may have allowed her to say goodbye to her dying father in person instead of on a hard-fought FaceTime call.

Theodore "Cigo" Crews, 73, died in a prison hospital earlier this month after a late cancer diagnosis, 30 days after hed been granted parole after serving 18 years. His daughter believes the harsh conditions and poor food inmates get in coronavirus lockdowns quickened his death. She said he lost 15 pounds from May to June.

He would have died anyway, but it would have been nice for him to die in the free world, Crews said.

Her father was required to take a drug and alcohol program first, she said, but she didnt understand why he couldnt have taken classes any other time in his nearly two decades behind bars, or outside with her.

Inmates who are set to leave on parole and arent required to take programming have been stuck as well during the pandemic. Long-awaited release dates are taken off the calendar when units go on or extend the medical lockdowns, and the parole board has set release dates far in the future, to the dismay of prisoners loved ones.

Debra Boyds son won parole in May, with the caveat that he first had to undergo the prisons life-skills program. The three-month class which Renaud and other prison reform advocates criticize on its effectiveness focuses on managing stress, time and money, and personal assessments. To try to hasten his homecoming, Boyd informed the parole board that her 41-year-old son had already completed the program months earlier.

His parole condition was changed after her phone call so that her son could be released without completing a program but not until January.

It was real exciting, she said, when she first learned her son was approved for parole, even if he had to redo the program. Then when everything switched around to January, its like, Oh my god, what has happened?

The boards chief of staff, Timothy McDonnell, said Boyds sons release was never intended to be before 2021. His release was first set to be after he completed the three-month program, which the board directed to begin in November at the earliest, McDonnell said. A future release date for parole approvals is often issued when the parole panel wants the inmate to serve more time, but not necessarily as long as it would take for the next parole review, he said.

With the second week of trial nearing an end, TDCJ continues defending itself in a case that questions whether the agency adequately protected inmates at the Pack Unit. State attorneys argued that the question of parole, which inmate Reynolds raised in his testimony, was irrelevant to the case since the lawsuit focuses on how TDCJ protects inmates. But advocates and epidemiologists have said for months that releasing inmates and reducing the prison population is the most effective strategy to promote social distancing and keep infections from spreading like wildfire among prisoners and into the community.

There was two ways to go, said Renaud. Either kick everybody out who is on parole or not let anybody go and not take anybody in and hope that little by little that the disease would just wear itself out, that it would just burn out.

Read the original:

Coronavirus is keeping Texas inmates approved for parole in prison - The Texas Tribune

Chicago's Little Village neighborhood is 80% Latino and has one of the highest rates of positive coronavirus cases in the city. Across the US, states reporting racial data show overwhelmingly high rates of infection within the Latino population. (May 20) AP Domestic

The coronavirus continued rampage through the southern and western United States is almost certain to leave an especially deadly trail among Latinos, who not only represent a significant percentage of the population in those regions but often face structural conditions that make them more vulnerable.

A new study published Thursday, the first nationwide analysis of COVID-19 cases and deaths among Latinos, concludes that crowded housing arrangements and high-risk jobs in industries like meatpacking, poultry and hospitality are among the major reasons Latinos have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

We had some structural challenges that were there before the pandemic,''said Carlos Rodriguez-Diaz, the study's lead author, "and the pandemic is highlighting those problems.

R-0 may be the most important scientific term youve never heard of when it comes to stopping the coronavirus pandemic. USA TODAY

Looking at the data available through May 11, the study found Latinos accounted for a much higher number of COVID-19 cases than their percentage of the population in the Northeast,Midwest and West.On a national basis, reports cited by the study indicated Latinos accounted for 33% of the cases even though they make up just under 18% of the population.

A New York Times analysis based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released after a lawsuit was filed shows 73 of every 10,000 Latinos contracted the virus, compared to 62 Blacks and 23 whites.

As the virus extracts a heavy toll on California, Texas and Florida the three states with the largest Latino populations the death count among the countrys biggest minority group could be staggering.

My prediction is that its very likely because the policies and practices that are needed to prevent infections and deaths are not in place, said Rodriguez-Diaz, who's an associate professor of prevention and community health at George Washington University. There is nothing that gives us hope that it would be different.

A boy receives a free COVID-19 test at a St. Johns Well Child & Family Center mobile clinic set up outside Walker Temple AME Church in South Los Angeles amid the coronavirus pandemic on July 15, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. A clinic official said most of the residents they are currently testing in their South L.A. clinics are Latinos. According to the California Department of Health, Latinos are currently 2.9 times more likely than white people to test positive for the coronavirus. California reported over 11,000 new coronavirus infections today, the most in the state in a single day since the pandemic began.(Photo: Mario Tama, Getty Images)

Rodriguez-Diaz and his colleagues found other factors that contribute to putting Latinos at increased risk of developing COVID-19, like a lack of access to health care and living in areas with high levels of air pollution, especially in the Northeast.

One of the studys most surprising findings was the Midwest, where only 4% of the counties are predominantly Latino,was the one region where their coronavirus-related deaths were higher than their representation.

We found access to health care was harder in the Midwest, so its very likely people only accessed care when they felt really bad, and as the disease progresses it gets more difficult to manage, Rodriguez-Diaz said. Theres also the fact they need to continue working.

Think twice: Rethinking college, or at least fall semester, during coronavirus? You risk not graduating

And often in unsafe jobs. According to the CDC, 87% of the workers at meatpacking plants where social distancing is extremely difficult are minorities, more than half of them Latinos. Through the end of May, there had been more than 16,000 infections and 86 worker deaths at those facilities, the CDC said.

Large plants in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Minnesota had to close because of outbreaks.

John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, an expert on public health and Latino social movements who teaches history at Texas State University, was not taken aback by the high incidence of Latino mortality due to COVID-19 in the Midwest.

In Midwest counties, theyre being recruited by meatpackers and living in really crowded conditions, Mckiernan-Gonzalez said.

He has observed a somewhat similar phenomenon in his home city of Austin, where mostly Latino construction workers have contracted the virus at a high rate. In his own neighborhood, Mckiernan-Gonzalez said he noticed a house meant for five to seven people is home to as many as three families, with perhaps 12 of them construction workers.

Deacon Jose Garza presides over the burial service for Mark Anthony Urquiza at Holy Cross Cemetery in Avondale, Ariz. on July 8, 2020. Urquiza of Phoenix, died June 30, of COVID-19. He was 65. (Photo: David Wallace, Arizona Republic)

Construction jobs often dont include health insurance or sick days, prompting employees to go to work when theyre ill. Living in close quarters, one infection could quickly spread. Another consideration: Undocumented Latinos may be reluctant to seek health care for fear of being discovered and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, making it even more likely they could unwittingly transmit the virus.

Rodriguez-Diaz said organizations in Latino communities need more resources so they can provide information on prevention and access to care to help stem the pandemic. Mckiernan-Gonzalez said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should establish COVID guidelines for employers.

Moreover, Mckiernan-Gonzalez said there needs to be an outreach to the communities of color that have been so harshly impacted by the virus so they feel like part of the group effort to curb the spread.

It would help to have hospital directors, mayors, churchgoers coming out and saying, If you have COVID-19, it isnt just you who has it, its a whole community. So please come into the hospital and get treated so you dont pass it on to other people. Well make sure you will be safe in the hospital, Mckiernan-Gonzalez said. That should be made clear every time, that in pandemic times we cant have ICE lurking in the hallways in hospitals.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/23/coronavirus-pandemic-toll-latino-communities-may-get-deadlier/5499268002/

See the rest here:

Coronavirus pandemic tearing through Latino communities and it may get worse - USA TODAY

Broadway theaters and museums that tourists would flock to are still closed. The United States has banned travel from China, Brazil and much of Europe. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has ordered a quarantine for visitors from 31 of the countrys states.

Four months after New York City shut down to combat the coronavirus, its vital tourism industry remains essentially paralyzed even as the city struggles to kick-start its moribund economy.

The enormous challenge the city faces was on vivid display when the Statue of Liberty reopened on Monday. Instead of carrying the usual throngs of visitors from around the world, the first boats to the island that holds the statue ferried more journalists than paying customers.

Times Square, typically gridlocked with visitors, was nearly as lonesome. Its not that happening, said Swathi Roja, who lives in Washington, assessing the so-called Crossroads of the World. Maybe Im not getting the real New York City.

New Yorks abrupt lockdown in March came just before the annual onslaught of tourists as the weather begins to warm. Officials had been expecting more than 67 million visitors in 2020, about one-fifth of them from outside the country.

Now the citys tourism officials have been left wondering how they will ever revive an industry that brought in about $45 billion in annual spending and supported about 300,000 jobs.

Not since the grim days of the 1970s, when crime was rampant, the subway was in disarray and boarded-up storefronts were abundant, has promoting New York to out-of-towners seemed so daunting, said Jonathan M. Tisch, chief executive of Loews Hotels and former chairman of NYC & Company, the citys tourism marketing agency.

There are all kinds of challenges that are going to make our jobs of rebuilding tourism and New York Citys economy even tougher, said Mr. Tisch, who worked the front desk at one of his familys hotels as a college student in the 1970s.

He said the process of rebuilding the citys image as a safe and fun place to visit would take a lot of time and help from the state and city government. Along with rhetorical support from elected officials, hotels and restaurants are seeking tax breaks and rent relief.

We can survive this, Mr. Tisch added.

Mr. Tisch is one of dozens of leaders of tourism-dependent businesses who have been devising plans for the industrys recovery from its longest and steepest slump in memory. The situation is unlike the citys brief shutdown after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 because Americans felt a patriotic urge then to help the city heal, he said.

Two nights after the attacks, on Sept. 13, shows resumed at all 23 Broadway theaters.

But this time, with confined indoor spaces making it easier for the virus to spread, the theaters plan to remain dark until next year. Without the shows that serve as the citys thumping heart, hundreds of hotels and restaurants in Manhattan are simply trying to survive 2020.

The perception is that if Broadway is closed, New York City is closed, Mr. Tisch said.

In the second week of July, the occupancy rate of New York City hotels was just 37 percent, according to STR, a research firm. That is down from more than 90 percent in recent summers.

We think its too soon to encourage travel and invite folks to come back in, said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of NYC & Company. He said that for the past four months the city had had no tourism to speak of and that he was not even guessing how many visitors it would tally for the year.

So, instead of promoting the city in international capitals and other faraway places as it typically does, the agency is narrowing its focus to New York and its surrounding areas.

This month the city introduced a campaign themed All In NYC that was created by Aruliden, a Manhattan marketing firm, to stir interest among local residents in exploring the city and seeing some of its sights.

The strategy is similar to one being employed by Paris, which is encouraging its own residents to tour the city without the usual hordes. Paris is yours is the theme of that campaign.

But even a scarcity of tourists may not be enough of a lure to get jaded New Yorkers to venture to the citys famous attractions. Local residents were nowhere to be found among the few visitors to the Statue of Liberty on Monday morning.

For now, the city may have to rely on people like Shin Roldan, 31, and her new husband, Keith, 30. The couple, who live within commuting distance in Morristown, N.J., were having a honeymoon of sorts a few months after a pandemic wedding in their backyard, Ms. Roldan said.

Despite the citys continuing ban on indoor dining, they said they were enjoying their stay in a Midtown Manhattan hotel. They had already ridden the tram to Roosevelt Island in the East River and planned to go to the observation deck atop the Empire State Building, which had just reopened.

Updated July 23, 2020

We can take a lot of pictures, just the two of us, with nobody else in the pictures, Mr. Roldan said. Thats always a problem in New York.

The fourth phase of the citys reopening, which started Monday, was a mixed blessing for Brad Hill, whose company operates the concessions on Liberty Island and nearby Ellis Island. It allowed him to bring back more than 100 employees who had been laid off since mid-March. But with so few tourists, being open again was a losing proposition, he said.

Just a few days before, Mr. Cuomo had upended his plans by excluding museums from the list of places that could reopen. That ruled out Ellis Island, whose main attraction is its exhibits on immigration and archives that visitors can search for records of their relatives.

Mr. Hill said he had spent about $60,000 preparing the dining areas and gift shops on the two islands to accept customers in a socially distant manner. Now he was no longer planning to hire more than 150 seasonal workers for the summer.

Mr. Hill said he was having flashbacks to the recovery from past shutdowns of the statue, after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The only problem with this one is there are no tourists, he said.

Kate Fone and her family, visiting from Haverhill, Mass., saw the statue from a passing tour boat before it reopened. She, her husband and son made a spontaneous trip to take advantage of the low prices and lack of crowds.

They were staying in an Airbnb rental on Fifth Avenue that was a real good deal, she said as she stood outside St. Patricks Cathedral.

Some intrepid travelers made longer treks in defiance of Mr. Cuomos quarantine rules.

Shea Ellis, 33, and Tony Green, 34, drove to New York from Talladega, Ala., a state on Mr. Cuomos list, with his three children. Ms. Ellis, a business manager, said she was undaunted by the spreading virus.

Its all over the country, she said. I havent been worried about it.

Mr. Green, a truck driver, added, You cant just stop your life.

They said they liked the lack of traffic in Manhattan but were disappointed that so much of the city like the 9/11 Memorial Museum, was still closed.

You dont get the real experience, she said.

Abigail Valle made an even longer haul with her nephew, Hazael, and her mother. Taking a break from posing at the base of the Statue of Liberty, she said they had driven 48 hours straight from their home in Azusa, Calif., to see relatives in Brooklyn.

I just wanted to see it in real life, she said of the statue.

After a week in the city, they were heading back on the road Monday night, Ms. Valle said. Next stop: Las Vegas.

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

Read more here:

Coronavirus Flushed Tourists From New York City. Will They Ever Come Back? - The New York Times

Breden said Denver Public Schools has done a lot of planning at the high school level for core subjects like math, English and science but she hasnt seen as much coordination around art and music, which typically involves the sharing of supplies or instruments.

The state has advised cohorts as just one precautionary step districts should take for students to return to school during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Alexis Burakoff, a medical epidemiologist with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

What we're hoping is that schools can limit the number of people that each student and staff member interacts with ideally to kind of one closed group so that if there is an illness among a member of that group, it's very clear who has been exposed, she said.

Summer child care is an example Burakoff used to compare the potential spread of COVID-19. If a positive case was found in places where staff and children mixed freely throughout a daycare, the entire location had to stop operations and every individual had to quarantine. In cases where children and staff were around the same 10 people in a single classroom, then only those 10 people had to quarantine for 14 days and the rest of the daycare could run as normal.

Our hope is that by using this strategy, we are both minimizing the spread of disease because we're limiting the number of contacts that each person has, but also really minimizing disruptions to schools, Burakoff said.

As an added layer of defense, the state also asks districts to have people wear face masks and practice social distancing, too.

Burakoff gets how cohorts are a challenge logistically, especially for older students, but she said its important for schools to be creative in how they strategize with things like block schedules.

We understand that this cohorting does not extend to what people do at home and on the weekends, et cetera, and so the best thing we can do is just continue to educate our communities about being safe outside of school hours, she said. What it can really do is help the response in the event that there are illnesses in school, which we know that there will be.

Sarah Christensen Fu of Centennial, a parent of three kids who attend STEM School Highlands Ranch, is fortunate to work from home and have the flexibility to choose how her kids get their education this year. Although the school has an option to do in-person learning or a hybrid of virtual and in-person, Christensen Fu said her kids would be doing online only.

With this pandemic spiking, schools being reopened just seems really rushed, she said. I do feel like most of the people I know are really excited to get their kids back to routine and so I feel like a little stodgier, like a nervous Nellie Going all into a big building seems like a bad choice.

Her 11-year-old son isnt happy about the decision. Christensen Fu said it feels like a choice between her kids seeing their friends or their grandparents.

Nicole Gates, the mother of two boys in Littleton Public Schools, also works from home and wants to get back to the normal routine. She realizes, however, that may not be an option this year.

There's part of me that thinks if we just have to put the school year on hold and it starts in January after a vaccine is available or if they say, Hey, your kid's going to graduate a year later than you thought because this school year, we can't figure it out and we don't know how to keep everyone safe, I'm fine with it, she said. This is a pandemic. We haven't seen anything like it in a hundred years.

So far, her family hasnt come in contact with the virus even with her sons participation in summer activities like baseball and hockey. While it would be nice to send her kids to school a couple of times a week in small groups, Gates understands why teachers would be concerned about their safety and possible exposure.

How do you feel about Colorado schools reopening? Tell us.

Go here to see the original:

What Is Cohorting? And Is It The Cure For Colorado's Coronavirus School Worries? - Colorado Public Radio

NEIDL has been working with live samples of the coronavirus since March, when it received a sample that was derived from the U.S.s first diagnosed case: a thirty-five-year-old man in Washington State who had recently returned from Wuhan. But its staff had been making plans to investigate the virus since January, when early reports of its rapid spread convinced them that it would proliferate worldwide and lead to severe outbreaks in the U.S. They immediately began writing protocols for using the virus and submitting requests for approval from B.U. In March, institutions at B.U., including NEIDL, received 1.9 million dollars in funding from the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, part of a hundred-and-fifteen-million-dollar grantcordinated by the Dean of Harvard Medical School and financed by a Chinese investment fundto support researchers working in the Boston area and Guangzhou.

In the U.S., most of the B.S.L.-4 labs are in government or military facilities, but NEIDL, despite its origin as part of a federal initiative, operates on an open academic model. We work with absolute transparency, its director, Ronald Corley, told me. We have to have the trust of the public, so everything we do is known and communicated freely. In the past two years, Corley, a lanky microbiologist in his seventies, has recruited fourteen scientists to join the center, looking for researchers with a wide range of expertise. The staff of NEIDL and its affiliates includes experts in the basic biology of the deadliest pathogens, in animal models that can be used to mimic the progress of human diseases, and in effective treatments and potential vaccines. Corley believes in giving them the freedom to pursue their hunches without being micromanaged. From the outset, he organized the centers COVID-19 research on the presumption that it would be, as recent evidence has borne out, an evolving targetand that progress would more likely come from a cluster of approaches than from a single breakthrough.

Since Donald Trump took office, his Administration has worked to systematically disassemble key elements of federal pandemic planning. In 2018, it largely disbanded the National Security Council unit responsible for pandemic preparedness, which was formed during the Obama Administration, after having ignored the councils playbook for fighting pandemics. It removed Rick Bright, from his job as a Health and Human Services official in charge of vaccine development, after he submitted a three-hundred-page complaint about the Administrations coronavirus response. Most recently, the White House directed the National Institutes of Health to cut off federal grant funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization headquartered in New York that studies the global spread of viruses from animals to humans, and which collaborated on research about coronaviruses with researchers based in China.

But some aspects of the countrys pandemic planning have managed to survive, in large part because they were designed as enduring homes of scientific inquiry into the most dangerous biological threats. NEIDL was conceived to be at once independent of politics and ready to respond in a cohesive way to a national emergency. Its approach represents the polar opposite of the warp speed language popularized for the public.

Theres lots of good work going on across the globe, Corley said. Theres also a lot of junk, because people are rushing. The issue is not just sloppiness; laboratories are inherently artificial environments, and even the most careful work can yield apparent breakthroughs that turn out to be artifacts of the experimental process. When a virus infects human cells grown in a lab, it can mutate slightly. It is possible to spend years developing a therapy for an altered form of a pathogen only to find that that therapy brings no benefit to patients. Corley and his team have been sequencing the genes of their virus samples repeatedly as they work, in order to make sure that the pathogen is not morphing into a form that no longer corresponds with what was originally retrieved from the Seattle patienta time-consuming, but necessary, precaution.

As Corley led me on a tour of the facility and introduced me to its researchers, I got a sense of NEIDLs institutional preference for care over speed. Anthony Griffiths, a virologist and an Ebola expert whose focus is on animal modelling, stated the value of deliberate science plainly. I learned lessons from Ebola. I understand speed, he told me. But, if you do science in a rush, you are at risk of going down the garden path. Griffiths hopes to use observations of the progress of the disease in animal hostsgenetically manipulated mice, golden Syrian hamsters, and rhesus monkeysto learn about its mechanisms and to test possible treatments. This could help determine how much virus has to be present to cause infection, and what the routes to inoculation might be, with the aim of uncovering the dynamics of human immunity against the coronavirus. I would love to be first, but were not going to be, he told me. But we want to put ourselves in the best position to do the kind of work that can help understand the performance of the vaccine, and what its limitations may prove to be.

Griffiths works closely with Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at Boston Medical Center who is an expert in emerging pathogens. In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, she was part of a W.H.O. team that treated patients and training local caregivers. Part of her role is to draw the attention of NEIDL scientists to evolving and unexplained clinical findings of COVID-19, such as those that Fauci highlighted, so that they investigate them in the laboratory. For example, she has observed patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, then repeatedly tested negative, and then tested positive again. Have they become reinfected or has their immunity waned? she said. Or were they just shedding virus from the initial infection? With scientists at NEIDL, she is working to take a chronological sequence of virus samples from such patients. Genetic analysis can show whether a patient was carrying the same pathogen at different times, or whether the virus mutated in a way that outflanked the persons immune response. This work will ultimately make it easier to assess the likely potency of prospective vaccines. Bhadelia has also noted that some patients who were not terribly sick, meaning they werent in the I.C.U, nonetheless appear to have residual problems with cognition. Such persistent effects could potentially be modelled in animal studies at NEIDL.

Rob Davey, an Australian microbiologist with a wry sense of humor and hyperkinetic way of talking, is an expert on discovering novel treatments for pathogens. In 2018, while he was working with the biotech company Regeneron, Davey helped identify a kind of antibody that successfully treated Ebola in animal test subjects by latching onto viral proteins and blocking the microbe from entering cells. These antibodies ultimately became treatments for patients with the infection. Since he began working on COVID-19, he has been looking for agents with the potential to disrupt the progress of the disease. He is currently screening almost seven thousand chemicals that he obtained from the Broad Institute (the joint HarvardM.I.T. enterprise that specializes in assembling large libraries of chemical compounds), along with an additional thirty-two hundred provided by B.U. Some of these compounds are drugs already in use for illnesses including diabetes, hypertension, and migraine. If Daveys screening process indicates that one of them has potential as a COVID-19 treatment, testing on patients could follow quickly, since they already have F.D.A. approval.

Visit link:

The Long Game of Coronavirus Research - The New Yorker

TheWest Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) reports as of 10:00 a.m., on July 24,2020, there have been 251,565 total confirmatory laboratoryresults received for COVID-19, with 5,653 total cases and 103 deaths.

In alignment with updated definitions fromthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the dashboard includes probablecases which are individuals that have symptoms and either serologic (antibody)or epidemiologic (e.g., a link to a confirmed case) evidence of disease, but noconfirmatory test.

CASESPER COUNTY (Case confirmed by lab test/Probable case):Barbour (28/0), Berkeley (579/19), Boone(67/0), Braxton (8/0), Brooke (42/1), Cabell (243/9), Calhoun (5/0), Clay(17/0), Fayette (111/0), Gilmer (14/0), Grant (37/1), Greenbrier (82/0),Hampshire (55/0), Hancock (80/4), Hardy (49/1), Harrison (152/1), Jackson(153/0), Jefferson (273/5), Kanawha (641/12), Lewis (24/1), Lincoln (38/1),Logan (66/0), Marion (146/4), Marshall (93/1), Mason (38/0), McDowell (13/0),Mercer (79/0), Mineral (87/2), Mingo (77/2), Monongalia (791/15), Monroe(18/1), Morgan (24/1), Nicholas (22/1), Ohio (217/0), Pendleton (25/1),Pleasants (5/1), Pocahontas (39/1), Preston (93/21), Putnam (132/1), Raleigh(118/4), Randolph (199/3), Ritchie (3/0), Roane (12/0), Summers (2/0), Taylor(35/1), Tucker (7/0), Tyler (11/0), Upshur (34/2), Wayne (166/2), Webster(3/0), Wetzel (41/0), Wirt (6/0), Wood (208/11), Wyoming (15/0).

As case surveillance continues at the local health department level, it mayreveal that those tested in a certain county may not be a resident of thatcounty, or even the state as an individual in question may have crossed thestate border to be tested.

Pleasenote that delays may be experienced with the reporting of information from thelocal health department to DHHR.

Please visit thedashboard at http://www.coronavirus.wv.gov for more detailed information.

Read the rest here:

COVID-19 Daily Update 7-24-20 - 10 AM - West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources

Despite the sharp uptick in cases he acknowledged and a US death toll that now exceeds 142,000, Trump declared that "it's all going to work out. And it is working out."

He suggested children do not transmit the coronavirus, though early evidence suggests children can and do. He attributed the recent rise in cases in part to racial justice protests, though early evidence suggests the protests did not cause a spike, and in part to migration from Mexico, though there is no evidence for this either.

Trump also claimed that he has done more for Black Americans than anyone else with the "possible exception" of President Abraham Lincoln. That is transparently ridiculous.

Here is a look at some of Trump's claims and the facts behind them.

Trump suggests Mexico to blame

In assigning blame for the uptick in coronavirus cases, Trump also suggested that Mexico was responsible, even though public health officials haven't publicly made this same accusation.

"Likely also contributing were also sharing a 2,000-mile border with Mexico, as we know very well, and cases are surging in Mexico, unfortunately," Trump said on Wednesday.

Referring to his proposed US-Mexico border wall, Trump added, "It was really meant for a different purpose, but it worked out very well for what we're doing right now and the pandemic."

Facts First: Trump didn't provide any evidence to back up his claims, and the nation's top public health officials aren't blaming Mexico for the US pandemic. Also, cases are spiking in states that don't share a border with Mexico -- like Florida, Louisiana and Idaho -- undercutting Trump's implication that border-crossers are bringing the disease into the US en masse. It's worth noting that the virus first flared in places such as Washington State, New York and New Jersey, thousands of miles away from the Mexican border.

After the briefing, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta said there isn't medical evidence supporting Trump's assertions. "I don't think there's any data specifically on Mexico," Gupta said. "We actually looked up to see if there was any data on that, and I didn't find any."

There is also a logic problem with Trump's comments. On one hand, he's blaming Mexico for the US spike. But he's also saying that the border barriers have successfully kept out the virus.

Kids transmitting the virus

During Wednesday's briefing, Trump continued to advocate for schools opening in the fall. In support of this he claimed that "a lot of people" say children "don't transmit" coronavirus.

"They don't catch it easily, they don't bring it home easily," Trump added. "And if they do catch it, they get better fast."

According to one recent study from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children between 10 and 19 years old may transmit coronavirus just as much as adults.

"Although the detection rate for contacts of preschool-aged children was lower, young children may show higher attack rates when the school closure ends, contributing to community transmission of Covid-19," the study said.

As a result, even though children appear to be affected less commonly or severely than adults, returning to school still poses certain risks.

Protests and the rise in cases

Trump said there were a "number" of causes for the recent spike in coronavirus cases. He cited some uncontroversial possible contributors, such as Americans returning to bars and increasing their travel.

The first cause he listed, though, was the racial justice protests that swept the country following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May.

"Cases started to rise among young Americans shortly after demonstrations...which presumably triggered a broader relaxation of mitigation nationwide," Trump said.

Obama and Chicago

CNN's Kaitlan Collins noted that in 2016 Trump said that it was President Barack Obama's fault that homicides were up in Chicago. She questioned Trump, "Why was it the President's fault then and not your fault now?"

Trump claimed that Obama "was invited in and he did a poor job. President Obama could've gone into Chicago. He couldn't have solved the problem and he didn't."

Since his early days in office, Trump has suggested sending the National Guard to curb gun violence in Chicago. Chicago's history with the National Guard is tumultuous, most notably during the 1968 Chicago riots and later at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Chicago wants a federal presence in the city

After Trump announced plans to send a "surge of federal law enforcement" to Chicago this week after the city experienced more gun violence, he claimed that Chicago will "want us to go in, full blast."

"I think in their own way they want us to go in, full blast. There will be a time when they're going to want us to go in full blast, but right now we are sending extra people to help. We are arresting a lot of people that have been very bad," the President said.

Facts First: This is an overstatement and needs context. The mayor of Chicago, who has a testy relationship with Trump, has cautiously welcomed federal law enforcement into the city to help combat its gun violence, but noted that federal agents were not welcome to "terrorize our residents."

But by Tuesday, Lightfoot cautiously embraced Trump's federal law enforcement to help combat Chicago's gun violence so long as the agents remain focused on gun violence.

Trump and Black Americans

But Trump's response to Biden's assertion was also wrong.

Facts First: While we give Trump lots of latitude to express opinions, this one is simply ridiculous even if he is only comparing himself to previous presidents and excluding other Black heroes. It's absurd to say Lincoln is a "possible" exception; emancipating the slaves was obviously more important for Black Americans than anything Trump has done. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, monumental bills whose impact dwarfed the impact of any legislation Trump has signed.

CNN's Andrea Kane contributed to this fact check.

Visit link:

Fact check: Trump falsely suggests kids don't transmit coronavirus and that US case surge is due in part to protests and Mexican migration - CNN

Dr. Glenn Lopez administered a standard test for the coronavirus to Daniel Contreras at a mobile clinic in South Los Angeles last week. Though highly accurate, such tests can take days or more to process. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption

Dr. Glenn Lopez administered a standard test for the coronavirus to Daniel Contreras at a mobile clinic in South Los Angeles last week. Though highly accurate, such tests can take days or more to process.

Anybody who has waited for hours in line for a coronavirus test, or who has had to wait a week or more for results, knows there has to be a better way. In fact, the next generation of tests will focus on speed.

But what should the Food and Drug Administration do with a rapid test that is comparatively cheap but much less accurate than the tests currently on the market? A test like that is ready to go up for FDA approval, and some scientists argue it could be valuable despite its shortcomings.

At first blush, you wouldn't want a medical test to be pushing out untrustworthy results. And that's certainly the case for a medical diagnosis. But rapid test could be valuable if used to screen large numbers of people for infection repeatedly and frequently.

For example, some of the rapid tests under development don't detect the virus in a person who is in the early or late stages of infection they only catch an infection at its peak. Dr. Michael Mina at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health says that's OK, under certain circumstances.

"As long as you're using the test on a pretty frequent basis," Mina says, "you will be more likely than not to catch the person on the day they might go out and transmit. And they'll know to stay home."

To be useful, such tests need to be widely available and affordable, he says. "I envision a time when everyone can order a pack of 50 tests for $50 and have those and use them every other day for a couple of months."

When it comes to controlling the epidemic, that could be an appealing alternative to the current laboratory-based system, an overburdened process that has become a serious bottleneck. These days, some people are waiting a week or more for results, and by then they have potentially spread the virus to others.

Highly accurate at-home tests are probably many months away. But Mina argues they could be here sooner if the FDA would not demand that tests for the coronavirus meet really high accuracy standards of 80 percent or better.

A Massachusetts-based startup called E25Bio has developed this sort of rapid test. Founder and Chief Technology Officer Irene Bosch says her firm has field-tested it in hospitals. "What we learned is that the test is able to be very efficient for people who have a lot of virus," she says.

It's nowhere near as good at detecting low levels of virus. But you can have the most sensitive test in the world, she says, and if you only test people once a month, that test, too, will miss a lot of people who are infected. So, her company is focusing on quick, easy and cheap.

"These are very simple strips," she says. "They're [like] miniaturized pregnancy tests. So, you can imagine you can't find anything more simple than this."

The sample for this test would come via a swab of the nose or mouth. Results would be available within 15 minutes, according to the manufacturer. Most important is the price.

"The test has to be affordable. It cannot work if it's not affordable," Bosch says. "Right now it might cost $3 to make it [or] $4 to make it. So affordable will be what it costs."

E25Bio would like to set the price at cost, though for the start-up company to stay in business, Bosch says, the test would need a government subsidy. The company has a local partner that's poised to produce a million of these tests a week, she says, adding that another company in the United Kingdom is poised to produce 8 million tests a day.

E25Bio has asked the governor of Massachusetts to approve the rapid test for sale not for use at home just yet, but in pharmacies and out in the community.

To bring people back to work, or teachers and students back to the classroom safely, "this is the kind of test you need," Bosch says.

The company would like to pair the test with a smartphone app. The app would take a photo of the test result and upload it to a public database. The information would be stripped of personal details and precise location, but if people volunteered to take this step, she says, the public could crowdsource information about the spread of the coronavirus that would be useful to researchers. The information would also be available to public health authorities.

The company is in talks with the FDA about approving this test, even though it would be a departure for the federal agency, which has so far required a higher level of accuracy.

She isn't sure how the FDA is responding to the company's request. "This is a Pandora's box and this like is a black box," she says with a laugh.

In other words, the FDA doesn't want to take an action that backfires, and it also doesn't tend to reveal its thinking as it deliberates. The FDA told NPR that the agency weighs the benefits and risks of all coronavirus tests, but didn't elaborate on its thinking about this novel testing strategy.

"There's always a tradeoff here. There's no free lunch," says Trevor Martin, chief executive officer of the Bay Area biotech startup, Mammoth Biosciences. His company is also making a rapid test, based on the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Though CRISPR is best known for its ability to edit DNA, part of that process involves pinpointing specific sequences. And by targeting the coronavirus' genetic sequence, this approach can be highly accurate, he says.

"Our goal is to have a test that delivers extremely high-quality results with a single test. The same as you would get in a lab, or better," Martin says.

His company's test isn't likely to be on the market until the end of the year, which seems like the distant future, considering the pace of the epidemic. He agrees tests need to be affordable, but he didn't name a price range for the test.

Martin says precision has a place in controlling the epidemic, too. A test that can detect very low levels of virus is more likely to pick up someone with a mild infection, even in the absence of symptoms. And that's "super important if you want to prevent spread," he says.

Other labs are pursuing tests based on CRISPR as well. And two companies have temporary approval by the FDA to sell a rapid test that detects certain proteins antigens from the coronavirus. These antigen tests are less accurate than the standard PCR tests, which detect genetic material from the virus. The average wholesale price for antigen tests is in the $20 range. Such tests are currently in limited supply, and available at hospitals, medical clinics and some doctor's offices.

It's unlikely that there will be one single testing solution for the coronavirus, and the best blend of approaches is still a work in progress.

You can contact NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.

Follow this link:

How An At-Home Test For COVID-19 Could Help Control The Pandemic : Shots - Health News - NPR

By Spencer Custodio | 16 hours ago

While it seems that the number of people hospitalized for Coronavirus in Orange County stabilized this week, there is concern that daily death counts seem to be creeping up, now well into the double digits with 22 people reported as killed by Covid on Thursday.

Orange Health Care Agency officials on Thursday also confirmed that they are increasingly transferring Covid patients from hospitals into skilled nursing facilities.

Editors Note: As Orange Countys only nonprofit & nonpartisan newsroom, Voice of OC brings you the best, most comprehensive local Coronavirus news absolutely free. No ads, no paywalls. We need your help. Please, make a tax-deductible donation today to support your local news.

An unknown number of Orange Countys coronavirus hospital patients have been moved to long term care facilities and skilled nursing facilities as hospitalization numbers ticked up the past couple weeks.

Yes, hospitalized COVID-19 positive patients are being discharged to long term care facilities. The OC Health Care Agency (HCA) does not track individual transfers. However, when a hospitalized COVID-19 positive patient is transferred to a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF), that patient would be subtracted from the hospitalized count (by the sending hospital) and added to the SNF count via the state daily reporting, HCA staff said in a Thursday email.

A daily situation report from the county Office of Emergency Medical Services on Thursday shows theres been an increase of over 500 virus-positive patients in skilled nursing facility cases since the beginning of the month to 1,837 cases. The report doesnt note which cases are transfers and which ones are virus cases originating from the facilities.

At a Thursday news conference, OC interim health officer Dr. Clayton Chau said he hasnt heard of any surges at the skilled nursing facilities.

In normal times, Chau said, a patient gets into an acute hospital and the next level of care that they need is a skilled nursing facility, then the hospital, as well as the family and their insurance company, will try and find a skilled nursing facility that is appropriate to place people.

As far as I know, I have not heard any surge in skilled nursing facilities, Chau said. Ive not heard staff reporting that weve had an issue yet.

UC Irvine epidemiologist Andrew Noymer said the transfers to nursing facilities could explain why hospitalizations are remaining relatively steady.

So that could explain why all the hospital numbers looked like they plateaued, Noymer said in a Thursday phone interview.

But, Noymer said, the deaths continue to increase.

Theres no shirking the deaths, I mean 22 deaths today, Noymer said. I know the death reporting is clunky but the seven-day average is 2.1 percent per day.

When deaths are reported, they can span a window of up to eight days, the Health Care Agency notes on its website.

So thats the number that Ive been watching and Ive been doing seven-day averages precisely so we dont go crazy over single day jumps because those are just reporting issues, Noymer said.

Meanwhile, the virus has now killed 543 people out of 32,648 confirmed cases, according to the county Health Care Agency.

There are 690 people hospitalized, including 233 in intensive care units.

Over 380,000 tests have been conducted throughout OC, which is home to roughly 3.2 million people.

Dr. Paul Yost, whos an anesthesiologist at St. Josephs Hospital in Orange, said it would be helpful to know how many hospital cases are transferred to skilled nursing facilities so the overall picture of the countys healthcare system can be better understood.

Yost, the CalOptima board chairman, also noted the current system wasnt designed for a pandemic.

Our whole healthcare system is not designed something like this a pandemic that strikes a large percentage of the population, he said. Its designed around providing high quality care around things like heart surgeries but a global pandemic, its not designed for.

Noymer said he cant predict which direction OC heads from here, based on the recent patterns.

So heres the thing, were basically treading water. When I look at the OC numbers the past few days, I see a county thats not changing very much. And compared to three weeks ago, were worse. But compared to last week, were holding steady. So you can say were about to turn the corner and do better or take the plunge into a precipice. And I cant tell you exactly which of the two it is.

Heres the latest on the virus numbers across Orange County from county data:

Spencer Custodio is a Voice of OC staff reporter. You can reach him at scustodio@voiceofoc.org. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerCustodio

See original here:

Is Orange County Turning The Corner On Coronavirus or Headed Off a Cliff? A Closer Look at the Numbers - Voice of OC