Category: Corona Virus

From the White House to the county courthouse, the coronavirus pandemic has drastically upended the 2020 elections.

Many Democratic leaders now doubt their national party convention will take place as planned in July, while President Trumps determination to hold the Republican convention could collide with life-and-death realities.

Both Mr. Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are wary of holding public events too soon and may not engage in full-fledged campaigning until the summer.

And hundreds of congressional, statewide and local candidates, who are always overshadowed in presidential years, are turning to the role of good Samaritan aiding with groceries and hiring people newly out of work in an effort to stay visible without being insensitive to the crisis.

The virus has fundamentally transformed political life in America, affecting how candidates communicate with voters, raise money from donors and confront their opponents. This is for now the countrys first virtual campaign, as the risk of disease physically separates candidates from the people they seek to represent, and pushes officeseekers from Mr. Biden on down to appeal to homebound voters and contributors through balky web videos.

Even when more traditional electioneering resumes, the nature of this race will be profoundly different.

The outbreak, which has already claimed more than 2,000 lives in the United States and well over three million jobs, has thrust the public health threat and economic downturn to the forefront in races up and down the ballot this year.

Incumbents at every level, starting with Mr. Trump, will be judged on how they prepared for and steered the country through a crisis that has turned the life of nearly every voter upside down.

This is the question that is going to dominate the election: How did you perform in the great crisis? said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, who has canceled fund-raisers and instead scheduled tele-town hall events with guests like the provost at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

The duration of the election season itself is likely to shrink significantly. The presidential campaign, which typically dominates news coverage for much of the year, could look more like one of Britains six-week general election sprints. Should the two major American candidates return to the stump before the fall, they will most likely be crowded out by the grim accounting of the countrys worst pandemic in over a century.

Regional disparities in how the virus is spreading could mean that officeseekers may be able to campaign in parts of the country that are less hard-hit. And if the social distancing measures in place mitigate the outbreak, the contenders could return to the parade and banquet circuit sooner than some anticipate.

But until the spread of the virus slows, there is likely to be little interest in the presidential race and even less in state and local races.

Representative Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois, has culled his campaigns phone bank list to voters 60 or older. Rather than ask them policy questions or trumpet his accomplishments, Mr. Castens volunteers ask if they need any health and safety information and provide a list of senior-only hours at local supermarkets.

Nobody wants to talk about my thoughts on carbon pricing, said Mr. Casten, who was a renewable energy executive before he was elected to Congress in 2018.

At the moment, there effectively is no campaign of any consequence to voters who are consumed with their familys safety and well-being.

Every issue in my district is impacted by this, said Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican who represents much of New Yorks vast North Country. This is going to be an economic issue, its going to be a higher ed issue, its going to be a border issue.

The long sweep of American history is filled with presidential elections that took place during times of war and upheaval, but there is little modern precedent for a campaign unfolding against a backdrop of such widespread national fear.

The closest comparison may be the New York mayoral race in 2001, when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks loomed over the citys general election. In presidential politics, the Vietnam War, assassinations and civil rights struggles shaped the 1968 campaign and seemed to reveal a country coming apart.

But some historians believe the closest comparison to this year, the last time the entire nation was consumed by a single issue, may be 1944, when the threat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan fully mobilized American citizens behind the war effort.

That was the last time there was this sort of disruption in our daily lives and change in rituals, said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential scholar, noting that millions were deployed in arms and those who remained home lived with rationed goods. But at least people then could go to work, be part of the effort to win the war.

Sensing opportunity, Mr. Trump has sought to portray himself as a wartime leader in daily televised news briefings. It has given him a bump in the polls, with his approval ratings creeping up toward 50 percent as independents and some Democrats rally behind him, while Mr. Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, is largely drowned out by the president and even Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

Its a defining moment, said Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi, adding of Mr. Trump: The more he reassures Americans, gives them the facts and delivers results, the harder it will be for Joe Biden.

A race that turns entirely on the response to the current health and economic crises could also render other traditional campaign markers less important if they happen at all.

While Mr. Trump is loudly insisting his convention will go on in Charlotte, N.C., in late August, it remains to be seen whether the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, would allow such a large gathering in his states most populous city.

Democratic officials are even more skeptical about their convention.

Hundreds of local and state conventions have already been canceled or become mail-in, telephone or online events. Theres talk among some Democrats of conducting the national convention online or through the mail, with some operatives and fund-raisers discussing a one-night television event that could replicate a star-studded awards show.

The D.N.C. is going to have to start considering that this convention will have to be held in other ways, said Ken Martin, the Democratic chairman in Minnesota who is also the president of an organization of state Democratic leaders.

For now, Democrats are using a barrage of ads to try to remind voters of Mr. Trumps initial dismissal of the viruss severity, but its been difficult to broadly divert attention from the threat of the moment.

Some in the party, however, believe the president will ultimately be held to account for his slow response, the unfolding damage to the economy and will suffer from the new light the crisis will cast on domestic issues in the fall.

The administrations court case to repeal the A.C.A. takes on a very different meaning, said Guy Cecil, who runs a Democratic super PAC, referring to the legal effort to strike down Obamacare in its entirety.

But the larger question for Mr. Trump may be whether he can sustain the appearance of a wartime leader able to summon Americans to sacrifice.

The president has already displayed impatience and pique that could damage his re-election chances, lashing out at governors, refusing to take any responsibility for the coronavirus crisis and suggesting Americans can return to life as usual in a way that experts say could exacerbate the spread of the virus.

His campaign is already discussing the possibility of a rally-style event in one of the less-affected states in late April, although one adviser said those discussions are preliminary.

While they would have preferred to use the months before Mr. Biden formally claims the nomination to define the former vice president to their advantage, Republicans generally believe this crisis has done little to diminish Mr. Trumps prospects.

His campaign continues to raise money online at a brisk pace, but Republican officials privately conceded it has been harder to raise money without events featuring the president.

Fund-raising has been even more difficult for other candidates on the ballot, who often rely more on big-dollar, in-person events rather than internet solicitations.

Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist, said he expects fund-raising totals for federal candidates from the first three months of the year to be down about 20 percent from what they would have been without the pandemic.

In Missouri, Nicole Galloway, the state auditor and a Democrat, is running for governor. On Thursday night she held a virtual cocktail hour by teleconference with a few dozen invited supporters.

With framed photos of her three children over her shoulders, Ms. Galloway told about 60 supporters that Missouris Republican governor has been following her lead in responding to the pandemic, answered questions about education funding and professed sadness that she couldnt travel the state in person.

In the small frames atop the screen, supporters could be seen pouring and mixing drinks. One Missouri donor had distributed a recipe for a drink called The Democrat, inspired by the native son Harry Trumans fondness for bourbon.

Ms. Galloway is hardly the only candidate being creative.

In Georgia, Lynne Homrich, a Republican running for the House, announced her campaign would hire 20 people who had been laid off from local businesses, augmenting a paid campaign staff of five ahead of her May 19 primary.

Ms. Homrich, a former Home Depot executive, began sorting through dozens of emails from people seeking campaign staff work which in the age of virus means calling or writing people from ones own home.

Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency room doctor running for Congress in Arizona, said she spends just as much time explaining the details of the pandemic in phone calls, video chats and during Facebook Live sessions as she does asking people to vote for her in November.

They have medical questions, Ms. Tipirneni said. Its a scary time and whatever I can do to alleviate some of those fears, its a moral responsibility.

The rest is here:

How Coronavirus Has Transformed Elections Across the U.S. - The New York Times

An organ transplant specialist has become the first working NHS surgeon to die from coronavirus.

Adil El Tayar, 63, died on Wednesday at West Middlesex university hospital in London, his family said.

The doctor, who had worked around the world, spent his final days volunteering on the frontlines against the outbreak in an A&E department in the Midlands.

He wanted to be deployed where he would be most useful in the crisis, his cousin, British-Sudanese journalist Zeinab Badawi, said in a moving tribute on BBC Radio 4.

It had taken just 12 days for Adil to go from a seemingly fit and capable doctor working in a busy hospital to lying in a hospital morgue.

Tayar started self-isolating at home after developing symptoms about two weeks ago, but was taken to hospital and placed on a ventilator after his condition worsened.

Four days later medics told his family that his lungs had come under attack from the virus and he could no longer breathe unaided.

Until I had learned of Adils death I had been fairly phlegmatic about the pandemic, Badawi said. But there is nothing like a death in the family to bring home the realities of what we are facing.

Badawi learned of her cousins death on Thursday, three minutes before she joined millions across the UK in applauding NHS workers.

She said: Clapping along with my neighbours engendered in me a feeling of unity that we are all in this together and that we sink or swim together.

Perhaps this transformation will be permanent. I hope it will be.

Former colleague Abbas Ghaznafar, a renal transplant surgeon at St Georges University in Tooting, described Tayar as a noble human being who was a hard-working, dedicated surgeon.

Dr Hisam El Khidir, another of the surgeons cousins, told the BBC that he suspected Tayar had caught the virus while working on frontlines.

The British ambassador to Sudan Irfan Siddiq tweeted: Saddened to hear of Sudanese doctor Adel Altayars death in the UK from Covid-19.

Health workers around the world have shown extraordinary courage. We cannot thank them enough. In this fight we must listen to their advice.

Tayar leaves behind a wife and four children, two of whom also work as doctors in the NHS.

El Khidir told the BBC: Adil was someone who was central to our family, who was well respected by so many people.

Since his death on Wednesday, I have had hundreds of text messages from his colleagues and friends. He will be sorely missed.

View original post here:

First working NHS surgeon dies from coronavirus - The Guardian

The coronavirus pandemic, which has escalated dramatically in the last month, has upended most of American life and the polling industry is no exception. Social distancing requirements have closed most offices and the exponential growth of cases has meant that a poll can be outdated even just a few days after it's conducted due to the rapid shifts in public opinion.

Polling is conducted in numerous ways and with an almost infinite number of methodological choices to be made. Surveys can be conducted by phone with live people asking questions, online, by mail, in person, by phone with automated callers and many other options in between, each presenting their own pros and cons in the pandemic.

And now public opinion firms are combating issues such as conducting polls without a room full of people at call centers, an influx of interest in pandemic data and a news cycle that won't stay still long enough to field a poll.

But with rapidly changing data comes new innovations and strategic changes to the polling industry. In an effort to gauge public opinion, many call centers are working from home, while pollsters who are methodologically diverse are relying more and more on online polling to properly represent the nation, trying to keep their finger on the ever-moving pulse.

How to have a call center at home

"Our work from home infrastructure has been in place for more than a decade, thankfully. We had it all set up," she said. "So, with the recent coronavirus development, we've been transitioning as many of our interviewers as possible using that technology. If we had to build this infrastructure on the spot, I think it would've been difficult to do."

Without that infrastructure in place, companies may have been scrambling to properly equip the thousands of call center employees before sending them off, but Herrmann reports they've been prepared.

"A few years ago, we moved our phone operations to where people are able to work remotely and essentially use a virtual console to do dialing from their homes. So, we're able to have some consistency and some continuity in our phone operations," Jackson said.

Ipsos conducts polling in multiple ways: over the phone, their online panel, mail, face to face and more. Jackson said the company is "methodologically agnostic" despite being known for their Ipsos KnowledgePanel.

It's important that Ipsos' and other pollsters remain relatively consistent with their methodology since many surveys have a trend line dating far back in history, and a change from live phone to online could make surveys not directly comparable.

Those guidelines vary country to country, but in the US, Jackson said Ipsos is pivoting slightly by relying more heavily on their online panel. Herrmann reports SSRS hasn't changed their methods significantly, but is ensuring all employees are safe.

Increased response rates

Jackson told CNN that, anecdotally, he's seen an increase in the people responding to surveys.

"We've definitely seen a real spike in demand, especially for our online platform," he said. "We've been talking internally, and we think we've done -- across the entire company, around the world -- around over a million interviews over the past couple of weeks. People who are stuck at home have nothing else to do but answer surveys, right?"

While there aren't any hard figures on response rates over the past few weeks, all pollsters mentioned some preliminary numbers that showed a boost in phone responses, online responses, people ready to discuss the issue.

Herrmann noted how interested Americans are in discussing the constantly changing issue, saying, "People have been really engaged about speaking to us on these salient topics and current events we're asking about, particularly coronavirus, due to the obvious impact it's having on everyone's lives right now."

How quickly the data is changing

Pollsters already struggle to keep up with the news. Polls with a short fielding period take around three days, depending on what questions the pollsters are asking, and pollsters often run the risk of having their poll completely irrelevant by the time the data is released.

Upwards of 30 polls have been released on coronavirus since February, included a huge number this week alone. Many are repeat polls, trying to get a proper trendline to show how quickly concerns around coronavirus have surged.

Companies like Abt Associates -- another major survey outlet contracted by private and public sectors alike, including the CDC -- are seeing how far and wide the data can reach.

"Not only do we need to maintain continuity for our current data collection, analytic, and systems support efforts, but we also have to continue providing urgent support to agencies attempting to understand the wide-ranging impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health, homelessness, the education of our children, food security and the like, in addition to efforts to track the prevalence of the virus itself," writes Link.

Survey demand and employee safety

But increased response rates and a salient topic doesn't always mean easy going for the pollsters. Media attention spikes around coverage of emerging infectious diseases and pollsters are feeling the heat of a busy news cycle.

Herrmann told CNN that SSRS can anticipate this, but still says they're working long hours.

"Once you do polling, you're pretty accustomed to working quickly. Our teams are used to it. But it has been changing so quickly in this case," she said.

Herrmann specifically discussed concern for her employees at SSRS. After lamenting how much she misses the office -- they usually conduct their own daily poll around the coffee machine for questions like "favorite candy type" -- she said she's had to be assertive, making sure they aren't biting off more than they can chew and are keeping their own well-being at the forefront.

"But in terms of what has changed, it's mostly been from a personnel perspective, making sure we're doing things in the best interest of our staff. You have to be forceful about it and we're trying to keep everyone safe."

Jackson said he's been working long days but wants to get his data out there before it goes bad, since the dialogue has changed so quickly.

"It's a terrifying, yet fascinating time to be doing public opinion research," he said.

Read this article:

How coronavirus is impacting public opinion research - CNN

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Only three COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in the 22 counties in state Rep. Drew Springers North Texas House district, and he said Thursday that a lot of people are just coming to the realization about why we need social distancing.

There were more people on the road in Gainesville and Muenster yesterday than in New York City, he said.

My constituents would have argued [earlier] that were drastically overreacting, Springer said. I think as they have started hearing more, theyre coming around. ... Im waiting to see whether the cases here, and the names of people who get sick, will change peoples opinions.

Pandemic is a word for a disease that is no longer local, that has taken on worldwide scope.

But the responses to the new coronavirus pandemic in Texas and elsewhere are distinctly local and vary deeply from the mostly voluntary shelter-in-place orders in effect in the states most populated cities and counties to the wait-and-see positions of governments and businesses elsewhere.

Those local differences help explain why statewide officials like Gov. Greg Abbott have been so reluctant to issue statewide stay-at-home orders. Metropolitan areas are aggressively putting social distancing rules in place, while less populated parts of Texas are more reticent.

Reports of COVID-19 cases might not be as prevalent outside of the metropolitan areas, and official actions have been slower and less restrictive.

In Midland, many residents have continued their normal routines, shopping in grocery stores and at busy retail locations. The city hasnt issued restrictive orders but has been talking about it. Theres a striking parallel between the places restricting social gathering and the political map, but thats not what some politicians see.

I dont know if its a red versus blue thing; its a human nature thing, said Jack Ladd Jr., a member of the Midland City Council. A lot of people want to see something like this before they react.

That visibility is increasing as cases pop up in Midland. And the county recorded its first death attributed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, this week, which has prompted more discussion from public leaders.

At the same time Abbott was issuing his first set of emergency orders, Anderson County in East Texas was doing the same, barring gatherings of 10 people or more and asking people to limit their interactions.

County Judge Robert Johnston said the reaction has been pretty positive overall. He said some churches have pushed back, noting many of them dont have the kind of internet access that would allow online services to replace in-person congregation.

The order has limited gatherings but hasnt kept people inside, Johnston said. No, I dont think theyre staying at home. They are eating at home, still running errands, but there are fewer people out.

So far, the county hasnt reported any confirmed cases of COVID-19, either from its general population or from any of its five state prisons.

The county has no plans to impose a shelter-in-place order, he said, but suggested it might not be necessary. People know if were going to get a hand on this, were going to have to stay home.

Lubbock stopped short of telling residents to stay at home, but it did put restrictions in place. Lubbocks emergency order, Mayor Dan Pope said, is like the stay-at-home orders elsewhere, without the panic in it.

You know West Texas, he said. We have a little more common sense ... and a healthy sense of skepticism.

I would say people are in two camps those who have bought in and understand and are really staying home, and another group thats harder to reach, he said.

He said Lubbocks two hospitals are well situated at the moment they can open another 40 ICU beds if needed and added that we dont have any stress on our health care system at this time. As of Thursday, the city had a drive-through testing center, and he said it plans to have a total of four by Monday. Lubbock County had 19 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, he said.

Springers House District 68, which stretches from north of Dallas-Fort Worth across North Texas and into the Panhandle, is seeing a new kind of visitor he attributes to the pandemic: shoppers.

The odd stuff here is really the foot traffic, he said.

One meat market sold out in a matter of hours this week. Some of the stores are limiting sales, he said, to allow locals a chance to buy groceries and supplies before out-of-towners scoop them up.

He said the county clerks in Cooke and Montague counties have seen a rush of lovebirds from the D-FW area, where the courthouses are closed, seeking marriage certificates. The clerk has to actually see both people to issue a license, he said. Some of them dont want to wait.

Read more:

Coronavirus and local control in Texas - The Texas Tribune

If the rate of growth in coronavirus cases in the New York metro area continues, it will suffer a more severe outbreak than those experienced in Wuhan, China, or the Lombardy region of Italy.

There is no guarantee, of course, that current trends will continue. What has happened to this point cant be used to predict what will happen next. It is possible that social distancing will soon slow or arrest the growth of cases.

But what can be said is that the New York metro area has had less success in flattening the curve, at this point in its outbreak, than Wuhan or the Lombardy region did at the same point in theirs. And some other American metropolitan areas appear to be on a similar path.

Here are four ways to measure the size of the outbreak across the countrys metro areas.

The New York City area has more known cases per capita than any other metro area in the United States.

Figures as of March 26; includes micropolitan statistical areas

Pros of this measure Focuses on communities where the disease is prevalent.

Cons Varying testing rates make comparisons difficult. Not all confirmed cases are active.

In the early stages of an outbreak, the population size doesnt matter one infected person will probably infect a few people, whether that person lives in a metropolitan area of 100,000 or one of 10 million. But as an epidemic progresses, the number of cases per capita can provide a good measure of the prevalence of coronavirus in a community. Per capita measurements also give a sense of how strained a communitys health care system has become, since larger places tend to have more medical resources.

To make useful per capita comparisons, weve focused on metropolitan areas instead of countries or cities or U.S. states. Thats because metropolitan areas roughly correspond with the regions where the virus might spread quickly among families, co-workers or commuters. The New York City metropolitan area includes nearby cities and suburbs in Westchester, Long Island, and northern New Jersey, as well as sprawling, outlying areas that stretch even farther from the city.

As of March 26

Our tables include numbers from Lombardy and Wuhan to provide a benchmark for metro areas in the United States. The comparisons are illustrative, but not exact. Those outbreaks have been going on longer, which means their case numbers are spread over more time. In most of the U.S., cases are from only the last month.

The number of confirmed cases is an imperfect measure of what we really care about: the prevalence of the virus in the population, and therefore if it is early in the epidemic how many people are sick or may be contagious. The limited availability of testing in some places means that many people with coronavirus wont be counted among the confirmed cases. And the varying rates of testing across states and countries make it hard to compare the number of confirmed cases in different regions.

Deaths per capita are currently higher in the New York City area than in most other places.

As of March 26; includes only metro areas with three deaths or more.

Pros of this measure Coronavirus deaths are much more likely to be accurately counted than total cases.

Cons Death rates depend on the underlying health and age of various communities. They also lag infections by several weeks, so they dont tell us whats happening now.

Examining deaths can allow for a more direct comparison between communities, since it avoids many of the problems with variable testing. Testing differences matter less in measuring deaths because in most places with established outbreaks in the United States, the sickest patients are getting tested. (That may be less true in other parts of the world: Patients who die outside hospitals in Britain and Italy have, in some cases, been omitted from official data.)

But measuring only deaths has drawbacks, too. We know that the death rate from coronavirus differs depending on the age and health of the populations affected and the availability of medical resources, like ventilators. That means that per capita rates may look high in places where the virus has infiltrated nursing homes, for example, even if it has not spread widely through the rest of the community.

Because patients who die of Covid-19 tend to be sick for weeks first, counting deaths may also understate the current size of the outbreak in a given place if it is growing quickly.

As of March 26; includes only metro areas with three deaths or more.

The number of cases in the New York area is still growing quickly.

To assess the possible future of the outbreak, its helpful to look not just at the number of cases but also at how quickly they are increasing. The accompanying chart shows the growth rate of cumulative cases over time, averaged over the previous week.

Pros of this measure Growth rates help us judge whether the epidemic is getting better or worse in a given place right now.

Cons The timing of different outbreaks can make comparisons difficult. Case data quality varies a lot by place.

Here, we can see whether the trajectory of a local epidemic is getting better or worse. A growth rate of 40 percent on this chart means the cumulative number of cases is growing by 40 percent every day. A rate of 100 percent would mean that the number of cases was doubling daily.

Public health officials have been talking about the value of social distancing measures as a way to flatten the curve of the epidemic. Such a flattening would mean that the rates in this chart are falling, eventually to zero. New Yorks current growth rate is just over 30 percent, suggesting that its curve remains quite steep, and that the disease is continuing to spread rapidly throughout the region.

In some other metro areas, like Baton Rouge, La., the growth rate is high, but the number of cases is still low. That means the community may still have time to flatten its curve before the outbreak becomes widespread. But communities with a lot of cases and a high growth rate are on track to have a serious problem. A high growth rate on top of a large number of cases means that a still larger number of people are on track to become ill or die.

Case numbers in the New York area are also growing quickly given the size of its outbreak.

Pros of this measure Helps distinguish between places where cases are growing fast with few cases and places where cases are numerous and still growing fast.

Cons Hard to read. Relies on case data.

The chart above shows the growth rate by the number of cases in a given place. This measurement shows whether a community has succeeded in slowing the rate of growth before there are many cases. In other words, it shows whether a community is succeeding at flattening the curve.

By this measure, the situation in the New York area does not appear promising. The rate of increase in cases is far higher for the number of cases than it was in Wuhan or Lombardy, once they had reached similar numbers of cases. Other metropolitan areas, like Detroit and New Orleans, stand out as places where a coronavirus outbreak might escalate quickly without preventive measures. The Seattle and San Francisco areas, in contrast, seem to have made serious progress in flattening the curve.

The chart also helps avoid the illusion of success created by a slow, initial rate of growth. Many charts depict the growth of cases over time, and it can be easy to assume that the communities that get an outbreak quickly, and therefore appear above the pack on the chart, are faring the worst. But a community that experiences a high rate of growth with a large number of cases is in serious trouble, regardless of whether the outbreak occurs 10 or 100 days after it had its first cases.

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Some U.S. Cities Could Have Coronavirus Outbreaks Worse Than Wuhan's - The New York Times

Pennsylvania has scant reserves and likely cant rely on them to bridge the gap: The states rainy day account could fund government operations for only about 3 days, even after a large deposit last year. The decision to extend the deadline prioritizes public health at a time when Wolf is urging Pennsylvanians to stay at home to help prevent the spread of the virus, said Jeffrey Johnson, a state Department of Revenue spokesperson.

Read this article:

Delay of tax deadline due to the coronavirus will cause significant disruption to Pa.s budget process - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Google has banned the Infowars Android app from the Google Play store, the company confirmed to Wired on Friday. Google also confirmed the apps removal to The Verge, and we couldnt find the Infowars app in a search on the Play Store this evening.

The app was apparently removed because of a video posted by radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that, according to Wired, disputed the need for social distancing, shelter in place, and quarantine efforts meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Before it was removed, the app had more than 100,000 downloads, Wired reports.

Now more than ever, combating misinformation on the Play Store is a top priority for the team, a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to The Verge. When we find apps that violate Play policy by distributing misleading or harmful information, we remove them from the store. Infowars was not immediately available for comment.

Last week, Alex Jones was ordered by New York Attorney General Letitia James to stop selling Infowars products that were marketed as a treatment or cure for the coronavirus. [Alex Jones] latest mistruths are incredibly dangerous and pose a serious threat to the public health of New Yorkers and individuals across the nation, James said in a statement.

Tech companies have also publicly committed to cracking down on coronavirus misinformation. Google has an SOS Alert in place for searches for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, that points to resources from the CDC and local governments at the top of search results. And a group of companies that includes Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube said theyre jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus in a statement issued on March 16th.

Apple permanently banned the Infowars app from the App Store in September 2018, citing App Store guidelines that forbid content thats offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, or in exceptionally poor taste.

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Google has banned the Infowars Android app over false coronavirus claims - The Verge

In the third week of February, as the COVID-19 epidemic was still flaring in China, I arrived in Kolkata, India. I woke up to a sweltering morningthe black kites outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming currents of airand I went to visit a shrine to the goddess Shitala. Her name means the cool one; as the myth has it, she arose from the cold ashes of a sacrificial fire. The heat that she is supposed to diffuse is not just the fury of summer that hits the city in mid-June but also the inner heat of inflammation. She is meant to protect children from smallpox, heal the pain of those who contract it, and dampen the fury of a pox epidemic.

The shrine was a small structure within a temple a few blocks from Kolkata Medical College. Inside, there was a figurine of the goddess, sitting on a donkey and carrying her jar of cooling liquidthe way she has been depicted for a millennium. The temple was two hundred and fifty years old, the attendant informed me. That would date it to around the time when accounts first appeared of a mysterious sect of Brahmans wandering up and down the Gangetic plain to popularize the practice of tika, an early effort at inoculation. This involved taking matter from a smallpox patients pustulea snake pit of live virusand applying it to the pricked skin of an uninfected person, then covering the spot with a linen rag.

The Indian practitioners of tika had likely learned it from Arabic physicians, who had learned it from the Chinese. As early as 1100, medical healers in China had realized that those who survived smallpox did not catch the illness again (survivors of the disease were enlisted to take care of new victims), and inferred that the exposure of the body to an illness protected it from future instances of that illness. Chinese doctors would grind smallpox scabs into a powder and insufflate it into a childs nostril with a long silver pipe.

Vaccination with live virus was a tightrope walk: if the amount of viral inoculum in the powder was too great, the child would succumb to a full-fledged version of the diseasea disaster that occurred perhaps one in a hundred times. If all went well, the child would have a mild experience of the disease, and be immunized for life. By the seventeen-hundreds, the practice had spread throughout the Arab world. In the seventeen-sixties, women in Sudan practiced tishteree el jidderee (buying the pox): one mother haggling with another over how many of a sick childs ripe pustules she would buy for her own son or daughter. It was an exquisitely measured art: the most astute traditional healers recognized the lesions that were likely to yield just enough viral material, but not too much. The European name for the disease, variola, comes from the Latin for spotted or pimpled. The process of immunizing against the pox was called variolation.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, had herself been stricken by the disease, in 1715, leaving her perfect skin pitted with scars. Later, in the Turkish countryside, she witnessed the practice of variolation, and wrote to her friends in wonder, describing the work of one specialist: The old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened, whereupon she puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle. Patients retired to bed for a couple of days with a fever, and, Lady Montagu noted, emerged remarkably unscathed. They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark; and in eight days time they are as well as before their illness. She reported that thousands safely underwent the operation every year, and that the disease had largely been contained in the region. You may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, she added, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. Her son never got the pox.

In the centuries since Lady Montagu marvelled at the efficacy of inoculation, weve made unimaginable discoveries in the biology and epidemiology of infectious disease, and yet the COVID-19 pandemic poses no shortage of puzzles. Why did it spread like wildfire in Italy, thousands of miles from its initial epicenter, in Wuhan, while India appears so far to have largely been spared? What animal species transmitted the original infection to humans?

But three questions deserve particular attention, because their answers could change the way we isolate, treat, and manage patients. First, what can we learn about the dose-response curve for the initial infectionthat is, can we quantify the increase in the risk of infection as people are exposed to higher doses of the virus? Second, is there a relationship between that initial dose of virus and the severity of the diseasethat is, does more exposure result in graver illness? And, third, are there quantitative measures of how the virus behaves in infected patients (e.g., the peak of your bodys viral load, the patterns of its rise and fall) that predict the severity of their illness and how infectious they are to others? So far, in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been measuring the spread of the virus across people. As the pace of the pandemic escalates, we also need to start measuring the virus within people.

Most epidemiologists, given the paucity of data, have been forced to model the spread of the new coronavirus as if it were a binary phenomenon: individuals are either exposed or unexposed, infected or uninfected, symptomatic patients or asymptomatic carriers. Recently, the Washington Post published a particularly striking online simulation, in which people in a city were depicted as dots moving freely in spaceuninfected ones in gray, infected ones in red (then shifting to pink, as immunity was acquired). Each time a red dot touched a gray dot, the infection was transmitted. With no intervention, the whole field of dots steadily turned from gray to red. Social distancing and isolation kept the dots from knocking into one another, and slowed the spread of red across the screen.

This was a birds-eye view of a virus radiating through a population, seen as an on-off phenomenon. The doctor and medical researcher in meas a graduate student, I was trained in viral immunologywanted to know what was going on within the dots. How much virus was in that red dot? How fast was it replicating in this dot? How was the exposurethe touch timerelated to the chance of transmission? How long did a red dot remain redthat is, how did an individuals infectiousness change over time? And what was the severity of disease in each case?

What weve learned about other virusesincluding the ones that cause AIDS, SARS, and smallpoxsuggests a more complex view of the disease, its rate of progression, and strategies for containment. In the nineteen-nineties, as researchers learned to measure how much H.I.V. was in a patients blood, a distinct pattern emerged. After an infection, the virus count in the blood would rise to a zenith, known as peak viremia, and patients with the highest peak viremia typically became sicker sooner; they were least able to resist the virus. Even more predictive than the peak viral load was the so-called set pointthe level at which someones virus count settled after its initial peak. It represented a dynamic equilibrium that was reached between the virus and its human host. People with a high set point tended to progress more rapidly to AIDS; people with a low set point frequently proved to be slow progressors. The viral loada continuum, not a binary valuehelped predict the nature, course, and transmissibility of the disease. To be sure, every virus has its own personality, and H.I.V. has traits that make viral load especially revealing: it causes a chronic infection, and one that specifically targets cells of the immune system. Yet similar patterns have been observed with other viruses.

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How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? - The New Yorker

Can blood from coronavirus survivors help other people fight the illness?

Doctors in New York will soon be testing the idea in hospitalized patients who are seriously ill.

Blood from people who have recovered can be a rich source of antibodies, proteins made by the immune system to attack the virus. The part of the blood that contains antibodies, so-called convalescent plasma, has been used for decades to treat infectious diseases, including Ebola and influenza.

Its kind of difficult scientifically to know how valuable it is in any disease until you try, said Dr. David L. Reich, president and chief operating officer of the Mount Sinai Hospital, which will be using the treatment. Its not exactly a shot in the dark, but its not tried and true.

Dr. Reich said it would be tried as a treatment for hospitalized patients who had a moderate form of the disease and had trouble breathing, but not for those who are in advanced stages of the disease.

The idea is to get to the right patients at the right time, he said. But its experimental.

Researchers at Mount Sinai were among the first in the United States to develop a test that can detect antibodies in recovering patients, an essential part of this treatment strategy.

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration gave permission for the plasma to be used experimentally on an emergency basis to treat coronavirus patients, and hospitals in New York quickly began asking to participate, said Dr. Bruce Sachais, chief medical officer of the New York Blood Center, which will collect, test and distribute the plasma.

Our main focus is, how do we implement this quickly to help the hospitals get product to their patients, Dr. Sachais said. We have blood centers in New England, Delaware and the Midwest, so we can do the same thing in other regions. Were working with other blood centers and hospitals that may collect their own blood and want to do this. We may not be able to collect enough plasma in New York to help the entire country, so we want to share with other centers to help them.

Dr. Reich said that an email asking Mount Sinai staff members who had recovered to consider donating plasma went a little viral, and quickly drew 2,000 responses.

But volunteers will have to be carefully screened to meet strict criteria. The donors will include people who tested positive for the virus when they were ill, recovered, have had no symptoms for 14 days, now test negative and have high levels, also called titers, of antibodies that fight the virus. Dr. Reich said that because there were delays and shortages in testing, the number of people who qualify may be low at first.

Our expectation, based on reports from the Chinese experience, is that most people who get better have high-titer antibodies, Dr. Sachais said. Most patients who recover will have good antibodies in a month.

People who qualify will then be sent to blood centers to donate plasma. The procedure, called apheresis, is similar to giving blood, except that the blood drawn from the patient is run through a machine to extract the plasma, and the red and white cells are then returned to the donor. Needles go into both arms: Blood flows out of one arm, passes through the machine and goes back into the other arm. The process usually takes 60 to 90 minutes, and can yield enough plasma to treat three patients, Dr. Sachais said.

People who have recovered have antibodies to spare, and removing some will not endanger the donors or diminish their own resistance to the virus, Dr. Sachais said. We may get rid of 20 percent of their antibodies, and a couple days later theyll be back.

The plasma will be tested to make sure it is not carrying infections like hepatitis or H.I.V., or certain proteins that could set off immune reactions in the recipient. If it passes the tests, it can then be frozen, or used right away. Each patient to be treated will receive one unit, about a cup, which will be dripped in like a blood transfusion. As with blood transfusions, plasma donors and recipients must have matching types, but the rules are not the same as those for transfusions.

We think this is going to be an effective treatment for at least some patients, but we dont really know yet, Dr. Sachais said. Hopefully, well get some data in the next few weeks from the first patients, to see if were on the right track.

In other coronavirus epidemics I dont think we have strong evidence, he said. We dont have controlled data. There were reports from SARS and MERS that patients improved.

He said the decision to try this approach was based in part on reports from China that it seemed to help patients. But the reports are not based on controlled studies or definitive data.

Dr. Sachais said an article in a journal that was not peer-reviewed described treating 10 patients in China with one unit each of convalescent plasma, and said it appeared safe and seemed to quickly lower their virus levels.

Its anecdotal, he said.

A researcher not associated with the new treatment plans said there was evidence to support using plasma from survivors.

Four to six or eight weeks after infection, their blood should be full of antibodies that will neutralize the virus and that will theoretically limit the infection, said Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

In studies in mice, he said, If you can drive the virus replication down tenfold to hundredfold, that can be the difference between life and death.

He described the use of convalescent plasma as a classic approach that is a really effective way to treat if there are enough donors with enough of the right antibodies.

A potential risk, he said, is that the patients immune system could react against something in the plasma, and cause additional illness.

Although hospitals will gather information about the patients being treated, the procedure is not being done as part of a clinical trial. There will not be a placebo group or the other measures needed to determine whether a treatment works.

People are so desperately ill now, it isnt the right time, Dr. Reich said. Theyre in the hospital, theyre sick, in intensive care, on ventilators. Some get sick so quickly, and its such a severe illness in some people, we feel its not the right moment.

He said the doctors were relying on science and evidence as much as possible.

But he added: You see this steamroller coming at you, and you dont want to sit there passively and let it roll over you. So you put together everything you have to try to fight it. This has the potential to help and also the potential to harm, but we just wont know until its later in the process of the disease and people have had an opportunity to try different things.

Survivors seem eager to help.

Were getting a lot of requests, Dr. Sachais said. One center sent a survey to patients who are getting better, and there were hundreds of responses saying they were interested in being donors. This is going to bring people together. People whove survived will want to do something for their fellow New Yorkers.

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Blood Plasma From Survivors Will Be Given to Coronavirus Patients - The New York Times

Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday.

In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.

The Times is engaged in a comprehensive effort to track the details of every confirmed case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials.

With 330 million residents, the United States is the worlds third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat.

A series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nations response.

Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive.

This could have been stopped by implementing testing and surveillance much earlier for example, when the first imported cases were identified, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.

If these are the cases weve confirmed, how many cases are we still missing? she added.

Chinas leaders, stung by the SARS epidemic in 2003 and several bird flu scares since then, were slow to respond to the outbreak that began in the city of Wuhan, as local officials suppressed news of the outbreak.

But Chinas autocratic government acted with ferocious intensity after the belated start, eventually shutting down swaths of the country. Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan quickly began preparing for the worst.

The United States instead remained preoccupied with business as usual. Impeachment. Harvey Weinstein. Brexit and the Oscars.

Only a few virologists recognized the threat for what it was. The virus was not influenza, but it had the hallmarks of the 1918 Spanish flu: relatively low lethality, but relentlessly transmissible.

Cellphone videos leaking out of China showed what was happening as it spread in Wuhan: dead bodies on hospital floors, doctors crying in frustration, rows of unattended coffins outside the crematories.

What the cameras missed in part because Beijing made Western journalists lives difficult by withholding visas and imposing quarantines was the slow, relentless way Chinas public health system was hunting down the virus, case by case, cluster by cluster, city by city.

For now, at least, China has contained the coronavirus with draconian measures. But the pathogen had embarked on a Grand Tour of most countries on Earth, with devastating epidemics in Iran, Italy, France. More videos emerged of prostrate victims, exhausted nurses and lines of coffins.

The United States, which should have been ready, was not. This country has an unsurpassed medical system supported by trillions of dollars from insurers, Medicare and Medicaid. Armies of doctors transplant hearts and cure cancer.

The public health system, limping along on local tax receipts, kills mosquitoes and traces the contacts of people with sexually transmitted diseases. It has been outmatched by the pandemic.

There was no Pentagon ready to fight the war on this pandemic, no wartime draft law. There was eventually a White House Coronavirus Task Force, but it has been led by politicians, not medical experts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is one of the great disease-detective agencies in the world, and its doctors have contributed mightily in skirmishes against Ebola, Zika and any number of other health threats.

But the agency retreated into silence, its director, Dr. Robert Redfield, almost invisible humbled by a fiasco in the failure to produce basic diagnostic testing.

Now at least 160 million Americans have been ordered to stay home in states from California to New York. Schools are closed, often along with bars, restaurants and many other businesses. Hospitals are coping with soaring numbers of patients in New York City, even as supplies of essential protective gear and equipment dwindle.

Other hospitals, other communities fear what may be coming.

We are the new global epicenter of the disease, said Dr. Sara Keller, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Now, all we can do is to slow the transmission as much as possible by hunkering down in our houses while, as a country, we ramp up production of personal protective equipment, materials needed for testing, and ventilators.

The world will be a different place when the pandemic is over. India may surpass the United States as the country with the most deaths. Like the United States, it, too, is a vast democracy with deep internal divisions. But its population, 1.3 billion, is far larger, and its people are crowded even more tightly into megacities.

China could still stumble into a new round of contagion as its economy restarts, and be forced to do it all again.

In the meantime, with the virus loose in the streets while millions of Americans huddle indoors, when will it be safe to come out and go back to work?

The virus will tell us, said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical School.

When a baseline of daily testing is established across the country, a drop in the percentage of positive tests will signal that the virus has found as many hosts as it can for the moment, and is beginning to recede.

When hospital admissions have hit a clear peak and begun to plateau, we can feel optimistic, Dr. Schaffner said. And when they begin to drop, we can begin to smile.

That moment may arrive this summer. But as soon as the first of Americans begin venturing cautiously out, we will have to start planning for the second wave.

Reporting was contributed by Knvul Sheikh.

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The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases - The New York Times