Category: Covid-19

(CNN) So far a total of seven passengers have tested positive for Covid-19 aboard the SeaDream 1 cruise ship docked in Barbados, according to two passengers on the ship.

Passengers who have tested negative for the virus will be able to leave the ship and travel home, Gene Sloan and Ben Hewitt told CNN on Friday. They are both among a handful of cruise journalists and bloggers on board.

The SeaDream Yacht Club cruise was the first to return to the Caribbean since the coronavirus pandemic shut operations down in March and was meant to demonstrate that increased safety protocols, including regular testing aboard the ship, could allow cruise voyages to take place during the pandemic.

Instead one passenger fell ill on Wednesday, forcing the SeaDream 1 to return to Barbados, where all 53 passengers and 66 crew were tested.

Hewitt said the crew had informed passengers that everyone who had tested negative twice would be allowed to disembark the ship and fly home on Saturday.

SeaDream Yacht Club said in a news release Thursday afternoon that "guests" had received "assumptive positive" results to preliminary rapid Covid tests, but did not specify the number who had done so.

"We are working closely with local health and government authorities to resolve this situation in the best possible way," said SeaDream's Andreas Brynestad, in the SeaDream release.

Passenger Gene Sloan took this photo during the cruise that's been cut short by a Covid-19 outbreak.

Gene Sloan/The Points Guy

Intercom announcement of positive test result

Passengers were instructed to return to their cabins and remain isolated there, he said.

The ship, which was in the Grenadines at the time of the first preliminary positive test, docked in Barbados Wednesday evening.

Passengers were tested in advance of traveling to the ship and also before boarding the ship, Sloan said.

"And SeaDream also was testing passengers four days into the trip," he said. "We were scheduled to be tested again today. That's a more rigorous testing plan than most lines had been discussing for the restarts."

The protocol is due in part to the strict testing required by Barbados, where the ship will be based for the season, Sloan noted.

"I think what this shows is it's going to happen. And until there's a vaccine or herd immunity, when cruising starts up you're going to see things like this happen. The question is how often and how big?"

The current sailing was carrying 53 passengers and 66 crew, Sloan said.

Gene Sloan/The Points Guy

Voyages from Barbados

SeaDream's winter voyages from Barbados started on November 7 with the sailing that has now been cut short.

"After completing a successful summer season in Norway, we implemented even stricter health and safety protocols for our Barbados winter season. All guests were tested twice prior to embarkation and we are in the process of retesting guests," said SeaDream's Andreas Brynestad in the statement released on Thursday.

"It's just so disappointing that this has happened because everybody has their hopes up high, and we can't see anything more that they could've done," said Hewitt.

"It's just such a horrible virus, it just gets everywhere even with the constant testing."

The use of masks on the voyage has been far less stringent.

Sloan told CNN that initially no one was wearing face masks, not even the crew. Crew members told him they weren't necessary since the ship was a Covid-free "bubble."

Then a few days into sailing, SeaDream instituted a mask policy but didn't offer an explanation, he said.

Fewer than 250 guests

SeaDream's ships, which the company refers to as "superyachts," have 56 staterooms, with a capacity for 112 guests and 95 crew.

Carrying fewer than 250 guests outside of US waters allows SeaDream to operate outside of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's orders around cruising.

The CDC recently issued a "Framework for Conditional Sailing Order for Cruise Ships."

Safety measures may not be enough to contain the virus.

Gene Sloan/The Points Guy

On Friday, a letter signed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) called on the CDC to reinstate its no-sail order for cruise ships and reverse efforts to restart the industry's US operations.

The letter cites the outbreak aboard SeaDream 1.

Despite precautions, "the virus was still able to infect multiple people on the ship, with the possibility of more confirmed cases emerging as passengers and crew are retested," the letter reads.

"Unfortunately, this troubling development is not surprising and reaffirms the need to exercise extreme caution before sending passengers and crew back out to sea on cruises."

Photo from SeaDream Yacht Club. CNN's Tamara Hardingham-Gill contributed to this report.

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Covid-19 cases rise aboard first cruise to resume sailing in the Caribbean - CNN

New York University physician and epidemiologist Cline Gounder serves on President-elect JoeBidens new coronavirus task force.

By Warren CornwallNov. 13, 2020 , 11:20 AM

Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Cline Gounder has straddled the worlds of medicine, government, and the media: Now, the New York University epidemiologist and infectious disease expert is one of 13 people President-elect Joe Biden has named to a high-profile task force to help steer his response to the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to her medical work, Gounder co-hosts a podcast about the pandemic with Ron Klain, Bidens newly named chief of staff. Until recently she was also a CNN medical analyst.

Gounder spoke with ScienceInsider 4 days after her appointment to the task force.

See all of our coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Do you have particular skills that made you a candidate for the task force?

A: I have a lot of experience in terms of public health and clinical medicine when it comes to epidemics.

I led the Bureau of Tuberculosis (TB) Control in New York City, another respiratory infection. Contact tracing historically has been based out of TB. I worked in sub-Saharan Africa from the late 90s, up until 2012, on tuberculosis and HIV, public health programs, and research. Then I was also an Ebola aid worker in Guinea.

Q: You also have quite a presence in the communication world. You have a podcast. Youre working on a movie. Youve written articles for a variety of publications. Do you think that plays a part in it?

A: Im sure. A big part of public health is communication. How do you convince people to wear a mask? How do you message around social distancing? When we dont yet have a vaccine scaled up, when we dont have things like monoclonal antibodies scaled upbut even afterits these very basic public health measures that we need to be encouraging and explaining, and thats very much the job of science communicators.

Q: So how do you get people to wear masks?

A: Its a challenging one, because the issue has been so politicized. But in my mind, its like politicizing toilet paper. Its a basic hygienic measure. Its not about your political party. And we need to somehow break through that.

I will say people are doing better. If you look at the surveys, people are not perfect about wearing masks, but they are wearing them more. Part of this is also just letting people know that this is becoming the social norm. People are more likely to do something if they feel like everybody else is doing it.

Q: President-elect Biden has talked about mask mandates. How much carrot and how much stick do you think play a role in getting masks adopted?

A: Well, I think a mask mandate is almost entirely a carrot. Because how are you going to enforce that? So I think part of the power of a mandate is to really communicate the seriousness of this, and to create a situation where it becomes a social norm.

Q: Has the Trump administrations unwillingness to acknowledge that Biden is the president-elect affected the task forces ability to get its work done?

A: Its certainly not an ideal situation. But you have many people, including Biden himself, who have very long careers working in government. So while you may not have cooperation occurring in any official transition capacity, its not like theyre in the cold.

Theres also nothing to prevent the transition team from interfacing with governors and state and local health officials. Finally, much of health care is delivered in this country by the private sector. In particular with respect to tests and vaccines, and monoclonal antibodies, thats really about collaborating with the private sector to figure out how to scale up and distribute.

Q: So is there anything that you as a task force have wanted to do, but havent been able to do yet because of the standoff?

A: Im not going to answer that specifically.

Q: How do you recommend the Biden administration address the poor communication and rampant misinformation about the pandemic?

A: Scientists and doctors and public health experts need to be front and center at press conferences, at daily briefings. Not political officials. Because by definition, once you have a political official communicating this it becomes politicized. It really doesnt matter whether its a Republican or a Democrat, it is politicized.

Q: President Donald Trump has put himself at the center when they held press briefings. But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has done that at the New York state level. So it seems like you have the risk of politicization on both sides.

A: I 100% agree.

Q: The toll from the virus has fallen disproportionately on communities of color, particularly Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities in the United States. Are there immediate steps that the incoming administration could take to address this?

A: You cant react to a problem if you dont know the problem is there. So I think we need to be collecting data. Part of that is really scaling up testing. But then, as part of testing, making sure were collecting data on demographics to understand what the problem is, and what transmission patterns are.

Secondly, is making sure theres equitable distribution of vaccines and therapeutics. Thats also going to really require addressing issues of trust some really careful messaging and the involvement of those communities in making those plans.

Q: The Biden team talked about ramping up testing in a big way. What kinds of testing do you think are critical?

A: We need to ramp up testing on asymptomatic persons, because the vast majority of infections are among asymptomatic people. They are very much contributing to transmission in the community.

Q: How do you do that?

A: You need to make [testing] as easy and accessible as possible, which means offering it where people are, where theyre working going to school, in their neighborhood. It means really decentralizing it and if possible some of that may be in the home.

Q: Is there a particular kind of test? Michael Mina at Harvard University is talking about widespread use of antigen tests, which are not as accurate or sensitive as polymerase chain reaction tests, as a way to reduce infection spread.

A: I have spoken to Michael about this. Even if you have low sensitivity, you want to make sure that the specificity is high enough. [Specificity is how well the test avoids false positives.] So thats one piece of it. The other piece of it is, because were talking about asymptomatic screening, the studies on these antigen tests have been, to my knowledge, all amongst symptomatic. So you need to appropriately study it. Once you do that then I think you can talk about scaling them up.

Q: Contact tracing is part of the Biden plan. With infections as widespread as they are now, one person likened contact tracing to trying to clean up an oil spill with a paper towel. Is there a place for contact tracing right now?

A: It depends on how widespread the community transmission is. New York, for example, is still not so high that its a fruitless exercise. And there are different ways to think about contact tracing. Are you using it to identify those contacts as individuals? Or are you also trying to characterize what are the places of spread? For example, our understanding is that indoor dining is very important, in terms of spread. The way in which the contact tracing helped illuminate that was really useful.

But I think it works best where you have relatively suppressed transmission rates, not when things are on fire the way they are in the upper Midwest, for example.

Q: Do the preliminary results on the Pfizer vaccine change how you think about the next steps in tackling the pandemic?

A: Weve had this timeline in our minds for a while. We would probably have a vaccine that we could start distributing to the highest priority individuals towards the end of this calendar year. The general public, we could start looking at vaccinating probably around April, May. That timeline has not really changed at all.

Q: How does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regain its authority and its status as an independent, science-driven organization?

A: I really hope that well be hearing from Anne Schuchat [CDC principal deputy director], from Nancy Messonnier [director of the CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases], from people like that, starting in January [2021]. I think that would really change the quality of information, the tenor of the communication. CDC remains the premier public health institution in the world. People are feeling incredibly demoralized, undervalued, and I think they just need a big shot in the arm. And I think an important place to start is really by having them lead the communication.

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'It's like politicizing toilet paper.' A member of Biden's COVID-19 panel surveys the task ahead - Science Magazine

Mobility network models of COVID-19 explain inequities and inform reopening  Nature.com

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Mobility network models of COVID-19 explain inequities and inform reopening - Nature.com

Maine set another daily record with 244 new cases of COVID-19 reported Friday, continuing a disturbing upward trend that shows no sign of slowing down.

Three more people died as well.

It was the fifth consecutive day of at least 100 cases and the 10th time in the last 11 days the state has reached triple digits. The seven-day average daily cases also rose to 171 cases, the highest to date. One month ago, the seven-day average was 30 cases.

There have now been a total of 8,639 confirmed or probable cases and 162 deaths since the pandemic reached Maine back in March. Over the last two weeks, 16 people have died from COVID-19 complications, more than one per day. In the previous two-week period, there were none. Deaths often lag behind case spikes.

The longer Maine sees a sustained high level of new cases each day, the harder it becomes for contact tracers to identify possible contacts who can then quarantine and limit further spread.

Gov. Janet Mills on Friday updated the states color-coding system for schools, moving Androscoggin County into the yellow designation, joining Knox, Franklin, Somerset and Washington counties. Under the yellow designation, schools should take extra precautions, such as limiting the number of people in school buildings at the same time, suspending extracurricular or co-curricular activities or other measures.

The remaning counties remain green, although the state is closely monitoring Cumberland, Hancock, Kennebec and York.

Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Nirav Shah and Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew are scheduled to brief the media at 2 p.m. on Friday.

Hospitalizations also have been rising rapidly. On Friday, there were 13 new hospitalizations reported. The number currently hospitalized was 66, including 18 in critical care, the most since June. This time last month, just eight people were in the hospital.

Maines rate of hospitalization, 4.6 per 100,000 people, still remains well below the national rate of about 13, but state officials are beginning to worry again about bed capacity if things continue to worsen.

Additional cases were reported Friday in every county except Aroostook and Sagadahoc, a sign that community spread has taken hold in many cities and towns across the state even rural areas that had largely been spared from the virus.

Androscoggin County led the way with 68 new cases. Two of the three deaths also were residents of Androscoggin County. Cumberland (40), York (33) and Penobscot (27) also saw high numbers of new cases Friday.

Health officials say the recent increase has been driven more by smaller indoor gatherings where people arent always masked or distanced, rather than the larger gatherings that defined the early days of the pandemic.

New cases also continue to significantly outpace recoveries, which has driven the number of active cases over 2,000 for the first time three times what it was one month ago.

The virus is here, it is all around us and its spreading with ferocity, Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Nirav Shah said Thursday during a briefing with reporters.

As cases climb, the states ability to effectively contact trace to help contain the spread is jeopardized. Some states have effectively given up trying to contact trace because the number of new cases coming in is too much to keep up with.

Shah acknowledged Thursday that it has become more challenging but said the CDC has been training people from other departments to assist with contact tracing, bringing the number of staff members up to 135.

We still believe that the strategy of offering widespread testing coupled with case investigation and contact tracing has value, he said.

The states online program, called Sara Alert, has 1,146 currently enrolled, which is a little more than half the number of active cases. The average number of contacts for each confirmed case rose to 5.8 people in October after sitting at about 3.5 from March through September, another sign that people have been increasing the size of their bubbles.

Many states have seen precipitous and even record-breaking rises in cases, hospitalizations and deaths over the last several weeks as the winter months approach and more people move indoors, where the risk of the virus spreading is greater. Despite Maines rapid rise, it stil ranks low in the number of cases per 100,000 people and its test positivity rate of about 2.5 percent is much lower than the national average of 6 percent, a sign that testing capacity here is strong.

On Thursday, the United States set a record for the 7th time in the last nine days with more than 152,000 cases. According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 10.8 million cases and more than 240,000 COVID-19 related deaths in the United States. Both are far and away the most of any country.

This story will be updated.

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Record 244 new COVID-19 cases reported in Maine and three more deaths - Press Herald

Ms. Chavez was barely sustaining her oxygen levels despite being on maximum support through the thick tubing in her nose. Two days before coming to the hospital, Ms. Chavez developed fevers and diarrhea, tested positive for the coronavirus in the emergency department and by the next day was unable to breathe. Her son and daughter-in-law would both test positive soon after as well.

She lived in a small apartment with them and their two small children. The family barely made ends meet both worked essential jobs, one in a food-processing plant and the other at a fast-food restaurant. Without paid leave, they continued working even after others in their workplaces had tested positive for the coronavirus.

This anecdote is not an anomaly, nor is it the subplot. This is the main story of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, and it demands that all of us doctors, politicians and everyone else start approaching the pandemic from the lens of equity as a guiding principle. This is the only way we are going to bring a disease that's now killing more than 1,000 people a day in the U.S. under control. As Joe Biden's transition team moves forward in its strategy to stop the virus, equity must be at the center.

The virus does not strike equally

According to recent reports on NPR, in The New York Times and elsewhere, Black and Latinx people in the U.S. have contracted the coronavirus at rates significantly higher than white people per capita, are much more likely to become sick enough to require hospitalization and are more likely to die from that infection than their white counterparts. These disparities exist across state lines, in both urban and rural areas and across all age groups.

A recent working paper from Harvard University researchers shows that the particular racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths among younger age groups means that Black and Latinx populations have lost significantly more potential life years than their white counterparts. Additionally, the mental health burden including serious consideration of suicide in the past 30 days as described in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is disproportionately higher among Black, Latinx and essential workers than among white and wealthier populations.

Some of the reasons for these disparities are structural, with Black and Latinx populations disproportionately holding service jobs that without an option to work from home or receive paid leave required them to keep working during lockdowns. If we examine where the biggest clusters of spread are coming from in the U.S., jails and food-processing plants account for many of the largest. And in an alarming report by the CDC, 87% of the thousands of COVID-19 cases in meat and poultry plants in April and May occurred among racial and ethnic minorities. Data from Utah from March to early June suggest similarly disproportionate COVID-19 burdens on Black and Latinx essential workers in construction, manufacturing and wholesale trade industries.

These disparities are not by chance, nor are they explained by those who have tried to attribute blame, such as an Ohio lawmaker who groundlessly speculated in an Ohio Senate hearing in June that Black people might not be washing their hands as well as white people. Structural racism the system by which some groups of people are exploited and marginalized for the economic and social benefit of others is one of the main drivers of the American COVID-19 epidemic.

How an "equity" approach would work, instead

Ultimately, we need to approach the COVID-19 response through what we see as a lens of true equity a permanent transformation in how our nation thinks about and responds to this illness and other epidemics that might arise in the future.

For example, telling a person to "stay home" to prevent COVID-19, without understanding that their home is a one-bedroom apartment with four people and no safe way to isolate, or that they are an "essential worker" with no ability to work from home or otherwise earn money to put food on the table, is largely devoid of pragmatic, actionable advice for many people. And it actually ends up perpetuating more harm to them and to society.

If government officials instead apply an equity lens to the ways they implement new lockdowns (which may be necessary in parts of the country), it would shift that strategy in the following way: First, they would carefully evaluate the effects that lockdowns could have on our poorest residents and prepare for those downsides accordingly. Closing businesses, for example, has an outsize effect on our poorest workers who live paycheck to paycheck. Paid leave supplemented by the federal government (not simply a one-time stimulus check) would be critically important for a number of our poorest families.

Furthermore, many of these laid-off workers are immensely skilled and want to contribute to helping their communities. By helping them repurpose their skills and rewarding them accordingly with hazard pay we can create a stronger workforce of people who can help directly with epidemic control, including with contact tracing, testing, helping to staff isolation centers and community engagement efforts around public health education.

Similarly, lockdowns still require essential services, such as grocery stores, to remain open. Accordingly, it is imperative to equip these front-line, essential workers with adequate personal protective equipment and reward them with hazard pay for working to keep society afloat at great personal risk.

An equity lens would also demand that we provide safe quarantine options outside the home for anyone who does become infected with the virus such as in repurposed hotels, if they so choose.

Next: Engage and learn from the community

The focus on equity, at its foundation, is a critical examination of communities how we gain their trust and how we understand their struggles within systems that are often designed to harm them. These are lessons that were crucial in the past two Ebola outbreaks, which two of us were directly involved with.

In the West African Ebola epidemic, for example, anthropologists helped medical response teams understand the stigma and misunderstandings of cultural traditions that had led community members to mistrust doctors, nurses and public health officials. Those insights and changes in the way the medical team worked with local people led to improvements in contact tracing and safer burials and ultimately brought the epidemic to a close. That entailed a careful focus on situating safe burial practices within sociological contexts, not just epidemiological ones.

Sensitively addressing such challenges, often deemed "social" or "political" issues, is very much part of the responsibility of the public health system and has come up again during the recent Ebola outbreak in conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Importantly, this means ensuring that communities are equal stakeholders and authors of epidemic response policies that affect them far more than the people typically charged with writing and enforcing these policies. With Ebola, for example, it was only when response teams worked with local leaders to adapt traditional burial practices in ways that prevented infection yet still adhered to religious and cultural norms that this major route of transmission stopped.

And although we are writing this essay within the American context, the same shortcomings have been experienced throughout the world even in countries that were initially touted as having a strong response to the pandemic. In Singapore, for example, poor migrant workers were ignored, and that led to a resurgence of COVID-19 in this community a resurgence of illness that then spread more widely.

Anti-racism protests and the equity lens

When protests erupted after the killing of George Floyd, we, as global health physicians looking at the tragedy through an equity lens, recognized right away that the coronavirus pandemic and the epidemic of social injustice and structural racism are deeply intertwined.

Accordingly, we argued that protests, while posing clear risk to protesters for contracting COVID-19, were nonetheless of critical importance because they could set in motion revolutionary changes that are necessary. Focusing on issues of racism and racial inequities, we realized, could directly reduce the impact of COVID-19 in Black and brown communities.

One case in point: Roxbury, a largely Black neighborhood in Boston that had little access to COVID-19 testing before Floyd's death, suddenly got its own testing site. That was a direct result of the protests.

There were key differences, we would argue, between these anti-racism protests and earlier ones that sought to end lockdowns. The anti-lockdown protests did not directly address the inequities of a pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black people and other people of color. And while being able to get back to work is important, dying because you could never afford to stop working in the first place carries a different urgency.

That addressing inequity has not been the central guiding principle to the response in the U.S. ultimately speaks to why a diversity of expertise is essential as President-elect Biden establishes his team. Experts who failed to acknowledge the role of racism in the spread of COVID-19 have fallen into the trap of the epidemic silo. An epidemiologist who is focused only on transmission dynamics, for instance, will see protests only as a means by which COVID-19 may spread, rather than as a means by which inequities that underlie the epidemic could be illuminated and then, bit by bit, dismantled.

Much more needs to be done, and it needs to be done with vulnerable communities not at the margins, but at the center, of the response. Employing an equity lens is a necessary first step to stopping this pandemic once and for all and necessary to preventing the next one from taking root.

Abraar Karan is a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was previously involved with Massachusetts' COVID-19 state epidemic response. Ranu Dhillon, a Harvard Medical School instructor and physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, was a special adviser to the president of Guinea for its Ebola response. David Walton, an associate physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and CEO of Build Health International, has led epidemic response work in Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa. Ingrid Katz is the associate faculty director at the Harvard Global Health Institute, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and an associate physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

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OPINION: Biden's COVID-19 Response Must Start With Most Vulnerable : Shots - Health News - NPR

When it comes to the gradual reopening of schools and businesses, California counties hang on the words of state health officials. Each week, they give counties approval to restart different sectors of the economy or not, based on the COVID-19 case rate and test positivity threshold established by the states color-coded tiering system.

Whether or not a county can move up depends on several factors, such as how many people live there, how many tests are being administered, and whether there are outbreaks at schools and nursing homes. During the past two months, 10 counties have contested their tier status using the states readjudication process, which allows counties to request a reassessment when theyve been moved back a tier. But the state only approved four of those requests.

While many counties were successful in moving to less restrictive tiers at the start of the pandemic, several have been backsliding in the past few weeks. Last week, only one county moved forward a tier. This week, none moved forward and 11 moved backward.

Going into the purple tier is quite an impact on many of our local businesses, including restaurants, said Shasta County spokesperson Kerri Schuette. It is a hardship to go into the purple tier.

After the state has determined a county must move back a tier, it allows county health departments to submit requests for readjudication if the county feels theres been a data discrepancy, or if the county believes its rates dont accurately reflect its current situation due to other outstanding circumstances.

The tiers mostly place restrictions on how bars, restaurants, entertainment centers, gyms and other businesses can operate. But many counties say COVID-19 isnt being spread in those locations, and most of their cases are traced to home gatherings, workplaces and congregate care facilities.

Placer County requested readjudication last week, in part because they felt moving back a tier would unfairly punish restaurants and other establishments.

There is little evidence that most of the sectors subject to additional restrictions in the Red tier are a major driver of community COVID-19 transmission in Placer County, they wrote in their appeal. Further restrictions risk damaging trust and compliance that has stemmed from the Countys efforts to educate and reinforce social norms. These restrictions may also risk encouraging private gatherings as an alternative to gathering in public, more regulated establishments.

That request was denied. Placer County Supervisor Kirk Uhler recently told CBS Sacramento that county leaders wont enforce the state restrictions in the red tier and advised business owners to do whatever it takes to stay open.

When Shasta County was at risk of moving into the most restrictive purple tier, they filed a request for readjudication, arguing that an outbreak at a local school brought their case and positivity rates up.

The state denied the request, arguing that the school is not an isolated institution and was likely generating community spread.

Since late September, San Mateo County has requested readjudication three separate times. They were approved one time, when they were able to demonstrate an error with lab results at one of their testing sites.

Sacramento County recently requested readjudication, arguing there had been several dozen false positives related to a nursing home outbreak.

We were notified of a discrepancy with one of the long-term care facilities, said Sacramento County Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye. Were submitting to the state to say hey hold off, could you freeze us in red until we figure this out?

The state denied Sacramentos request and moved them into the purple tier, stating that they could not assume that the results were false positives.

Restaurant owners across the state have complained that the tier system unfairly punishes businesses, especially when a county is pushed over the threshold because of an outbreak at a long-term care facility or a school.

Riverside County asked the state for an additional two weeks to allow their data to stabilize after Labor Day weekend.

Previous surges appear to be linked to large gatherings over holiday weekends and similarly these recent increases in cases are evenly spread out over various geographies and demographics, they wrote on their request form. As a result, we request to remain in the red tier for an additional 2 weeks until our data stabilizes from the Labor Day weekend reporting.

The state denied Riversides request.

On Tuesday, state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said the tier system is necessary to mitigate COVID-19 spread statewide, and that California is still in a less restrictive position than it was earlier in the pandemic. On Aug. 31 there were 38 counties in the purple, or widespread tier and only two counties in the least restrictive yellow tier. Now there are 12 counties in purple and five in yellow, with the rest in orange and red.

We started seeing some slow increases, probably the beginning of October, Pan said. As weve seen more reopening, which is anticipated, weve started to see more cases and more concerns about increasing community transmission.

She says that shift should make it clear that people need to wear face coverings in public, stay six feet from others and avoid gatherings.

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Several California Counties Have Appealed Their COVID-19 Status, But Very Few Have Had Success - Capital Public Radio News

Scientists have discovered antibodies that react to the new coronavirus in blood samples donated prior to the start of the pandemic. They suggest that some people may have at least a degree of preexisting immunity to the new virus.

The number of new COVID-19 cases is on the rise in many regions across the globe. But not everyone who comes into contact with SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus, develops COVID-19.

Stay informed with live updates on the current COVID-19 outbreak and visit our coronavirus hub for more advice on prevention and treatment.

A group of scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, in London, along with colleagues at University College London, both in the United Kingdom, may have found a clue as to why some people can fight off a SARS-CoV-2 infection better than others.

Their work recently appeared in the journal Science.

The research team originally set out to develop a high-sensitivity test to detect antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Scientists can use this type of test to establish whether a person has antibodies after they had COVID-19, which is a key piece of information for those trying to establish how long immunity may last after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

As part of their work, the scientists used serum samples provided by people who did not have COVID-19. To their surprise, they found antibodies that reacted to SARS-CoV-2 in some of the samples.

In their paper, the researchers describe a scientific theory that exposure to any of the common human coronaviruses, which can cause the common cold, may lead to immunity against the other common human coronaviruses. They refer to this as immune cross-reactivity.

There are four seasonal common human coronaviruses, all of which mostly cause mild disease. The vast majority of people have an infection with at least one of these viruses at some point.

Scientists already know that our bodies do not build up long-lasting immunity to these viruses, which is why a person can contract an infection with a common human coronavirus more than once in their lifetime.

But can a previous exposure to a common human coronavirus provide at least temporary protection against SARS-CoV-2?

Coronaviruses use a protein called the spike protein to attach to and infect host cells.

Prof. George Kassiotis, a senior author of the new study and the group leader of the Retroviral Immunology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, explains how antibodies that recognize a part of the spike protein may provide immune cross-reactivity.

The spike of this coronavirus is made of two parts, or subunits, performing different jobs. The S1 subunit allows the virus to latch onto cells and is relatively diverse among coronaviruses, whereas the S2 subunit lets the virus into cells and is more similar among these viruses, he says. Our work shows that the S2 subunit is sufficiently similar between common cold coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 for some antibodies to work against both.

In their study, Prof. Kassiotis and colleagues determined the levels of cross-reacting antibodies in several collections of samples, most of which had been donated prior to the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In a group of 50 blood samples from pregnant people from May 2018, the team found that 10% had cross-reacting antibodies. In a separate cohort of 101 samples from May 2019, three had these antibodies.

In a further experiment, the team analyzed 13 additional samples from adults who had recently had an infection with a common cold coronavirus. Of these, only 1 sample had cross-reacting antibodies.

Overall, the authors report, 16 of 302 samples, or 5.29%, had SARS-CoV-2 cross-reacting antibodies. The median age of the donors was 51 years.

But why did relatively few people have cross-reacting antibodies, given that infections with common human coronaviruses happen frequently?

This suggested that their emergence was not simply a common transient event following each [common human coronavirus] infection in this age group, the authors comment. Instead, given that [common human coronavirus]-reactive antibodies are present in virtually all adults, the rarity of SARS-CoV-2s cross-reactivity [] indicates additional requirements.

One such requirement, they suggest, may involve how often a person has an infection with a common human coronavirus. The frequency is highest in children and adolescents.

To look for a link between age and SARS-CoV-2 cross-reacting antibodies, the team analyzed 48 blood samples from children and adolescents aged 116 years. All of the samples stemmed from before the pandemic.

Here, they found that 21 of the samples had cross-reacting antibodies, while in a separate cohort of samples from people aged 1725 years, these were only present in one sample.

Our results show that children are much more likely to have these cross-reactive antibodies than adults. More research is needed to understand why this is, but it could be down to children being more regularly exposed to other coronaviruses, comments Kevin Ng, one of the lead study authors and a post-graduate student in Prof. Kassiotis lab.

These higher levels we observed in children could also help explain why they are less likely to become severely ill with COVID-19. There is no evidence yet, however, that these antibodies prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or spread.

co-lead study author Kevin Ng

Professor Kassiotis also weighs in: It is important to stress that there are still many unknowns which require further research. For example, exactly how is immunity to one coronavirus modified by exposure to another?

Or, why does this activity decline with age? It is not the case that people who have recently had a cold should think they are immune to COVID-19, he adds.

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COVID-19: Who is immune without having an infection? - Medical News Today

SALT LAKE CITY Amid sky-high COVID-19 case counts in Utah and an ever-increasing death toll, a family on Wednesday remembered a loved one who passed away after contracting the disease.

As Patty and Roy Sandstrom both in their mid-80s fell sick to COVID-19 in late October, their son largely suffered from fatigue.

Nearing the end of the Sandstrom familys quarantine last week, however, 53-year-old Michael took a bad turn.

He slid to the floor and Roy couldnt lift him, so we called the paramedics, Patty Sandstrom said.

Roy Sandstrom said once Michael was in the intensive care unit at St. Marks Hospital on Saturday, it was apparent that his lungs were filled with fluids and were not functioning properly.

They said that they couldnt even get enough oxygen to resuscitate his lungs at all, his mother said. And then it just took him.

Michael passed away Sunday afternoon as his sister, Laura Sandstrom Bascom, held his hand.

He just for two or three moments said, Remember, remember, remember Michael, his father recalled.

(Those were) his closing words to Laura, his mother said.

The family pleaded Wednesday evening for the public to take COVID-19 seriously by wearing masks and following all guidelines.

Wear the mask always always, Roy Sandstrom said. If they think its a political move, tell them they ought to sit in our shoes for a while. They would never think that again.

The couple questioned if perhaps the disease should have taken them instead of their son, who had Down syndrome.

Michael, they said, had been healthy most of his life.

(It) should be us at the mortuary, Patty Sandstrom said. Thats whats amazing. Were 84 and 85, and were still here.

We should have been on the slab, Roy shrugged.

The Sandstroms remembered their son as a fun-loving soul who delighted with his singing.

He knew all the words and he was so on-key, Patty Sandstrom said. It was amazing!

Roy said his son was a kind, gentle person and his angel.

I told everybody that, and they agreed, Michaels father said. He loved his dad, and thats why its hard for dad to say goodbye.

Bascom said her brother was very sweet and sensitive.

You had to be careful about talking, fighting around him or anything like that because hed get upset, she said. If someone was sad and they were crying, youd see the tears start coming down.

Nephew Cameron Cross said his uncle was the type of person who could immediately brighten someones mood.

He changed so many peoples lives, just through his presence, Cross said.

Bascom said she was grateful she could be with Michael at the end of his life.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, but it was the most cherished thing I will ever have, Bascom said.

Family members set up a GoFundMe page to help offset expenses and to provide what they hope will be a fitting service for Mikey.

Excerpt from:

Utah couple mourns the loss of son to COVID-19 - Deseret News

(KTIV) -- Nebraska health experts on Thursday report 2,611 new cases of COVID-19 in the state, which brings the total number of cases in Nebraska to 92,553.

Twenty-five more virus-related deaths were reported, increasing Nebraska's death toll to 756 on Thursday.

Nebraska's COVID-19 dashboard indicates 905 residents are currently hospitalized, with a total of 3,460 residents who have been hospitalized due to the virus.

State health experts say Nebraska's total recoveries rose to 51,017 on Thursday.

So far, 650,985 Nebraskans have been tested for the virus and health experts say 558,106 tests have come back negative.

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Nebraska reports 2,611 new cases of COVID-19 and 25 more virus-related deaths - KTIV

WINK NEWS

Hopping on a plane or hitting the road to go see family for the holidays is tradition for many. But with a surge in COVID-19 cases nationwide, doctors say you should think twice about the risks of celebrating with the ones you love this year.

Coronavirus cases continue to surge across the country. We are recording more than 100,000 new COVID-19 cases a day as a nation.

We learned the skyrocketing cases are likely caused by small get-togethers and game nights. Experts say this is concerning with Thanksgiving right around the corner.

We know thanksgiving is a time when family and friends gather, but the doctor we spoke to says even a small family gathering risks the spread of COVID-19, especially if you have to travel by plane to get there or if youre a college student returning home from campus.

Im seeing an increase in cases from small gatherings, from people being in close proximity indoors, said Dr. Rebekah Bernard, the president of Collier County Medical Society. I am worried that we are going to see a significant increase in COVID cases after Thanksgiving holiday and Christmas as well.

Experts worry some of those cases could come from college students returning home for the holidays.

College students seem to be getting a little bit more sick than younger kids, and that means that they tend to have a higher viral load and therefore they are more likely to transmit that viral infection to other people, Bernard said.

Some FGCU students are concerned about the impacts of Thanksgiving gatherings on the spread of the virus within families and on campus.

I am more worried about them getting sick and like on their way to and from their families, FGCU student Caitlyn Newman said. In case if they do get sick, they bring it here on accident without realizing it.

Other students say they are taking some precautions before they go home to try to protect themselves and their family.

Since Im going to be on a plane, I want to make sure I dont have COVID before and then coming back to the university, FGCU student Emma Kurtenbach said. I want to make sure I dont have it, so Ill take another test too.

I usually only hang out with just my roommates, FGCU student Keara Schilling.

Cities including Chicago have already issued a stay-at-home advisory and new restrictions on gatherings ahead of the holidays. If you decide to travel or celebrate in groups, Bernard says its especially important to consider the vulnerability of the people youre visiting before you go, and she said the best thing you can do to prepare is to self-quarantine.

When I say self-isolate, I mean try to minimize your contact with other people in close proximity, wear your mask, do very good handwashing and definitely avoid any close encounters like bars, perhaps restaurants or anywhere that you may be exposed to a large number of other people, Bernard said.

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Surge in COVID-19 cases a concern ahead of the holidays, health experts say - Wink News