Category: Covid-19

A growing number of cities in France are experiencing a worrying spread of the coronavirus and will have to enact new restrictions on public gatherings, the French health minister said on Thursday as he urged people to reduce their social contacts.

Olivier Vran, the minister, said at a news conference that local authorities in the cities of Lyon and Nice plan to tighten restrictions in the coming days, and he warned that other cities like Paris, Dijon or Toulouse might have to do the same soon.

The epidemic is once again very active in our country, Mr. Vran said.

Frances rate per capita of new cases over the last seven days is currently one of the highest in Europe, with 91 cases per 100,000 residents, up from 10 at the end of July. Gatherings of family and friends had become massive vectors of infections, Mr. Vran said.

In cities like Marseille and Bordeaux where the number of cases has surged the most, and where authorities had limited public gatherings to 10 people last week Mr. Vran said authorities might have to close bars and restaurants or ban gatherings completely.

Mr. Vran said that France had carried out over 1.2 million tests over the past week, but he acknowledged that massive demand had led to long lines and growing waiting times. Hundreds of medical lab workers even went on strike on Thursday over strained working conditions because of the overwhelming demand. Mr. Vran said the authorities were improving the process, while working on rolling out faster antibody tests and greenlighting saliva tests.

Mr. Vran also said that the authorities were able to monitor the pandemic much more closely than they could in the spring and that doctors have improved at treating severe cases of the virus.

We are not fighting with the same weapons and we know our opponent better, Mr. Vran said.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Aurelien Breeden, Luke Broadwater, Nick Bruce, Emily Cochrane, Stacy Cowley, Hana de Goeij, Elizabeth Dias, Sydney Ember, Nicholas Fandos, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Jeffrey Gettleman, Denise Grady, Anemona Hartocollis, Jan Hoffman, Mike Ives, Jennifer Jett, Apoorva Mandavilli, Alex Marshall, Claire Cain Miller, David Montgomery, Claire Moses, Roni Caryn Rabin, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Anna Schaverien, Nelson D. Schwartz, Christopher F. Schuetze, Michael D. Shear, Eliza Shapiro, Daniel E. Slotnik, Mitch Smith, Kate Taylor, Katie Thomas, Glenn Thrush, Maria Varenikova, Lauren Wolfe and Sameer Yasir.

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Covid-19 Live Updates: For Small Businesses, Rent Help Is Needed to Survive - The New York Times

Ortiz told New England Sports Network (NESN) announcers during Friday's Major League Baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.

"Yeah, man, I just got it. I just had my last test yesterday. Thank God I tested negative," Ortiz said, adding that he was asymptomatic so he didn't struggle too badly.

"My brother had it really bad, he had to be in the hospital for about a week. He ended up losing like 25 pounds and, man, this is no joke," he said. "You don't realize how crazy this is until it hits home."

CNN's Jill Martin contributed to this report.

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David Ortiz admits he had Covid-19, but was asymptomatic - CNN

Some people, like Ms. Kim, have paid a price. Online harassers labeled her a cougar, suggesting she used sex to proselytize to a younger man. Others said that, should she get pregnant, the infant should undergo a paternity test. Officials in the city of Busan debunked the rumors, but they continued to spread online.

Once discharged, she filed complaints with a major web portal to remove the fake content. But after trying to hound dozens of blogs, she gave up. There were too many of them, she said.

The global fight against the pandemic has raised privacy concerns across countries. Governments, including those of Italy, Israel and Singapore, have used cellphone data to track potentially infected people and their contacts. China has employed mobile phone apps with little disclosure about how they track people. Venezuela has urged neighbors to turn each other in.

South Korea, an intensely connected country where nearly everyone totes a smartphone, has taken those efforts a step beyond. In addition to making some personal data public, the authorities sometimes use it to send text messages to people whose cellular data history indicates they were in proximity to an infected person. Other than China, South Korea is virtually the only country in the world whose government has the power to collect such data at will during an epidemic, according to Prof. Park.

In the initial desperate months of the pandemic, government websites uploaded a detailed sketch of each patients daily life until they were diagnosed and isolated. The government did not reveal patients names but sometimes released revealing data such as their addresses and employers.

That rush of data fed a growing culture of online harassment. In South Korea, doxxing digging up and publishing malicious personal information had already been a growing problem, often cited in the recent suicides of K-pop stars.

Restaurants visited by patients were sometimes treated as if they were cursed. Citing one female patients frequent visits to karaoke parlors, online trolls claimed that she must be a prostitute. Gay South Koreans began to fear being outed, prompting the government to promise them anonymity in testing after an outbreak erupted at a gay club in Seoul in May.

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In South Korea, Covid-19 Comes With Another Risk: Online Bullies - The New York Times

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If you want to know whats happening with business reopenings during the pandemic in Texas, watch your local hospital.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday that COVID-19 hospitalizations are the most important number in his decision-making about how many people to allow in restaurants and other businesses in the state.

He made the announcement a few days after the states health department rejiggered its calculations of positivity rates a measure of how many people tested for COVID-19 are infected, and the governors old favorite metric.

Instead of concentrating on the spread of the virus, the state is now concentrating on the severity of the spread. Its not primarily about how many Texans are infected, but about how many of them get sick enough to go to the hospital.

As long as that COVID-19 hospitalization rate the percentage of occupied hospital beds that are occupied by coronavirus patients remains below 15% for at least seven days in a row, the governor said Thursday, businesses dependent on crowds can admit more customers. That excludes only three of the states Trauma Service Areas Laredo, Rio Grande Valley and Victoria which means that most of the states businesses will be on longer leashes starting Monday.

What businesses? The governor specified restaurants, retail stores, office buildings, manufacturing facilities, gyms and exercise facilities, museums, and libraries. Elective surgeries were reauthorized. Bars, which remain closed unless theyve transformed themselves into restaurants, didnt make the cut.

Texas schools and colleges remain as they were, most operating a mix of virtual and in-person classes. Whether and how much those reopenings have sped the spread of the coronavirus is still not clear.

Abbott said hospitalizations are the primary metric, but not the only one. Hospitalization rates will tell you what share of the people in Texas hospitals by district are coronavirus patients.

But the governors new standard is a lagging indicator of COVID-19 cases. Epidemiologists say it takes nine to 16 days to see increases in infections from social interactions and another five to seven days to see changes in the number of people hospitalized. That means someone infected at a particular social gathering might not show up at the hospital for two to three weeks.

The hospitalization number misses a lot about how things are going. It wont tell you how many people have died and whether deaths are rising or falling. It wont reveal the spread of the virus, whether case numbers are going up or down, and it wont provide any information about how many infected Texans have symptoms and how many are asymptomatic. It doesnt tell you anything about how a patient contracted the disease.

One piece of news got buried in state leaders conversation about metrics and reopenings, and thats because they didnt say it directly: This amounts to a declaration that Junes coronavirus numbers arent as scary as they seemed in June, when attention was more on the rising numbers than on the numbers themselves.

After a summer spike in the coronavirus in Texas that followed Abbotts first round of reopenings whether you measure that rise by positivity rates, hospitalizations, deaths or something else state leaders have adopted June numbers that revealed that surge as normal enough to justify more social activity.

The trends are encouraging. Just look at The Texas Tribunes coronavirus tracker: On Wednesday, the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 was down 355 from the previous week to a number not seen since mid-June, and 5.5% of occupied hospital beds were being used by people with the virus, at June levels and down from a high of almost 20%.

Those are less ghastly numbers than the July and August tallies, but thats no consolation to the Texans wrestling with the virus or at risk of being infected. The trends might even be reason for optimism, but not too much: Abbott was emphatic about the continuing need for masks, social distancing and hand washing.

But with those numbers on the status board, state officials have set their acceptable level of ongoing damage from the pandemic the numbers of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths that justify looser restrictions on people getting together in large groups for business and commerce, sporting events, and in-person public and higher education.

Watch the hospitals. In two or three weeks, well know how this new standard is working out.

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Ross Ramsey: Texas reopenings tied more to COVID-19 severity than to spread - The Texas Tribune

In the early weeks of the pandemic, before coronavirus cases crushed hospitals in New York and spiked in other states, Dr. Rebecca Shadowen asked her friends a question on Facebook.

"If you could save the life of another person without harming your own, would you?" Shadowen, an infectious disease specialist in Kentucky, posted on March 13.

From the start, the doctor advocated for social distancing, hand-washing and mask-wearing, and she hoped her community of Bowling Green could become a model for the rest of her state, where residents sparred over stay-at-home orders and challenged Kentucky's mask mandate in the courts.

In May, while offering her expertise as a member of the Bowling Green-Warren County Coronavirus Workgroup, Shadowen fell ill. At first, she complained of feeling tired, but on the night she was taken to the hospital, she woke up saying she was short of breath, her husband, David, said.

She toggled between local hospitals for the next four months, at times being placed on a ventilator and in the intensive care unit. During weeks she regained her strength, she was lucid enough to continue working from her hospital bed and sharing what she knew about a virus that was ravaging her body in unexpected ways.

"There were multiple times she thought she was turning the corner and we thought she was on the road to recovery," David Shadowen, who is also a doctor, said.

But after dealing with complications from the virus, including abdominal bleeding and weakened lungs, Shadowen died on Sept. 11 surrounded by her husband and two adult children. She was 62.

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David and Rebecca Shadowen were college sweethearts at Western Kentucky University, and together they enrolled at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. Shadowen went on to specialize in infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and Lyme disease, and, this year, Covid-19.

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She worked out of the Medical Center at Bowling Green, where colleagues leaned on her more than three decades of medical knowledge and she enjoyed helping medical students and residents.

Even after she became sick, she continued on the county's coronavirus workgroup, urging the need for a local mask ordinance. When she learned something especially important, she would send out a group text, sometimes in the middle of the night. She believed the simple act of wearing a mask could stop the spread of the disease.

"She'd say, 'Look folks, this isn't politics. This is science,'" said Dennis Chaney, the Medical Center's vice president of ancillary services. "I heard her say that many times."

After her death, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear tweeted his praise of Shadowen as being a "front line hero."

David Shadowen believes his wife contracted Covid-19 the way he and their daughter, Kathryn, did: from a home health aide who had infected his elderly mother.

But the Shadowens' son, Jesse, did not test positive for the virus. David Shadowen said he and his daughter had mild symptoms from Covid-19, which made Shadowen's debilitating struggle all the more frustrating.

Before she got sick, Shadowen went to her church, empty during the pandemic, and prayed in a pew. She was conflicted, wrestling with all the risks and her responsibilities as a health care worker, said Adam Shourds, senior pastor at Broadway United Methodist Church.

"She said, 'We all have a responsibility,'" Shourds recalled. "'My role is important, but it's no more important than anyone else's.'"

He said Shadowen texted him the day she was scheduled to be placed on a ventilator: "I'm going on the vent today. This is not the end."

She wasn't bitter, she said, and used her last few months to understand everything she could about the coronavirus.

"She fought the virus harder than anybody because she knew how," Shourds said.

During Shadowen's visitation and funeral service this week, former patients and family members of patients approached David Shadowen and his children.

Many told them the same thing: "'I'm alive today because she saved my life,' or 'She saved my mother's life,'" David Shadowen said.

He described her as the glue that held their household together, working long shifts, taking care of the finances, making meals and shuttling the kids between soccer practice and ballet, all without breaking a sweat.

She embodied so much, David Shadowen said: a person of faith, a mother, a wife and a doctor.

Their daughter, Kathryn, 23, said there were countless times when they were out in public that someone would stop her mother to thank her for what she did.

"It was really powerful to be the kid of someone who saved people," she said. "A lot of kids think of their parents as heroes. Mine actually was."

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Kentucky doctor who urged mask-wearing early on dies of Covid-19 - NBC News

TheWest Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) reportsas of 10:00 a.m., September 18, 2020, there have been 502,803 total confirmatory laboratory results receivedfor COVID-19, with 13,683 total cases and 297 deaths.

DHHR has confirmed the deaths of an83-year old male from Mingo County, an 87-year old female from Mason County,and a 62-year old male from Logan County. As we extend our deepestsympathies to the loved ones, we also encourage all West Virginians torecognize the continued need to take every possible step to slow the spread ofthis disease, said Bill J. Crouch, DHHR Cabinet Secretary.

CASESPER COUNTY: Barbour(42), Berkeley (929), Boone (191), Braxton (10), Brooke (106), Cabell (707),Calhoun (23), Clay (33), Doddridge (17), Fayette (524), Gilmer (20), Grant(150), Greenbrier (119), Hampshire (100), Hancock (140), Hardy (78), Harrison(332), Jackson (244), Jefferson (413), Kanawha (2,194), Lewis (38), Lincoln(153), Logan (559), Marion (252), Marshall (150), Mason (130), McDowell (86),Mercer (394), Mineral (161), Mingo (346), Monongalia (1,836), Monroe (146),Morgan (49), Nicholas (79), Ohio (349), Pendleton (51), Pleasants (16),Pocahontas (59), Preston (147), Putnam (471), Raleigh (470), Randolph (233),Ritchie (10), Roane (43), Summers (34), Taylor (117), Tucker (15), Tyler (15),Upshur (60), Wayne (336), Webster (7), Wetzel (49), Wirt (10), Wood (346),Wyoming (94).

Pleasenote that delays may be experienced with the reporting of information from thelocal health department to DHHR. As case surveillance continues at the localhealth department level, it may reveal that those tested in a certain countymay not be a resident of that county, or even the state as an individual inquestion may have crossed the state border to be tested.

Pleasevisit the dashboard located at http://www.coronavirus.wv.gov for more information.

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COVID-19 Daily Update 9-18-2020 - West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources

Statement from Governor Cuomo on CDC Reversing Its COVID-19 Guidance | Governor Andrew M. Cuomo Skip to main content September 18, 2020

Albany, NY

"Today the CDC has reversed itself - that is not enough. How do they compensate for the lives lost and the millions in expenses and who was responsible for distorting the truth and jeopardizing the health of millions of Americans?"

The State of New York does not imply approval of the listed destinations, warrant the accuracy of any information set out in those destinations, or endorse any opinions expressed therein. External web sites operate at the direction of their respective owners who should be contacted directly with questions regarding the content of these sites.

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Statement from Governor Cuomo on CDC Reversing Its COVID-19 Guidance - ny.gov

We were extremely saddened to learn of the loss of the states first adolescent with COVID-19. On behalf of all of us at VDH, I extend sincere condolences to the teenagers family and loved ones, said State Health Commissioner M. Norman Oliver, M.D., M.A. No age group is immune from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this unfortunate event, along with the increasing numbers of coronavirus cases we are seeing in some areas of the Commonwealth, is a reminder that we all need to do our part to help slow the spread of virus in the community.

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First teen dies due to COVID-19 in Virginia - WWBT NBC12 News

Photo by KPBS Staff

Above: File photo of a banner in the Gaslamp Quarter showing restaurant workers pledging to keep customers safe during the pandemic, Sept. 17, 2020.

San Diego County health officials have reported 174 new COVID-19 infections and six deaths tied to the illness, raising the region's totals to 43,619 cases and 754 deaths as the county waits to see if it will have to roll back business openings next week.

Of the 9,495 tests reported Thursday, just 2% returned positive potentially a good sign as San Diego County appears poised to regress into the state's most restrictive public health tier due to increasing COVID-19 numbers by Tuesday, when state data is released.

However, as the data runs on a seven-day lag, it may be too little, too late to prevent moving to a more restrictive tier with Gov. Gavin Newsom rejecting a county effort Wednesday to discount the more than 700 positive tests recorded by San Diego State University since the semester began.

The county will find out Tuesday if it will slip back to the "purple" tier of the state's coronavirus reopening roadmap. If so, it would likely shutter indoor operations for restaurants, houses of worship and gyms, limit retail businesses to just 25% capacity and have major impacts on indoor business for most other industries until the county can improve its numbers.

RELATED: Governor Won't Exclude SDSU COVID-19 Cases From County Figures

Should the county be placed in that tier, it would have to wait a minimum of three weeks before moving back to less restrictive tiers.

Data released this week showed one of the two metrics the state monitors being flagged as "widespread."

SDSU is playing an outsized role in the county's 7.9 new daily cases per 100,000 population, the San Diego Public Health Officer, Dr. Wilma Wooten, said Tuesday. The positive testing percentage for the county is 4.5%, good enough for the "orange" tier of the state's four-tier reopening plan.

Should the county have a case rate higher than 7 next week, it could be moved into the purple tier the most restrictive. However, if the numbers from the university were removed from the equation, San Diego County would suddenly drop below the mark to remain in the "red" tier.

County Supervisor Greg Cox said Wednesday he was writing a letter to Newsom to ask for considerations in excluding SDSU cases or for other alternatives to avoid rolling back business openings.

But Newsom said he isn't inclined to overlook the SDSU cases. The governor said the county can't separate cases at a university because it goes to "what a community by definition is and that is integrated individuals, and as a consequence, you can't isolate as if it's on an island, a campus community that is part of the larger community. So the answer is 'No."'

County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher said it was a difficult decision by Newsom, but the county had to do the best it could from here on out.

"We are in a battle against the coronavirus, not the state of California," Fletcher said Thursday. "Their public health experts looked at the situation in San Diego closely and made a decision that I understand and respect."

According to Dr. Eric McDonald, the county's epidemiology expert, the vast majority of those students live in the 92115 ZIP Code around the university many just a few blocks off campus. He said that while it is true they are technically in the community at large, they are close enough to campus to make the county's request to exclude those positive tests from the countywide number a realistic endeavor.

SDSU reported 17 COVID-19 cases Thursday.

The university has not received any reports of faculty or staff who have tested positive, SDSU health officials said, nor have any cases been traced to classroom or research settings.

Four women and two men died between Sept. 11 and Sept. 15, and their ages ranged from early 60s to mid-90s. All had underlying medical issues.

Of the total cases, 3,366 or 7.7% have been hospitalized, and 791 or 1.8% have spent at least some time in intensive care units.

County health officials reported six new community outbreaks on Thursday. In the previous seven days, 20 community outbreaks were confirmed. Two of the new outbreaks were in business settings, one in a restaurant, one in a food processing setting, one in a residence and one in a grocery setting.

The number of community outbreaks remains above the county's goal of fewer than seven in a seven-day span. A community setting outbreak is defined as three or more COVID-19 cases originating in the same setting and impacting people of different households in the past 14 days.

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San Diego COVID-19 Rate Improving But May Be Too Late To Prevent More Restrictions - KPBS

Back in March, I booked a public use cabin outside of Homer for the end of August. I figured the pandemic would be over by then, wed be free from lockdown, and I could gather a bunch of my friends together for a weekend cabin getaway.

But here we are in September, and COVID-19 is still a part of our lives. When I went to the cabin last month with two friends in my bubble my small group of friends that limit social interactions with others and take COVID-19 safety precautions I figured Id be OK. I work from home, wear a mask when I go out, dont eat in restaurants, dont go to bars and limit my interactions with others. My bubble friends did the same.

But we didnt know one person had been exposed to the virus before we left. By the end of the weekend, they were coughing. By the next week I would be, too.

In some ways, coughing was the least of it. My lungs literally ached. My throat was raw. My energy was so low that getting up to go to the bathroom left me lightheaded and winded. I lost my sense of taste and smell. I lost my appetite and gained nausea instead. I developed a pounding headache that lasted for days.

Im 32 years old. Im healthy and an avid runner, biker and skier. I run marathons. I spent most of my summer biking through mountain passes on the Kenai Peninsula and hiking peaks in the Chugach front range. This virus still knocked me out.

I was alone for two weeks while I was sick, with no one but my dog to keep me company. I am lucky that I had friends and family checking in on me daily. I had so many people bring me groceries or offer to deliver food. I was overwhelmed by kindness.

But I also sat on my couch and cried when a headache that lingered for days sucked the last bit of energy from me. I cried in the doctors office when they told me theyd be monitoring me closely for blood clots and to prepare myself for a visit to the emergency room if things didnt get better. I was scared. I was angered to come home to see people post on social media how they were annoyed that public health officials are just overreacting or proclaim that their freedom had been violated by mask mandates. While some gathered en masse to protest the idea of taking precautions, I struggled to fall asleep, wondering if a rogue blood clot would kill me in the middle of the night.

My symptoms are gone now and my energy is coming back, but I still have more recovery ahead of me after two weeks of being bedridden. After 20 minutes of walking my dog on the Chester Creek trail, I find myself exhausted and ready to collapse on the couch.

Although I can trace my infection back to the cabin, what I cant trace back is how it managed to infiltrate my small social bubble. So please be careful, wear a mask and keep your circles small. If you have any symptoms, stay home and isolate.

Remember that testing alone is not enough, nor should it be considered a pass for all of the other protective measures we must take in order to keep others safe. My first test, even after I had some symptoms, came back negative. A second test, unsurprisingly, came back positive. The first person in my bubble to get COVID-19 experienced the same; a false negative later followed by a positive. If you are experiencing symptoms or have been exposed to someone who is positive, isolate yourself from others and monitor for symptoms for 14 days, even if your test comes back negative.

I hope by sharing my story that people who have been fighting the reality of this take a quick pause and check themselves. This pandemic has been devastating for everyone, and it will not be getting better anytime soon. We are all making sacrifices, but we can all do better. This virus has no mercy. It doesnt care if you are young and healthy. Please take it seriously.

Suzanna Caldwell is an outdoor enthusiast; she works as the recycling coordinator for Municipality of Anchorage Solid Waste Services. She was formerly a reporter with the ADN.

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COVID-19 doesn't care if you're young and healthy. We all need to do better. - Anchorage Daily News