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Learning from the Covid-19 failure — before the next pandemic

Learning from the Covid-19 failure — before the next pandemic

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker write: Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose. Someday, after the next pandemic has come and gone, a commission much like the 9/11 Commission will be charged with determining how well government, business, and public health leaders prepared the world for the catastrophe when they had clear warning. What will be the verdict?” That is from the concluding paragraph of an essay entitled…

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The CDC is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising crucial metrics governors depend on to reopen their economies

The CDC is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising crucial metrics governors depend on to reopen their economies

The Atlantic reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is…

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The CDC says coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ on surfaces or objects. Here’s what we know

The CDC says coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ on surfaces or objects. Here’s what we know

USA Today reports: Recent guidance issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sheds new light on how coronavirus spreads through surfaces. Though there is the possibility that coronavirus could be transmitted by touching a surface — and then your nose, mouth or eyes — the likelihood of that is lower than person-to-person contact, which is believed to be the primary way coronavirus is transmitted. “COVID-19 is a new disease and we are still learning about how it…

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Trump says he won’t close the country if second wave of coronavirus hits

Trump says he won’t close the country if second wave of coronavirus hits

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday said “we are not closing our country” if the U.S. is hit by a second wave of coronavirus infections. “People say that’s a very distinct possibility, it’s standard,” Trump said when asked about a second wave during a tour of a Ford factory in Michigan. “We are going to put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country,” Trump said. “We can put out the fires. Whether it is an ember…

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Study finds 36,000 American lives could have been saved if Trump had showed decisive leadership in early March

Study finds 36,000 American lives could have been saved if Trump had showed decisive leadership in early March

The Washington Post reports: On March 8, it was mostly business as usual in the United States. As the Lakers faced the Clippers in a much-anticipated Los Angeles basketball matchup, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) rallied before a packed crowd in Michigan. In Miami, thousands squeezed onto the beach for a massive dance party. With 500 coronavirus infections reported nationwide at the time, the outbreak seemed like a distant threat to many Americans. But by the following Sunday, the nation had…

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America’s billionaires got $434 billion richer during the lockdown

America’s billionaires got $434 billion richer during the lockdown

CNBC reports: America’s billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the U.S. lockdown between mid-March and mid-May, according to a new report. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains, with Bezos adding $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg adding $25 billion, according to the report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program for Inequality. The report is based on Forbes data for America’s more than 600 billionaires between…

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How SARS-CoV-2 hijacks cells

How SARS-CoV-2 hijacks cells

Sharon Begley writes: A deep dive into how the new coronavirus infects cells has found that it orchestrates a hostile takeover of their genes unlike any other known viruses do, producing what one leading scientist calls “unique” and “aberrant” changes. Recent studies show that in seizing control of genes in the human cells it invades, the virus changes how segments of DNA are read, doing so in a way that might explain why the elderly are more likely to die…

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No one has the right to spread disease

No one has the right to spread disease

Graham Mooney writes: So far, COVID-19 has killed more than 90,000 Americans—at least that’s the official count. More than 1.5 million have been infected, and every day another 25,000 or so test positive. Despite this, across the country there is an increasing push to ease social-distancing restrictions. Florida, Wisconsin, and many other states are moving to reopen. Most public-health experts say it is too soon, and that easing restrictions will lead to a spike in transmissions. Many of the people…

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Why do some Covid-19 patients infect many others, whereas most don’t spread the virus at all?

Why do some Covid-19 patients infect many others, whereas most don’t spread the virus at all?

Science reports: When 61 people met for a choir practice in a church in Mount Vernon, Washington, on 10 March, everything seemed normal. For 2.5 hours the chorists sang, snacked on cookies and oranges, and sang some more. But one of them had been suffering for 3 days from what felt like a cold—and turned out to be COVID-19. In the following weeks, 53 choir members got sick, three were hospitalized, and two died, according to a 12 May report…

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How Bolinas mounted one of the most advanced coronavirus-testing efforts in America

How Bolinas mounted one of the most advanced coronavirus-testing efforts in America

Nathan Heller writes: This winter … the coronavirus brought a wave of social change from which Bolinas [a tiny hippie enclave north of San Francisco] could not flee. On January 11th, China reported its first death caused by covid-19; on January 21st, a resident of Washington State, who had travelled to Wuhan, became the first confirmed case in the United States; and, by mid-February, fatalities spanned the world. On March 16th, a group of counties across the Bay Area declared…

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The coronavirus is coursing through different parts of the U.S. in different, harder to predict, ways

The coronavirus is coursing through different parts of the U.S. in different, harder to predict, ways

Ed Yong writes: There was supposed to be a peak. But the stark turning point, when the number of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. finally crested and began descending sharply, never happened. Instead, America spent much of April on a disquieting plateau, with every day bringing about 30,000 new cases and about 2,000 new deaths. The graphs were more mesa than Matterhorn—flat-topped, not sharp-peaked. Only this month has the slope started gently heading downward. This pattern exists because different…

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Americans harbor strong fear of new wave of coronavirus infections

Americans harbor strong fear of new wave of coronavirus infections

The Associated Press reports: Strong concern about a second wave of coronavirus infections is reinforcing widespread opposition among Americans to reopening public places, a new poll finds, even as many state leaders step up efforts to return to life before the pandemic. Yet support for public health restrictions imposed to control the virus’ spread is no longer overwhelming. It has been eroded over the past month by a widening partisan divide, with Democrats more cautious and Republicans less anxious as…

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CDC staff being ‘muzzled’ as White House puts politics ahead of science

CDC staff being ‘muzzled’ as White House puts politics ahead of science

CNN reports: In the early weeks of the US coronavirus outbreak, staff members in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tracked a growing number of transmissions in Europe and elsewhere, and proposed a global advisory that would alert flyers to the dangers of air travel. But about a week passed before the alert was issued publicly — crucial time lost when about 66,000 European travelers were streaming into American airports every day. The delay, detailed in documents…

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How most Americans really feel about wearing face masks

How most Americans really feel about wearing face masks

HuffPost reports: Most Americans consider wearing a mask near others a sign of respect and a matter of public health, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s frequent eschewal of masks, combined with a few high-profile incidents of public protest, have seemingly threatened to turn the issue into another front for partisan hostilities. But public opinion on masks, like other aspects of the coronavirus crisis, doesn’t fit neatly into the hyperpolarized…

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Why contact tracing may be a mess across America

Why contact tracing may be a mess across America

MIT Technology Review reports: Dozens of states across the US are pinning their hopes on contact tracing to control the spread of the coronavirus and enable regions to reopen without sparking major resurgences of the outbreak. Alaska, California, Massachusetts, New York, and others are collectively hiring and training tens of thousands of people to interview infected patients, identify people they may have exposed, and convince everyone at risk to stay away from others for several weeks. Contact tracing is a…

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