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Category: Health

‘We need an army’: Hiring of coronavirus contact tracers seen as key to curbing disease spread

‘We need an army’: Hiring of coronavirus contact tracers seen as key to curbing disease spread

STAT reports: K.J. Seung is surprised to be hiring and training new workers in Boston. His public health nonprofit, Partners in Health, specializes in helping the poorest people in developing nations — tracking down contacts of Ebola patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone; running child health and HIV clinics in Haiti; and operating tuberculosis control programs in Peru. But now it is advertising for 500 people to help do what’s known as contact tracing to try to control Covid-19 in…

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East and West coast governors preempt move by Trump and form pacts to control reopening of economies

East and West coast governors preempt move by Trump and form pacts to control reopening of economies

CNN reports: States on the country’s East and West coasts are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen from the stay-at-home orders each has issued to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. The first such group to be announced came Monday on the East Coast. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts each plan to name a public health and economic official to…

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As more of grocery workers die, increasingly they fear showing up at work

As more of grocery workers die, increasingly they fear showing up at work

The Washington Post reports: Doug Preszler wasn’t thinking about risk when he took a cashier job at a regional supermarket in eastern Iowa. But five months in, he has found himself at the forefront of a global crisis with little training or protection — save for the pocket-size bottle of hand sanitizer and Ziploc full of disposable gloves he brings from home each day. The 51-year-old has told himself not to live in fear yet concedes he increasingly is. Even…

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Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in contact with coronavirus

Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in contact with coronavirus

The Washington Post reports: Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat the novel coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected with the disease. The changes the two companies announced targeting iPhone and Android devices could inject valuable new technological support into contact tracing, a strategy public health officials say is essential to allowing people to return to work and normal life while…

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Five-step plan for reopening business is put to the test in China

Five-step plan for reopening business is put to the test in China

The Washington Post reports: Employers and employees around the world are anxious to get back to work as soon as possible. A picture of how that will unfold is starting to emerge — and it’s far from straightforward. Businesses have long relied on a five-tier inverted pyramid called the “hierarchy of controls” to reduce workplace risks to employees, ranging from chemical exposure to physical injury. This framework will also be the basis for companies’ plans to get back to work,…

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Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective T cells, scientists warn

Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective T cells, scientists warn

South China Morning Post reports: The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 could kill the powerful immune cells that are supposed to kill the virus instead, scientists have warned. The surprise discovery, made by a team of researchers from Shanghai and New York, coincided with frontline doctors’ observation that Covid-19 could attack the human immune system and cause damages similar to that found in HIV patients. Lu Lu, from Fudan University in Shanghai, and Jang Shibo, from the New York Blood Centre,…

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How San Francisco flattened the coronavirus curve

How San Francisco flattened the coronavirus curve

The Atlantic reports: London Breed wasn’t going to wait around for COVID-19. San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February. Two weeks later, Breed’s decision to ban gatherings of more than 1,000 people forced the hand of the Bay Area’s beloved Golden State Warriors, who this year moved into San Francisco’s Chase Center after nearly a half century in Oakland. Her…

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The first Americans to recover from Covid-19 test drive immunity

The first Americans to recover from Covid-19 test drive immunity

The New York Times reports: Christy Karras and her husband received a tantalizing text the other day from friends they had not seen since February, when all four were among the first people in the United States to be sickened by the new coronavirus. “Dinner at our place?” It had been a week and a half since any of them had experienced symptoms, past the point when Covid-19 patients are thought to be contagious. And, assuming conventional virology wisdom applies,…

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America’s billionaires’ gifts to charity are mostly PR stunts

America’s billionaires’ gifts to charity are mostly PR stunts

Robert Reich writes: As millions of jobless Americans line up for food or risk their lives delivering essential services, the nation’s billionaires are making conspicuous donations – $100m from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for food banks, billions from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for a coronavirus vaccine, thousands of ventilators and N95 masks from Elon Musk, $25m from the Walton family and its Walmart foundation. The list goes on. On Wednesday, Forbes released its annual billionaires list, happily noting that “the planet’s…

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Bolsonaro dragging Brazil towards coronavirus calamity, experts fear

Bolsonaro dragging Brazil towards coronavirus calamity, experts fear

The Guardian reports: Medical experts have said they fear that Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, could be hastening the country’s march towards a devastating public health crisis like those to have hit northern Italy and New York by undermining social distancing measures. Bolsonaro is one of just four world leaders still downplaying the threat of coronavirus to public health, alongside the authoritarian presidents of Nicaragua, Belarus and Turkmenistan. Over Easter, Brazil’s far-right leader repeatedly sniffed at his own health ministry’s distancing…

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Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia

Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia

The Times reports: Prominent British academics have been sharing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus online, The Times can disclose. They included suggestions from other social media users that Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets in Davos may be involved in plots to exploit the illness and speculation that it was a biological weapon. The academics include Tim Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Piers Robinson, co-founder…

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He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump’s failure on the pandemic

He could have seen what was coming: Behind Trump’s failure on the pandemic

The New York Times reports: “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long…

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Experts fear ‘national naivete’ on Covid-19 optimism

Experts fear ‘national naivete’ on Covid-19 optimism

The Hill reports: After an unprecedented month of strict social distancing and an economic lockdown that has cost tens of millions of jobs and untold billions in damage, Americans saw the faintest glimmers of hope last week that the worst of the coronavirus crisis may be passing. Modelers at the University of Washington downgraded their projections of the number of people who would die. Some states closed field hospitals they never had to use. Major professional sports leagues began considering…

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In six days more Americans died from Covid-19 than died from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined

In six days more Americans died from Covid-19 than died from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined

Business Insider reports: The US has become the first country in the world to record more than 2,000 coronavirus deaths in a single day. 2,108 people lost their lives on Friday, according to data collated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The US also surpassed half a million infections at the end of what has been a devastating week. More Americans died between Monday and Saturday (8,800) than died from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The US death…

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The Trump administration has many task forces — but still no plan for beating the coronavirus crisis

The Trump administration has many task forces — but still no plan for beating the coronavirus crisis

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration still has no clear plan for ending the coronavirus crisis, but it does have many task forces. There is the official task force led by Vice President Pence that meets daily and is supposed to oversee the government’s sprawling response to the deadly pandemic that has cratered the economy and, as of Saturday, killed more than 19,000 in the United States alone. There is the “Opening Our Country Council,” an economic task force…

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