What DeMarcus Ware wants from Cowboys coach Dan Quinn this season
Former Cowboys player DeMarcus Ware shares his hopes for Dallas defense in 2021 season.
SportsPulse, USA TODAY
OXNARD, Calif. Front-office members and coaches called players. Head coach Mike McCarthy shared his initial hesitancy and how the science won him over. Players swapped questions and answers, communicating among themselves.
The result: The Cowboys expect roughly 84 of the 89 players on their current roster will soon be vaccinated against COVID-19.
It was a many-faceted effort, Jones said Wednesday morning in a news conference to launch Cowboys training camp. From the standpoint of the players, from what I call in the pipeline that is committed atsome various stage of whether they need two vaccine shots and theyve got one, or theyre waiting a period of time to have the vaccine and go through the protocol.
We have a handful that in my mind that have still to commit to this. A handful and a hand is five. Thats iffy that in my mind. Several of that hand of five are on the way to potentially having their vaccine.
Were very satisfied with where the Dallas Cowboys are as far as looking at our competition.
Like with many NFL teams, such vaccine buy-in has not been a given.
NFL Network reported on July 12 that seven NFL teams had surpassed the 85% vaccination threshold that other sports leagues haveidentified for reducing team restrictions. A person with knowledge of the Cowboys vaccination rate told USA TODAY Sports that night that Dallas was not one of those seven. The person, speakingon condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly disclose the information, said they didn't foresee enough players even receiving first doses for the team to clear that bar before training camp.
The NFL has not solidified a team vaccination rate protocol, league spokesman Brian McCarthy told USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday, instead coordinating restriction on an individual basis. Even after a team has more than 85% of players vaccinated, any unvaccinated player will be subject to masking, testing and distancing protocols, McCarthy said.
Monday, on the eve of the Cowboys departure to Oxnard,the person with knowledge of the Cowboys vaccination rate said the club had a pretty good run of guys going to get it recently.
My opinion is (vaccinations)absolutely will not limit us in any way … as to being competitive as early as when we play Pittsburgh in the first preseason game, Jerry Jones said of the Cowboys' Aug. 5 competition in Canton, Ohio.
Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones clarified that players in the pipeline those who decided to get vaccinated more recently or those who have said they will but have not yet received a shot will not all be vaccinated by the opening preseason competition. Negotiating a team threshold around 85% is "still a work in progress," Stephen Jones said, but I do think well hit that threshold and more.
Per NFL policy, all Cowboys staff members and media who will interact with players were required to be vaccinated for admission to training camp in Oxnard. Media members were required to verify their vaccine both online and via showing a hard copy of a valid vaccine card in addition to showing proof of a negative COVID-19 test. Tracking devices are required while on premises.
Player vaccination is not required, but unvaccinated players are subject to daily testing, masking, isolation and additional restrictions on in-person activities including meetings and workouts. That factored into the decision for McCarthy who acknowledgedhe wasnt the first one to jump to get vaccinated.
At the end of the day, professionally, were here to win championships, said McCarthy, who added that he consulted medical professionals. This is part of the responsibility and its an educated, its an individual choice.
Cowboys Hall of Famers from the 1990s Super Bowl days have publicly encouraged the vaccine. Running back Emmitt Smithrecently partnered with First Lady Jill Bidento promote vaccines in Dallas, while receiver Michael Irvin said a player who declines the vaccine isnt doing everything he can in pursuit of a Super Bowl.
Jerry Jones said Irvins message was outstanding.
Michael Irvin is the best example that I know of how much will and how much body language and how much of heart and sacrifice mean to winning championships, Jones said. He comes with all the credibility in the world.
So when he talks, I listen.
Follow USA TODAY Sports Jori Epstein on Twitter @JoriEpstein.
Scientists have come up with a new way to get vaccinated against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and it comes with a twist: No needles needed.
This vaccine would instead be aerosolized so it could be inhaled by a patient.
Paul Whitford, associate professor of physics in the College of Science and the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Northeastern. Courtesy Photo
Researchers have tested this vaccination strategy in mice, and it elicited a strong immune response. A team led by researchers from Northeastern University, Rice University, and Rutgers University published a proof-of-concept study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. The project is still in early stages, but the team sees the vaccine theyre developing as a way to expand the reach of COVID-19 vaccines around the world.
If we can have this new tool, that would be great. Its easy to produce, easy to ship, easy to administer, says Paul Whitford, associate professor of physics at Northeastern and an author on the new paper. Such an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine wouldnt require the precise refrigeration of existing inoculations, and could be dispersed more easily to rural and remote communities. You just need basic instructions on how to use an inhaler.
The teams vaccine strategy uses modified bacteriophage particles to deliver instructions to the immune systemvia the lungsto develop a protective response to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Bacteriophage particles (or phage particles for short) are viruses that infect bacteria but are safe for humans, and have been used to treat bacterial infections in humans for a century.
In this new vaccine strategy, a phage particle in the immunizing mist is kind of like a visitor knocking on the door of the lung tissue. It has an arm reaching out to greet the lung tissue and a backpack filled with immune instructions on its back, Whitford explains.
The phage particles have been modified to contain a protein (the metaphorical arm) that the lung cells will recognize and pull into the recipients bloodstream. You need to put a hand out there and be like, Let me in! he says. And then, Okay, Ive got something for you.
That something is precious cargo: tiny pieces of the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2. But its not just any piece. This is whats called an epitope. Its the part of the invasive protein where an antibody can attach itself to the offending viral cell to keep it from infecting one of our cells.
The idea is to deliver these parts of the virus to the bodys immune system to give it a sort of practice run in fending off SARS-CoV-2. That way, Whitford says, if youre exposed to the real virus, your immune system will know what to do immediately.
But theres a wrinkle. The spike protein contains many different epitopes. And some of them lose their shape (and thus their properties) when you remove them from the rest of the virus.
So Whitford and his colleagues at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, housed at both Northeastern and Rice, turned to supercomputers. The team ran simulations of what would happen when some selected epitopes were transferred to a phage. Their analysis identified which epitope would retain its structure and best train the immune system to attack the real SARS-CoV-2. Then, the experimental team at Rutgers developed the vaccine and tested it on mice.
Practically, experimentally, you cant build a thousand vaccine candidates and test all of them just to see which one works, Whitford says. You cant use that many mice just to see if it will work.
The newly published study is largely preliminary, as there are many more epitope candidates that the team has yet to examine. Sorting through all of the possible configurations using the supercomputers is the next step, Whitford says. This study provides a sort of proof-of-principle that this is a decent strategy, he says. That was our first pass.
For media inquiries, please contact Marirose Sartoretto at m.sartoretto@northeastern.edu or 617-373-5718.
In the spring of 1846, a Dutch physician named Peter Ludwig Panum arrived on the Faroe Islands, a volcanic chain about two hundred miles northwest of Scotland. He found the Faroes to be a harsh and unforgiving place. The islands eight thousand inhabitants, who were Danish subjects at that time, spent their days outdoors, buffeted by sea winds, fishing and tending sheep. The conditions, Panum wrote, were unlikely to prolong the lives of the inhabitants. And yet, despite the scarcity of medical care and a diet of wind-dried, sometimes rancid meat, the average Faroese life span was forty-five years, which matched or exceeded that in mainland Denmark. The islanders benefitted from a near-complete lack of infectious disease; many illnesses, including smallpox and scarlet fever, rarely reached them. Panum had arrived to study a measles epidemicthe first outbreak of that virus in the Faroe Islands in sixty-five years.
For the most part, the course of the outbreak was devastating and predictable. In six months time, more than three-quarters of the islands inhabitants were infected, and about a hundred people died. But the outbreak was also unusual in many ways. In mainland Europe, measles was typically a childhood infection. Few Faroese children died in the outbreak; instead, adults bore the brunt. Their mortality rates increased with every decade of life until about the age of sixty-five, and then dropped off. It turned out that those whod been infected during the islands last measles epidemic, in 1781, were still protected by the immunity that theyd acquired decades before. Of these aged people, Panum wrote, not one, as far as I could find out by careful inquiry, was attacked the second time.
Panums study remains a striking demonstration of a remarkable fact: the body remembers. It learns to recognize the pathogens it encounters, and, in some cases, it can hold on to those memories for decades, even a lifetime. Ancient civilizations knew about immune memory long before they understood it; Thucydides, in his account of the plague of Athens, wrote that the same man was never attacked twicenever at least fatally. Many of us draw our ideas about the immune system from stories like these. We think of immunity as a binary state: without it, were vulnerable; with it, were safe.
For many pathogens, however, including coronaviruses, immunity is less clear-cut. The coronavirus family includes SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, along with four seasonal coronavirusesHCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-HKU1, and HCoV-NL63which together cause an estimated ten to thirty per cent of common colds. Today, these seasonal coronaviruses are the cause of common childhood infections, as measles was in Panums time. In sharp contrast to measles, though, adults are reinfected by seasonal coronaviruses every few years.
Much of what we know about these reinfections comes from the Common Cold Unit, a remarkable British research program whose studies of virus transmission and treatment involved more than eighteen thousand human volunteers over the course of forty-four years. In one of the units last studies, published in 1990, fourteen healthy volunteers were exposed to seasonal coronavirus 229E by means of a nasal wash. They returned, a year later, to receive a second, identical dose. Of the nine people who were successfully infected the first time, six were infected again in the second exposure. The five volunteers whod escaped the virus the first time were all infected, too. The fact of the reinfections might seem alarming, but the volunteers whod been reinfected had fewer symptoms and were less likely to transmit the virus to others. They werent completely immune, but they retained a degree of immunitylow enough to allow for reinfection, but high enough to render the virus less potent.
This murky portrait of coronavirus immunity will shape our future as the U.S. brings COVID-19 under control. After getting the virus, the vaccine, or both, at least a hundred and sixty million Americans have acquired some form of immunity. Still, it is likely that the virus itself is here to stay. I personally think that theres essentially zero chance that SARS-CoV-2 will be eradicated, Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me. (Bloom advised my Ph.D. research on influenza evolution.) Most viruses, including the four seasonal coronaviruses, other common-cold viruses, and the flu, havent been eradicated; scientists describe them as endemic, a term derived from the Greek word ndmos, meaning in the people. Endemic viruses circulate constantly, typically at low levels, but with occasional, more severe outbreaks. We dont shut out these endemic viruses with quarantines and stay-at-home orders; we live with them.
What will it be like to live with endemic SARS-CoV-2? That depends on the strength of our immune memories. How vividly will our bodies remember the virus or vaccine? How will waning immunity and the rise of variantssuch as Delta, which is currently driving a spike in COVID cases around the worldaffect our vulnerability to reinfection? Were beginning to learn the answers to some of these questions, and to get a sense of the years to come.
On May 13, 2020, a fishing vessel left Seattle in search of hake. Before boarding, the ships hundred and twenty-two crew members were tested for the coronavirus, and also for antibodies against it, which indicate prior infection. Three crew members tested positive for antibodies before departure; everyone tested negative for the virus. But, while at sea, a member of the crew fell ill and tested positive. A ship at sea is an island, and the coronavirus spread rapidly. When the vessel returned to shore, after an eighteen-day voyage, a hundred and three crew members tested positive for the coronavirus. And yet none of the three crew members whod possessed antibodies before boarding were infected a second time. In October, 2020, when these results were reported in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, it wasnt yet clear whether antibodies that formed during an initial infection could protect against reinfection. The vessel had brought home reassuring news.
Antibodies arent always the first line in our immune defense. When our cells encounter a new virus, they first respond by means of the so-called innate immune system, which shuts down many incipient infections quickly, before they grow out of control. This initial response is nonspecific; for the most part, its the same for every pathogen, novel or familiar. Its only a few days later that the adaptive immune systemthe home of immune memoryshifts into gear. Part of that ramping up involves B cells, which make antibodies. As a matter of course, our bodies produce millions of B cells, each tuned, in a more or less random way, to make a different kind of antibody; these antibodies are so diverse that one will inevitably match whatever pathogen might infect us. During an infection, the B cells that happen to be well suited to the new invader receive a signal to multiply. The antibodies they produce circulate in the bloodstream, binding to virus particles and disabling them.
The fishing-vessel study confirmed that the antibody response inspired by an initial SARS-CoV-2 exposure could protect against subsequent infections for some period of time. Immune memory had taken root. Those B cells will, in many cases, persist through the rest of your life and keep cranking out antibodies, so your body will now remember whatever youve been exposed to, Bloom, who was one of the authors of the study, said. And yet there are degrees of immune memory. Antibodies against certain viruses, such as measles, mumps, rubella, and smallpox, persist at extraordinarily stable levels for many decades; its because of that persistence that the aged people in Panums study were able to resist disease a lifetime later. But not all antibody responses are so durable. In 2007, researchers published a study of workers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. The workers blood is tested regularly for exposure to animal diseases. The researchers found that, although some antibody levels stayed high, others fell over time. Antibodies against tetanus and diphtheria, two bacterial toxins, fell to half their previous levels in ten to twenty years.
The gradual erosion of antibody levels in the blood can lower protection and render us vulnerable to reinfection. An important unanswered question about SARS-CoV-2, therefore, is how long our antibody responses will last. Long term, do your antibodies go to a stable plateau that persists for the rest of your life, or is it a downward-sloping line? Bloom asked. For SARS-CoV-2, specifically, its too early to know. But long-term studies of its relatives, the viruses that cause SARS and MERS, have found that antibody levels can decline detectably in the two or three years after an infection. Time may erode levels of COVID antibodies as well.
Decline is not disappearance. Even if antibody levels go down from their initial post-infection peak, they may remain high enough to prevent a viral exposure from becoming an infection, or to keep an infection from progressing into severe disease. Onboard the fishing vessel, two of the three protected crew members had only modest antibody levels. The virus still left them untouched.
Immune memory isnt inscribed in antibodies alone. There is a whole array of memory cells that are just waiting to get reactivated, Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. In addition to the B cells that make antibodies, we possess T cellsmarauding defenders capable of destroying the bodys own cells if theyve been infected with a virus. Like antibodies, T cells come to circulate at lower levels over time. But both adaptive systems boot up faster upon reinfection. It takes five to seven days to mount an adaptive immune response when you first see a virus, Pepper said. But it can take as little as two to four hours when you see it again.
Last summer, Peppers lab conducted a detailed study of immunity in fifteen volunteers whod had mild COVID-19 infections three months earlier. The researchers looked for antibodies, but also for so-called memory B and T cellsscouts that live in our tissue and bloodstream, monitoring for the reappearance of specific pathogens from the past. When these memory cells recognize an old foe, they sound the alarm, speeding the multiplication of pathogen-specific B and T cells. Memory cells are little needles in a haystack, Pepper told me, but the researchers still found ones tuned to the coronavirus, even though their research subjects had experienced only mild symptoms. I have a lot of faith in the immune system, Pepper said.
The immune systems overlapping layers work together to strengthen its memory. But viruses arent static. As they accumulate mutations, their shapes shift, and they gradually become more difficult for the system to recognize. Survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic maintained strong antibody responses against that virus for almost ninety years. And yet adults still get the flu approximately once every five years, because the influenza viruss rapid evolution insures that each year brings new variants. On average, flu viruses acquire half a dozen mutations each year; many of these alter the proteins that allow the viruses to enter and exit host cells. Antibodies that once bound tightly to a virus may have a weaker grip on its evolved form; the virus might escape the notice of certain T cells that used to recognize it.
You can also ask the question for coronaviruses, Bloom said. How much of the ability to reinfect people might be driven by the virus changing? Growing evidence suggests how much viral evolution might make us vulnerable to coronavirus reinfection. Recently, researchers in Blooms lab analyzed blood samples collected from people in the nineteen-eighties and nineties; the samples contained antibodies for the version of seasonal coronavirus 229E that circulated back then. Those same antibodies failed to recognize the descendants of the virus that had evolved in the intervening years. Coronaviruses mutate more slowly than viruses like influenza and H.I.V., but, over the course of a decade or two, they can still change enough to evade our immune memory.
Today, we are grappling with several coronavirus variants that are more transmissibleand possibly more deadlythan the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. Antibodies created in response to the initial virus or the current vaccines bind more poorly to several of these variants, creating opportunities for reinfection. The city of Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, is a case that has given researchers some reason for concern. In early 2020, the coronavirus spread there virtually unchecked; by October, tests showed that about half of the citys inhabitants harbored antibodies, leading some scientists to declare that the area had reached herd immunity. But, in December, the city experienced a second coronavirus surge that was even more severe than the first, causing more hospitalizations and deaths than the initial wave.
With new infections rising around the country due to the delta variant, reports of breakthrough cases among the fully vaccinated can be worrisome. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption
With new infections rising around the country due to the delta variant, reports of breakthrough cases among the fully vaccinated can be worrisome.
There have been a number of recent reports of fully vaccinated people testing positive for the coronavirus at the White House, Congress, the Olympics and Major League Baseball. And with the fast-spreading delta variant driving up infections, hospitalizations and deaths, a lot of people are wondering whether the vaccines are as protective as we thought.
But the current crop of vaccine breakthrough cases doesn't surprise or alarm public health experts. "I haven't seen any signals in the U.S. indicating that they are occurring at the levels that would give us concern that the [vaccine] effectiveness is going down," said Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
In all of these settings, from Capitol Hill to professional sports, nearly everyone is vaccinated, he points out, and people are subject to frequent, asymptomatic testing. "It is not surprising to see a substantial number of cases in the vaccinated when the vaccination rate is high," he said.
Still, people who've been vaccinated may rightly be asking: Are breakthrough cases becoming more common because of the delta variant? Could I get sick or get a family member sick?
Here's what to know about breakthrough cases in the context of delta, and what scientists are doing to track the vaccines' efficacy:
Bottom line: Don't panic. So far, research shows the current vaccines are holding up well against the delta variant. For instance, a June study from the U.K. found that the Pfizer vaccine is 96% effective against hospitalization from the delta variant after two doses.
If you do get infected (which is not likely but possible), the vaccine should help you keep from getting seriously sick. "Breakthrough infections, they tend to be mild they tend to be more like a cold," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, professor of medicine and infectious disease epidemiology at Emory University.
"Those mild breakthroughs, according to a New England Journal study three weeks ago, are accompanied by lower viral loads and less much less symptoms," added Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. In particular, the study "showed that if you get a mild breakthrough with any variant, you have a 40% lower viral load in your nose after vaccination than you do if you had a natural infection," she said.
Severe cases among vaccinated people are possible, but extremely rare the vaccines dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness that leads to hospitalization or death. And 97% of those currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For context, as of July 12, out of 159 million fully vaccinated people, the CDC documented 5,492 cases of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died from COVID-19, and 75% of them were over age 65. It's not clear how many of these breakthrough infections were caused by the delta variant, but that's now by far the dominant variant in circulation.
The chances of getting seriously ill after being vaccinated are higher for those with certain health conditions that affect the immune system. Dr. Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, said that at his hospital, 90% of the patients with COVID-19 are unvaccinated. The small percentage of vaccinated patients who do end up hospitalized, he said, "have underlying significant health risks like cancer, like [organ] transplants that probably prevented them from mounting a full immune response to the vaccine."
"I think we are misusing the term breakthrough," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "If someone who is fully vaccinated is subsequently hospitalized or killed by the virus, that's a breakthrough case." He said he wouldn't call an "asymptomatic or relatively mild case" a "breakthrough case."
What matters, he said, is "the vaccine is still doing what it is designed to do keep people out of the hospital and out of the morgue."
In fact, the CDC doesn't even recommend routine testing of asymptomatic vaccinated people for the coronavirus. As Gandhi of UC San Francisco explains, positive tests might just be picking up "dead viral particles in your nose," she said. "Vaccinated people may get it in their nose, but they're going to kill it that's actually what the immune system does."
There's no exact number of breakthrough cases, for several reasons. First of all, there would be no way to count the asymptomatic breakthrough cases, because the U.S. isn't testing nearly enough to catch them all. And in fact, the CDC stopped keeping a running tally of mild breakthrough cases in May.
But that's not necessarily a problem, said Emily Martin, epidemiology professor at the University of Michigan. "You don't want to test everybody you don't need every positive to be identified," she said. "You just need to understand how the positives that you're finding represent the whole pie that you're not seeing."
The CDC runs carefully designed surveillance systems (which try to find pie slices that are representative) and does burden estimation (calculations you use to fill in the rest of the pie). It's a process that's already done every year with the flu, Martin said, to assess how well the flu shot is working when the vast majority of people who get the flu are never tested.
Now, the CDC is doing the same thing to monitor COVID-19. Hospitals and health departments are sending the CDC detailed information about certain cases of vaccinated patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19.
"We'd like to have a sample of the virus so that we can understand the viral load, so that we can sequence it, we can understand their symptoms and their risks that potentially put them in that situation," the CDC's Walensky told a Senate panel on Tuesday.
At the same time, the agency is doing ongoing vaccine effectiveness studies at long-term care facilities, academic medical centers, hospitals, and among health care and essential workers. "We're doing many of those studies across the nation," Walensky said, explaining that these allow the CDC to get an accurate picture of the real rate of breakthroughs among vaccinated people and whether that's changing over time.
"That is a more systematic way of measuring breakthrough cases," Martin said. Realistically, health officials can't count every case, so this careful, long-term surveillance, along with calculations to extrapolate those findings, gives a fuller picture of how much virus is really out in the community.
There's basic arithmetic at play: As more people get vaccinated, even if breakthroughs are rare, a rising number of cases will be among the vaccinated.
"Even with a 95% efficacious vaccine, you will have one in 20 vaccinees who are exposed get the disease," said Dr. Kathleen Neuzil, director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health at the University of Maryland. The important thing to note is that "the overwhelming number [of cases] are among the unvaccinated," she said.
Certainly, with the delta variant taking over which spreads about two to three times faster than the original strain there will be more cases among everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated, said John Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine.
"But its ability to infect fully vaccinated people is much less than those who are not vaccinated," he said. "In other words, the vaccines still work, just a bit less well."
Epidemiologist Martin added that there's no clear data yet to show that delta is to blame for a big rise in breakthrough cases in the United States. "We are still watching carefully though," she added.
In general, people who are vaccinated and get infected have less virus. "That lower viral load makes it less likely for you to transmit not impossible by any means but less likely," Gandhi said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser on COVID-19 for President Biden and the nation's top infectious disease expert, told reporters Friday that research on "whether or not the transmission occurs is a large study that's ongoing right now," referring to Prevent COVID U, a study of transmission among about 12,000 college students vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine.
While there aren't yet results from that study, Fauci added, the lower viral load in breakthrough cases suggests "it would be less likely that that vaccinated breakthrough person would transmit, compared to an unvaccinated person."
Even so, with cases rising and the vaccination campaign in a slump, a growing chorus of health experts is recommending using masking and other mitigation strategies to prevent spread just in case. "I think that the prudent thing at this point in time and what I'm doing personally," Emory's del Rio said, "if I'm going to a place that it's crowded, where there are multiple individuals, including people who are likely not vaccinated, I am wearing a mask."
"We have not seen reports yet of breakthrough cases causing long COVID, thank goodness," said Gandhi of UC San Francisco. One reason for that could be that long COVID involves "a very dysregulated inflammatory response that you get with natural infection," she said. "What you get with an infection after you've been vaccinated, it's what we call a more regulated response or adaptive immunity."
However, virus expert Angela Rasmussen of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada noted the data on this is limited so we can't completely rule it out.
"The safest thing to do is to avoid being infected altogether, and that's why I think it is appropriate for people to employ additional mitigation measures," she said.
That might mean in addition to vaccination breaking out masks again, re-upping good hand hygiene and getting more air circulating when gathering indoors. "The mitigation measures that we have put in place previously will still work against the delta variant it's not being transmitted by some other route," she added.
NPR's Allison Aubrey contributed to this report.
Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
State Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, has tested positive for the coronavirus, marking the sixth case among nearly 60 House Democrats who traveled to Washington, D.C., last week to prevent the passage of a GOP election bill at the Texas Legislature.
"Despite following CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines and being fully vaccinated, I tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday," Howard said in a statement Tuesday, noting that she was "basically asymptomatic except for some minor congestion."
Over the weekend, the Texas House Democratic Caucus said that five of its members had tested positive for the virus. The members who tested positive, including state Reps. Celia Israel, D-Austin, and Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, have been fully vaccinated.
The caucus, which has said it plans to not identify lawmakers who test positive, has started additional precautionary measures, such as providing daily rapid tests.
News of Howard's positive test was first reported Tuesday by the Austin American-Statesman. The Dallas Morning News first reported news of a sixth case Monday night.
A small percentage of vaccine breakthrough cases, which involve a fully-vaccinated person testing positive for the virus, have been expected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but they do not discount the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.
In her statement, Howard said she will continue to work virtually and urged people to continue to get vaccinated.
"The delta variant [of the coronavirus] seems to be much more contagious, even for those vaccinated, than initially thought," she said. "Vaccines work."
The caucus in recent days has met with Vice President Kamala Harris and other lawmakers on Capitol Hill in an effort to push Congress to pass federal voting laws, though the confirmed cases have prompted the delegation to make adjustments for how to continue having such conversations.
Harris has since tested negative for the virus, though others, including a White House official and staffer for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have tested positive after the staff member helped the delegation around the Capitol last week, according to Axios.
At a news conference later Tuesday, state Rep. Chris Turner, who chairs the caucus, said the group likely would not be aware of the confirmed cases had members not been proactively testing for the virus.
"If we were not proactively testing, we probably would not even know about it," he said.
Turner also said there was not an update yet on a potential meeting with President Joe Biden or whether the confirmed cases had dimmed the caucus' chances of meeting with the president in-person.
"Obviously we would welcome the opportunity to visit with the president virtually," Turner said.
Coronavirus: US extends travel limits at borders with Canada and Mexico - as it happened Financial Times
Taylor Crabb, shown here in a 2019 tournament, is widely reported to have tested positive for the coronavirus in Japan. Justin Casterline/Getty Images hide caption
Taylor Crabb, shown here in a 2019 tournament, is widely reported to have tested positive for the coronavirus in Japan.
The first U.S. athlete expected to compete in the Tokyo Summer Olympics has tested positive for the coronavirus while in Japan.
USA Volleyball confirmed to NPR that a member of the team received a positive test and has been transferred to a hotel.
The team is not confirming the identity of the athlete, though it has been widely reported in southern California local media to be men's beach volleyball player Taylor Crabb.
Teams of two play beach volleyball at the Olympics. Crabb, 29, and his partner, Jake Gibb, have been scheduled for their first game early Sunday morning ET, against a pair from Italy.
The positive test makes it unlikely that Crabb will be able to play.
"As for a potential replacement, there is a protocol for an alternate athlete to join the team," USA Volleyball said. "We are working through that process."
Crabb was getting ready to make his Olympic debut. Gibb, 45, has competed in three other Games. Last month, the pair secured their spot to Tokyo.
Crabb's brother Trevor, who is also a professional beach volleyball player, told a local NBC affiliate that he thought the situation was "terrible." He said Crabb is "fine and healthy and should be allowed to play in my personal opinion."
It's not clear what the positive test means for Gibb. The COVID-19 protocols for the Games leave the door open for officials to determine on a case-by-case basis whether a close contact of a positive case can compete.
A U.S. gymnastics alternate, Kara Eaker, also tested positive in Japan, although she was not expected to compete at the Games. U.S. tennis star Coco Gauff received a positive test while she was still in the U.S.
(Washington, DC) The Districts reported data for Tuesday, July 20, 2021 includes 31 new positive coronavirus (COVID-19) cases, bringing the Districts overall positive case total to 49,858.
The District reported no additional COVID-19 related deaths.
Tragically, 1,146 District residents have lost their lives due to COVID-19.
Visit coronavirus.dc.gov/data for interactive data dashboards or to download COVID-19 data.
Below is a summary of the Districts current ReOpening Metrics.
Below is the Districts aggregated total of positive COVID-19 cases, sorted by age and gender.
Patient Gender
Total Positive Cases
%
Female
%
Male
%
Unknown
%
All
49,858*
100
25,974
100
23,719
100
165
100
Unknown
64
<1
21
<1
38
<1
5
3
0-18
6,476
13
3,221
13
3,233
14
22
13
19-30
13,434
27
7,383
29
5,998
25
53
32
31-40
9,931
20
5,103
20
4,790
20
38
23
41-50
6,376
13
3,209
12
3,154
13
13
8
51-60
5,865
12
2,885
11
2,966
13
14
9
61-70
4,220
9
2,121
8
2,092
9
7
4
71-80
2,118
4
1,148
5
965
4
5
3
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) Indonesia has converted nearly its entire oxygen production to medical use just to meet the demand from COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe. Overflowing hospitals in Malaysia had to resort to treating patients on the floor. And in Myanmars largest city, graveyard workers have been laboring day and night to keep up with the grim demand for new cremations and burials.
Images of bodies burning in open-air pyres during the peak of the pandemic in India horrified the world in May, but in the last two weeks the three Southeast Asian nations have now all surpassed Indias peak per capita death rate as a new coronavirus wave, fueled by the virulent delta variant, tightens its grip on the region.
The deaths have followed record numbers of new cases being reported in countries across the region which have left health care systems struggling to cope and governments scrambling to implement new restrictions to try to slow the spread.
When Eric Lam tested positive for COVID-19 and was hospitalized on June 17 in the Malaysian state of Selangor, the center of the countrys outbreak, the corridors of the government facility were already crowded with patients on beds with no room left in the wards.
The situation was still better than in some other hospitals in Selangor, Malaysias richest and most populous state, where there were no free beds at all and patients were reportedly treated on floors or on stretchers. The government has since added more hospital beds and converted more wards for COVID-19 patients.
Lam, 38, recalled once during his three weeks in the hospital hearing a machine beeping continuously for two hours before a nurse came to turn it off; he later learned the patient had died.
A variety of factors have contributed to the recent surge in the region, including people growing weary of the pandemic and letting precautions slip, low vaccination rates and the emergence of the delta variant of the virus, which was first detected in India, said Abhishek Rimal, the Asia-Pacific emergency health coordinator for the Red Cross, who is based in Malaysia.
With the measures that countries are taking, if people follow the basics of washing the hands, wearing the masks, keeping distance and getting vaccinated, we will be seeing a decline in cases in the next couple of weeks from now, he said.
So far, however, Malaysias national lockdown measures have not brought down the daily rate of infections. The country of some 32 million saw daily cases rise above 10,000 on July 13 for the first time and they have stayed there since.
The vaccination rate remains low but has been picking up, with nearly 15% of the population now fully inoculated and the government hoping to have a majority vaccinated by years end.
Doctors and nurses have been working tirelessly to try to keep up, and Lam was one of the fortunate ones.
After his condition initially deteriorated, he was put on a ventilator in an ICU unit filled to capacity and slowly recovered. He was discharged two weeks ago.
But he lost his father and brother-in-law to the virus, and another brother remains on a ventilator in the ICU.
I feel I have been reborn and given a second chance to live, he said.
With Indias massive population of nearly 1.4 billion people, its total number of COVID-19 fatalities remains higher than the countries in Southeast Asia. But Indias 7-day rolling average of COVID-19 deaths per million peaked at 3.04 in May, according to the online scientific publication Our World in Data, and continues to decline.
Indonesia, Myanmar, and Malaysia have been showing sharp increases since late June and their seven-day averages hit 4.17, 4.02 and 3.18 per million, respectively, on Thursday. Cambodia and Thailand have also seen strong increases in both coronavirus cases and deaths, but have thus far held the seven-day rate per million people to a lower 1.29 and 1.74, respectively.
Individual countries elsewhere have higher rates, but the increases are particularly alarming for a region that widely kept numbers low early in the pandemic.
With the Indian experience as a lesson, most countries have reacted relatively quickly with new restrictions to slow the virus, and to try to meet the needs of the burgeoning number of people hospitalized with severe illnesses, Rimal said.
People in this region are cautious, because they have seen it right in front of them 400,000 cases a day in India and they really dont want it to repeat here, he said in a telephone interview from Kuala Lumpur.
But those measures take time to achieve the desired effect, and right now countries are struggling to cope.
Indonesia, the worlds fourth most populous nation with some 270 million people, reported 1,383 deaths on Wednesday, its deadliest day since the start of the pandemic.
Daily cases through about mid-June had been about 8,000, but then began to spike and peaked last week with more than 50,000 new infections each day. Because Indonesias testing rate is low, the actual number of new cases is thought to be much higher.
As hospitals there began to run out of oxygen, the government stepped in and ordered manufacturers to shift most production from industrial purposes and dedicate 90% to medical oxygen, up from 25%.
Before the current crisis, the country needed 400 tons of oxygen for medical use per day; with the sharp rise in COVID-19 cases, daily use has increased fivefold to more than 2,000 tons, according to Deputy Health Minister Dante Saksono.
Though the production of oxygen is now sufficient, Lia Partakusuma, secretary general of Indonesias Hospital Association, said there were problems with distribution so some hospitals are still facing shortages.
In Indonesia, about 14% of of the population has had at least one vaccine dose, primarily Chinas Sinovac.
There are growing concerns that Sinovac is less effective against the delta variant, however, and both Indonesia and Thailand are planning booster shots of other vaccines for their Sinovac-immunized health workers.
In Myanmar, the pandemic had taken backseat to the militarys power seizure in February, which set off a wave of protests and violent political conflict that devastated the public health system.
Only in recent weeks, as testing and reporting of COVID-19 cases has started recovering, has it become clear that a new wave of the virus beginning in mid-May is pushing cases and deaths rapidly higher.
Since the start of July its death rate has been climbing almost straight up, and both cases and fatalities are widely believed to be seriously underreported.
With little testing capacity, low numbers in the country vaccinated, widespread shortages of oxygen and other medical supplies, and an already beleaguered health care system under increasing strain, the situation is expected to get increasingly worse in the coming weeks and months, said ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, a regional advocacy group.
Meanwhile, the juntas confiscation of oxygen, attacks on health care workers and facilities since the coup, and the lack of trust in any services they provide by the majority of the population, risks turning a crisis into a disaster.
On Tuesday, the government reported 5,860 new cases and 286 new deaths. There are no solid figures on vaccinations, but from the number of doses that have been available, its thought that about 3% of the population could have received two shots.
Officials this week pushed back at social media postings that cemeteries in Yangon were overwhelmed and could not keep up with the number of dead, inadvertently confirming claims that hospitals were swamped and many people were dying at home.
Cho Tun Aung, head of the department that oversees the cemeteries told military-run Myawaddy TV news on Monday that 350 staff members had been working three shifts since July 8 to ensure proper cremations and burials of people at Yangons seven major cemeteries.
He said workers had cremated and buried more than 1,200 people on Sunday alone, including 1,065 who had died at home of COVID-19 and 169 who had died in hospitals.
We are working in three shifts day and night to inter the dead, he said. It is clear that there is no problem like the posts on Facebook.
___
Rising reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Edna Tarigan and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Grant Peck in Bangkok contributed to this report.
At the Democratic convention last summer, Ms. Urquiza very publicly denounced Mr. Trump. But her group is nonpartisan, and with Mr. Biden now six months into his term and squarely in charge of the response, she and other activists are training their sights on him. She wrote to the president asking him to meet with her groups board; the White House offered other officials instead.
For the record, I feel ignored, she said. We all do.
Many survivors and family members view the president as too eager to declare independence from the virus, as he did on July 4, and not attentive enough to the plight of long haulers who are desperate for financial and medical help.
Ms. Bishof, the former firefighter from Florida, said members of her long-haulers group cheered out loud when Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, described himself as a Covid long hauler during a Senate Health Committee hearing in March. We were like, Contact him now! she exclaimed.
Ms. Bishof was also instrumental in forming the Long Covid Alliance, a coalition of health and coronavirus-related groups, which scored a preliminary victory in April when Representatives Donald S. Beyer Jr., Democrat of Virginia, and Jack Bergman, Republican of Michigan, introduced bipartisan legislation authorizing $100 million for research and education into long-haul Covid.
Others have had a harder time getting buy-in from either side.
After her father died of Covid-19, Tara Krebbs, a former Republican from Phoenix who left the party before Mr. Trump was elected, reached out to Ms. Urquiza on Twitter. She was frustrated and angry, she said, and feeling alone. There was a lot of silent grieving at first, she said, because Covid is such a political issue.
