Efforts are gearing up to enlist trusted voices in hard-hit communities of color to help ensure potential COVID-19 vaccines are tested in the minority populations most ravaged by the virus. (Sept. 18) AP Domestic
PHOENIX While COVID-19 is known as a respiratory infection, there's emerging evidence linking it to heart damage, too.
Cardiologists are seeing patients with signs of inflammation and scar formation in their hearts even after recovery from COVID-19, experts say.
For that reason, anyone who plans on participating in vigorous exercise and was sick with COVID-19 for three or more days should get a cardiac screening before working out or participating in their sport, said Dr. Steven Erickson, medical director for Banner University Sports Medicine and Concussion Specialists in Phoenix.
"You don't get sick with COVID-19 and stay home from school for a week and the next day goback and play two hours of soccer," Erickson said.
"You're taking a risk, and that is not what the medical community is recommending right now."
Having assessed seriously ill COVID-19 inpatients since March, Arizona cardiologist Dr. Dawn Pedrotty said she has seen evidence linking the disease with cardiac damage.
What's not clear is what that damage will mean for patients in the long term, butresearchers and physicians are closely following the link, she said.
"There is a connection to heart disease. It's not just a respiratory disease," Pedrotty said. "It's an important public health message that it does affect more than your lungs."
People who have been sick with COVID-19 for three days or more should get a blood test and an EKG, also known as an electrocardiogram, before returning to strenuous exercise, Erickson said.
An electrocardiogram measures the heart's electrical signal. The blood test Erickson recommends measures troponin proteins, which are normally found in the heart musclebut released into the bloodstream when the heart is injured.
All athletes should be symptom-free for at least 14 days before resuming sports and should resume activities gradually while being monitored for cardiac symptoms, he added.
If patients are competitive athletes who will be training or participating in an upcoming sports season and had COVID-19, Erickson recommends they seek an evaluation with their primary care physician or sports medicine specialist to see if they need additional evaluation by a cardiologist.
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Recent studies about heart damage and COVID-19 in athletes gained attention in recent weeks as college sports leaders debated returning to play.
An Ohio State University study published in a Sept. 11 research letter in JAMA, a prominent medical journal, found four of 26 competitive male and female college athletes who had tested positive for COVID-19 showed signs of myocarditis, a disease of the heart muscle that can cause heart failure and sudden cardiac death.
Having 15% of athletes show signs of myocarditis raised concern among some who read the study. But the study sample was so small that some critics have said the alarm has been overstated.
"It is believed that there are many different organs in the body that are affected by the virus. After infection, the virus goes to different organs and tissues and after entering them it causes an inflammatory response," said Chris Glembotski, a professor of internal medicine and director of the Translational Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix.
"This inflammatory response seems to be an over-response, almost like too much inflammation. Usually, a little inflammation is good if you get an infection because it helps you fight off the infection. But this seems to be a hyper response, which directly or indirectly affects numerous organs in the body."
The respiratory system and the heart are focal points of the response, Glembotski said. There's also evidence that theSARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can directly infect the heart and cause arrhythmias and, in some cases, contributeto symptoms that mimic a myocardial infarction, or heart attack, Glembotski said.
"There have been cases of some brain problems, a few cases of stroke and brain fog where people report that they have a general feeling that their thinking is not as good as it was before COVID-19. Among the things that are so worrisome about SARS-CoV-2 is that it has such widespread effects in the body, and the spectrum of its effects are so different from one person to the next," he said.
"Most of what we are learning about COVID-19 is from research emerging currently, so not a lot is known. There's more to be found out."
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Erickson said the aim of his recommendation for athletes is to prevent sudden cardiac deathand to prevent long-term damage from COVID-19. The evidence may not be conclusive, but when the risk is death, it's better to do more than less, he said.
His advice comes from emerging research such asthe Ohio study that is not definitive yet suggests an association between COVID-19 and cardiac problems, chiefly myocarditis.
Myocarditis may cause shortness of breath and symptoms of congestive heart failure.It can cause arrhythmia, which is an irregular heartbeat that reduces the heart's ability to pump blood and cause someone to collapse and even die.
Erickson is the first to say the research to date is not conclusive, but he doesn't want to take chances. Myocarditis is of particular concern in athletes because it is associated with a higher-than-average rate of sudden cardiac death.
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It's doubtful that athletes have more of a tendency for myocarditis than the regular population, but the stress of constant exercise means the myocarditis can manifest more severely in them.
"Somebody that is not participating in vigorous cardiovascular exercise doesn't need to be screened," Erickson said.
"But anyone, including your middle-aged marathon runner, absolutely we think they need to be screened after they recover from COVID before they go back to vigorous exercise because we don't want them to damage their heart or have sudden cardiac death."
Pedrotty agrees with Erickson's recommendation to do routine cardiac screening on high-functioning athletes of all ages who have been sick with COVID-19 for three days or more.
She might add testing for c-reactive protein in addition to looking for troponin in a blood test, she said, because c-reactive protein is a measure of inflammation.
Heart damage is unlikely in someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 yet had no symptoms, nor is it likely in anyone who was sick with the virus for fewer than three days, Erickson said.
Those individuals do not need cardiac screenings, he said.
Myocarditis as a result of viral infections like HIV and Coxsackie B virus, while rare, haslong been a concern for cardiologists. The risk of myocarditis is one of the reasons the general recommendation for sports medicine is that no one with a fever of 101.5 or more should exercise, Erickson said.
"The risk of playing is that the virus could spread to the heart and you could have myocarditis," he said
The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the concern over myocarditis because the viral disease is so new and its long-term effects remain uncertain.
"We don't see a lot of myocarditis in general. But the reason it's particularly important in athletes and exercise is that it's one of the more common causes of sudden death in young athletes," said Dr. R. Todd Hurst, a cardiologist with the Banner University Medicine Heart Institute.
"Maybe up to 20% of sudden death in a young athlete is subsequently diagnosed as myocarditis. When we have a patient that has been diagnosed with myocarditis, the recommendation is that they not participate in strenuous exercise for three to six months."
Various early studies of COVID-19 patients have shown evidence of myocardial damage in anywhere from 5% to 25% of the patients who were hospitalized, which Hurst said is enough to indicate there is something "concerning" about the new coronavirus and the heart.
"Even after the infection is resolved, there are anecdotal reports of people that are still battling fatigue and other symptoms, and whether that warrants a heart evaluation, I don't know the answer," Hurst said.
"But if I saw a patient like that, that had those ongoing symptoms they were short of breath, they were fatigued, they didn't have the energy I certainly think a cardiac screening evaluation for them would at least make sense."
Christopher Ruggles, a 49-year-old dog walker who lives in Arizona, said he's been living with COVID-19 symptoms since mid-March. He wasn't able to get a test during the early weeks of his illness and has since tested negative three times. An antibody test came up negative, too.
But Ruggles can't think of any other cause for his lingering fatigue, cough and muscle weakness that has left him unable to work. While he normally was walking 10 to 12 miles a day, he can now barely do 30 minutes of yoga, he said.
Ruggles just connected with a third doctor. The first two did not take his symptoms seriously, but he persisted. He's part of a COVID "long-haulers" group for people with residual problems from the virus and he is hoping to get a cardiac MRI. An EKG did not show any heart damage, but Ruggles remains concerned.
"I worry about my heart," he said.
Any COVID-19 survivor who has lingering symptoms like heart palpitations that could indicate heart trouble should follow up with a cardiologist, said Dr. Pallavi Bellamkonda, a cardiologist with the Heart and Vascular Institute at Dignity Health St. Josephs Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.
Similarly, Pedrotty said she has a patient who had COVID-19 and recovered at home but is now experiencing chest tightness. A stress test was negative and Pedrotty is now looking for "residual inflammation."
"For those patients, we do recommend a cardiac MRI," she said. "Obviously the [medical]societies have not all put out guidelines. It's a bit premature, but I think a lot of us suspect that if we do have COVID patients that have subsequently recovered and now have symptoms, an MRI is appropriate.
Bellamkonda said other symptoms COVID-19 survivors should watch for that could signal heart trouble include persistent chest pains, shortness of breath and once they are fully recovered a "decrease in exercise tolerance" not being able to do something like run a mile that a person could easily do prior to getting sick, for example.
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Pedrotty said COVID-19 is not just a cardiac disease:It's cardiovascular, too, which means it could involve the body's blood vessels.
"There have been a lot of studies published about patients having clots and pulmonary embolisms and all of these types of things that have happened, especially in the severely ill," she said.
"We're just starting trials to understand the hematologic aspects of this. We know there's some endothelial damage, and that's what lines all your blood vessels."
Not everyone who has had COVID-19 needs a cardiac screening, but the illness can cause extreme reactions in the body, she added.
"That is partly why we suspect we're seeing some of the damage," she said."It's a much more extreme response from your body than we see with the flu. With your flu you get sick, you can have systemic illness, especially with the elderly and immune-compromised. But it's not to the level of what we're seeing with COVID."
Follow Stephanie Innes on Twitter @stephanieinnes.
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Most employers are waiting before they recall all employees.
New Jersey is catching its breath after six months of the coronavirus pandemic with steady numbers in most of the public-health categories, although the rate of transmission remains touch-and-go. And the number of available jobs in the state has leveled off, although we have recovered only about half of the jobs that were lost during the early days of the pandemic. Only about one in four of employer-respondents from a survey taken by the Employers Association of New Jersey (EANJ) say they have plans for a full recall this year. Most employers are waiting. What are they waiting for? Nearly 25% of employer-respondents say they are waiting for the widespread availability of a vaccine or effective treatment for COVID-19 before a full recall.
At the time of this writing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that researchers worldwide are working around-the-clock to find a vaccine against the coronavirus. Experts estimate that a fast-tracked vaccine development process could speed a successful candidate to market in approximately 12-18 months if the process goes smoothly from conception to market availability.
Of course, in a world ruled by science and reason, people would be inclined to trust credible medical evidence when it comes time to line up for vaccination. But even before the pandemic, public-health agencies around the world were struggling to counter increasingly sophisticated efforts to turn people against vaccines. With vaccination rates against measles and other infectious diseases falling in some locations, including the United States, the World Health Organization in 2019 listed vaccine hesitancy as one of 10 major global health threats.
The CDC is now working on a plan to boost vaccine confidence as part of the federal effort to develop a vaccine but trust in the governments initiatives are low. All the misinformation weve seen so far that the U.S military manufactured the virus, that 5G cellphone towers spread it, that drinking bleach or injecting UV rays can cure it, that Dr. Anthony Fauci is part of a political conspiracy, that Bill Gates holds the patents for a cure may be causing widespread confusion and suspicion. Recent polls have found as few as 50% ofpeople in the United States are committed to getting a vaccine, with another quarter hedging their bets. Some of the communities most at risk from the virus are also the most suspicious: Among African Americans, who account for nearly one-quarter of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, 40% said they wouldnt get a vaccine in a mid-May poll by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago.
Public-health experts say they need to start now to counter all this misinformation, because epidemiologists estimate that to break the pandemic, 70% of the population may need to develop immunity, either by getting a vaccine or becoming infected. And with a national election upon us filled with incendiary, conspiracy-based campaigning, the virus has been politicized. But whatever the political affiliation, the Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that Americans trust in government is at an historic low. Only 17% of Americans said they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always (3%) or most of the time (14%). Distrust cuts across political affiliation only 21% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they can trust government, compared with only 14% of Democrats and Democratic leaners and racial and ethnic lines.
Some public-health agencies say we should consider taking vaccinations out of medical settings and into places where people work. New Jersey law already requires that each health care facility establish and implement annual flu vaccination programs including mandatory annual vaccinations. And during the Novel H1N1 influenza surge in 2009, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had taken the position that employers could mandate flu vaccines, with some exceptions, although guidance would need updating for COVID-19.
During the first six months of the pandemic, it was the frontline worker who was a risk. Now, it is the business owner on the front line, as a new legal front is showing the risks of reopening workplaces without taking proper precautions. Walmart, Safeway, Tyson Foods and some health care facilities have been sued for gross negligence and wrongful death since the coronavirus pandemic began unfolding in March. Employees families allege that the companies failed to protect workers from the deadly virus and should compensate their family members as a result. Workers who survived the virus also are suing to have medical bills, future earnings and other damages paid out, which could last a lifetime because of the potential long-term consequences of the virus, including damage to the lungs and other organs.
In responding to the lawsuits, employers have said they took steps to combat the virus, including screening workers for signs of illness, requiring they wear masks, social distancing, sanitizing workspaces and limiting the number of customers inside stores. Some point out that it is impossible to know where or how their workers contracted the virus. But COVID-19 has been a game-changer and employers who rely on misinformation or the political passions of the moment will be penalized as they are required to make their best efforts to obtain public-health advice that is contemporaneous and appropriate for their location, and to make reasonable assessments of conditions in their workplace based on this information.
In the meantime, with or without a vaccine, employers should take every precaution to avoid workers compensation liability. Learn how.
CDC Director Robert Redfield testified at a Senate panel on coronavirus and gave his opinion on face masks, but then President Trump contradicted him. USA TODAY
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed controversial guidance on coronavirus testingFriday, nowrecommending that people who have been exposed to someone with COVID-19 should get tested, even if they're not symptomatic.
If you have been in close contact withan infected person and do not have symptoms, "you need a test," the CDC said in an updateto its website Friday.
"Due to the significance of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, this guidance further reinforces the need to test asymptomatic persons, including close contacts of a person with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection," the CDC says.
The recommendation departs from guidance the agency issued at the end of August, which said that someone who was in close contact (within 6 feet) of an infected person for at least 15 minutes but doesnt have symptoms does not "necessarily need a test."
Vaccine update: Data, data and more data will make a coronavirus vaccine safe, USA TODAY's vaccine panel says
Infectious disease experts were confused and troubled by the change, as people who are not showing symptoms can still have and spread COVID-19.
"Our work on the 'silent'spread underscored the importance of testing people who have been exposed to COVID-19 regardless of symptoms," Alison Galvani, director for the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at Yale School of Medicine, said on Twitter at the time. "This change in policy will kill."
The CDC estimatesthat 40% of infections are asymptomatic and 50% of transmissions occur before symptoms appear. Experts worry that failing to test asymptomatic carriers could not only result in more infections but also hinder contact tracing efforts.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the controversial guidance was not written by CDC scientists and was posted to the agencys website "despite their serious objections," according to internal documents and several people familiar with the matter.
Dr. ThomasFile Jr., president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, cheered the update Friday.
"The return to a science-based approach to testing guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is good news for public health and for our united fight against this pandemic. We urge officials to support the work of controlling this pandemic by following medical guidance of experts in the field," he said in a statement.
Galvani said the move Friday was "a step in the right direction."
"In order to control the pandemic, it is imperative that contact tracing is conducted and that exposed individuals be tested irrespective of symptoms. The goal should be that this process is implemented fast enough that cases are identified before they become symptomatic," she said. "People are highly infectious during the presymptomatic phase and catching people during that phase is key to interrupting transmission."
Contributing:Adrianna Rodriguez and Karen Weintraub
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By Adam Mossoff
To ensure that coronavirus vaccines and treatments are available at a price affordable to all people, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky and several other House Democrats recently proposed a radical solution to the coronavirus pandemic commandeer any lifesaving, yet-to-be-created vaccine and allow the government to set reasonable prices.
Although this may sound like it would benefit people, it would be a disaster for patients. Intellectual property protections arent a barrier to care. Just the opposite. Theyre responsible for the most revolutionary medical innovations in human history. And theyre our best hope of ending this pandemic.
Patents enable companies to sell their drugs and licenses to other companies to make those drugs without copycat competition for a limited time. Without such protections, thered be little incentive for private companies and investors to dedicate hundreds of billions of dollars to the scientists at the cutting edge of biomedical research.
The Founding Fathers understood that intellectual property rights were essential to the growth and success of the country, empowering Congress in the Constitution to secure this exclusive right to inventors. They placed the governments power to protect patents on par with creating federal courts, declaring war, and creating an army and navy.
Our early leaders proved prescient. Nearly all of the medical breakthroughs in the past century would have been impossible without reliable and effective IP rights. These include recent developments, such as the antiretroviral therapies that have brought Americas HIV/AIDS death rate down by 80 percent, and the cancer therapies that have cut mortality rates by nearly a quarter since the early 1990s.
After more than a century of continuous breakthroughs, its easy to take this medical progress for granted. But we shouldnt forget that, before IP rights and the free market brought us modern medicine, life was nasty, brutish and short.
People routinely died from diseases that are easily treatable today. Less than a hundred years ago, President Calvin Coolidges 16-year-old son died in 1924 after injuring his toe playing tennis on the White House lawn. Without antibiotics, Calvin Jr. developed a common blood infection that killed him within a week.
We cant let misinformed, misguided politicians bring us back to those days.
America has had the strongest IP protections in the world and as a result, were far more innovative than other nations. The United States accounts for about 5 percent of the worlds population and a quarter of its economic output, but invents two-thirds of all new drugs.
Despite this ingenuity, some public officials still view patents as barriers to healthcare access particularly during public health emergencies like COVID-19.
Others urge the federal government to march in and seize drug patents under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. They misunderstand what this law does.
Bayh-Dole only allows the government to seize patents in extremely rare situations, such as when a company is unwilling or unable to sell or license a drug in the healthcare market. Thats not the case right now with COVID-19. In fact, drug companies are racing to turn lab discoveries into real-world treatments. Around 80 clinical trials are already underway for coronavirus drugs and vaccines.
If Congress guts intellectual property protections, biotech firms will hesitate to invest additional money in future research and development projects. Theres no surer way to limit patients access to health care than to undermine IP rights and thus ensure that new medicines are never invented at all.
Adam Mossoff is a patent law expert at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
FOR MORE COLUMNS AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, CHECK OUT OUR OPINION SECTION HERE.
The multi-surface cleaner underwent testing from a third-party laboratory which proved it's efficacy with a '10-minute contact time on hard non-porous surfaces.'
WASHINGTON, D.C., USA The multi-surface cleaner Pine-Sol has received approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to kill coronavirus "on hard non-porous surfaces."
According to a press release from the cleaner, made by Clorox, it underwent testing from a third-party laboratory that proved its efficacy with "a 10-minute contact time on hard non-porous surfaces."
"We hope this new Pine-Sol kill claim will increase access to disinfectants that can help prevent the spread of COVID-19," Vice President and General Manager of Pine-Sol Chris Hyder said in the statement.
Pine-Sol joins a list of 494 products with emerging viral pathogens and human coronavirus claims for use against SARS-CoV-2.
A full list of products that meet EPA's criteria for fighting coronavirus can be found here.
When using any EPA-registered disinfectant, it recommends following the label directions and to "follow the contact time, which is the amount of time the surface should be visibly wet."
More than 6.7 million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 198,000 people have died.
For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms that clear up within weeks. But for others, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, the virus can cause severe symptoms and be fatal. The vast majority of people recover.
World Health Organization official Dr. Hans Kluge tells reporters that coronavirus cases are rising in Europe. David Barrett/AP hide caption
World Health Organization official Dr. Hans Kluge tells reporters that coronavirus cases are rising in Europe.
The World Health Organization warned on Thursday that weekly coronavirus case numbers are rising in Europe at a higher rate than during the pandemic's peak in March.
At a virtual news conference, Dr. Hans Kluge, regional director of WHO in Europe, warned, "We do have a very serious situation unfolding before us."
"Weekly cases have exceeded those reported when the pandemic first peaked in Europe in March," he said. "Last week, the region's weekly tally exceeded 300,000 patients."
Wearing a green face mask, Kluge said, "Strict lockdown measures in the spring and early summer yielded good results. Our efforts, our sacrifices paid off. In June, cases hit an all-time low."
Reported cases in Spain, France and the U.K. were in the hundreds in June and July.
However, Kluge said the early September case numbers "should serve as a wake-up call for all of us." He said the numbers reflect more comprehensive testing but also "alarming rates of transmission across the region."
"More than half of European countries have reported a greater than 10% increase in cases in the past two weeks," said Kluge. "Of those, seven countries have seen newly reported cases increase more than twofold in the same period."
"Where the pandemic goes from here is in our hands. ... We have fought it back before, and we can fight back again," he said.
Kluge said quarantines should remain in place.
So far, Europe has seen 4,893,614 confirmed cases, and the death toll is at 216,005 during this pandemic. Spain has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus infections in Europe at 625,651, followed by France at 454,099, the United Kingdom at 384,075 and Italy at 293,025, according to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard.
As college campuses across the nation become the new COVID-19 hot spots, with hundreds of positive cases reported in some places, Florida university officials have not been sounding many alarms.
Aside from Florida State University, where cases are climbing the fastest and president John Thrasher threatened Friday to suspend infected students who continue to socialize, the states biggest campuses have yet to see the huge numbers reported in some other states.
Not that the virus hasnt made inroads.
Young people are the primary drivers of outbreaks in Florida as the recent drop in new COVID-19 cases and deaths begins to stall, according to state data. And while social media posts have documented large gatherings on some campuses, with few sporting masks, officials say they are also concerned about smaller get-togethers in residence halls or students sharing meals in close quarters.
Cases are not something were looking at as a defeat, said Dr. Mike Lauzardo, who leads the University of Floridas Screen, Test & Protect initiative. As expected, when you start to open things up, cases occur. ... Cases are going to go up. Were going to manage and control them.
That effort has taken different forms across the state. Heres a look at the COVID-19 situation at Floridas larger universities, and how those schools are handling cases:
After starting its semester on Aug. 24, FSU has reported 1,182 cases. This week, 64 students were in quarantine or self-isolation in two on-campus residence halls, with an additional 24 students in isolation off-campus.
Since the school started testing on Aug. 2, its positvity rate is 8.49 percent.
During the first week of the semester, 11 people were arrested at a house party held by a banned fraternity. Later, the school limited events and restricted access at Greek houses to residents only. Tailgating before football games, which was initially allowed, is temporarily prohibited.
On Friday, president Thrasher coupled his threat to suspend students with a call to action, saying the behavior of a few is hindering our ability to continue the in-person experience this fall and the traditions we all cherish. The notice followed posts on social media that said students who were asked to quarantine had attended last Saturdays home football game against Georgia Tech.
It just feels like Im kind of realizing a lot of people lack empathy and regard for the greater community we live in, said Molly Lavoie, an FSU sophomore who mostly stays in her off-campus apartment and takes classes online. "Its really frustrating seeing the spike, and nobody seems to care.
A Tampa Bay Times analysis found that 1,731 cases of COVID-19 had been reported in the three zip codes covering the FSU campus and surrounding areas since September 1. That translated to one new case for every 55 people in those zip codes an area of roughly 95,000 residents.
Case records are sometimes initially assigned to where a person was tested before being updated to where they live, so some of the data could change.
Across all of Leon County, cases among 15- to 24-year-olds more than tripled from their prior high in late June. Visits to emergency rooms in the county also have increased this month.
Since the fall semester began on Aug. 24, USF has reported that 165 students and employees including 71 this week have tested positive across its three campuses.
Those cases are self-reported by students, faculty and staff or those who test positive at the Student Health Services Center. The university does not report its positivity test rate, and said it cannot provide that data because it shares its on-campus testing site with Hillsborough County.
Soon, the university will begin testing 10 percent of the on-campus population at random and will provide a positivity rate from that, said Donna Petersen, chair of USFs COVID-19 task force.
University officials declined to provide the number of individuals quarantined on campus facilities. But during a Facebook Live Q & A with parents this week, dean of housing Ana Hernandez said USF had 66 students in isolation in residence halls, a number she said fluctuates with people coming and going every hour.
During the same session, some parents complained that USFs protocols for keeping students under quarantine were lacking, with little or no contact from the university and no food being provided for nearly a day.
Dean of Students Danielle McDonald said that students placed in a residence hall to self-isolate are assigned to a care team, which checks in with them daily and delivers them at least two meals a day.
She also said she is cautiously optimistic about the reopening so far.
I feel like I need to keep knocking on wood every time I say this because I feel like Ill jinx it and well be setting ourselves up for a fall, but it is going well, McDonald said. Its still not easy.
She said each fraternity and sorority signed a pledge to abide by the universitys standards. There have been sporadic reports of large gatherings at off-campus apartment complexes, but McDonald believes she would know if more were taking place. She bases that on social media accounts that shame students who participate in those events, and on information reported through the universitys anonymous tip lines.
We started a little later than some other schools, and theyve seen what can happen if people do not take care of our community," McDonald said.
Petersen added: We dont have big parties or those super spreaders with massive numbers of people."
Since the fall semester began on Aug. 31, UF has reported 693 new student and employee cases. The Student Health Care Center testing site has a 26.6 percent positivity rate.
University spokesman Steve Orlando said last week that 31 students were in quarantine on campus and 23 were in isolation. An additional 81 students were either quarantining or isolating off campus. Most, he said, went home.
In Alachua County, emergency room admissions have remained essentially flat since late August.
Lauzardo, the doctor leading the universitys screening and testing efforts, said the increase was anticipated.
He said in-depth contact tracing, including 30- to 45-minute interviews with each person who tests positive, has allowed the university to learn more about possible points of transmission and adjust its approach to the virus. Lauzardo said not much spread has been detected on campus or in classrooms; instead it has occurred in residence halls and off-campus Greek housing.
We do our best to find where those cases are, he said. "This is something to be managed, not something to be avoided. We lost that ability to avoid it once this virus left China.
The university has reported 199 cases since the semester started on Aug. 24.
Fifteen students were quarantined in residence halls last week, while the majority of those who were told to isolate returned to their permanent residence, the university said.
Dr. Michael Deichen, associate vice president of UCF Student Health Services, said most of the positive cases were coming through noncompliant behavior rather than community spread. Some students, he said, spread the virus by eating near others.
Eating is such an important facet of socialization and something important we all need to do, but people are letting down their guard, Deichen said. Were trying to make sure people understand the risk."
He said the university will begin targeted testing of certain populations first fraternities and sororities, and later other groups such as dining hall employees and residence hall occupants to see if they need to allocate more resources in specific areas.
But Deichen said he expects things to improve, and the university is preparing for how to disseminate a vaccine when it arrives.
Were hopefully in the sixth or seventh inning of this pandemic, he said.
The World Health Organization warned Friday that the coronavirus is "not going away," noting that it's still killing about 50,000 people a week.
"That is not where we want to be," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's health emergencies program, said of Covid-19 deaths during a news conference at the agency's Geneva headquarters. "It's not where the Northern Hemisphere wants to be going into the winter season. It's not where developing countries want to be with their health services under nine months of pressure."
Ryan said the virus still has a "long way to burn." WHO officials said they are beginning to see "worrying trends" in the number of Covid-19 cases, ICU admissions and hospitalizations in the Northern Hemisphere as it enters the colder seasons.
"It has not burned out, it is not burning out, it is not going away," Ryan said, "and especially for those countries entering their winter season in terms of people coming together more indoors. There's a lot of work to do in order to avoid amplification events, drive down transmission of this epidemic, protect the opening of schools, and protect the most vulnerable in our society from severe disease and death."
European health officialshave warned for weeksabout a rising number of Covid-19 cases. More than half of European countries have reported a 10% or greater increase in cases in the past two weeks and, of those, seven have seen newly reported cases increase more than twofold, the WHO's regional director for Europe, Dr. Hans Kluge, said Thursday in a news briefing.
In the U.S., health officials are reporting an average of about 39,000 new Covid-19 cases per day, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University data. Covid-19 cases were growing by 5% or more, based on a weekly average to smooth out daily reporting, in at least 34 states as well as Washington, D.C., as of Friday, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data, an increase from eight states at the same time last week.
"The energy has not gone out of this pandemic. There's a lot of energy left in this spring and this can drive the pandemic forward," Ryan said.
U.S. health officials fear the outbreak could get worse as the nation enters the fall and winter seasons. Health officials have repeatedly warned that they are preparing to battle two bad viruses circulating later this year as the Covid-19 outbreak runs into flu season.Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci,thenation'sleadinginfectiousdiseaseexpert, said daily new cases were"unacceptably high"intheU.S. this close tothe fall.
"Once you get the level of infection down really, really low, it almost self-propagates itself to stay low, but you've got to get it low," Fauci told The Wall Street Journal's "The Journal" podcast published on Thursday.
"Once it's way up there it's tough to get it down," he said. Fauci said that number for the U.S. would be "hundreds of cases, thousands, but not 20, 30, 40 thousand cases a day."
Dr. Maria VanKerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on the Covid-19 pandemic, noted Friday that global health officials have "literally hundreds" of seroepidemiology studies ongoing that examine the extent of coronavirus infection in different populations. The studies indicate that "a majority of the world's population is susceptible to infection from this virus," she said.
"That means the virus has a long way to go," she said.
Van Kerkhove said it's "absolutely critical" for countries to have a strong plan for when outbreaks arise. She told CNN's "New Day" program earlier Friday that the rise in hospitalizations in some European countries, like the U.K. and France, are "worrying trends" because the Northern Hemisphere hasn't "even started to hit the flu season yet," which could add more strain to an already burdened health system.
"What's really important right now is for countries in their response is that they break down the problem, they break down the outbreak into the lowest administrative level as possible as the data will allow," she said."It's not just about case numbers. These are incredibly important and we need to be able to track these trends but we also need to look at hospitalizations, we need to look at ICU occupancy and how many people are being admitted into intensive care."
Lets set aside the wave analogy. Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says that its far more accurate to think of the pandemic as a forest fire. We have suppressed it in some places, but we have not put it out completely. Its going to keep burning as long as it has wood, he says. In this case, wood is humans that are susceptible to infection.
Its safe to assume that case counts will rise in the coming months, as colder weather forces more people indoors (in the North, at least) and as more students and teachers return to in-person schooling. Colleges are already grappling with outbreaks, and infected students are already returning home to seed a further spread in their own communities.
Case counts could start spiking just a few weeks from now, Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, told me. The most rigorous predictions are that we head into November with 220,000 deaths. And if pandemic-fatigued families travel to spend the holidays together, it will get worse in late fall and winter.
Its tough to say whether the nation will reach or surpass the grim peaks of the summer, when we were seeing 65,000 to 70,000 new cases every day. Hopeful policymakers have speculated that fall outbreaks will be less severe, because many communities are at or approaching the herd immunity threshold the point at which enough people have become immune to the virus that it can no longer spread easily. But there are several problems with this hypothesis.
First, we dont really know how durable immunity to the virus might be. Most scientists think its likely that it lasts anywhere from several months to a year. But doctors have confirmed a few cases of repeat infection and, in at least one of them, the second infection proved more severe than the first.
Second, herd immunity is not a magical doorway that will take us back to the before-times. People think once we hit this number we can all go to the bar because now its over, Dr. Jha says. But it doesnt work like that. Its hard to know what the threshold even is (most experts put it at around 60 percent or higher, though some argue it could actually be much lower) and difficult to say when a population has crossed it. But even then, the virus would only slow down, not stop.
Third, most experts agree that, whatever the threshold proves to be, no country in the world is there yet. Even if some of the hardest hit communities in Corona, Queens, for example are partly protected, antibody tests indicate that, overall, just 10 percent to 12 percent of Americans have been infected with the virus to date. If SARS-CoV-2 is a forest fire, it still has a lot of wood to burn through.
Heres our recap of thepast week inthe coronaviruspandemicfrom our tracking, policy analysis, polling, and journalism.
With U.S. coronavirus case and death cumulative totals continuing to lead the world, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman wrote a featured essay for The BMJ discussingtwo fundamental policy decisions made by the Trump Administration that set the U.S. on the controversial and highly criticized course it has taken on COVID-19. He writes, The US coronavirus failure was not inevitable and does not have to be permanent. But it is historically aberrant for our federal government to follow and not lead in a national crisis, and equally unusual for our country to divide rather than unify in a time of crisis. Additionally, KFF released an overview of President Trumps record on health care, which features a section on his COVID-19 response.
An analysis by Epic Health Research Network and KFF of 50 million patients records finds disparities for people of color across the spectrum of the COVID-19 pandemic, including higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death. Further, people of color are sicker when they test positive and the disparities in hospitalization and death remain when accounting for underlying health conditions and differences in sociodemographic factors.
As public health officials and policymakers prepare for an eventual COVID-19 vaccine, a Policy Watch post examines flu vaccination rates, highlighting the lower rates among adults of color. Insightsinto the potential barriers and issues that should be addressed as part of a vaccination strategy are discussed.
Global Cases and Deaths:Totalcases worldwide surpassed30 millionthis week withan increase ofapproximately1.9 million new confirmed cases in the past seven days.There wereapproximately35,400new confirmed deaths worldwide, bringing the total to nearly 945,000confirmed deaths.
U.S. Cases and Deaths:Total confirmed cases in the U.S. neared 6.7 million this week.Therewas anapproximateincrease of 278,000confirmed cases betweenSeptember 11 and September 17.Approximately 6,000confirmed deaths in the past week brought the total in the United States toapproximately197,600.
Extensions: GA, IA, MS, WY
Rollbacks: FL, IA, MI, MS, UT
