The current consensus by scientists and public health experts is that the only way to end the coronavirus' devastating effects on America's citizens and its economy is to develop, produce at scale and widely distribute an effective vaccine against COVID-19 as quickly as possible.
There are, of course, myriad scientific challenges inherent to that imperative, among them the virus' potential mutability, our lack of knowledge about whether antibodies provide protection against reinfection (and, if so, for how long), and the time it takes to discover an effective vaccine, test it, receive regulatory approval and begin commercial production.
But there is one more problem we've rarely had to consider: By pharmaceutical companies own estimates, no company has anywhere near the production capacity needed to meet the demand, once those effective vaccines (or treatments) have been found.
The number of vaccine producers has been dwindling for years, because vaccines do not offer the kinds of profits that pharmaceutical companies think they deserve. And, despite their very public proclamations of support for vaccine research at moments like these, companies often pull out of such efforts before a fully viable product can be produced because of a lack of market incentives.
For instance, a number of companies reported losing money on Ebola or SARS vaccine development programs. In recent years, GSK made, then later abandoned, its commitments to Ebola vaccine development; Sanofi did much the same with Zika; and Novartis got rid of its whole vaccine development unit in 2014.
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There is, then, but one viable solution: We should nationalize what remains of the American vaccine industry now, thereby assuring that any coronavirus vaccines produced can be made as widely available and as inexpensive soon as possible.
If that sounds like a drastic (or even un-American) solution, nothing could be further from the truth. We should recall that nationalizations in times of emergency in the United States are common. The tradition includes the telephone system during World War I; the thousands of coal mines, railroads, and manufacturers during World War II; gold and silver during the New Deal era; and even the savings and loan industry in the 1980s.
Also during World War I, we nationalized the U.S. subsidiaries of the pharmaceutical giants Merck and Bayer.
Furthermore, the U.S. has specific experience with critical public sector mobilizations through public-private partnerships that specified that the private actors could not profit off the work of vaccine development, production and distribution, including our highly successful vaccine program during World War II, one of several wartime programs that developed and improved 10 vaccines in a short period of time.
In another example, at the turn of the 20th century, the New York City Public Health Department played a pivotal role in developing the testing and immunization for diphtheria, which had reached epidemic levels and caused thousands of deaths in the city. It offered free immunization to the poor to stem the tide of the crisis.
Additionally, a legal analysis shows that nationalizing the vaccine industry could be accomplished for next to nothing, given the industrys substantial reliance on government funding and licensing.
Furthermore, there are three major roadblocks to the development and widespread distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine that could be resolved if the sector were nationalized.
First, instead of allowing firms to compete with one another for monopoly rights to manufacture a future COVID-19 vaccine, thereby squandering limited financial and scientific resources to ensure future potential profits, the whole sector could immediately be put to work, collaboratively, in the public interest, both developing and producing the vaccines we need.
As recent history has already definitively shown, vaccine development is a textbook case of a public good that the free market simply cannot efficiently provide and, when it comes to a coronavirus vaccine in the United States, that failure is already beginning to play out again. As a recent New York Times article noted in regards to a promising vaccine collaboration coming out of the United Kingdom: The team has not yet reached an agreement with a North American manufacturer, in part because the major pharmaceutical companies there typically demand exclusive worldwide rights before investing in a potential medicine.
Second, any vaccine developed in the public sector could be licensed through a global pool or developed and marketed without patents altogether, eliminating the monopoly rights pharmaceutical manufacturers enjoy in the United States. Providing one manufacturer exclusive rights to a COVID-19 vaccine could be devastating for millions worldwide, as it would take any one supplier many years to meet demand. In the meantime, entire swaths of the globe would be unable to afford sufficient vaccine supplies from for-profit manufacturers even if they sold those supplies at cost.
But eliminating monopoly rights would ensure that every vaccine developed with public funds would be available to all at a reasonable cost, ensuring the timely and equitable access necessary for coherent public health interventions especially with COVID-19, when time is so clearly of the essence.
Finally, rather than waiting to build production facilities from scratch after a proven vaccine is developed, nationalizing vaccine development would allow us to scale up the existing infrastructure of the American vaccine industry by pooling the existing resources of organizations that would not normally cooperate at all. Only nationalization would allow for the sort of high-level coordination required to meet the challenge of a pandemic like COVID-19, leveraging the full capacity of the sector to meet the most pressing public health needs, rather than shareholders desires for quick returns.
Taking the few remaining vaccine producers into public ownership could also hasten the transition to a full public option in pharmaceuticals which we badly need in the long term to ensure public health-oriented innovation and long-term access to medicines in the U.S. and beyond.
But in the short term, it is clear that only a robust, nationalized program of vaccine development and production can meet the challenge of rapidly inoculating our population against a threat like COVID-19.
Donald Trump has said coronavirus will go away without a vaccine and is expecting 95,000 or more deaths in the US, as Mike Pences press secretary tested positive for coronavirus.
The presidents comments, at an event with Republican lawmakers, capped a horror week in the US, in which it was revealed unemployment had risen to 14.7%, up from 3.5% in February, with 20 million people losing their jobs in April.
The news that Mike Pences press secretary Katie Miller had Covid-19, having recently tested negative, again brought the danger of the virus to the White House inner circle. Katie Miller is married to the White House immigration adviser and speech writer Stephen Miller. On Thursday one of Trumps personal valets tested positive to the virus.
The president again appeared to reset expectations for the final US death toll, saying he expected 95,000 or more to die. The current toll stands at just over 77,000, with nearly 1.3 million infections, including nearly 29,000 new infections added to the count on Friday.
The US state department on Friday accused China and Russia of stepping up cooperation to spread false narratives over the coronavirus pandemic, saying Beijing was increasingly adopting techniques honed by Moscow.
Even before the Covid-19 crisis we assessed a certain level of coordination between Russia and the PRC in the realm of propaganda, said Lea Gabrielle, coordinator of the state departments global engagement centre which tracks foreign propaganda.
But with this pandemic the cooperation has accelerated rapidly, she told reporters, in a continuing war of words between Washington and Beijing.
Leaders of the US congressional foreign affairs committees weighed in by writing to nearly 60 countries asking them to support Taiwans participation in the World Health Organization, citing the need for the broadest effort possible to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The move is likely to further inflame Sino-US relations as Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations, and has been excluded from the WHO, due to objections from China, which considers Taiwan to be part of its territory.
Taiwan has been seeking to join a ministerial meeting this month of the WHOs decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, with backing from Washington and several US allies. Taiwan has argued that its exclusion from the WHO has created a dangerous gap in the global fight against the coronavirus.
China reported one new coronavirus case on Saturday and 15 new asymptomatic cases. the countrys total number of infections stood at 82,887, with the death total unchanged at 4,633, the national health authority said.
In Italy, the head of the infectious diseases department at the renowned Sacco hospital in Milan, Massimo Galli, said the northern city was a bit of a bomb in terms of the virus spreading.
We have a very high number of infected people returning to circulation, he told La Repubblica, after photographs of people sitting along Milans canals enjoying aperitifs in the sunshine, many without wearing masks or respecting physical distancing rules, were splashed over the front pages of the countrys newspapers.
Milans mayor, Giuseppe Sala, said the behaviour was shameful and threatened to close the well-known aperitif area if people persisted in flouting the rules. Almost 40% of Italys infections are in the Lombardy region, of which Milan is the capital.
On Friday, Italy became the first country in the European Union to pass 30,000 deaths from the virus. Britain, which left the EU in January, passed that milestone on Wednesday, and deaths on Friday stood at more than 31,300.
Travellers into the UK will be quarantined for two weeks when they arrive as part of measures to prevent a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic, Boris Johnson is expected to say on Sunday when he lays out his roadmap out of the lockdown. He will announce the introduction of quarantine measures for people who arrive at airports, ports and Eurostar train stations, including for Britons returning from abroad.
People will be asked to provide the address at which they will self-isolate for two weeks on arrival by filling out a digital form, according to a report in the Times newspaper.
Russia on Friday registered more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the sixth day in a row, after emerging as a new hotspot of the pandemic. The total number of infections stood at nearly 188,000. The country also recorded 98 new deaths from the virus, for a total of 1,723, and while some officials were considering softening the current lockdown, the WHO warned Russia was going through a delayed epidemic.
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan said in a virtual briefing must learn some of the lessons which came at great cost in other parts of the world.
In other coronavirus news:
Global infections stood at 3,937,813, with 276,863 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker.
Roy Horn, of the double act Siegfried and Roy, has died after contracting Covid-19, according to US media reports. He died in Las Vegas on Friday, aged 75.
The US issued a new rule on Friday tightening visa guidelines for Chinese journalists, saying it was in response to the treatment of US journalists in China.
Mexicos president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday that he aimed to present plans next week to reopen the economy, as key sectors like car-making look to begin business again after over a month of quarantine measures.
Argentina will extend a quarantine covering its capital Buenos Aires but relax restrictions in the rest of the country.
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As researchers around the world race under immense pressure to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, a controversial approach could potentially help get them there faster but it's incredibly risky.
The process is known as a human challenge study, and it involves intentionally infecting willing volunteers with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in order to test the effectiveness of potential vaccines and treatments against it.
"These are very powerful studies that could make a difference, especially since we don't know a lot about the novel coronavirus," said Seema Shah, a medical ethicist at Northwestern University and Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.
"They could clarify what's happening in infections with people who are not symptomatic and people who have more severe disease even if they don't have underlying conditions that put them at higher risk."
Shah said COVID-19 human challenge studies could also help identify people who have developed immunity to the coronavirus, while also helping to narrow down the growing list of potential vaccines and treatments for patients.
"If there were a couple of vaccine candidates that had gotten through safety testing and there was a question about which one of those vaccines was more likely to work, a human challenge study could be a quick way to pick the best vaccine of the candidates," she said.
"It could also be useful to study whether the vaccine itself causes different kinds of harm."
The WHOsays any potential vaccine is still at least a year away, but human challenge trials could accelerate theprocess because of the time they save in the clinical trial phase.
Typically, researchers inject thousands of study participants with a vaccine or placebo and wait for symptoms to develop an approach that can take months or years after vaccine development.
Human challenge studies instead vaccinatea small group of people and then intentionally infectthem with the virus, saving critical research time, especially during a global pandemic.
But despite the potential benefits of a controlled human challenge study on COVID-19 patients, experts say the controversial approach is an ethical minefield that could have disastrous consequences if not handled carefully.
Human challenge studies typically recruit young, healthy volunteers in an effort to keep the risk of severe medical complications low.
Thousands of potential volunteers have already pledged to participate in human challenge trials on a website called 1DaySooner, but no such studies are yet underway.
Yet given what we know and don't know about the different ways in which COVID-19 attacks the human body even in young, healthy people, how do we effectively inform participants who may be unknowingly putting themselves at severe risk?
"We know that younger people tend to tolerate COVID-19 as an illness better, but what would worry me about that is there's a lot that is still unknown," said Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist and professor of global health at the University of Toronto.
He said the potential for COVID-19 patients of all ages to face long-term health implications and even death from a virus we still know so little aboutcalls into question how truly informed participants could be on the risks of a human challenge study.
"Do you truly have an informed decision?" he said. "You have consent, but is itreally well-informed? Do people fully understand? Because if we don't understand the virus itself, I wonder about the quality of informed consent that you can ask of people."
In a new paper published in the journal Science Thursday, Shah and a team of international researchers outline an ethical framework for how human challenge studies could be effectively used to combat COVID-19.
The researchers supportdeveloping a "challenge strain" of the coronavirus a stabilizedversion of the one thatis circulating worldwide to potentially infect participants, but stopped short of advocating for the work to proceed.
"The pandemic has affected just about everyone in the world in various ways, so the potential amount of social value is unprecedented here," Shah said.
"That's why our group concluded it's really important to give challenge studies a hard look and potentially invest in laying the groundwork for doing them.
"But then make that judgment call about whether and how to do them at a later date when they're ready to go."
The World Health Organization released specific criteria this week outlining its recommended approach to conducting human challenge studies, without advocating for or against them.
Among those recommendations is a need for "strong scientific justification" for the studies, ensuring that the potential benefits outweigh risksand that the selection of participants should be done with "rigorous" informed consent.
"The overarching, really important one is to minimize risk to participants as much as possible," said bioethicist Dr. Ross Upshur, of the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, who helped work on the WHO guidelines.
"You need to make sure that people understand what's being proposed:what they're going to be doing;how they're going to be managed in this situation;how their safety and their well-being is going to be protected.
"But it's also incumbent on the researchers to outline all of the uncertainties,because we may not be able to actually quantify some of those risks."
Timothy Caulfield, a Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta who has researched human challenge studies, said those ethical dilemmas have historically plagued this approach.
"I understand the desire to use human challenge trials, especially in this context, because people are desperate to get a vaccine quickly, not just for clinical reasons, but also for economic and social reasons," he said.
"So the pressure is intense, but the exact reason that we have research ethics guidelines is to protect research participants."
Caulfield said the damage that could be done if a human challenge trial were to go awry would be devastating.
He points to the ethics scandal involvingJesse Gelsinger, a teenager who died in a clinical trial for gene therapy in 1999, as an example of a failed human study that set the research ethics field back immensely.
Gelsingerhad a genetic disease called ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) that he controlled through diet and medication, but after enrolling in the trialhe was injected with an experimental therapy and died a few days later.
"Just imagine the impact that it could have on vaccine research, especially in this environment where there's so much uncertainty," Caulfieldsaid.
"If it doesn't go well and if we cut corners on research ethics standards, it could end up backfiring and being really problematic."
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RESEARCHERS IN Italy have claimed to have developed a successful vaccine against Covid-19.
Scientists from Rome's Lazzaro Spallanzani Hospital, which specialises in studying infectious diseases, say they have successfully developed a vaccine which neutralises the coronavirus in human cells.
Luigi Aurisicchio, Chief executive of Takis, the company working on the treatment, told Italian news agency Ansathat tests carried out on mice created antibodies after just one vaccine, which they expect to also work in human trials.
This is the most advanced stage of testing of a candidate vaccine created in Italy, Mr Aurisicchio said, adding that "as far as we know we are the first in the world so far to have demonstrated a neutralisation of the coronavirus by a vaccine".
Human trials are expected to take place after the summer, he told the outlet.
While the researchers are developing the vaccine with "Italian research, with an all-Italian and innovative technology, tested in Italy" he said that the vaccine, if successful, will be made available to everyone.
In order to reach this goal, we need the support of national and international institutions and partners who may help us speed up the process.
The researcher worked on developing a vaccine which centred around the coronavirus's 'spike' DNA protein which it uses to latch on to and enter human cells, and so far the trials are proving a success.
The next part of the vaccine trial will be to test how long the immunity lasts.
Meanwhile in the UK, human trials have begun on a vaccine developed at Oxford University's Jenner Institute, with researchers there saying a vaccine could be available as early as September.
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Title: Gene therapy expert leads project to develop AAV-based COVID-19 vaccine
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Vaccines are chemicals that help the body develop antibodies while antibodies are developedby the bodys immune system to fight pathogens
Italy and Israel both claim to have had breakthroughs indeveloping methods to neutralise the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), that is responsible for the disease (COVID-19) pandemic, suggest several media reports.
Media reports suggestthe vaccine had antibodies that worked on human cells, blocking the virus from infecting humans.
Some media reports used the terms vaccines and antibodies interchangeably. There is, however, a difference between them.
Vaccines are chemicals that when injected into the body, help it develop antibodies. Antibodies, on the other hand, are developed by the bodys immune system to fight pathogens.
Italian researchers at the Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases in Rome, Italy claim they found a vaccine to treat the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Takis the firm working on developing the vaccine used it to produce antibodies in mice that was then used to neutralise the virus in human cells.
This suggested that the vaccine may lead to a similar production of antibodies in human beings and would help shield the person from the infection.
A component from the pathogen is introduced into the body through a vaccine. While this component does not lead to the disease, it trains the bodys immune system to prepare a response for when the actual pathogen attacks.
The pathogen component that triggers the reaction in the body can be inactivated, weakened or even a toxin produced by the pathogen.
Another way of using antibodies produced in experimental animals or designed in silico (produced through computer simulations or modelling) can be to use them as a medicine or therapy.
This option is being explored as well to combat SARS-CoV-2. The Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR)claimed it developed an antibody that can neutralise the virus. Naftali Bennet, Israels defence minister claimed the monoclonal neutralising antibody developed by IIBR, attacks the virus and neutralises it inside the virus carriers body.
Monoclonal antibodies as the name suggests are cloned from a single recovered cell. This cell was obtained through plasma samples collected from patients who recovered from COVID-19.
These antibodies form the basis for plasma therapy too.
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A 5-year-old boy in New York has become the first child in the United States to die from a condition called pediatric multisymptom inflammatory syndrome that is believed to be linked to COVID-19.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a briefing Friday that the state department of health is investigating several related cases in children.
This would be really painful news and would open an entirely different chapter, Cuomo said.
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"This is an extremely rare and previously unknown presentation of COVID-19 in children," the Mount Sinai Health System said in a statement. "We extend our deepest condolences to the family in the wake of this tragedy."
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Nationwide, nearly 100 children have been diagnosed with the newly identified syndrome. At least eight states California, Delaware, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington as well as Washington, D.C., have reported cases.
Pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome can mirror symptoms of other inflammatory illnesses, such as Kawasaki disease and toxic shock-like syndrome.
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New York health officials urged parents to seek immediate care if a child has:
Most concerning is that children can develop problems with heart function. The heart doesn't pump as efficiently as it should. The problem appears to be the result of a child's immune system going into overdrive after a COVID-19 infection.
Many, but not all, children with the condition have been diagnosed with the coronavirus. At a news conference with Westchester County, New York, officials on Friday, doctors said some children don't develop symptoms until a month after exposure to the virus.
A 14-year-old boy in the U.K. has also died from the inflammatory syndrome. His and other such cases in Europe were detailed in a report published this week in The Lancet.
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Erika Edwards is a health and medical news writer and reporter for NBC News and "TODAY."
The serious inflammatory syndrome sending some children and teens to the hospital remains extremely uncommon, doctors say. But if your child spikes a high, persistent fever, and has severe abdominal pain with vomiting that doesn't make them feel better, call your doctor as a precaution. Sally Anscombe/Getty Images hide caption
The serious inflammatory syndrome sending some children and teens to the hospital remains extremely uncommon, doctors say. But if your child spikes a high, persistent fever, and has severe abdominal pain with vomiting that doesn't make them feel better, call your doctor as a precaution.
Updated May 8 at 11:54 a.m. ET
Sixty-four children and teens in New York State are suspected of having a mysterious inflammatory syndrome that is believed to be linked to COVID-19, the New York Department of Health said in an alert issued Wednesday. A growing number of similar cases including at least one death have been reported in other parts of the U.S. and Europe, though the phenomenon is still not well-understood.
Pediatricians say parents should not panic; the condition remains extremely rare. But researchers also are taking a close look at this emerging syndrome, and say parents should be on the lookout for symptoms in their kids that might warrant a quick call to the doctor a persistent high fever over several days and significant abdominal pains with repeated vomiting, after which the child does not feel better.
"If [the child is] looking particularly ill, you should definitely call the doctor," says Dr. Sean O'Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children's Hospital Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and member of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The new condition associated with COVID-19 is called Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome. Symptoms include persistent fever, extreme inflammation and evidence of one or more organs that are not functioning properly, says cardiologist Jane Newburger, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Kawasaki Program at Boston Children's Hospital.
"It's still very rare, but there's been a wave of cases. Physicians and scientists are working hard to understanding the mechanisms at play, and why only some children are so severely affected," Newburger says.
Some symptoms can resemble features of Kawasaki Disease Shock Syndrome. Kawasaki disease is an acute illness in children involving fever with symptoms including rash; conjunctivitis; redness in the lips, tongue and mucous membranes of the mouth and throat; swollen hands and/or feet; and sometimes an enlarged group of lymph nodes on one side of the neck, says Newburger. Some children with the condition develop enlargement of the coronary arteries and aneurysms in those blood vessels.
A small percentage of Kawasaki cases go on to develop symptoms of shock, which can include a steep drop in systolic blood pressure and difficulty with sufficient blood supply to the body's organs. Kawasaki disease and KDSS more often affect young children, although they can sometimes affect teens, Newburger says.
Some cases of the new inflammatory syndrome have features that overlap with KD or with KDSS including rash, conjunctivitis, and swollen hands or feet. The new inflammatory syndrome can affect not only young children but also older children and teens.
But patients with the new syndrome have lab results that look very different, in particular, "cardiac inflammation to a greater degree than we typically see in Kawasaki shock syndrome," which is usually very rare, O'Leary says. In New York City and London, which have seen large numbers of COVID-19 cases, "those types of patients are being seen with greater frequency."
Some patients "come in very, very sick," with low blood pressure and high fever, O'Leary says. Some children have had coronary artery aneurysms, though most have not, he adds.
Other patients exhibit symptoms more similar to toxic shock syndrome, with abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, and high levels of inflammation in the body, including the heart, O'Leary says. Most cases are treated in the intensive care unit, he says. Treatment includes intravenous immunoglobulin, which can "calm the immune system," says Newburger, as well as steroids and cytokine blockers.
The evidence so far from Europe, where reports of the syndrome first emerged, suggests most children will recover with proper supportive care, says O'Leary, though one adolescent, a 14-year-old boy in London, has died, according to a report published Wednesday in The Lancet.
Most children with the syndrome, O'Leary and Newburger note, have either tested positive for a current infection with the coronavirus, or for antibodies to the virus, which would suggest they were infected earlier and recovered.
And, according to case reports, some of the kids with the inflammatory syndrome who tested negative on coronavirus tests had been exposed at some point to someone known to have COVID-19. The inflammatory syndrome can appear days to weeks after COVID-19 illness, doctors say, suggesting the syndrome arises out of the immune system's response to the virus.
"One theory is that as one begins to make antibodies to SARS-COV-2, the antibody itself may be provoking an immune response," says Newburger. "This is only happening in susceptible individuals whose immune systems are built in a particular way. It doesn't happen in everybody. It's still a really uncommon event in children."
In late April, the U.K.'s National Health Service issued an alert to pediatricians about the syndrome. Reports have also surfaced in France, Spain and Italy, and probably number in the dozens globally, Newburger and O'Leary say, though doctors still don't have hard numbers. Newburger says there needs to be a registry where doctors can report cases "so we can begin to generate some statistics."
"Doctors across countries are talking to each other, but we need for there to be some structure and some science so that everybody can interpret," she says.
Dr. Deepika Thacker, a cardiologist with Nemours Children's Health System, in Wilmington, Del., says she's seen three cases in children that fit the profile for the new syndrome. The first case was back in mid-April.
"When we first saw that kid, we didn't know what it was," she says. But a couple of days later, a pediatrician friend from the U.K. sent her a WhatsApp message about the emerging syndrome. "In retrospect, that's what it was," Thacker says now.
"He responded beautifully to treatment, so he was already out of the hospital by the time I got bad reports from Europe," she says. Since then, doctors have gone back to that first patient and tested the boy for antibodies to the coronavirus; they're still awaiting the results.
Earlier this week, the New York City Health Department issued an alert saying 15 children ranging in age from 2 to 15 had been hospitalized with the syndrome. Dr. Purvi Parikh, a pediatric immunologist at NYU Langone Health, says she's seen three patients with the syndrome in the past week, all of whom are doing well with treatment.
"They all present in varying ways," says Parikh, who is also a spokesperson for Physicians for Patient Protection. "But the common theme was fever and rash. One had very, very swollen lymph nodes and lymph glands. And then, aside from that, they had markers of inflammation elevated in their blood."
"Up until now, we were mostly seeing these markers of inflammation in adults that were presenting with COVID-19," Parikh says. "But now we're also seeing a similar syndrome in children."
A spokesperson for Children's Healthcare of Atlanta says infectious disease specialists there are evaluating several cases of children who have exhibited Kawasaki-like symptoms and inflammation to determine if those patients may also have had COVID-19 and to investigate if any association between the two conditions might exist.
Newburger says that she's been contacted about cases in New Jersey and Philadelphia, as well.
While the syndrome's precise connection to the coronavirus isn't yet clear, O'Leary says the fact that the children in most of these cases are testing positive for exposure to the virus, one way or another, provides one point of evidence. The sheer number of cases small in absolute terms, but still "much higher than we would expect normally for things like severe Kawasaki or toxic shock syndrome" provides another, he says.
And then there's the fact that most reports of the syndrome have come out of the U.K. and New York City, places that have been hit with large numbers of COVID-19 cases.
"It's pure speculation at this point," he says, "but the U.K. cluster kind of went up about a month after their COVID-19 infections went up, which would suggest that it is some kind of an immune phenomenon."
Roy Horn kisses a tiger cub at his Las Vegas home with Siegfried Fischbacher in 2008. Horn, who survived a tiger mauling in 2003, died on Friday of complications related to COVID-19. Louie Traub/AP hide caption
Roy Horn kisses a tiger cub at his Las Vegas home with Siegfried Fischbacher in 2008. Horn, who survived a tiger mauling in 2003, died on Friday of complications related to COVID-19.
Magician and animal trainer Roy Horn, of the legendary Las Vegas duo Siegfied and Roy, died Friday from complications related to COVID-19. Horn tested positive last week. He was 75.
"The world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend," Siegfried Fischbacher said of his partner in a statement.
"Roy was a fighter his whole life including during these final days. I give my heartfelt appreciation to the team of doctors, nurses and staff at Mountain View Hospital who worked heroically against this insidious virus that ultimately took Roy's life."
Roy Horn was born in Germany in 1944. He and Siegfried began their act in Las Vegas in 1967. In 1989 they began a 14-year run at the Mirage Resort performing illusions with exotic animals, making tigers, lions, even elephants vanish and reappear.
In October of 2003, Roy Horn was performing with a 400-pound white tiger named Mantecore when the great cat grabbed him by the throat before a stunned audience and dragged him offstage. Horn suffered a stroke and paralysis.
The US Department of Agriculture investigated the incident and produced a 233-page report. But it did not determine why the tiger acted as it did. As USDA spokesman Jim Rogers told NPR's Steve Inskeep in 2005, "We do try to understand why animals in this situation may turn on a trainer... There have been cases in the past where it was something as simple as somebody turning their back on an animal or changing a costume without allowing the animal to become familiar with it. In this instance, I don't believe there was a reason that we determined for the animal turning on Mr. Horn."
Horn survived and partially recovered, returning to the stage with the same cat for one performance in 2010. He has insisted the tiger was reacting to the stroke and acting to save him and not the other way around. A statement from the duo's publicist says Roy referred to Mantecore as "my lifesaver."
Said Siegfried Fischbacher on Friday: "Roy's whole life was about defying the odds."
More than 60 days after Fairfax County had its first case of COVID-19, the county has, by far, the most cases, hospitalizations and deaths than any other in Virginia and now the county's emergency information department is giving three reasons why.
More than 60 days after Fairfax County announced its first case of COVID-19, the county has, by far, the most infections, hospitalizations and deaths than any county in Virginia and now the countys emergency information department is giving three reasons why.
The county, the largest in population in the state at an estimated 1.1 million people, said Thursday its pandemic curve is still in the exponential growth phase. As of Wednesday night, Fairfax County has 5,045 cases, 832 hospitalized and 211 deaths from COVID-19 each of those numbers is more than twice the total of the next highest county.
Fairfax County outlined the causes:
Fairfax County said it has taken proactive measures to slow the spread of the virus in high-risk places like nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
The county said even as Virginia and other states begin to ease restrictions, residents should stay vigilant with mitigation actions and think of these measures as a marathon, rather than a sprint.
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Looking for more information? D.C., Maryland and Virginia are each releasing more data every day. Visit their official sites here: Virginia | Maryland | District of Columbia
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