Category: Corona Virus

The ship, which is currently in port in San Diego, was the second US warship to be struck by an outbreak of the pandemic after the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier.

The officials said that there are more than 95 cases currently aboard the ship, meaning that almost 30% of the crew has been infected, surpassing the infection rate for the USS Theodore Roosevelt which has seen approximately 24% of its crew infected.

The handing of the outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier led to the firing of the ship's commanding officer, and the resignation of the acting Navy Secretary. It has been the subject of a Navy investigation which is due to be completed on May 27 following an initial preliminary inquiry that officials tell CNN recommended that the aircraft carrier's former captain, Capt. Brett Crozier, be reinstated.

The Navy on Friday stopped providing official daily figures about the number of cases on the Kidd and Theodore Roosevelt, saying that it "will only report significant changes on these vessels and new cases on any other deployed vessels."

On Thursday night, a Navy statement said that official number of active coronavirus cases on the Kidd was 78.

The 20% increase in positive coronavirus cases does not appear to have met the Navy's definition of "significant" information.

The statement Thursday said that the USS Theodore Roosevelt had 1,102 active cases in addition to 53 sailors who have recovered from coronavirus after completing at least 14 days in isolation and two successful negative tests. Three sailors from the ship are being treated in US Naval Hospital Guam for coronavirus symptoms. None of those sailors are in the ICU.

Asked about the new policy, chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman told reporters at the Pentagon "we wanted to get out of the pattern of providing a daily tracker of minor changes."

"We've now reached a point with both of those ships, particularly with the (Theodore Roosevelt), where we've gone through, the entire crew's been off, the entire crew's been tested, we have the results, the ship has been cleaned, the crew is now returning to the ship. So we believe that we have moved past a point where the daily updates are providing useful information for a public conversation about it," Hoffman said.

"If there was unfortunately an additional outbreak, we would provide information. But we wanted to get out of the pattern of providing a daily tracker of minor changes in this. And I think that's a reasonable place to be," Hoffman added.

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Number of coronavirus cases from second warship outbreak nears 100 as Navy restricts information on pandemic - CNN

This government should be on the rack. The evidence that it botched crucial decisions at crucial moments is piling up. The litany is now so familiar it barely needs repeating, from the failure to secure personal protective equipment for frontline workers in health and social care to the 11 lost days of delay before imposing a lockdown that has proved essential for saving lives.

You can focus on specific judgments: why did ministers allow mass gatherings, from racing at Cheltenham to a Stereophonics gig in Cardiff, ignoring the warnings that such events would be a virus-fest? Why did it initially tell people to stay away from pubs and restaurants, but simultaneously allow those places to stay open? Why did the government call a halt in March to testing and tracing? If the answer is a lack of capacity, then why did it not immediately set about recruiting the army of contact tracers that will be required if we are ever to emerge from our homes? Why the focus on mega-labs, rather than seizing on the offer of small laboratories to do testing for their local hospitals, which, as Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, has argued, could have made those hospitals safe places? Why the rules initially limiting tests to those NHS employees with symptoms, which, as Nurse puts it, allowed staff to be on wards infecting people?

Or you can look at decisions going back a decade, pointing a finger at Tory austerity that starved public services to the bone, leaving them underequipped and eroding our resilience. Either way, the country now faces a death toll approaching 30,000.

And yet, far from being on the rack, the government continues to bask in public support. True, approval for the governments handling of the crisis has fallen from the dizzying 61% it reached a month ago to 51% at last count. But 51% is still the kind of approval rating most politicians long for.

What accounts for this disconnect between the governments record and the publics high regard for those responsible? Put another way, why isnt Boris Johnson in more trouble?

Any answer must begin with what pollsters call the rally-around-the-flag effect, the tendency for voters to back their leaders in a time of crisis. Data from around the world, in this era and in others, suggests that when citizens are scared, they want to believe those in charge have the wisdom and strength to protect them. Think of electorates as passengers on a plummeting plane: in that moment of peril, they need to trust the pilot.

In Johnsons case, theres an additional factor. No one can throw at him the traditional accusation directed at politicians, namely that he is out of touch with the seriousness of the disease. His own near-death experience with Covid-19 immunises him from that charge. The outpouring of sympathy while he clung to life in intensive care was real; some of it lingers when he briefs the nation from No 10 and grows visibly tired before the hour is up. That might prompt some voters to go a bit easier on the prime minister than they otherwise would, an indulgence buttressed by the arrival this week of a Downing Street baby. The extraordinary month Johnson has endured acts to protect the prime minister and, since this is very much his administration, the entire government.

Hes helped, too, by the fact that there is so little we know for certain about this disease. The UK may have the highest death rate in Europe, but as David Spiegelhalter argued persuasively, we wont be sure of that until the end of the year, and the years after that. Even if Britain does turn out to be the worst hit, itll be easy to argue that it wasnt the governments fault but was rather a function of certain immovable facts about this country: that, for example, it includes a city, London, that has no direct European equivalent in size or scale.

Some voters are surely minded to give the government the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that it has merely been following the science. That could prove a valuable alibi, nicely positioning the scientists as the fall guys once all this is done. Even those who know that when it comes to public health policy there is no such thing as the science that there are always going to be competing views over how to act on data once youve got it could see that as a reason to cut ministers some slack: faced with a near-unprecedented threat, politicians have had to make life-and-death decisions with no clear manual to follow.

It helps that much of the press is supportive, putting the Johnson baby news or Capt Tom Moore on the front and condemning the dead to the inside pages. Its handy, too, to have a few outriders attacking journalists for daring to ask awkward questions at a time like this, suggesting they should be biting their tongues in the spirit of national unity (when, of course, asking awkward questions of those in power is journalists essential duty). Nor does it hurt to have an opposition that for reasons that may make sound political sense has decided to offer mild, constructive criticism rather than to put the boot in.

All of these factors have helped insulate the government from the flak that would otherwise be coming its way. But theres one more, perhaps less obvious explanation and it relates to judgment by comparison. We dont need to wait for a full statistical analysis to know that Johnson has not been the worst world leader in this crisis, because we can declare a winner in that contest right now.

Each day Britons wake up to ever more jaw-dropping news from across the Atlantic. Last week, it was Donald Trump advising Americans to inject bleach. On Friday, it was his claim to have seen evidence that coronavirus was developed in a Wuhan laboratory, a claim denied by his own director of national intelligence. The shocking images of protesters wielding assault weapons storming into the state assembly in Michigan on Thursday night are hardly a surprise, given that Trump himself was tweeting Liberate Michigan! a matter of days ago, cheering on those who are demanding their states defy the advice of Trumps own White House and prematurely end the lockdown that has so far proved to be the only way to stop the virus.

However bad Johnson and his government of conspicuously few talents is, we know theyre not that. They can at least show a modicum of human empathy for those whove lost loved ones, a feat that continues to elude Trump. They have at least eventually united behind a coherent stay home message, rather than undermining that advice at every turn. They are not hawking quack cures and endorsing deranged conspiracy theories. They do not seem willing to countenance mass death in the insane belief that it will help them win an election. Its a low bar, but these are low times.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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Trump is handling coronavirus so badly, he almost makes Johnson look good - The Guardian

She was just 12 when she dropped out of school and began clocking in for endless shifts at one of the garment factories springing up in Bangladesh, hoping to pull her family out of poverty.

Her fingers ached from stitching pants and shirts destined for sale in the United States and Europe, but the $30 the young woman made each month meant that for the first time, her family had regular meals, even luxuries like chicken and milk.

A decade later, she was providing a better life for her own child than she had ever imagined.

Then the world locked down, and Shahida Khatun, like millions of low-wage workers around the world, found herself back in the poverty she thought she had left behind.

In a matter of mere months, the coronavirus has wiped out global gains that took two decades to achieve, leaving an estimated two billion people at risk of abject poverty. However indiscriminate the virus may be in its spread, it has repeatedly proven itself anything but that when it comes to its effect on the world's most vulnerable communities.

The garment factory helped me and my family to get out of poverty, said Ms. Khatun, 22, who was laid off in March. But the coronavirus has pushed me back in.

For the first time since 1998, the World Bank says, global poverty rates are forecast to rise. By the end of the year, half a billion people may be pushed into destitution, largely because of the pandemic, the United Nations estimates.

Ms. Khatun was among thousands of women across South Asia who took factory jobs and, as they entered the work force, helped the world made inroads against poverty.

Now those gains are at grave risk.

These stories, of women entering the workplace and bringing their families out of poverty, of programs lifting the trajectories of families, those stories will be easy to destroy, said Abhijit Banerjee, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for economics.

While everyone will suffer, the developing world will be hardest hit. The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will see its first recession in 25 years, with nearly half of all jobs lost across the continent. South Asia will most likely experience its worst economic performance in 40 years.

Most at risk are people working in the informal sector, which employs two billion people who have no access to benefits like unemployment assistance or health care. In Bangladesh, one million garment workers like Ms. Khatun 7 percent of the countrys work force, and many of them informally employed lost their jobs because of the global lockdowns.

For Ms. Khatun, whose husband was also laid off, that means that the familiar pangs of hunger are once again filling her days, and she runs into debt with a local grocer to manage even one scant meal of roti and mashed potato a day.

The financial shock waves could linger even after the virus is gone, experts warn. Countries like Bangladesh, which spent heavily on programs to improve education and provide health care, may no longer be able to fund them.

There will be groups of people who climbed up the ladder and will now fall back, Mr. Banerjee, the M.I.T. professor, said. There were so many fragile existences, families barely stitching together an existence. They will fall into poverty, and they may not come out of it.

The gains now at risk are a stark reminder of global inequality and how much more there is to be done. In 1990, 36 percent of the worlds population, or 1.9 billion people, lived on less than $1.90 a day. By 2016, that number had dropped to 734 million people, or 10 percent of the worlds population, largely because of progress in South Asia and China.

Since 2000, Bangladesh brought 33 million people 20 percent of its population out of poverty while funding programs that provided education to girls, increased life expectancy and improved literacy.

Famines that once plagued South Asia are now vanishingly rare, and the population less susceptible to disease and starvation.

But that progress may be reversed, experts worry, and funding for anti-poverty programs may be cut as governments struggle with stagnant growth rates or economic contractions as the world heads for a recession.

The tragedy is, its cyclical, said Natalia Linos, executive director of Harvard Universitys Franois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. Poverty is a huge driver of disease, and illness is one of the big shocks that drive families into poverty and keep them there.

When it comes to a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak, Ms. Linos said, the poor are even more outmatched than people with means. They cannot afford to stock up on food, which means they must go more frequently to stores, increasing their exposure. And even if they have jobs, they are unlikely to able to work from home.

A resolution that committed the United Nations to eliminating poverty and hunger and providing access to education for all by 2030 may now be a pipe dream.

More than 90 countries have asked the International Monetary Fund for assistance. But with all countries hurting, well-to-do nations may be too strapped to provide the aid the developing world needs or offer debt forgiveness, which some countries and aid organizations are calling for.

To avoid having large chunks of their population slipping into devastation, countries need to spend more, Mr. Banerjee said. In times of crises, like after World War II, economies rebounded because governments stepped in with big spending packages like the Marshall Plan.

But so far, economic stimulus packages and support for those newly out of work have been weak or nonexistent in much of the developing world.

While the United States has committed nearly $3 trillion in economic stimulus packages to help the poor and small businesses, India plans to spend just $22.5 billion on its population of 1.3 billion four times the size of Americas. Pakistan, the worlds fifth-largest country, has committed about $7.5 billion, far less than Japans $990 billion stimulus package.

In Bangladesh this week, several hundred garment factories decided to reopen a move almost certain to worsen the countrys coronavirus caseload.

Ms. Khatuns employer, however, remains shuttered.

The owner told employees that even after the pandemic, he may no longer have work for them. The demand for clothing in Western countries may drop if people have less to spend, he said.

Ms. Khatun worries she and her family will be evicted from the small room they rent, with a bathroom and kitchen they share with neighbors.

If they are thrown out, she said, they will return to the village she left a decade ago as a child determined to to improve her lot in life.

My only dream was to ensure a proper education for my son, she said. I wanted people to say, Look, although his mother worked for a garment factory, her son is well educated and has a good job.

That dream is now going to disappear.

Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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Millions Had Risen Out of Poverty. Coronavirus Is Pulling Them Back. - The New York Times

Health Secretary Matt Hancock asserted on Friday that it had met a headline-grabbing aim of conducting 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April. The figure was 122,347, he said -- although officials conceded that 40,369 of those were sent to people's homes or to satellite testing centers, and had not necessarily been processed by labs.

The government argued, with some justification, that the huge expansion in testing capacity -- up from 10,000 a day at the beginning of April -- was a huge achievement.

But the fact that the target was needed at all, critics say, only served to illustrate the inadequacies of Britain's testing regime in the first place.

"This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided by the best scientific advice," a government spokesperson told CNN, in response to a request to address the criticisms raised in this article. Ministers and officials have been "working day and night to battle coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed to protect our NHS and save lives," the spokesperson said. "We have provided the NHS with all the support it needs, [and] made sure everyone requiring treatment has received it."

But could more have been done to prevent the scale of loss of life? Should ministers have acted sooner? And could there be more transparency in the overall strategy?

A crucial date

Historians might look back on March 12 as the most significant date in Britain's coronavirus response. This was the day the UK formally abandoned the "contain" phase -- an attempt to stop the virus in its tracks by tracking every outbreak and tracing its origins; and moved to the "delay" phase -- an effort to "flatten the curve" and prevent the health service from being overloaded.

As he spoke, tens of thousands of people gathered at the Cheltenham racecourse for its annual festival, an early fixture in England's social calendar. Was that wise, he was asked? "It is very important that we're guided by the science," Johnson said, using a phrase that was to become a favorite of government ministers. "There is very little epidemiological or medical reason at the moment to ban such events."

Johnson's chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, admitted that even people with "really quite mild symptoms" could be contagious. Despite this, the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, agreed with Johnson that canceling large events was "not a major way to tackle this epidemic."

Indeed, the next day, Vallance told BBC Radio 4's flagship morning news program, in a now-infamous interview, that a "key" aim would be to "build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission." Government sources have told CNN that herd immunity was never official policy.

Three key questions

Critics are zeroing in on three key areas as they seek to find out what went wrong in the UK.

First, there was the abandonment of mass testing.

At the start of the outbreak in the UK, public health officials tracked and traced every known case. Ministers have never offered a clear reason for why that policy was abandoned. Was it because the testing capacity had been reached? Was it because the system could not cope with the expected upturn in demand? Was it structural, since the public health system in England has, over the years, gradually been centralized?

"Abandoning testing gave the virus the green light to spread uncontrollably," says the Royal Society of Medicine's Gabriel Scally. "If you don't have access to testing, you won't know that you have an outbreak until a lot of people are ill."

Some in the scientific community say an obsession with central control led officials to set up the testing regime initially in just a few labs, rather than allowing local hospitals to do it themselves.

"Sadly, it seems likely to me that once the government models showed how bad the crisis would be, our testing capacity wouldn't be anywhere near able to cope with the coming surge," a leading microbiologist told CNN on condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions. "God only knows what their thinking was not telling hospitals to get ready. It was a mistake." Downing Street declined to provide an on-the-record explanation to CNN on this issue.

The second crucial question is whether the government failed to order a lockdown early enough.

Even though the government did not know by that March 12 briefing just how many people were infected, Whitty said it was still too early to lock down because "if people go too early, they become very fatigued." If tough restrictions came too early, the theory went, the British public would begin to tire of it just as they were starting to become effective, and demands for them to be lifted would become impossible to resist.

Government sources defended that course of action to CNN, pointing out that some mitigation measures were put in place between March 12 and the full lockdown on March 23, like advising vulnerable groups to stay at home and requiring people with certain symptoms to self-quarantine.

The third big question is the pursuit of so-called "herd immunity."

"It's not possible to stop everybody getting it," said Vallance at the March 12 briefing. However, the experience of countries like South Korea and Germany, where testing and tracking systems have been significantly more rigorous, and in New Zealand, where lockdown measures were taken at a much earlier stage, suggest that it has been possible to stop quite a large number of people from getting it.

Medical experts both inside and outside the government's circle of trusted advisers have admitted to CNN that they believe the government waited too long to enter lockdown. "Many of the decisions the government has made ignore basic public health science," says Dr. Bharat Pankhania, senior clinical lecturer at University of Exeter. "From abandoning track and trace, to the timing of the lockdown, to providing the correct protective equipment, ignoring basic public health science may have led to more deaths than necessary."

Pankhania believes that despite government claims it has been guided by science at every step, the decision to delay lockdown was likely "governed by economic consideration, rather than public health science."

This conflict between the government's claim that it has followed the science from day one, and some in the scientific community's skepticism as to how good that evidence is, has become a key battlefield between those inside and outside the UK government.

Following the science

This secrecy has led to speculation from prominent members of the public health community about the quality and breadth of evidence that is reaching the top levels of government. "The government's decisions show no characteristics of public health input. I wouldn't be surprised if the public health voice was marginalized both within SAGE and in government," says Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine.

It's "driving the public health guys mad," said another scientist who has contributed to the UK's National Risk Register, an overview of the potential threats facing the UK.

Another criticism of the process has been that the government has at times even sidestepped the normal groups of scientific advisers. "Things are moving so fast that they're rather going direct to the modelers," said Openshaw. "The epidemiological modelers have got a very direct line into government."

However trivial it might seem, disagreements between public health experts and scientific modelers are a significant part of the story. "We're seeing a struggle that has been going on for about 20 years between modelers and epidemiologists," a scientist who advises SAGE told CNN on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential government business.

It's no secret that Dominic Cummings, Johnson's top adviser, has a personal interest in scientific modeling. So it's little surprise that public health experts were enraged when the government was forced to admit last week that Cummings had attended SAGE meetings, which are supposed to be independent advisory forums. The government said he attended in order to understand the scientific debate around the virus and its behavior.

Multiple members of SAGE and groups that advise it defended their impartiality to CNN. "The debate is robust, and everyone sets out their case clearly and articulately," said one member, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "There are lots of people criticizing from the sidelines, but I think it's possible those people are angry they have been left on the sidelines."

A source who advises SAGE said: "Frankly, I find it hard to see that the presence of Cummings makes much difference. We're not talking about shrinking violets."

However, the source went on to express concern at how scientific evidence is being presented. "Science is not homogenous... The best SAGE can do is present imperfect material. The government has been able to take advantage of the public view of science as a voice of certainty, and present some of its decisions as being taken with more concrete certainty than they have."

This has prompted fears that at some time in the future, the government might try hiding behind the science for decisions they've taken -- or worse, throw members of SAGE under a convenient bus. "It certainly does seem to be an anxiety of some of my colleagues, but I am less worried. Many politicians are not exceptional thinkers. Should a public inquiry come, I would be surprised if it's the scientists who do a bad job of making their case," said a member of SAGE.

That public inquiry seems inevitable, once the worst of the crisis is over.

And when it comes, the government will stick to its line that the decision to prioritize the protection of the NHS was the right course of action, and that it succeeded. While it's true the NHS didn't fall over during what look like the worst weeks of the crisis, a cynic might claim that focusing on hospitals ignored what was happening in the wider community.

"People might well reply that it protected the NHS at the expense of shifting deaths elsewhere. Not to mention the physical and mental suffering experienced across the country," said one of the scientists advising SAGE.

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Where did it go wrong for the UK on coronavirus? - CNN

US fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50m in taxpayer money they probably wont have to pay back, according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.

A total of $28m is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

The other $22m is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.

Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, said: The federal money Congress appropriated should be going to help small businesses and frontline workers struggling as a result of the pandemic, not the corporate polluters whose struggles are a result of failing business practices and existed long before Covid-19 entered the public lexicon.

More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have argued that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.

Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.

Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly-traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has committed to issuing monthly reports.

So far, its clear the program is not working as intended. The funds are aimed at helping small businesses to keep paying their employees and covering other recurring expenses during the economic downturn. But they have been exploited by large companies forced to return the money amid a public outcry, including the Los Angeles Lakers, Shake Shack and Ruths Chris Steak House.

The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader bailout for oil and gas corporations, which were already under pressure before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices nosedive because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The US government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.

The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great, said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. The worry is that the moneys going to the top and not going to filter down.

The $50m already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1tn Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.

Environmental advocates and oversight experts tracking the funds say its impossible to count how much of the money will assist fossil fuels, including because some firms provide services across multiple industries.

All of this is voluntary disclosures by the companies, said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with Documented. No matter what, its going to be an incomplete picture of whats going on.

Coleman said in many cases the fossil fuel companies getting aid have made bad investments and now theyre going to come crawling hat in hand and say: look at what the coronavirus did to us.

Its both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers, and a bad situation for the planet

Among the coronavirus aid recipients is Hallador Coal, an Indiana-based coal mining company that hired Donald Trumps former environment chief Scott Pruitt as a lobbyist. The companys former government relations director now works at the energy department. Hallador is taking $10m to fund two months of payroll and other expenses.

Coal mining company Rhino Resources, which was formerly run by Trumps Mine Safety and Health Administration head, David Zatezalo, is receiving $10m.

Coal firm Ramaco Resources, whose CEO, Randy Atkins, is on the energy departments National Coal Council, is getting $8.4m.

The US coal industry has been in steep decline, driven out of the market by cheap natural gas and environmental concerns. Trump campaigned on putting coal miners back to work, and his agencies have unsuccessfully explored ways to bail out coal companies, which are seeing their lowest employment levels in modern history. The Trump administration has also rescinded nearly all of the environment and climate protections the fossil fuel industry has opposed.

Fossil fuel companies can also take advantage of tax benefits under the coronavirus legislation, including deferring payment of social security and medicare taxes.

The Missouri-based Peabody Energy coal company has said it will speed up collecting an alternative minimum tax refund of $24m to 2020 and defer $18m of owed taxes.

US taxpayers already subsidize the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20bn a year, according to conservative estimates.

The Center for International Environmental Law has accused the oil, gas and plastics industries of exploiting the crisis by aggressively lobbying for massive bailouts and special privileges in a desperate attempt to revive an oil and gas industry already in decline.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argues that federal lending to the oil and gas sector would be a complete waste of money, because it wouldnt fix the industrys underlying financial problems.

Oil industry lobbyists have pushed for changes at the Federal Reserve to let companies with large amounts of debt use its Main Street Lending Program and borrow to pay off existing loans.

In an 15 April letter to the Federal Reserve, the oil trade group the Independent Petroleum Association of America asked for the new provisions, saying oil and natural gas producers are not looking for a government handout; they are seeking a bridge to help survive this economic disruption.

Environmental advocates say the move would disproportionately benefit small and mid-sized oil and gas companies, such as Occidental Petroleum, which has nearly $80bn in liabilities on its balance sheet.

Graham Steele, who directs the corporations and society initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the situation the classic disaster scenario where an opportunistic administration and industry is taking advantage of a crisis.

And by the way, these are industries driving climate change. Its both a bad financial proposition of the Fed and for taxpayers and a bad situation for the planet.

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Fossil fuel firms linked to Trump get millions in coronavirus small business aid - The Guardian

What has happened to Elon Musk?

A highlight reel of the billionaire Tesla CEOs activities since early March includes his pooh-poohing the coronavirus panic as dumb; keeping his northern California factory open in defiance of local public health orders; falsely asserting that children are essentially immune from the virus; providing a giant platform to promoters of an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment; predicting (inaccurately) that the US would have no new cases of Covid-19 by the end of April; attempting to re-open the factory before the end of the local shelter-in-place order; and calling shelter-in-place orders fascist. (Lets not even get into the drama over whether the BiPap machines he donated to some hospitals count as ventilators.)

Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences

Musks dissemination of misinformation about the virus is not without consequences. He has more than 33m followers on Twitter and a fan base that tends to exalt him as a cross between Tony Stark and God. A recent study published as a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine linked his tweet about chloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that was subsequently touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment by Donald Trump, to a dramatic surge in online demand for the prescription medication. They werent aware of it, they werent interested in it they were trying to buy it, John Ayers, a UC San Diego professor of medicine and one of the studys authors, told the Guardian in an interview.

The chloroquine document that Musk shared was an example of what the infectious disease expert Carl Bergstrom has described as quantitative bullshit the use of statistics and data to persuade someone by overwhelming and intimidating them, without any allegiance to truth or accuracy. Last week, Musk was apparently taken in by another pair of coronavirus bullshit artists, this time a pair of doctors from Bakersfield, California.

Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi held a press conference to promote the idea that Covid-19 is much more widespread and much less deadly than what ivory tower figures such as Dr Anthony Fauci have said. Docs make good points, Musk tweeted, with a link to a YouTube video of the 50-minute press conference. (YouTube removed the video for spreading misinformation, but not before it received millions of views; one of the doctors has gone on to make appearances on Fox News.)

The docs did not make good points. After opening his remarks by defining science like a high schooler writing a term paper (What is science? Essentially, its the study of the natural world through experiment, through observation, so thats what were doing) Erickson presented testing data from the chain of urgent care clinics they own. The clinics have performed 5,213 Covid-19 tests and had 340 positive results, which they claimed means that there is a 6.5% rate of infection in the local population. The pair performed the same math (positive tests divided by total tests) on the statewide numbers of 33,865 positive tests out of 280,900 total, to arrive at a 12% infection rate for the state. From there, they calculated that California has had a total of 4.7m infections and calculated that the death rate for people who contract Covid-19 in California is just 0.03% much lower than that of the seasonal flu.

None of this stands up to scrutiny. In order to assume that the rate of infection amongst a small number of people can apply to the entire population, you have to use a random and representative sample. But the people who are getting tested at urgent care clinics in California are neither random nor representative; they are people with severe symptoms or who are performing certain essential jobs. Figuring out the actual infection rate across the broader population will require careful sampling that avoids this selection bias.

The Bakersfield duo used their meaningless numbers to argue that shelter-in-place orders must be lifted a position that Musk clearly also holds. (In an extraordinary joint statement, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine jointly and emphatically condemn[ed] the pair, and suggested they were releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the publics health.)

The issue is not that Musk has staked out a contrarian stance on the coronavirus. There are difficult debates that need to be had over how and when to restart the economy in order to minimize long term economic harms and maximize public health. We can and should have that discussion, and we should do it without impugning the moral character of everyone who argues for a faster loosening of restrictions.

But its increasingly difficult to take Musk seriously when he makes his argument by cherry-picking numbers or relying on blatant misuse of data. Please, make your case, but make it using real facts, and not by playing fast and loose with numbers in an effort to mislead the public about what is actually happening. Otherwise you look and sound a lot less like the brilliant engineer and entrepreneur, and a lot more like just another used car salesman.

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Coronavirus has Elon Musk acting like just another used car salesman - The Guardian

Even in a pandemic there are weavers and rippers. The weavers try to spiritually hold each other so we can get through this together. The rippers, from Donald Trump on down, see everything through the prism of politics and still emphasize division. For the rippers on left and right, politics is a war that gives life meaning.

Fortunately, the rippers are not winning. America is pretty united right now. In an ABC News/Ipsos poll last week, 98 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans supported social-distancing rules. According to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, nearly 90 percent of Americans think a second wave of the virus would be at least somewhat likely if we ended the lockdowns today.

A Pew survey found 89 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats support the bipartisan federal aid packages. Seventy-seven percent of American adults think more aid will be necessary.

According to a USA Today/Ipsos poll, most of the policies on offer enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support: increasing testing (nearly 90 percent), temporarily halting immigration (79 percent) and continuing the lockdown until the end of April (69 percent). A KFF poll shows that people who have lost their jobs are just as supportive of the lockdowns as people who havent.

The polarization industry is loath to admit this, but, once you set aside the Trump circus, we are now more united than at any time since 9/11. The pandemic has reminded us of our interdependence and the need for a strong and effective government.

Its also taken us to a deeper level. The polarization over the past decades has not been about us disagreeing more; its been about us hating each other more. This has required constant volleys of dehumanization.

This dehumanization has always been a bit of a mirage. A new study from the group Beyond Conflict shows that Republicans and Democrats substantially exaggerate how much the other side dislikes and disagrees with them.

The pandemic has been a massive humanizing force allowing us to see each other on a level much deeper than politics see the fragility, the fear and the courage.

On May 8, I recommend you watch In This Together: A PBS American Portrait Story, airing and streaming on PBS. It is just regular Americans talking into their cellphones and showing what they are going through.

Theres a mom giving birth to twins while in the hospital with the coronavirus. She cant see her babies for weeks.

There are a couple of married nurses who have to send their 6-year-old to live with Grandma while they shuttle to the hospital. The boy cant understand whats happening, and the hurt and missing manifest as tantrums.

Theres an older woman sitting in a dark living room: I never expected to be alone. My husband tested positive for Covid. He lasted over a week. He didnt die until St. Patricks Day. Were 78 and I know it sounds funny, but I thought we were going to grow old together. And now Im alone.

Were also being united by those who are sacrificing for the common good: the nurse who came from North Carolina to serve New York even though she has an 8-month-old baby at home; the E.M.T.s who are living through death after death; the workers who lived in their factory for 28 days to make masks.

In normal times, the rippers hog the media spotlight. But now you see regular Americans, hurt in their deepest places and being their best selves.

Everywhere I hear the same refrain: Were standing at a portal to the future; were not going back to how it used to be.

If you want to be there at one harbinger of the new world, I suggest you tune in to The Call to Unite, a 24-hour global streamathon, which starts Friday at 8 p.m. on Unite.us and various digital platforms. It was created by Tim Shriver and the organization Unite. There will be appearances by world leaders, musicians, religious leaders, actors and philosophers everybody from Oprah and George W. Bush to Yo-Yo Ma and the emotion scholar Marc Brackett.

When the streamathon was first being organized (I played an extremely minor role) the idea was to let the world give itself a group hug. But as the thing evolved it became clear that people are not only reflecting on the current pain, they are also eager to build a different future.

If you tune in, youll see a surprising layers of depth and vulnerability. Youll see people hungering for The Great Reset the idea that we have to identify 10 unifying ideas (like national service) and focus energy around them.

Americans have responded to this with more generosity and solidarity than we had any right to expect. Ive been on the phone all week with people launching projects to feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, perform little acts of fun with the young. You talk with these people and you think: Wow, youre a hidden treasure.

Originally posted here:

The Coronavirus Has Beaten Trumps Divisive Ploy - The New York Times

WASHINGTON The White House has ordered intelligence agencies to comb through communications intercepts, human source reporting, satellite imagery and other data to establish whether China and the World Health Organization initially hid what they knew about the emerging coronavirus pandemic, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter told NBC News.

A specific "tasking" seeking information about the outbreak's early days was sent last week to the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which includes the National Center for Medical Intelligence, an official directly familiar with the matter said. The CIA has received similar instructions, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

President Donald Trump appeared to refer to the request at his news conference Monday. "We're doing very serious investigations," Trump said. "We are not happy with that whole situation, because we believe it could have been stopped at the source, it could have been stopped quickly, and it wouldn't have spread all over the world."

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

As part of the tasking, intelligence agencies were asked to determine what the WHO knew about two research labs studying coronaviruses in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first observed. NBC News has previously reported that the spy agencies have been investigating the possibility that the virus escaped accidentally from one of the labs, although many experts believe that is unlikely.

The move coincides with a public effort by the White House, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump's political allies to focus attention on China's inability to contain the virus shortly after it emerged. As NBC News previously reported, U.S. intelligence officials have said China initially failed to disclose the seriousness of the outbreak, robbing the rest of the world of information that might have led to earlier containment efforts.

"As the president has said, the United States is thoroughly investigating this matter," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said. "Understanding the origins of the virus is important to help the world respond to this pandemic but also to inform rapid-response efforts to future infectious disease outbreaks."

The CIA eclined to comment. An official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, "We are not aware of any such tasking from the White House."

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.

Trump has shifted from initially praising China's handling of the outbreak to sharply criticizing it as the threat the pandemic poses to the U.S. economy and his re-election prospects has crystallized. Blaming China for America's economic struggles has proven effective for Trump with his political base, and his allies believe it's a message that could resonate in November with voters in the Midwest.

"The president is now running against China as much as anyone," said a person close to the president.

The Trump administration has also accused the WHO of erring in January when it reported no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Trump, alleging that China exercised undue influence over the agency, has suspended U.S. funding of the WHO.

Initially, the WHO used conservative language. In a statement about the disease on Jan. 14 regarding the first case outside China, in Thailand the WHO said, "There is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."

The agency soon stopped saying that, and by mid-January it was clear that the virus was spreading well beyond China.

Critics see the White House focus on China and the WHO as an effort to distract attention from the open question of what warnings Trump got in January and February from his own health and intelligence advisers during a time when he was downplaying the severity of the virus.

The Washington Post reported Monday that the intelligence reporting and analysis about the pandemic appeared in the president's daily intelligence brief more than a dozen times, although the newspaper did not specifically describe what information was passed along.

An administration official confirmed to NBC News that the President's Daily Brief, or PDB, included more than a dozen mentions in January and February of U.S. intelligence about the coronavirus in China, as well as Beijing's attempts to cover it up and suppress information about it.

The official played down the significance of the intelligence, saying there was not much more detail in the briefings than what was in the public domain. The official also said the briefings did not include any warning about how widespread and deadly the virus has now become around the globe.

An ODNI official told NBC News that details in the Washington Post story are not true, but declined to say what specifically is disputed, citing the highly classified nature of the PDB.

Asked Tuesday to clarify what intelligence officials were telling him in January and February, the president said, "I would have to check."

"I want to look to the exact dates of warnings," he said.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

NBC News has reported that U.S. intelligence agencies saw early warning signs of a health crisis in Wuhan as far back as November and that the National Center for Medical Intelligence predicted that the coronavirus would cause a global pandemic in February, well before the WHO declared one.

The House and Senate intelligence committees have requested access to all intelligence products produced about the pandemic and are closely examining what has already been turned over to them, officials from both committees have told NBC News.

The committees typically are not granted access to the PDB, the officials said. The congressionally sponsored commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was allowed to review presidential briefs and determined that President George W. Bush was warned in the summer of 2001 that Osama bin Laden was "determined to strike" inside the United States.

Ken Dilanian is a correspondent covering intelligence and national security for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Carol E. Lee is an NBC News correspondent.

Kristen Welker contributed.

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Trump administration asks intelligence agencies to find out whether China, WHO hid info on coronavirus pandemic - NBC News

As states across the country weigh options for reopening after weeks of stay-at-home orders, antibody tests have emerged as a potential pathway on how and when to do it.

But there are many caveats, as a recent study found that many of the antibody tests available currently provided inaccurate results.

Antibody tests look for signs in the blood that a person has been exposed to the novel coronavirus. Knowing who has been exposed, along with how many people have been, may help to better understand the spread of the virus. This is especially important as studies continue to show that significant percentages of all coronavirus carriers in some studies, up to half show no symptoms at all.

But should you get one? Can you get one? What do they actually tell us? Heres everything you need to know.

When your body is exposed to a foreign pathogen, like a virus that causes illness, your bodys response is to produce antibodies that live in the blood and tissue. These are proteins that bind to and destroy the virus, preventing it from making copies of itself and further spreading the infection.

The antibody test, also called a serology test, looks at whether your body has developed those antibodies; the presence of them most likely means you were exposed to Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. Some tests, like the one used by the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, can measure the level of antibodies in your system your titer.

But in general, most of the tests being made available across the country detect only whether the antibodies are present, said Dr. Jeffrey Jhang, medical director of clinical laboratories and transfusion services for the Mount Sinai Health System. A direct-to-consumer test announced on Tuesday from Quest Diagnostics more on that below measures only presence or absence.

Antibodies can take generally anywhere from about a week to 14 days to develop, Dr. Jhang said, and the levels of antibodies vary based on time since exposure and a persons immune system. This means that a lack of antibodies does not necessarily mean you were not exposed to the virus.

The test is similar to other blood tests you may have had before: A sample of blood is taken from the patient and is then analyzed to determine the presence of antibodies. Most tests will generally return results within a few days, but that may vary, as some tests can return results in a few hours.

Not necessarily.

The antibody test does not test for immunity to Covid-19. There is no test yet that can tell if you are immune. It is simply too early to know if the presence of antibodies confers immunity, as this is a new virus, meaning weve never seen it before.

But experts generally agree that, based on experiences with other viruses, including SARS, the presence of antibodies most likely does confer some level of protection, though we dont know to what extent or for how long.

The difficult thing is we do not have clinical evidence yet of whether the presence of antibodies actually prevents the individual from getting the disease again, Dr. Jhang said, adding, I think most people believe that the presence of antibodies in most cases would confer some protection given our experience with other viruses.

But we really have to wait to see some evidence of that before we can be confident in being able to say that these antibodies can be protective, he said.

An antibody test is not the same thing as a diagnostic test for Covid-19, and it will not diagnose whether you currently have it.

Remember that antibodies take time to develop, so a lack of antibodies may just mean your body hasnt had enough time to develop them postinfection.

As we just learned, knowing your antibody level will help you determine whether youve been exposed to the coronavirus. This does not mean youre immune, and you should still practice all of the safety precautions you have been. But it does mean you may be eligible to donate convalescent plasma, which can potentially help patients still suffering from Covid-19 by allowing them to borrow your antibodies to accelerate their recovery time.

Widespread antibody testing may also give us a clearer picture of the scope of the disease. Results from a random testing of 3,000 people in New York City recently suggested that as many as one in five residents or about 2.7 million people might have encountered the disease without realizing it. When describing the results, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that because the rate of infection might be far higher than initially thought, the death rate of the virus mighty be far lower than we thought.

Once the medical community determines whether antibodies confer immunity which experts say will take at least six months or so to determine well have a better sense of who may be less at risk emerging from lockdown.

Once we understand that the antibodies are protective, then the testing means something," Dr. Jhang said, as it may help figure out who can go back to work and be protected and not spread the disease, or when kids can go back to school, teachers going in to teach.

A study of 14 available antibody tests published last week found that only three delivered consistently reliable results. The study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, found that only one test never returned a false positive, which is when the test incorrectly confirms the presence of coronavirus antibodies in people who didnt have them. The other two tests with consistently reliable results returned false positives about 1 percent of the time.

Further, these three tests confirmed the presence of antibodies in infected people only 90 percent of the time.

Part of the reason for the inaccuracies, Dr. Jhang said, may be whats called cross-reactivity: This is when a test misidentifies antibodies for a different, but similar, coronavirus.

Florian Krammer of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York told The New York Times that false positives werent necessarily an issue when determining how widespread the disease is, as a given tests false-positive rate can be accounted for in estimates. They do, however, matter greatly on an individual level.

You dont want anybody back to work who has a false positive thats the last thing you want to do, Dr. Krammer said.

And the World Health Organization, citing ideas for an immunity passport or risk-free certificate from some countries, last week advised against relying on the tests for policy decisions.

If you think you currently have Covid-19, or have experienced in the last few days symptoms like coughing, fever, loss of taste or smell, or difficulty breathing, you should not get a test. Again, the antibody test is not the same as a diagnostic test for Covid-19.

The test is generally intended for people who either have had a positive test for Covid-19 and have recovered; or who think they were exposed to Covid-19 and no longer have symptoms.

Quest Diagnostics, which on Tuesday announced it is selling a direct-to-consumer antibody test meaning you dont need to first see a physician to take it offered these guidelines for people interested in an antibody test:

Have had a positive test for Covid-19 and it has been at least seven days and you want to know if you have detectable levels of immunoglobulin G, or IgG, antibodies.

Have not experienced new or worsening symptoms of Covid-19 in the past 10 days: loss of smell or taste, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, feeling weak or lethargic, lightheadedness or dizziness, vomiting or diarrhea, slurred speech and/or seizures.

While getting a test to diagnose Covid-19 is still somewhat difficult, antibody testing seems to be rolling out a little more smoothly. Many organizations nationwide are beginning to offer the test, perhaps most notably Quest, which is offering the test without a physicians referral at the 2,200 patient service centers it operates around the country, the company said.

LabCorp, a competitor of Quest, announced on Monday that, with a physicians referral, patients could get an antibody test at any of its more than 2,000 patient service centers, as well as its 100 locations in Walgreens.

In New York City, the walk-in clinic CityMD said in an email to patients that, as of Tuesday, it would also offer antibody testing that would indicate with high accuracy if you had the virus in the past whether or not you experienced symptoms.

CityMD advises that people wait two to four weeks after the end of symptoms to get the antibody test. For more information about getting tested through CityMD, click here.

Last, you can just ask your doctor about antibody testing, as doctors can refer patients to many locations running the test nationwide. Most insurance providers should cover the test, but check with yours to be sure.

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Coronavirus Antibody Test: What You Need to Know - The New York Times

The novel coronavirus has already claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. But experts fear that number could be far higher at this point in the outbreak -- perhaps by tens of thousands -- once the pandemic subsides enough for officials to go back and make a true reckoning of the dead.

Experts are urging leaders to take measures right now to preserve data and medical specimens so that science has the chance to determine the precise number of people who succumbed during one of the most severe global pandemics in memory.

Under-counting deaths in this particular epidemic is happening all over, said Dr. Daniel Lopez-Acuna, an epidemiologist and former top World Health Organization (WHO) official, who spent 30 years at the organization. "Its almost inevitable."

Calculating the precise number of COVID-19 deaths is remarkably complicated for a number of reasons. But leading epidemiologists, pathologists, medical examiners, medical history professors and local, state, federal and global health officials told ABC News that more testing is the single most important factor in determining an accurate national death count.

Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.

We need to have the testing available because the big question now with COVID-19 is the denominator -- of anything, said Dr. Alex Williamson of the College of American Pathologists. How many people get it? How many people recover? How many are hospitalized? How many died? We don't know the true denominator. More testing is the most important thing we need to do.

Funeral Director Joe Neufeld inventories the bodies of coronavirus victims bound for burial, in the main chapel of the Gerard J. Neufeld Funeral Home in Queens, New York, April 26, 2020.

Ongoing testing kit shortages in cities and states nationwide means that only clearly symptomatic patients are currently being tested in many places. There also is no uniform national system in the U.S. for investigating deaths, and until two weeks ago, the U.S. was only counting Americans who lab-tested positive, before or after death, for COVID-19.

Left out of the tally are people who died without being tested and those who died at home or some other non-healthcare facilities before they could seek medical care.

It is an extraordinary challenge, said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME). There just isn't really the infrastructure.

Further undermining an accurate national count are new analyses that suggest the virus was spreading in the U.S. much earlier than previously believed, likely playing a role in more deaths than currently known.

Californias first known COVID-19 death to date was Patricia Cabello Dowd, 57, in Santa Clara County. Dowd died on Feb. 6 of heart complications, which were later determined to have been unleashed by the COVID-19 virus. Dowd's death in which an autopsy obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle listed a heart rupture due to Covid-19 infection came three weeks before the earliest previously identified American coronavirus-related death.

New data on cardiac arrest emergency calls reviewed by ABC News suggests that New York Citys catastrophic outbreak likely began in close-knit neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn as far back as mid-February.

Cardiac Arrest and COVID19 Concentration by NYC Zip Code

Finally, as the cardiac arrest data suggested, scientists are contending with an ever-evolving understanding of how COVID-19 attacks the body. Initially, it was believed to primarily attack the lungs, but new research suggests its a danger to nearly every organ.

Experts say that many people like Dowd, who died of a non-respiratory COVID-19 complication early in the outbreak -- before the pandemics impact became apparent -- may never be accurately counted.

The confusion and complications inherent in tracking pandemics have left a weary nation wondering just how high the actual U.S. death count may be and how bad things really are.

Less than 2% of all Americans have been tested for the coronavirus to date, according to White House figures nearly 5.5 million people. It's a figure that experts say is both higher than most nations and far lower per capita than where the U.S. should be at this point.

U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health and White House testing czar Admiral Brett Giroir told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America on Tuesday that the Trump administration doesnt concur with a Harvard University study which concluded last week that the U.S. needs to be testing 5 million people a day in June and up to 20 million by July in order to safely re-open the country.

We dont believe those estimates are accurate, nor are they reasonable, Giroir said.

Yet either way, that testing is still mostly focused on the living. Experts told ABC News that an accurate death toll is not only important to later get a better picture of what happened, but if possible, real-time or near real-time death counts can also help public health officials in their battle to contain the virus now.

History: A chilling guide

Researchers retrospectively calculate overall deaths from a pandemic by studying excess deaths year-to-year in a given region. But thats a difficult figure to gauge until a pandemic is over.

Previous studies of other recent virus outbreaks suggest the actual number of COVID-19 deaths to date is very likely dramatically higher than the more than 58,000 deaths currently reported.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analysis of the H1N1 swine flu virus outbreak in the U.S. in 2009 and 2010 concluded two years later that the actual tally was likely 15 times higher than the officially recorded figures. A 2013 study by the U.S. National Institutes of Health determined the figure was seven times higher than the official count.

But scientists said that the current coronavirus pandemic is of an entirely different magnitude.

Ive never none of us have ever seen an infection like COVID-19, that literally stopped the world, said Williamson.

While most news organizations rely on the Johns Hopkins University figures, which are pulled directly from state and local government websites and is considered more timely picture of the problem, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a branch of the CDC, is the primary agency responsible for U.S. health statistics, which are compiled by collecting data on births, deaths and health surveys.

Due to the lack of a uniform U.S. system, the NCHS system lags about two weeks behind in reporting said, Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics.

Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist from the Yale School of Public Health, analyzed NCHS death count data to estimate how many COVID-19 deaths may have gone uncounted during the five-week period from March 1 to April 3.

He concluded the official death toll in the U.S., currently closing in on 60,000, is probably a substantial underestimate of the true number by tens of thousands.

An employee of the office of the New York Chief Medical Examiner looks through fencing blocking a view of refrigeration trucks lined up to serve as an expanded morgue in New York, April 3, 2020.

The actual figure, he said, may be in the ballpark of double the reported cases.

Given the still-looming threat to the U.S., researchers are urging municipalities to maintain as much detailed data about COVID-19 records as possible.

With patchwork of reporting protocols, a 'pipe dream' to gauge actual death toll

As the pandemic rages across all 50 states and around the globe with no uniform reporting protocol in place, experts said the official death count is hard to even estimate.

One of the difficulties is that every state does things differently, said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard Universitys T.H. Chan School of Public Health. When I look at the data, Im sitting there thinking, Okay, this is Oklahoma. What kind of modifier am I adding to that to figure out whats going on here? It would be incredibly helpful not to have to do that.

Hes doubtful that a uniform national death count reporting process is possible anytime soon.

Its a bit of pipe dream," he said.

A funeral worker is assisted moving a deceased patient into a van at the Brooklyn Hospital Center on April 27, 2020, in New York.

And that's before taking into account the ways other countries count their own death tolls.

Even now if youre comparing reporting among different countries, youve got to ask, Are they reporting only deaths in hospitals? Only people they are sure had COVID? Which test did they use? What about deaths occurring elsewhere in nursing homes and at home? Are they being counted?

COVID-19-related deaths in non-hospital settings -- largely nursing home deaths and deaths at home -- are also fueling revised death counts in some U.S. regions and nations around the world.

As many as half of the COVID-19 deaths in Europe may have come from nursing homes, Hans Kluge, the WHO's regional European director, said in a press briefing last week. When France added nursing homes to its tally, the nations death count spiked 40%, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While the U.S. is not currently counting nursing home deaths nationally, its estimated that thousands have died from or with COVID-19 complications in these facilities across the U.S. Last week ABC News reported that based on the reporting of 28 states, the death toll in long-term care facilities has already surged past 10,000.

Yet it was also only last week that the CDC began the laborious process of preparing to incorporate nursing home deaths into its overall death count. The agency issued a notification saying it would soon begin requiring that nursing homes report communicable disease deaths promptly to federal authorities. Its unclear when the U.S. will begin including those figures in its national death count.

On April 14, the CDC directed all U.S. states and territories to begin counting suspected as well as lab-confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

Officials in some states have said theyll adhere to the new CDC guidelines, but each state has their own laws, which sometimes takes time, said Janet Hamilton, executive director Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE).

In mid-April, New York City released its first death count to include suspected -- not just lab-confirmed -- cases. That metric accounted for at-home deaths. The revised city figures, which added 3,700 deaths, drove up the nationwide death count by 17%.

Last week, scientists at Yale School of Public Health published a scholarly paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, that estimated that the actual death count in New York and New Jersey could be up to three times higher than the official tally of confirmed COVID-19 deaths or deaths that would be expected normally this time of year with respiratory diseases.

Some states, such as Florida and Pennsylvania, might have missed deaths early on and might be under-counting deaths by a substantial degree currently, the Yale scientists concluded. Other states, like Washington, have an accurate estimate of the mortality burden of the pandemic virus due to intense testing," the paper said. "And in states that have been hit hard by the pandemic virus, such as New Jersey and New York, the total excess mortality burden is 2-3 times that ascribed to COVID-19 in official statistics.

The golden question

Many U.S. states remain too overwhelmed by the outbreak or too short on supplies to perform postmortem COVID-19 testing.

Yet experts say localities inclusions of suspected cases in their death counts is vital going forward.

It is critical to include both the probable and the confirmed cases so we have the full picture of the impact, said Hamilton, of CSTE. Failure to do so, she said, would be a failure of our public health system.

Even those areas that can include probable and suspected COVID-19 deaths face challenges due to how little we yet understand about the disease, and how long the dead may carry it.

Post-mortem, we don't know how long the [COVID-19 diagnostic] test is valid for after death, said CAPs Williamson. If a person is not found in their house for five days, does the COVID-19 test still work? We don't really know the answer to that.

There are two main types of death investigations in the U.S.: medical examiner autopsies and hospital-based autopsies.

A worker organizes bodies in the Gerard Neufeld funeral home in Queens on April 22, 2020, in New York.

Medical examiners are the most rigorously trained forensic pathologists in the death investigation field -- but even they do not have uniform national reporting protocols for COVID-19 deaths.

The CDC first introduced a common code to list COVID-19 as a cause of death on U.S. death certificates on March 24, followed by formal guidance on April 3, but the guidance will take time to take root nationwide, experts said.

Beyond a shortage of testing that is forcing hospital officials to prioritize testing of live patients over the deceased, many hospital pathologists remain wary of conducting autopsies during the pandemic because of all that is still unknown about the coronavirus, according to ABC News interviews around the nation.

Even swabbing the nose of a corpse could potentially re-introduce the virus into the air surrounding the body, pathologists said -- urging their colleagues to only conduct such testing in the proper settings.

One pathologist who spoke with ABC News on the condition of anonymity said a recurring theme online among prominent U.S. academic pathologists is that due to a limited, evolving understanding of how the virus spreads, shortages of personal protective equipment and limited autopsy rooms with appropriate precautions in hospitals, many pathologists are scared to do the autopsies for fear of being infected.

Yet postmortem samples and tissue can be preserved until more testing is available.

You can freeze the nasal pharyngeal swabs and test them later, Aiken said. And medical examiners and coroner's draw blood for toxicology. Eventually that blood could be used for antibody testing. So even though the lab tests are limited now, in the long run, they may be able to determine if deaths are COVID-19 related.

The final factor that undermines a complete COVID-19 death count, according to experts, is that many if not most of the people who have died had at least one additional underlying chronic medical condition that contributed to the deaths particularly obesity, diabetes and hypertension.

But which factor actually caused the death?

Thats the golden question: who died with COVID-19, and who died of COVID-19, Williamson concluded. Thats what we still dont know.

ABC News' Josh Margolin and Lee Ferran contributed to this report.

Continued here:

How accurate is the US coronavirus death count? Some experts say it's off by 'tens of thousands' - ABC News