LONDON (AP) — Pharma giants GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur have announced they will supply 100 million doses of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine to the United States as governments buy up supplies in hopes something will work. The United States will pay up to $2.1 billion “for development including clinical trials, manufacturing, scale-up and delivery of its vaccine,” the companies said in a statement. Sanofi will get the bulk of the funds. The U.S. government has a further option for the supply of an additional 500 million doses longer term as part of its Operation Warp Speed program. “The portfolio of vaccines being assembled for Operation Warp Speed increases the odds that we will have at least one safe, effective vaccine as soon as the end of this year,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement. “Today’s investment supports the Sanofi and GSK adjuvanted product all the way through clinical trials and manufacturing, with the potential to bring hundreds of millions of safe and effective doses to the American people.” Earlier this week the British government signed a deal for 60 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine that could start to be rolled out in the first half of next year. Britain’s GSK and France’s Sanofi’s vaccine prospect is based on the existing DNA-based technology that is used to produce Sanofi’s seasonal flu vaccine. It is one of several vaccines in development. “The global need for a vaccine to help prevent COVID-19 is massive, and no single vaccine or company will be able to meet the global demand alone,” said Thomas Triomphe, executive vice president of Sanofi Pasteur. The companies said discussions are ongoing with the European Commission. from https://ift.tt/319Y0uy Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/
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Dr. Anthony Fauci and Top Health Experts to Tell House Panel Theres No End in Sight to the Pandemic7/31/2020 (WASHINGTON) — There’s no end in sight to the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top government health experts will tell Congress on Friday. “While it remains unclear how long the pandemic will last, COVID-19 activity will likely continue for some time,” Fauci, along with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Dr. Robert Redfield and Health and Human Services testing czar Adm. Brett Giroir say in prepared testimony for a special House panel investigating the pandemic. At a time when early progress seems to have been lost and uncertainty clouds the nation’s path forward, Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, is calling on lawmakers — and all other Americans — to go back to public health basics such as social distancing and wearing masks. The panel, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, is divided about how to reopen schools and businesses, mirroring divisions among Americans. A rebound of cases across the South and the West has dashed hopes for a quick return to normal life. Problems with the availability and timeliness of testing continue to be reported. And the race for a vaccine, though progressing rapidly, has yet to deliver a breakthrough. Fauci’s public message in recent days has been that Americans can’t afford a devil-may-care attitude toward COVID-19 and need to double down on basic measures such as wearing masks in public, keeping their distance from others and avoiding crowds and indoor spaces such as bars. That’s echoed by Redfield and Giroir, though they are far less prominent. Fauci’s dogged persistence has drawn the ire of some of President Donald Trump’s supporters and prompted a new round of calls for his firing. But the veteran of battles against AIDS and Ebola has stuck to his message, while carefully avoiding open confrontations with the Trump White House. In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week, Fauci said he was “disturbed” by the flat-out opposition in parts of the country to wearing masks as a public health protective measure. “There are certain fundamentals,” he said, “the staples of what you need to do … one is universal wearing of masks.” Public health experts say masks help prevent an infected person who has yet to develop symptoms from passing the virus to others. For mask wearers, there’s also some evidence that they can offer a degree of protection from an infected person nearby. Fauci said in his AP interview that he’s concerned because the U.S. has not followed the track of Asian and European nations also hit hard by the coronavirus. Other countries that shut down their economies knocked back uncontrolled spread and settled into a pattern of relatively few new cases, although they continued to experience local outbreaks. The U.S. also knocked back the initial spread, but it never got the background level of new cases quite as low. And the resurgence of COVID-19 in the Sunbelt in recent weeks has driven the number of new daily cases back up into the 60,000-70,000 range. It coincided with economic reopening and a return to social gatherings, particularly among younger adults. Growing numbers of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths have followed as grim consequences. Nearly 4.5 million Americans have been infected since the start of the pandemic, and more than 150,000 have died, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Fauci said there’s evidence the surge across the South may be peaking, but upticks in the Midwest are now a concern. “They’ve really got to jump all over that because if they don’t then you might see the surge we saw in some of the Southern states,” he told the AP. Though Fauci gets push-back from White House officials, other medical experts in the administration are on the same page when it comes to the public health message. Giroir, the testing czar, told reporters Thursday: “I think it’s very important to make sure that we all spread the public health message that we can control all the outbreaks occurring right now.” He said controlling the outbreaks will require people to wear masks, avoid crowded indoor spaces and wash their hands frequently. from https://ift.tt/2XggyYZ Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ (BRASILIA, Brazil) — Brazil’s first lady and a fifth member of President Jair Bolsonaro’s Cabinet have tested positive for the new coronavirus, officials said Thursday. Science and Technology Minister Marcos Pontes wrote on Twitter that he tested positive after experiencing flu-like symptoms and headache. The 57-year-old is now in isolation. The presidency’s press office said in a statement later that Michelle Bolsonaro, 38, also tested positive. The statement said she appeared to be in good health, but would follow established protocols. President Bolsonaro told reporters on July 7 he had been diagnosed with the coronavirus and was then confined to the presidential palace in capital Brasilia for more than two weeks. He announced he tested negative on Saturday. He participated in his first public event on Wednesday, to recognize rural women workers, along with his wife. They were joined by Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina and the minister of women, family and human rights, Damares Alves. Last week, Citizenship Minister Onyx Lorenzoni and Education Minister Milton Ribeiro announced they had tested positive. In March, two other Cabinet members were infected. from https://ift.tt/2CUxZHR Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ The U.S. domestic response to the COVID-19 pandemic thus far has been “weak,” Bill Gates believes. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-chair and Microsoft co-founder told TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park during a TIME100 Talks discussion on Thursday that he’d give the U.S.’s COVID-19 response, “on a relative and absolute basis, not a passing grade.” But, he added, the U.S.’s funding for vaccine and therapeutic research “has been the best in the world,” so if it coordinates to share resources globally, the U.S. could “potentially score the highest” in that realm. During a global pandemic like COVID-19, Gates argued, governments must collaborate to ensure the virus is fully eradicated. The U.S. has historically led global responses to past health crises like smallpox or polio, he told Park, but has been less of a leader during COVID-19. Instead, countries that were exposed to SARS or MERS responded most quickly and “set a very strong model.” “There’s about six countries that immediately went to the private sector and said okay, ‘how do we get mass testing? We’ll commit to buy tests’,” he said. “That never happened in the U.S.” Read more: Mapping the Spread of the Coronavirus Outbreak Around the U.S. and the World The U.S. continues to face huge delays that make many tests “a waste of money,” he continued, adding that while the responsibility for testing has been delegated to the states, they “don’t have enough power” to speed up testing. “The more you know about this, the more you wish experts were taking charge,” Gates continued. If the U.S. can get its COVID-19 numbers down in the next few months, he noted, that will make a “huge difference” in terms of the death rate “going into the fall,” which “could be a challenge because people are indoors more, it’s colder and the flu symptoms will be confusing.” Fall could also bring new developments in vaccine and therapeutic research, however. “Even within two months, we can have some new anti-virals and antibodies that could make a big difference,” Gates said, adding that countries will need to work together to distribute those resources globally. Companies that create vaccines need to coordinate with those that have factory capacity and adopt tiered pricing “so the poorest countries get it for the lowest price,” he continued. And governments will also need to ensure that the vaccine is allocated equally—not only within countries but between countries. That can’t be done using only market forces, he said. “The private sector all by itself, would simply charge the highest price and only give to the very wealthy.” As of yet, the U.S. hasn’t “shown up in the international forums where money to get these tools out to countries is being discussed,” he told Park. Still, he continued, “that still absolutely can be fixed.” from https://ift.tt/3fgGCJL Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ An all-too-long 141 days after the NBA shut down on March 11—an event that first signaled to many Americans the dire seriousness of COVID-19—the league will restart its 2019-2020 season on Thursday, with a nationally televised doubleheader: the New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz face off at 6:30 p.m. eastern, while the Los Angeles Lakers take on the Los Angeles Clippers at 9; both games will air on TNT. At one point, fans, league officials and players might have imagined a resumed NBA season to be a sign that America has emerged from the worst of the novel coronavirus. Unfortunately, tip-off is no mark of public health improvement: July has seen a record surge of new daily cases of COVID-19; on July 28th alone, more than 60,000 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the U.S. Back in March, no one would have thought that the NBA would resume, 141 days later, as things are getting worse. But here we are. Tonight’s tipoff is a sober reminder of where America has been, and how far the country has to go to overcome COVID-19. At the same time, the idea of basketball as pleasurable distraction still holds, especially given yesterday’s welcome news: of the 344 players tested for COVID-19 in the NBA’s “Orlando bubble” since results were last announced on July 20, zero have returned positive tests. It’s early. Players can do silly things, like visit an adult establishment to eat wings in Atlanta, to puncture the NBA’s safety bubble. But so far, the NBA’s safety protocols--no doubles ping pong, fellas—are working. And while coronavirus has taken one baseball team, the Miami Marlins, temporarily off the schedule, and while college football teams fight COVID-19 outbreaks, we can, for now, watch basketball with a clear conscience. Players in Orlando haven’t suffered dangerous health consequences while trying to entertain us. So there’s plenty to look forward to with basketball resuming. Such as: The Race For 8The most intriguing aspect of the “seeding games”—the eight contests all 22 teams will play to determine which teams make the playoffs, and where they fall on the bracket —is the chase for the the last spot in the Western Conference playoffs. By dint of their record at the NBA stoppage, the Memphis Grizzlies currently own that slot, with three teams—the Portland Trail Blazers, New Orleans Pelicans, and Sacramento Kings—3.5 games behind Memphis in the standings, the San Antonio Spurs 4 games behind, and the Phoenix Suns trailing by 6 with just those 8 games to play. (After the seeding games, if the team with the eighth-best record in the conference is four games or fewer ahead of the team with the ninth-best record, there will be a “play-in” series, in which the ninth seed must beat the eighth seed in two straight games to make the postseason). The entire basketball universe, is seems, is pulling for the Pelicans and lusting after a potential first round matchup between New Orleans, featuring rim-shattering rookie Zion Williamson, and the Los Angeles Lakers, the current top seed in the West, who have LeBron James and Anthony Davis, an ex-New Orleans star. That would indeed be great. But Memphis making the playoffs shouldn’t be seen as a mere consolation prize: rookie point guard Ja Morant is the real deal, who runs the team with expertise far beyond his years. Lights Out LeBronGiven the total upending of the planet in these past 141 days, forgive yourself if you forgot that, in his 17th NBA season and at age 35, LeBron James is still very much on top of his game; he leads the the NBA, for example, in assists per game, at 10.6. If he holds on, he’ll become the second-oldest player to ever win the assist title—Steve Nash won one when he was 37—and just the sixth NBA player, besides James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Jerry West, Tiny Archibald, and Oscar Roberston—with both a scoring and assist title to his name (James led the NBA in points per game back in 2007-2008, with 30). The man’s been in his prime for almost two decades. Leading a third NBA team to a championship, like he’s already done with the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers, would just enhance his case in the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time) debate that’s not going away any time soon. During the stoppage, Michael Jordan got to make his case on the screen, via the wildly popular documentary The Last Dance. LeBron now gets his chance on the court. Clips’ Shiny ShipThough star sixth-man Lou Williams will have to sit out the beginning of the season as he quarantines following his hankering for some wings in Atlanta, L.A.’s other team, the Clippers, still have a strong shot to win the franchise’s first-ever title. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George front a roster loaded with talent. Los Angeles had the second-best record in the West before the shutdown, and they were never fully healthy; George, for example, missed 22 games. Will we see a fully-loaded Clippers squad in Orlando? Where’s Home?In typical times, the Lakers and Clippers share a home at the Staples Center, which could have led to an unusual occurrence: if the teams met, say, in the Western Conference finals, would there be a real home court advantage? Would Lakers fans buy up all the tickets for Clippers “home games?” Now, with no fans in the stands and all games playing on a campus at Walt Disney World, home court is just a mirage. Which, for fans, could enhance the competition. Home teams, sparked by the excitement of screaming fans, can often put games away with a stellar run. Without such rushes, will these neutral site games be closer? During a best-of-seven playoff series, a change of scenery often crushes momentum: an underdog can win a Game 4 at home to even a series or cut into a deficit, and then promptly fall in Game 5 on the road, worsening their chances for victory. With no home court, the playing field could be leveled. Might we see more Game 7s than ever? On the flip side, home court advantage works both ways in the playoffs: the home fans can propel the less talented team to a win or two. Without it, do the inferior teams even have a chance? Might we see more sweeps? This is just another element of a fascinating sports experiment. Freaky LeapThe Milwaukee Bucks enter the bubble with the NBA’s best record, at 53-12. Their best player, Giannis Antetokounmp (a.k.a. “The Greek Freak”) is likely to win a second-straight MVP award on the strength of his 29.9 points, 13.7 rebounds, and 5.8 assists per game—not to mention his efficiency, as he’s shooting 55% from the field. LeBron James and Stephen Curry are the other two players to have won back-to-back MVPs in the past decade; Antetokounmpo is 25. He’ll likely keep improving his three-point shooting, so we probably haven’t even seen the best of the Freak. The Bucks, however, have underwhelmed in recent postseasons. They finished with the best record in the Eastern Conference a year ago, before the Toronto Raptors bounced them out of the conference finals in six games. Antetokounmpo will be a free agent next summer. For Milwaukee, anything less than the team’s first NBA Finals appearance since 1974, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar manned the middle, feels like a failure. The 2020 Finals will take place in October, alongside the baseball playoffs. This NBA restart is unlikely to be perfect. But it’s bound to be something no sports fan will ever forget. from https://ift.tt/30d72b2 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ America’s testing infrastructure is collapsing. As coronavirus cases surge around the country, laboratories are facing crippling shortages of key supplies and growing backlogs of samples. In many states, it now takes 10-15 days to get test results – rendering these tests useless as a tool to prevent transmission and bring the pandemic under control. For most people, the peak period of infectiousness lasts about a week. And, in the middle of this testing collapse, cities and towns are preparing to return millions of children to school this fall with neither the intention nor the capability to test them. At this critical moment in our nation’s fight against COVID-19, it is time to radically rethink our approach to testing. The way forward is not a perfect test, but one offering rapid results. Over the past months, much of the conversation around testing has focused on accuracy. Tests have been touted for their high sensitivities, correctly identifying more than 98% of positive cases. The intuition is clear: we want a test that won’t miss positive cases and send infected individuals back into the world to spread the virus. These qPCR tests have become the backbone of our testing infrastructure, yet their high costs and slow rates of analysis have undermined any attempt to put their high sensitivities to good use. CDC analyses suggest that we are identifying only about 1 in 10 cases of COVID-19, mostly because we are testing so few people. This means that from a public health perspective, the ability to identify and isolate positive cases that matters most for disease control is only about 10 percent. By putting a premium on the accuracy of tests, we fail to test a majority of people with COVID-19 and these built in delays actually undermine our ability to timely identify cases which is the key purpose for widespread testing. Imagine spitting on a special strip of paper every morning and being told two minutes later whether you were positive for COVID-19. If everyone in the United States did this daily, we would dramatically drop our transmission rates and bring the pandemic under control. Schools and businesses could reopen with the peace of mind that infectious individuals had been identified and were staying home. Michael Mina of the Harvard School of Public Health has been a major proponent of this idea, and has pushed the idea of a $1 test that the government could mass-produce and provide freely to everyone. In fact these technologies exist today. Antigen tests are significantly cheaper and faster than qPCR tests, and Quidel has already received FDA approval for their antigen-based test on a strip of paper. Another $1 antigen test has been put to use in Senegal. Many other U.S.-based companies are developing antigen tests. Why, then, have these cheap and rapid tests not become the foundation of our national testing strategy? The answer lies with test sensitivity. Antigen tests require higher levels of virus than qPCR to return a positive result. There has been a significant pushback from those who believe it would be irresponsible to widely use a test that might miss many positive cases. But the frequency of testing and the speed of results counters that concern. The qPCR tests are currently slowing laboratories to a crawl. If everyone took an antigen test today—even identifying only 50 percent of the positives—we would still identify 50 percent of all current infections in the country – five times more than the 10 percent of cases we are likely currently identifying because we are testing so few people. Accuracy could be further increased through repeated testing and through the recognition that quicker test results would identify viral loads during the most infectious period, meaning those cases we care most about identifying – at the peak period of infectiousness—are less likely to be missed. Even better, we would be identifying these cases while they are still infectious, rather than in 10 days when the virus may have already been transmitted repeatedly. Mina and colleagues have shown through modelling that this logic holds up; speed matters much more than test sensitivity in controlling a pandemic. The evidence makes clear it is time for a paradigm shift on testing. Our goal should be to identify and prevent every cluster and every outbreak of COVID-19. Cheap and rapid antigen testing can achieve that goal, even if the test sensitivity never matches that of qPCR. It is time for the federal government to take strong leadership on directing our resources toward this new strategy. The U.S. has the ability to print paper-strip antigen tests in massive capacities and to distribute them all over the country. It has the capability to bring antigen tests to tens of millions of Americans daily. If we do these things, we can move past 10-day delays, quash the current outbreaks, and ensure that we can safely go to work, do our shopping, and send our kids to school. from https://ift.tt/3fdGACp Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ We all know that being more active is a good way to keep your body healthy. And more and more data are suggesting that it can have benefits for the brain as well. To understand why dance can be so beneficial, I spoke to Helena Blumen, assistant professor in the department of medicine at Albert Einstein Medical College, and Derek Hough, professional dancer and choreographer from Dancing With the Stars and currently a judge on World of Dance. It was helpful to hear Blumen talk about what she and others are finding out about what happens to the body and brain when you dance, and also hear directly from Hough about what happens to his physical and mental wellness when he dances. Blumen is studying dance in older adults, and described a study in which she compared people assigned to walk on a treadmill to those in a social dance class for six months. People who danced showed more encouraging improvements in tests of their cognitive functions than those walking on the treadmill, and Blumen says the social nature of dancing—working with a partner, as well as the intellectual skills required to learn steps and think about connecting different movements—could be contributing to these benefits. Hough described those processes as “not linear or lateral; it’s four dimensional.” For him, dancing is “constant problem solving,” and that may be part of why Blumen is seeing those cognitive benefits in the people assigned to dance in her study. The most important lesson from the discussion is that dance is good for getting your heart rate up and keeping you active, but it may also help to sharpen some of the thinking skills that tend to deteriorate with age. In fact, no matter how old you are, dancing may be a good way to keep fit and stay sharp, and even get your creative juices flowing. If you’re intimidated by dancing, Hough has this advice: “When in doubt, shake it out! This is reclaiming something, this freedom, this childlike state of ‘who cares the way I move, who cares if people are looking or watching.’” Try it for yourself—Derek teaches a quick routine at the end of the video above that will hopefully inspire you to start dancing. from https://ift.tt/30ayZAg Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Benjamin Knorr, a 40-year-old single father in Janesville, Wisc., says there’s about a 50-50 chance he’ll send his two teenage sons back to school this fall. His 13-year-old, Aiden, would especially like to get back to his friends, sports, and regular life. But Knorr, an independent contractor, has asthma, and fears that his health and finances would be imperiled if one of his boys brought COVID-19 home from school. “If the numbers go up in Dane County and Rock County, where I work and live, it’s over. We’re just doing the online school,” Knorr says. “We already got through two months of it, and yeah, it was hard. It was stressful. And yeah, it was more work on my part to come home and do the online schooling with them and stuff. But we can’t be homeless.” As school districts across the United States decide whether to welcome kids back into the classroom for in-person education this fall, administrators find themselves weighing a complex set of variables. There’s the risk of children, teachers and staffers getting sick or spreading the disease, on the one hand. But on the other, there’s evidence that being out of school can degrade children’s long-term learning prospects and mental health; make it harder for many to get the food they need; and make it difficult for parents to work—especially mothers, who are often expected to handle a disproportionate amount of childcare duties. Millions of students, meanwhile, lack access to high-speed broadband internet and other technological resources required to get the most out of remote learning, making it an inadequate substitute for many. Meanwhile, the debate over reopening schools has become intensely politicized. U.S. President Donald Trump and many other Republicans are pressuring schools to reopen, in part because they want American life to feel as normal as possible before Election Day this November. But many Democrats say it’s too early to go back to school, and we shouldn’t put the lives of children and teachers at risk before a vaccine is ready. Putting politics aside, what the science so far shows is this: young kids may be less likely to get sick from COVID-19 and rarely get very ill if they do show symptoms, and they seem to be less likely to infect other people. This June study, which examined epidemiological data from China and five other countries, found that people under 20 are about half as likely to get infected as older people, and only 21% of people between 10 and 19 years old who become infected show symptoms. Complicating matters in the U.S., experts tell TIME, is that American schools closed early in the pandemic and have since remained shuttered; therefore, we don’t have very good data about the way the virus spreads in U.S. classrooms. The best we do have so far comes from a large South Korean study published earlier this month. After contact tracing about 5,700 COVID-19 patients, researchers found that kids under the age of 10 spread the virus at about half the rate of adults, but kids between 10 and 19 spread it at a similar rate as adults (although the study included fewer people from that age group than adults). That suggests administrators and policymakers need to think differently about middle and high schoolers than they do younger students. “My take home from that is that it’s an age continuum,” says Dr. William Raszka, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Vermont. “The older you are, the more likely it is you’re going to have transmission similar to adults.” The findings out of South Korea comport with those of other, smaller studies. Research into French primary schools released as a pre-print in June found no evidence of transmission by children in schools; and research from Iceland published in April found that children under 10 were less likely to test positive for the virus than those over 10. Another small study published in July, based on data from hospitals in the Chinese cities of Wuhan and Qingdao, found that, among 68 pediatric COVID-19 patients, 96% were infected by another adult in their household, and there was no evidence that the children transmitted the virus to others (it’s unclear from the study how the other 4% of children became infected). There could be a number of reasons that younger people are less likely to spread COVID-19, says Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The virus may not replicate in children as much as it does in adults, meaning an infected child would have less viral material to pass on. Furthermore, because children generally have no or less severe symptoms, they may be less likely to spread the virus by coughing or sneezing, as a sick adult might. Still, that could be a mixed blessing, says Lessler—if a child is infected but doesn’t seem sick, they could be sent to school and wind up infecting others. “It’s a trade-off,” he says. “If they’re not shedding a lot of virus, it may be less likely, but they may be having a lot more contact because they’re not ill.” Absent proper health safeguards, that could be big trouble for schools. School-age children typically have more contact with other people than adults while school is in session. And even if they’re not coughing or sneezing, children are generally pretty good at spreading disease through other habits, like touching everything in sight or crying. Another big unknown is whether children who are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic can spread the virus--Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious disease physician and epidemiologist at Stanford Medicine, points out that the aforementioned South Korean study only traced the contacts of symptomatic children. One thing we do know: about a quarter of U.S. teachers are at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19, according to a July analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, because they are over 65, have a preexisting condition such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or a body mass index over 40. And unfortunately, discussions over kids’ vulnerability to COVID-19 frequently sidesteps the issue of whether reopening schools puts teachers’ and other staffers’ lives on the line. Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, gave the green light on July 28 for union members to go on so-called “safety strikes” in protest of unsafe working conditions. “If authorities don’t protect the safety and health of those we represent and those we serve,” she told union members, NPR reports, “nothing is off the table.” There are ways to help reduce risk, says Maldonado: precautions like social distancing, having teachers wear masks and face shields, and splitting children into smaller groups and staggering their school days can all help. (Some of those measures, especially social distancing, will be tougher in jam-packed schools or in schools with fewer resources.) “We have not seen transmission when you take the proper precautions,” Maldonado says. “So what I would want to know as a parent is, what is my school doing to make sure those precautions are in place. And that’s the key. If the school can do it, then I would feel comfortable. If the school seems like they really don’t have their act together, or they don’t have the resources, then I might be worried about that.” Whether a given school or district can safely reopen may ultimately be tied to the situation in the community more broadly—if a given state or county is experiencing a significant outbreak, it may be wise to keep the school doors closed. “You cannot easily separate schools from the community,” says Raszka, the University of Vermont specialist. “They’re not totally separate. And if you really want to minimize the risk of transmission in schools, then you should minimize the risk in the community.” from https://ift.tt/3hMsLMT Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ (WASHINGTON) — Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, tested positive Wednesday for the coronavirus, forcing him to abruptly cancel his plan to travel to his home state with President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One, a House Republican aide said. Gohmert, 66, one of the House’s most conservative and outspoken members, tested positive at the White House and planned to isolate, according to the aide, who was not authorized to publicly discuss Gohmert’s test result and spoke on condition of anonymity. It was not immediately clear where Gohmert was after he left the White House. An eight-term lawmaker, Gohmert is often seen without wearing a mask. He participated in the House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday where Attorney General William Barr testified. Before the hearing, Gohmert was seen approaching the meeting room a few feet behind Barr, with neither man wearing a mask. Gohmert also voted Tuesday on the House floor. He is at least the 10th member of Congress known to have tested positive for the coronavirus, which can cause COVID-19. from https://ift.tt/2X9s9sW Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ As of Tuesday morning, the Miami Marlins were still scheduled to play a baseball game against the Baltimore Orioles on Wednesday night in Baltimore. That game was originally scheduled to take place in Miami, a pandemic hotspot. But after a COVID-19 outbreak struck the Marlins—as of Tuesday, at least 17 players and coaches have tested positive—the game was shifted to Charm City. Two games in the four-game series, which was originally slated to start Monday, had already been postponed. But going forward with the series at all, says Emory University epidemiologist Zachary Binney, would have breached basic medical ethics. “Irresponsible, dangerous, reckless, stupid, uncaring, greedy, selfish,” says Binney. “All of those words are appropriate.” The Miami Marlins paused their season on Tuesday; they won’t play any games at least through next Sunday. Baseball finally made a right call. A mere five days into the start of baseball’s truncated 2020 season, COVID-19 managed to expose the flaws in MLB’s plans. Many North American sports leagues, including the NBA, WNBA, MLS, NWSL, and NHL, are requiring all players and staff to sequester in one place—to enter so-called safety “bubbles”—in order to return to play. So far, these models have seemed to help prevent major outbreaks: the NBA, which is set to tip-off its season restart on Thursday, recently announced zero positive tests within its Orlando bubble. On Sunday, the NWSL was able to crown a champion, the Houston Dash, after a month-long tournament held in Utah (one team, the Orlando Pride, decided to skip the event after an outbreak of positive tests among its players in June). The 24 NHL teams still fighting for the Stanley Cup have just arrived in two “hub cities,” Toronto and Edmonton, where the rest of the season will play out. The NHL administered 4,256 tests to more than 800 players between July 18 and July 25, they all came back negative. “The real difference,” says Binney, “seems to be bubble versus no-bubble.” So while hockey is bubbled up in a country, Canada, where the daily new COVID-19 caseload peaked in May, baseball players are still living at home in their communities, and traveling from city to city, in a country where the pandemic is largely worsening. Canada, for one, isn’t risking importing new disease from the U.S.: after officials in Ottawa refused to allow baseball players to skip a mandatory 14-day quarantine for visitors, the Toronto Blue Jays temporarily relocated to Buffalo. “I totally understand that having players be at home with their families is good from social, emotional perspective,” says Binney. “But the more contact you have with members of your community, the more there’s a chance for the disease to spread among players in your team, and to other teams, and to other communities. If you’re tying to play in communities with a lot of cases, you’re going to have outbreaks in your sport.” In places like South Korea and Germany, baseball and soccer returned without bubbles. “But those countries were successful in controlling the virus,” Binney says. “We emphatically have not been.” Not only does baseball’s plan risk furthering the spread of COVID-19 to cities around the country, tests are being administered every other day, and it can take as long as 48 hours to process them in labs in New Jersey and Utah. These lags present all kinds of problems. A player could be infected a day after taking a test, meaning he could continue to play, or travel to another city, while unknowingly carrying the disease. Because COVID-19 can take days to incubate, such a player could keep testing negative on the next round of results, further delaying his removal from games. In a group chat Sunday, Marlins players decided to play that evening’s game in Philadelphia, even though starting pitcher Jose Urena had tested positive (needless to say, the league and health officials, not players, should have been the most powerful voice in making this call). The next day, the Marlins saw a slew of more positive tests. Since Marlins players could have infected players in Philadelphia, four games between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, in Philadelphia, have also been postponed; the Yankees will play in Baltimore on Wednesday and Thursday instead. Got all that? “What alarms me most is the speed through which COVID-19 ripped through the Marlins clubhouse,” says Binney. “I did not think it could move through a baseball team that quickly. It’s really alarming, off the charts worse than I ever expected.” He says he’d be “shocked” if the Marlins outbreak doesn’t ultimately spread to other teams. (MLB says that in over 6,400 tests conducted since Friday, July 24th, there have been no new positives of on-field personnel from any of the other 29 teams.) Baseball’s early COVID-19 outbreak does not bode well for other sports without bubble plans, particularly football. Many college football players who’ve returned to campus this summer for workouts have tested positive for the virus. Despite the financial pressures to keep college football afloat this fall—at many schools, the enterprise helps subsidize other sports, as well as coaches and administrators’ lavish salaries—further spikes among teams and communities could derail plans to hold a season. Meanwhile, NFL training camps are already underway. Football teams carry even bigger rosters than baseball, meaning an outbreak could impact many more players overall. Since NFL teams won’t at this point won’t be able gather in one place for a bubbled season, Binney offers a sort of compromise between a full bubble and the riskier baseball model: the “home market bubble,” in which teams in each NFL city agree to sequester in a hotel for five months. Arrangements could be made for limited numbers of family members to join them. Even with strict testing protocols, traveling to road games could carry some risk. But teams could do their best to limit contact to the outside world on these trips. So ideally you’re assured, as much as possible, that COVID-free players are blocking and tackling each other on the field. “That might be the only way to do it,” says Binney, “given the amount of virus in this country.” from https://ift.tt/39B0ztp Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ |
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