Case count increases in Midwestern states with previously low infections
Health & BeautyAug 04. 2020Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
By The Washington Post · Anne Gearan, John Wagner, Jacqueline Dupree · NATIONAL, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS WASHINGTON – The novel coronavirus is surging in several Midwestern states that had not previously seen high infection rates, while average daily deaths remained elevated Monday in Southern and Western states hit with a resurgence of the disease after lifting some restrictions earlier this summer.
Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma are among those witnessing the largest percentage surge of infections over the past week, while, adjusted for population, the number of new cases in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi still outpaced all other states, according to a Washington Post analysis of health data.
Experts also see worrying trends emerging in major East Coast and Midwestern cities, and they anticipate major outbreaks in college towns as classes resume in August.
The University of Texas at Austin notified students that parties are prohibited when the campus reopens in three weeks. The school cited city health guidelines prohibiting groups larger than 10 people and requiring a mask when out in public.
President Donald Trump continued his push to fully reopen schools, even as some of the nation’s largest districts are delaying in-person instruction amid continuing spread of the virus.
“Ideally, we want to open those schools. We want to open them,” Trump said during a White House news conference
Trump also said the United States is doing much better dealing with the virus than most other countries – a claim inconsistent with the facts – and accused the news media of trying to make him and the country look “as bad as possible.”
At least 4.6 million coronavirus cases and 151,000 fatalities have been reported in the United States since February.
Despite growing momentum in the search for a vaccine and Trump’s confident assessment Monday that “we’re on pace to have a vaccine available this year, maybe far in advance of the end of the year,” the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that “there’s no silver bullet at the moment, and there might never be.”
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that “a number of coronavirus vaccines are now in Phase 3 clinical trials, and we all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection.”
He cautioned, however, that “of course there are concerns that we may not have a vaccine that may work” or that its protection would be effective for a short time.
The economic fallout from the virus widened, with the parent company of Men’s Wearhouse declaring bankruptcy as people have stayed away from offices and the suits and other business attire once needed for work.
Tailored Brands, which also owns Jos. A. Bank, K&G and Moores, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Sunday evening, the same day that department store chain Lord & Taylor did so. They are among about a dozen large retailers that have tipped into bankruptcy as pandemic-fueled store closures sent sales plummeting.
Top executives at Disney, IBM, Mastercard and Microsoft were among more than 100 business leaders who called on Congress to provide emergency relief for small businesses facing economic calamity.
In a letter sent to congressional leaders of both major political parties Monday, the executives issued a dire warning of mass closures triggered by the coronavirus, as companies report declining revenue and face the prospect of shutting down yet again to contain the outbreak.
The signatories put forward a series of recommendations, including federally guaranteed loans to last into 2021, flexibility in how those loans are put to use, partial loan forgiveness for small and midsize companies that have suffered significant revenue declines, and a focus on funding for businesses owned by people of color, who have less access to funding.
More than 4 million businesses have received emergency loans from the Small Business Administration, with Congress approving $700 billion in funding to support them. But for the 30 million small businesses in the country, that funding was too limited and short-lived, business leaders say. The letter calls for a more robust and sustained effort from the federal government.
“We cannot stress enough the urgent need to act,” the letter says. “Every day that passes without a comprehensive recovery program makes recovery more difficult.”
The business leaders predict another wave of permanent business closures by Labor Day if the government does not provide aid.
Trump continued to insist that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for the coronavirus even as leading health officials in his administration have concluded otherwise. The president suggested that opposition to its effectiveness is because he supports it, not because of science.
“Hydroxy has tremendous support, but politically it’s toxic because I supported it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “If I would have said, ‘Do not use hydroxychloroquine under any circumstances,’ they would have come out and they would have said, ‘It’s a great, it’s a great thing.’ “
He recounted taking the anti-malaria drug in May after it was announced that a couple of White House staffers had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“I mean, I had no problem. I had no problem whatsoever. And importantly, I didn’t test positive,” Trump said.
Pressed by a reporter about the differing opinions of leading health experts, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease official, Trump stood his ground.
“I don’t agree with Fauci on everything,” Trump said.
In several recent interviews, Fauci has dismissed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus, calling it ineffective.
Trump also feuded publicly with the other leading official face of the U.S. government response. Trump on Monday tweeted criticism of Deborah Birx, the physician overseeing the White House’s coronavirus efforts, a day after she warned that the United States is entering a “new phase” of the pandemic.
Trump tweeted that after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., criticized Birx for being “too positive” about his handling of the pandemic, the doctor “took the bait & hit us.” He appeared to be referring to Birx telling CNN on Sunday that increasing outbreaks in rural and urban areas are “different from March and April” and “extraordinarily widespread.”
The Orion giga coaster with a 300-foot drop at Kings Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio. MUST CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Jared Ream
By Special To The Washington Post · Cathy Free · FEATURES
Five years ago, roller coaster enthusiast Jared Ream was excited to take another ride on his all-time favorite coaster – the 310-foot Millennium Force at Ohio’s Cedar Point amusement park – when he received some bad news.
Because he couldn’t buckle his safety restraint, a park employee told him he would have to get off the coaster train.
At 430 pounds, he was too big to go on the ride.
“There’s nothing worse – it’s called the ‘walk of shame,'” said Ream, 35, who works for a digital advertising company in Dayton, Ohio.
Jared Ream at Walt Disney World in November 2018. MUST CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Jared Ream.
“It’s a terrible feeling when that little green light doesn’t come on to show that you’re buckled in,” he said. “Everyone is looking at you as you have to climb out of the car and walk away. To know that you’ve become so overweight that you can’t ride a roller coaster is painful and humiliating.”
Ream, a card-carrying member of American Coaster Enthusiasts who until then had ridden nearly 300 roller coasters around the country, was so embarrassed by the experience that he gave up his passion, he said.
Jared Ream before he rode Orion July 1, his first ride on a roller coaster in five years. MUST CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Jared Ream.
Then last August, he learned that his favorite coaster manufacturer, Bolliger & Mabillard, was building a “giga coaster” – one of only a handful of full-circuit coasters between 300 and 399 feet tall around the world.
Named the Orion, the coaster would be located at Kings Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio, just 30 miles from Ream’s home in Dayton.
At that moment, said Ream, he made a decision: He was going to lose enough weight to safely buckle up and ride the Orion when it opened.
In less than 11 months, Ream lost 195 pounds by limiting himself to 2,000 calories a day, eating more fruit and vegetables and jogging in place in his garage while watching television.
He wrote an essay in the Dayton Daily News about the inspiration for his weight loss.
The essay began, “When people ask me how I did it, they usually think I’ll respond with Keto, Atkins, Paleo or even surgery. They’re wrong. My answer: Orion.”
Kings Island invited him to ride the Orion as many times as he liked on the park’s media day, one day before it opened to the public.
On July 1, weighing 240 pounds, he sat down in the car of the Orion and buckled in, overjoyed that he fit in the safety restraint. He finally took the 300-foot drop on his dream roller coaster.
“When I pulled down the lap restraint and heard it click, I couldn’t stop smiling,” he said. “And I even had room to spare. It was an incredible feeling – all of that hard work had paid off.”
Chad Showalter, director of communications for Kings Island, called Jared’s weight loss journey “nothing short of amazing.”
“Orion’s first 300-foot drop makes it only the seventh giga coaster on the planet,” he said, “which is a pretty incredible way to celebrate such an accomplishment.”
At 6 feet 9 inches, Ream has always been a large man, he said, but it wasn’t until he took a desk job in digital advertising in 2015 that he started gaining a lot of weight.
“It was a lack of caring, a lack of exercise,” he said. “I’d come home, watch TV and eat whatever I wanted instead of doing something healthy.”
As the months passed, his eating became more problematic.
“When I could no longer ride roller coasters – something I’m passionate about – that made it worse,” he said. “I’d feel sad about it and eat a piece of cake.”
Ream’s love of roller coasters goes back to the day he learned he met the height requirement as a boy on a trip to Kings Island with his parents and three older brothers.
“I love everything about them – the speed, the height, the thrill, the views,” he said. “I’ve never been a screamer, though. More than anything, I find roller coasters relaxing. I just sit back and let them take me where they want to go.”
For years, he had gone out of his way to ride the fastest, smoothest and steepest coasters in the country, timing summer business trips to hit a park or two before coming home.
When that came to an end because of his weight gain, Ream said he felt defeated.
“I figured that I’d never get back that passion again,” he said. “I had no motivation.”
But last summer when he heard about the new Orion coaster, everything changed.
“To be honest, I don’t know if I’d have been able to do this if they hadn’t announced that roller coaster,” he said.
He gave himself less than a year to lose the weight.
Besides exercising and cutting calories, Ream said he limited his eating to two meals and one snack a day between the hours of 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
“I also got more sleep,” he said. “The more sleeping I did, the less time I had to eat.”
The weight quickly began to drop off, and Ream was soon losing about 22 pounds a month, he said.
In less than a year, he went down 18 sizes and now wears pants in a size 36, down from 54.
Still, on the day when it mattered, he felt a little nervous about passing the “green light” test to ride the Orion. When he did, it made all his hard work worth it.
“That first 300-foot drop was really something,” he said.
Ream rode the 91-mile-per-hour Orion four times that day and plans to return for another spin around the track every chance he gets.
“It’s my happy place,” he said. “You can’t see me smiling because of my face mask, but believe me, I am. And if I can now help inspire somebody else to lose weight and also be able to see that green light, then I know it’s all been worthwhile.”
Health experts issue urgent call for change of course as U.S. economy tanks
Health & BeautyJul 31. 2020Coronavirus cases and deaths Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
By The Washington Post · Carol Morello · NATIONAL, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS
WASHINGTON – Public health experts called for urgent new measures Thursday to halt the spread of the coronavirus amid warnings that the U.S. economy is in a historic and devastating contraction as covid-19 is killing Americans at the rate of about one every minute.
The stock market took a dive after the Commerce Department reported the economy shrank by 9.5% in the second quarter, the biggest recorded decline since the government began keeping track 70 years ago. The government also reported jobless claims climbing again last week by 1.4 million, another sign the recovery is fizzling. GDP shrank at an annual rate of 32.9%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The dismal statistics underscored the fragility of any economic recovery, as many states are reversing their attempts to reopen for business and have imposed new restrictions.
At an evening news briefing, President Donald Trump tried to swat away the raft of bad news about the economy and the disease, which he referred to as the “China virus” and compared to a plague.
“It’s China’s fault,” he said flatly.
Trump noted a resurgence of the disease in states that appeared to have vanquished covid-19 early, largely due to draconian restrictions, and suggested the praise was premature.
“Governors that were extremely popular are not so popular anymore,” he said. “They were held up as models to follow, and then they got it.”
But in deflecting any blame for the spread of the virus he once predicted would miraculously vanish in days and now has killed nearly 150,000 Americans, Trump offered several misrepresentations.
For example, he said children were “immune” to the disease and should return to school this fall. In fact, immunologists have said that while children under the age of 10 are unlikely to transmit the novel coronavirus, children older than 10 can spread it as easily as adults.
Trump also predicted a rapid economic recovery from the precipitous drop in employment and consumer spending caused by the pandemic.
“I think next year’s going to be an excellent year, maybe one of our best years ever from an economic standpoint,” Trump said.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said any recovery depends on whether Americans are willing to embrace behavior that can beat back the virus.
“The path of the economy is going to depend, to a very high extent, on the course of the virus and on the measures we take to keep it in check,” he said Wednesday. “Social distancing measures and a fast reopening of the economy actually go together. They’re not in competition with each other.”
Trump also used the coronavirus briefing to attack mail-in voting, hours after his Republican allies joined Democrats to rebuff his suggestion to delay the Nov. 3 election. Trump said he wants the election decided quickly, rather than drag on until millions of mail-in ballots are counted and determined to be legitimate.
“I don’t want to see that take place in a week, after Nov. 3, or a month,” he said. “Or frankly, with litigation and everything else that could happen, it could take years. Years. Or you never even know who won the election.”
Trump sounded more muted than combative as the death toll continued to mount and experts warned of the potential of economic collapse.
Nationwide, 1,400 people infected with the coronavirus died Wednesday, the highest number since May. Several states, including Florida and California, reported record highs for deaths in a single day. More than 4.4 million cases have been reported in the United States, and nearly 150,000 people have died, according to the Washington Post count.
Among the deaths Thursday was well-known businessman turned politician Herman Cain, who sought the Republican nomination for president in 2012. He had attended a June 20 rally for Trump in Tulsa, Okla., where he was photographed maskless in a crowd of others who were also without masks, but it was not determined whether that is where he contracted the virus.
Optimism is in short supply. Even though new infections have leveled off in some of the hardest hit states in the South, they are creeping up elsewhere, threatening to surge.
The trends prompted administration insiders and public health experts to urge governments to act more aggressively.
Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said states and localities should mandate wearing masks in public.
During an appearance on Fox News, Birx said there remains a “very serious pandemic” in Southern states. Despite signs of improvement, she added, the situation is deteriorating elsewhere.
“So now we see the virus, probably because of vacations and other reasons of travel, moving up into Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska,” she said. “And, of course, we continue to have problems across the coast – Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho and Utah, and now increases in Colorado.”
Birx urged people to follow mandatory measures that Trump and many Americans have resisted and called alarmist or infringements on their liberties.
“We believe if the governors and mayors of every locality right now would mandate masks for their communities and [if] every American would wear a mask and socially distance and not congregate in large settings where you can’t socially distance or wear a mask, that we can really get control of this virus and drive down cases as Arizona has done,” Birx said.
The Association of American Medical Colleges issued an ominous warning, along with a “road map” of actions the country must take to avoid calamity.
“If the nation does not change its course – and soon – deaths in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of thousands,” the organization said.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security released a report Wednesday with 10 recommendations for action and another stark warning.
“Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic. It’s time to reset,” six scholars wrote.
Despite the concerns over the rising death toll and economic impact, at least 17 of 21 states flagged as coronavirus “red zones” are not following all recommendations by the government’s coronavirus task force.
Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the chairman of the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which was formed to assess the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, wrote governors of several red-zone states urging them to heed experts’ advice.
The recent task force report “recommends far stronger public health measures than the Trump Administration has called for in public – including requiring face masks, closing bars, and strictly limiting gatherings,” Clyburn wrote in a letter to Birx and Vice President Mike Pence. “Yet many states do not appear to be following these unpublished recommendations and are instead pursuing policies more consistent with the administration’s contradictory public statements downplaying the seriousness of the threat.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, on Thursday asked the state’s liquor control commission to cut off alcohol sales at 10 p.m. each night. Any alcohol purchased by that hour would have to be consumed by 11.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said his residents now must wear masks inside public buildings and businesses. The order “strongly recommends” face coverings in other settings.
Some Republican lawmakers in the state opposed the order, and court challenges to its constitutionality are expected. Elsewhere, some of the restrictions being imposed by local and state authorities are openly flouted.
Senate candidate Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., is fundraising and holding in-person meetings in Washington this week, defying orders from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, that visitors from Alabama and other coronavirus hot spots quarantine for 14 days upon arrival.
Tuberville spent at least some of his time at the Trump International Hotel, according to a photo posted to Facebook by Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., showing the two men in the hotel lobby on Tuesday night. Neither man was masked.
Alabama’s coronavirus cases are surging, with more than 25% of its total cases appearing in the past two weeks, according to state data.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, defiantly walked the halls of Congress maskless and was not practicing social distancing before he was told Wednesday that he could not fly with Trump on Air Force One to Texas because he had tested positive for the virus.
Even then, he returned to the Capitol, ignoring expert advice on how to avoid spreading covid-19 germs, and filmed a video questioning the effectiveness of masks. He suggested that he may have caught the disease from a mask.
Gohmert’s mask skepticism spurred House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to order all lawmakers to wear a mask while appearing on the chamber floor.
And earlier this week, the White House confirmed that national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien had tested positive for the coronavirus and was working from home after experiencing mild symptoms of the disease. In mid-July, O’Brien was in Paris, where he was photographed with his counterparts in meetings in which they sat around a table close to one another without wearing masks. It was not clear when he was first infected.
Britain signs another deal to secure covid-19 vaccine supplies
Health & BeautyJul 30. 2020A scientist works with stem cells inside a stem cell research laboratory at the GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development Center in Stevenage, U.K., on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · James Paton, Suzi Ring · WORLD, HEALTH, EUROPE
Britain is snapping up supplies of future coronavirus vaccines, rushing ahead of other countries in a bid to end the pandemic.
The government signed a deal with partners GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi to secure as many as 60 million doses of their experimental shot. The agreement on Wednesday highlights the aggressive steps the U.K. government is taking to obtain inoculations for its population of 66 million people. Britain has now secured the highest number of doses per capita, putting the country ahead of the U.S., according to London-based analytics firm Airfinity.
Desperate for a way out of the crisis as the death toll mounts, governments are pursuing vaccines before anyone knows whether they will work. The Glaxo-Sanofi pact follows the U.K. government’s move last week to buy 90 million doses of potential vaccines from a partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech SE as well as from Valneva SE. The University of Oxford’s partner, AstraZeneca, intends to make as many as 30 million doses available to the U.K. by September as part of a pact to deliver 100 million doses.
That amounts to at least 250 million doses of different vaccines. Countries may need large quantities because it’s not clear how many shots under development will get across the line, and some may require repeated jabs to be effective.
“Spreading the risk is a sensible strategy,” said Graham Cookson, chief executive of the Office of Health Economics, a research firm. “However, it’s vital that countries and companies collaborate to ensure global access for all.”
As the U.K., the U.S. and other wealthy nations rush to arrange supply agreements with vaccine makers, health advocates worry that the rest of the world will be left behind. Pfizer and BioNTech last week reached a roughly $2 billion deal to supply their coronavirus vaccine to the U.S.
Sanofi and Glaxo plan to provide a significant portion of worldwide capacity in 2021 and 2022 to a global initiative that’s focused on accelerating development and production and deploying shots equitably.
While some companies have said they plan to profit on their covid-19 vaccines, others such as AstraZeneca and Glaxo have pledged not to during the pandemic. Glaxo CEO Emma Walmsley said the company would rely on the World Health Organization’s guidance on when the pandemic has ended and plans to invest any short-term returns back into planning for future emergencies and donations to developing nations.
“We’ve been very clear we don’t expect to profit from these vaccine partnerships during the pandemic,” Walmsley said on a call with reporters.
The companies are also in talks to sell the vaccine to the U.S., the European Union and global organizations, Sanofi said. Sanofi and Glaxo had been discussing such a deal with the U.K., valued at about $646 million (500 million pounds), a person familiar with the matter said earlier this month.
Sanofi is in late-stage talks with the U.S. and the EU, and announcements could come soon, CEO Paul Hudson told investors.
Glaxo and Sanofi, two of the world’s biggest vaccine makers, are following developers including Oxford, Moderna Inc. and Pfizer in a sprint to deliver a shot to help defeat a pathogen that’s killed more than 650,000 people.
Sanofi, based in Paris, and Glaxo, the British pharma giant, still see an opportunity to make a significant impact. The French company is targeting approval in the first half of 2021.
Sanofi on Wednesday raised its profit outlook for the year as some of its key drugs offset covid-19 disruption, while Glaxo said its 2020 earnings forecast is at risk if routine vaccination rates fail to recover after lockdowns. Sanofi’s stock rose less than 1%, while Glaxo fell 1.6%.
For the U.K., the new agreement gives the country about 3.75 doses per capita, compared with about 1.2 for the U.S., though the figures exclude supplies the U.S. is acquiring from Moderna and are likely to change, according to Airfinity. Coverage per capita would be half that given vaccines may require two doses.
“This diversity of vaccine types is important because we do not yet know which, if any, of the different types of vaccine will prove to generate a safe and protective response to covid-19,” Kate Bingham, chair of the U.K. government’s vaccines taskforce, said in a statement. “Whilst this agreement is very good news, we mustn’t be complacent or over-optimistic.”
At the heart of dismal U.S. coronavirus response, a fraught relationship with masks
Health & BeautyJul 29. 2020Matt Serenius helps his daughter Sloane Serenius, 2, put on her mask in Washington last week. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post.
By The Washington Post · Griff Witte, Ariana Eunjung Cha, Josh Dawsey · NATIONAL, HEALTH
Mike DeWine had blazed a trail in March with his forceful response to the coronavirus pandemic, rapidly shutting down his state to protect it from the worst ravages of disease.
A month later, Ohio’s governor made what seemed, by comparison, a modest proposal: If businesses wanted to reopen, customers and employees would have to wear masks.
A man wears a mask around his wrist while walking in Washington last week. He said he didn’t like wearing his mask because he recently had open heart surgery and is still experiencing breathing problems. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post.
The backlash came instantly. An avalanche of abuse on social media. Calls from anguished citizens. Angry recriminations and threats.
The next day, a chastened DeWine backed down. Asking people to wear a mask “is offensive to some of our fellow Ohioans,” the Republican declared somberly. “And I understand that.”
It would be three months – plus tens of thousands of cases and thousands of deaths – before the governor would try again.
The mask is the simplest and among the most effective weapons against the coronavirus in the public health arsenal. Yet from the start, America’s relationship with face coverings has been deeply fraught.
Faulty guidance from health authorities, a cultural aversion to masks and a deeply polarized politics have all contributed. So has a president who resisted role modeling the benefits of face coverings, and who belittled those who did.
The result, experts say, is a country that squandered one of its best opportunities to beat back the coronavirus pandemic this spring and summer. In the process, the United States fell far behind other nations that skipped the fuss over masks, costing lives and jeopardizing the recovery heading into the fall.
“Some countries took out their masks as soon as this happened,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist from the University of California, San Francisco, “and their rates of death are very low.”
In a coronavirus response that has been full of missteps and unforced errors, delayed acceptance of universal masking, Gandhi said, may be the single biggest mistake the United States has made.
In interviews, elected leaders, health specialists and mask advocates say it did not have to be that way – and very nearly wasn’t.
The country hit a tipping point on widespread mask use only this month, with a majority of states and the nation’s largest retailers all mandating them. But the science has long been pointing toward the efficacy of masks – even if the guidance from health authorities wasn’t.
In February – as the virus silently spread in communities from coast to coast – both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended against face coverings for healthy members of the general public. They urged that masks be preserved for front-line health-care workers, especially amid global shortages of personal protective equipment. It was a line repeated by top officials in the Trump administration.
CDC Director Robert Redfield was asked in February whether healthy people should wear masks. His answer to Congress was unambiguous: “No.”
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, repeatedly told Americans “there is no reason” for anyone in the United States to wear a mask. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted on Feb. 29: “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!”
The health officials had made their recommendations based on the flawed assumption that the bulk of transmission was taking place from people with obvious signs of illness. The thinking was that if people with fevers, coughs and other symptoms were to isolate, case counts would remain under control.
But it wasn’t long before CDC contact tracers began to find evidence of “silent” spreaders. One report in late March, from a skilled nursing facility in the Seattle area, found 13 asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic patients among 23 residents who tested positive.
Many experts backed the anti-mask guidance, arguing they weren’t sure face coverings would make a significant difference. They were worried masks could make people less disciplined about social distancing.
But some, including George Gao, the director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that the United States was making a “big mistake” by not mandating masks.
Zeynep Tufekci, an information science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examined the emerging evidence and knew that hand-washing and isolating the obviously sick wouldn’t be enough. If people were spreading the virus before they had any symptoms, “that’s huge. It’s a whole different ballgame.”
Going against both the CDC and the WHO felt like heresy at a time when few mainstream scientists were. But she decided she had no choice. The case that masks could slow asymptomatic spread was compelling. The arguments against – particularly the idea that people might hoard medical-grade masks, when cloth ones could easily be made at home – would only feed resentment.
“If you’re paternalistic and you don’t treat the public as a partner, what you end up with is mistrust and polarization,” said Tufekci, who laid out her views in a March 17 New York Times op-ed. “That’s not how you do public health.”
Across the country, data scientist Jeremy Howard was reaching a similarly against-the-grain conclusion on masks. A specialist in artificial intelligence at the University of San Francisco, he had no background in public health. But he knew how to interpret numbers.
“I had never personally worn a mask in my life. I thought they were kind of weird,” he said. “But I had vaguely heard they could maybe help a little bit.”
When he examined the data – particularly from Asia, where masks had become commonplace during the SARS outbreak and were then put to work in the fight against the novel coronavirus – it was overwhelming. In Europe, too, the evidence was persuasive: Masks had become widespread within days in the Czech Republic, thanks to a campaign among cultural influencers. Transmission rates soon fell.
“I was just stunned,” Howard said. “It seemed pretty likely that this was the most effective public health tool that we had.”
Howard put his argument for members of the public to wear do-it-yourself or other store-bought cloth masks into a March 28 piece for The Washington Post. Senators were calling the next day, asking for private briefings. One of them, Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., was so impressed he vowed to make the case to the president.
The White House was receptive, but only to a point.
Inside the administration, there had already been weeks of debate on masks at the coronavirus task force level without a decision on what to recommend to the public.
In the last week of March – as the official case count was approaching 100,000 – the CDC presented what was then considered a radical proposal to the White House, recommending routine masking by the public. Senior administration officials, particularly members of the vice president’s office on the coronavirus task force, pushed back, arguing it was unnecessary.
The new guidance was somewhat of a compromise. It encouraged – but did not require – people to cover their faces in “public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.”
On April 3, President Donald Trump stood at the White House podium and issued the recommendation. “It may be good” advice, he offered. But he immediately undercut the guidance by announcing he would not be wearing a mask himself.
“Somehow sitting in the Oval Office, behind that beautiful Resolute Desk” as he met with “presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens,” Trump said, “I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself.”
Initially, some Trump aides said they did not like the idea of him wearing a mask publicly because they believed it would be bad politically and make the president look weak. They thought it might lead others to panic or think the pandemic was worse than it was. There were also fears among some in the president’s circle that his supporters would rebel against anything that smacked of a government directive.
Among some of Trump’s most ardent fans, anti-mask insurrections were already brewing. In dark corners of the internet, mask conspiracy theories took shape. On the steps of state capitol buildings, activists shouted their objections to a masked attack on “liberty.”
Some of the president’s advisers, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, expressed repeated skepticism of masks and whether they made a difference, campaign and White House officials said. Trump campaign masks were produced and presented to the president but never sold. Some aides were fearful of selling merchandise he did not wear and appearing to profit off a pandemic, officials said.
“The President’s position has been consistent on this,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said in a statement. “In late March, before there was even a recommended but not required guidance given by the CDC on mask-wearing, he supported facial coverings.”
With little hope for progress at the White House, Howard had begun to make his data-based case for masks to the governors, focusing especially on Republicans who had shown a willingness to embrace a scientific approach to attacking the coronavirus. DeWine was at the top of his list.
The 73-year-old Ohioan had won plaudits from public health experts for the speed with which he shut down gatherings, businesses and schools in March when the coronavirus began to spread in the state. Cases stayed low, even as the economic damage rippled.
As pressure intensified on DeWine to reopen the state in late April, the governor seized on a mask requirement in stores and other businesses as a way to do so safely.
Masks would not be “forever,” the governor announced April 27, “but if we want to get back to work, we have to protect our employees.”
Within hours, as protests over the governor’s assault on “freedom” poured in, DeWine knew it had been a mistake that would need to be reversed.
“After 40 years of representing Ohioans in many different jobs, I’ve got a pretty good ability to gauge these things,” he said in an interview. “And with the pushback we got, my instinct was that this was too far.”
Unlike closing schools – which could happen with the stroke of a pen – requiring masks would involve getting “millions of Ohioans making individual decisions dozens of times a day.”
And unlike in Asia – where DeWine had traveled pre-pandemic and seen the widespread use of face coverings to ward off disease – there was no culture of mask-wearing for public health benefits in the United States.
The president’s unwillingness to set an example by wearing a mask didn’t help.
“I would have liked to have seen the president do that,” DeWine said.
Also unhelpful, the governor said, was guidance from some public health authorities that continued to be contradictory, even as the science behind masks became increasingly clear.
Studies suggesting masks could be effective in curbing the risk of transmission continued to accumulate. But the WHO – which has been criticized throughout the pandemic for being slow to respond to emerging data – took until June 5 to issue a mask recommendation for the general public. Even then, it was tepid and full of asterisks, with the global health body insisting the change was consistent with its original guidance.
U.S. officials have been more forthright in acknowledging their advice has shifted, arguing it was in response to shifting data.
“If you acted on the best information you had at the time and then later you get new evidence that points in a different direction, does that mean what you did three months ago was wrong? Well, existentially, yes it was. But it was based on the evidence we had at the time,” Fauci said in an interview Friday.
Once policy did shift, Fauci said, medical officials were united in getting behind the new recommendation. But other senior administration officials weren’t on board.
“That was a problem,” he said.
Trump was foremost among those who weren’t interested in promoting masks.
When, in late May, he toured a Ford plant in Michigan where masks were required, he refused to put one on in front of the cameras. “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” he said.
Over Memorial Day weekend, he retweeted a mocking criticism of his election opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, for wearing a mask.
Videos began going viral as Americans squared off on what to do about customers in stores who refused to mask up. Social media groups devoted to casting doubt on their efficacy proliferated. Face coverings had become debate points in the U.S. presidential campaign and potent symbols in the culture war.
Public health specialists could only shake their heads.
The debate radiated through big cities and small ones as the coronavirus began a resurgence in June, with many areas that had dodged the first round of infection getting hammered this time.
Joplin had no active cases at the start of June. Weeks later, the city of 50,000 in southwest Missouri had one of the nation’s fastest rising infection rates.
For five hours in late June, the city council debated whether to mandate masks, only to defeat the motion by a single vote.
Two weeks later, with hospitals hitting their capacities, the council voted again. This time, the mask mandate passed 6-3.
Mayor Ryan Stanley was among those who changed his mind. He had initially thought that a mandate was unenforceable and that, in a deeply conservative, pro-Trump region, it would only encourage defiance. But when he visited local businesses the weekend after the requirement kicked in, he was astonished by what he saw.
“We were getting 15% adoption before. I was crossing my fingers and hoping for 50 to 60%,” he said. “But now it’s at 90 to 95%. It’s certainly doing its job.”
Stanley said mask opponents had been loud – staging noisy demonstrations and dominating the debate. But they hadn’t actually been that numerous.
Public opinion polls bear that out, with large majorities of the population, across both major parties, favoring mandates.
Policies have begun to match those attitudes. A cascade of states – including Ohio – have instituted requirements in recent weeks, with DeWine identifying compliance as critical to the state’s hopes of bringing down infection rates and opening schools.
Major retailers such as Walmart have as well, making shopping trips difficult without a mask.
Evidence shows the mandates are working.
“There were seat belts in cars for decades. There were lots of public service announcements, people saying, ‘Wear seat belts’ ” said David Keating, who worked with Howard to found the nonprofit advocacy group #Masks4All. “But it’s when the law started requiring it that seat belt usage soared.”
Even the president has joined in – though still somewhat tepidly. On a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier this month, he wore a mask in public for the first time. Last Tuesday, he tweeted a photo of himself in a mask with the explanation that “many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”
Trump wore a mask again on Monday while touring a biotechnology plant. But as recently as last week, he was barefaced while in public at his hotel in D.C., despite local rules that require a face covering.
Political advisers and campaign officials say there has been a concerted effort around Trump – from aides to family members to advisers to lawmakers – to show that wearing a mask is the right thing to do. Aides have encouraged people to praise the president for wearing a mask, hoping that he will continue to embrace it, officials said.
It had been clear for months – as America’s coronavirus case count has climbed above 4 million and the death toll closes in on 150,000 – that masks are a public health imperative. But with grim polls showing Trump trailing in almost every key state, they have now become a political one, too.
“He was basically on an island even among his own supporters,” said Brendan Buck, a longtime Republican operative who last worked for then-Speaker Paul Ryan. “It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this pandemic is why he’s losing so badly.”
By The Washington Post · Hannah Denham · BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, HEALTH, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS, CAREER-WORKPLACE
Google won’t bring its 200,000 employees back to the office until July 2021, pushing past its January timeline as U.S. coronavirus cases surge and a vaccine remains months away.
That makes parent company, Alphabet, the first major U.S. company to push its comeback into the second half of next year. Google spokesman Jason Post confirmed the decision, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, on Monday.
Chief executive Sundar Pichai announced the new timetable in a companywide email, to “give employees the ability to plan ahead.”
Pichai made the decision last week. He was partly influenced by the differing approaches to school reopening across the country, the Journal reported. The work-from-home option applies to employees at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., as well as in other parts of the United States, the United Kingdom and India.
Google’s move could motivate other corporations to reevaluate their timelines, especially as the number of confirmed covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise in the United States. At least 4.2 million cases have been reported in the U.S. and at least 144,000 deaths.
Silicon Valley has taken varying approaches to mitigate safety risks for its workforce. Remote working was widely adopted in March, and many companies have signaled plans to reopen offices in January.
Facebook’s current plan is keep its 48,000 workers at home through the end of the year, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that he expects as much as half of them to transition to remote work in the next decade. Amazon’s corporate employees also are expected to telecommute through 2020. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Snap recently extended its timeline from September to January.
Astra to pay Daiichi up to $6 billion for new cancer drug
Health & BeautyJul 27. 2020A sign featuring the AstraZeneca at the company’s DaVinci building at the Melbourn Science Park in Cambridge, England, on June 8, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jason Alden.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Marthe Fourcade, Suzi Ring, Rachel Chang · BUSINESS, HEALTH, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS
AstraZeneca agreed to pay as much as $6 billion to buy into Daiichi Sankyo Co.’s promising medicine for lung and breast cancer, the drugmakers’ second potential blockbuster oncology deal in two years.
The U.K. drugmaker will pay Japan’s Daiichi $1 billion upfront to jointly develop and bring to market a cancer therapy in early clinical tests called DS-1062, the companies said Monday. As much as $5 billion in additional payments could follow, subject to regulatory and sales milestones.
AstraZeneca is forging ahead to become a global oncology powerhouse, even as it works on a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, the company committed to pay Daiichi as much as $6.9 billion for another cancer medicine, which marked its biggest deal in more than a decade. For the Japanese company, the deal is the latest in what has turned into a transformative partnership. Besides the cancer deals, Daiichi is in talks to make Astra’s Covid-19 vaccine in Japan.
The Daiichi treatment, an antibody-drug conjugate that targets tumors that express a protein known as TROP2, is “extraordinary,” José Baselga, Astra’s head of cancer research, said in an interview. He described it as an “agent that could transform and will transform the therapy landscape.”
AstraZeneca shares were little changed in London, trading at 8,617 pence. Daiichi shares rose 3% to 8,666 yen in Tokyo before the announcement.
The Japanese drugmaker pivoted to oncology treatments only a decade ago, after being mired for years in litigation over data fabrication at its Indian subsidiary. A key turning point came when the Tokyo-based company hired Antoine Yver, who ran the oncology unit at AstraZeneca, in 2016, paving the way for the British giant to take notice of Daiichi’s groundbreaking work in cancer.
“We had a number of potential collaborators who met with us,” about the therapy, Yver said in an interview. Astra was picked because “of their experience, because of their strength in oncology, because of our past collaboration.”
Since the first Astra deal last March, Daiichi’s stock has soared 70% and it’s now the second-biggest pharmaceutical company in Japan by market capitalization, edging past Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.
AstraZeneca will pay cash for the latest deal in three stages: $350 million this month when the deal closes, $325 million after 12 months and again a year later. Daiichi will manufacture and supply the cancer drug, and keep exclusive rights to the medicine in Japan.
Data from early trials points to strong activity in lung cancer, but also high toxicity with two deaths, said Sam Fazeli, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Baselga said the drugmakers are working to mitigate the toxicity and the patients had received the highest doses of the drug, which are unlikely to be those retained for broad use.
By The Washington Post · Meryl Kornfield, Marisa Iati · NATIONAL, WORLD, HEALTH
The United States tallied just shy of 1,000 coronavirus-related daily deaths on Saturday after a four-day streak of four-digit death tolls, the biggest such accounting of human loss from the virus since late May.
The country reported 59,737 new infections and 566 additional deaths as of Sunday evening, resulting in a seven-day average of infections that was slightly lower than Saturday’s and an average of deaths that was a little bit higher.The world surpassed 16 million confirmed cases over the weekend and reached at least 641,000 coronavirus-related deaths. The United States accounts for about one-fourth of the reported infections and one-fifth of the death toll.
As of Sunday evening, the seven-day averages for new cases hit fresh highs in several states, including Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Nevada, Texas and South Carolina set records for their seven-day averages of daily deaths, and Mississippi and North Carolina tied their previous highs.
In Texas, the seven-day average for cases was 8,302 on Saturday as Hurricane Hanna roared ashore. Winds, torrential rain and storm surges left a path of destruction in an area already ravaged by coronavirus infections. The seven counties from Corpus Christi south to Brownsville and inland along the border with Mexico, predicted to face Hanna’s strongest winds and heaviest rains, have diagnosed 18,420 active covid-19 cases, many in the past few weeks, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
Elsewhere in the state, bar owners reopened Saturday night, defying a June 26 order by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to shut down. Fort Worth bar owner and “Freedom Fest” protest organizer Chris Polone said in a video posted on Facebook that of the about 800 bar owners who participated, not one was penalized by authorities.
The county that Fort Worth is in has reported 24,562 coronavirus cases, 3,367 more since last week.
The surge in cases comes as states wrestle with reopening their economies or imposing greater public health restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
In Florida, Halsey Beshears, the secretary of the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation, signaled that he planned to start talking with bars and breweries about how they can return to business. His announcement came as Florida’s average number of deaths rose for the third straight day.
The state surpassed New York in total confirmed cases; Florida hit 414,511 on Saturday, with its health department reporting 12,180 new infections. Only California, with double the population of the Sunshine State, has more cases than Florida.
Despite the recent surge in cases and deaths, White House senior staff members painted a rosy picture of the country rebounding from the crisis.
“I don’t deny that some of these hot-spot states are going to moderate that recovery, but, on the whole, the picture is very positive, and I still think the V-shaped recovery is in place,” White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNN host Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday, referring to how a quick rebound would look on a bar chart.
Kudlow and other administration officials denied intraparty conflict was at play as lawmakers rush to pass legislation before the enhanced jobless aid expires. Hinting at developments, Kudlow said that the federal government would extend a four-month moratorium on evictions that ended Friday, and that $1,200 direct-impact payments will be part of the negotiated stimulus package.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday that the White House and GOP lawmakers were “on the same page” and would present a stimulus package Monday, straying from what White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., previously suggested. McConnell on Friday announced that an agreement could take a “few weeks,” potentially leaving millions of Americans in limbo when benefits are cut off.
Meadows also suggested progress Sunday, saying new therapies for treating the coronavirus could be announced this week. Speaking on ABC News’s “This Week,” he provided no details on what the therapies might involve or who was developing them. But he maintained that the key to defeating the virus would ultimately come down to “American ingenuity” more than mandates requiring people to wear masks, maintaining social distancing or keeping businesses closed.
Negotiations with Democrats will hinge in part on temporary unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of this week. Republicans aim to reduce the $600 weekly payments.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sunday that the Trump administration is effectively trying to take away employees’ freedom to not go to work if they don’t feel safe. On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Pelosi said President Donald Trump’s aim to pull unemployment benefits back from people with job options is unsafe.
“I have a new name for him, Mr. Make Matters Worse,” Pelosi told Margaret Brennan. “He has made matters worse from the start. Delay, denial, ‘it’s a hoax,’ ‘it will go away magically,’ ‘it’s a miracle’ and the rest.”
The White House’s coronavirus testing coordinator conceded Sunday that turnaround times for diagnostic testing should improve, promising better times this week.
In an interview Sunday on “State of the Union,” Adm. Brett Giroir blamed “large commercial labs that perform about half the testing in our country.”
“I started out by saying that we are never going to be happy with testing until we get turnaround times within 24 hours, and I would be happy with point-of-care testing everywhere,” Giroir said, referring to when sample collection and testing occurs in the same place. “We are not there yet. We are doing everything we can to do that.”
Giroir defended testing capacity, saying “no one is trying to stop testing in this country,” when Tapper asked about Trump’s remarks that he had instructed officials to slow testing out of concern that it would highlight the spread of the virus in the country.
As many of the largest school districts have already announced that students won’t immediately return to in-person instruction in the fall, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Sunday that the administration does not believe there should be uniform thresholds to meet for schools to reopen.
“Each community is going to have to make the determination about the circumstances for reopening and what steps they take for reopening, but the presumption should be we get our kids back to school,” Azar told CBS News’s Brennan.
Schools that reopen may not be able to stay open if cases surge again in those communities, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden warned.
“The hard part is opening them and keeping them open,” Frieden told Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said a slow testing process or high rate of positive tests in a community should trigger a review of whether schools there should remain in session.
“I think somewhere in 5 to 10%, it’s starting to get iffy,” Gottlieb said on “Face the Nation,” speaking about positivity rates. “Above 10%, I think that’s a threshold where you really want to think carefully about closing the school districts, because that is a sign that there is an epidemic underway inside that community.”
Outside the United States, North Korea declared a “maximum” national emergency and locked down the city of Kaesong near the border with South Korea after what could be the north’s first coronavirus case, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Sunday. North Korea alleged that the patient illegally crossed the border from South Korea last week and said virus screening results are “uncertain.”
เชื้อราในช่องคลอดและพยาธิในช่องคลอดต่างกันอย่างไร? รู้จักโรคติดต่อทางเพศสัมพันธ์ “โรคพยาธิในช่องคลอด” แพทย์เตือนไม่รีบรักษาอาจลุกลามไปถึงท่อปัสสาวะและกระเพาะปัสสาวะ
Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
Coronavirus cases and deaths Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
A scientist works with stem cells inside a stem cell research laboratory at the GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development Center in Stevenage, U.K., on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson.
Matt Serenius helps his daughter Sloane Serenius, 2, put on her mask in Washington last week. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post.
A sign featuring the AstraZeneca at the company’s DaVinci building at the Melbourn Science Park in Cambridge, England, on June 8, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jason Alden.
แพทย์ผู้เชี่ยวชาญแนะการรักษาโรคมะเร็งด้วยยาชนิดฉีดเข้าใต้ผิวหนัง ทางเลือกการรักษาผู้ป่วยโรคมะเร็งตามแบบฉบับการแพทย์วิถีใหม่ ปรับรูปแบบการบริหารยา ลดเวลาในโรงพยาบาล ช่วยผู้ป่วยลดความวิตกกังวลในยุค COVID-19
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