CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewgF5SMjZS4
2:52 min
Florida and Texas struggle with surging coronavirus cases
•Jun 27, 2020


CBS This Morning

The U.S. broke another single-day record for new coronavirus infections Friday as other countries around the world continued the process of reopening. The spike has the governors of Florida and Texas reversing course and tightening restrictions. Michael George reports from New York, once the epicenter of the pandemic.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dQDBadYQB0
5:00 min
Trump silent as US coronavirus cases soar to new high | DW News
•Jun 27, 2020


DW News germany

The US government's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says the country is facing a "serious problem," as Covid-19 infections surge in southern and western states. Many states are experiencing their highest infection rates since the coronavirus crisis began. Worst-affected are states including Florida, Texas and Arizona, along with California. Texas ordered all of its bars to close, while Florida banned its bars from selling alcohol. On Friday the US Coronavirus Task Force held its first press conference in two months. Vice-President Mike Pence encouraged US citizens to follow local health guidelines. President Donald Trump has remained largely silent on this devastating turn of events. DW's Stefan Simons reports from Washington. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq0eozDgcs
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnzKmEcM1WU
8:36 min
It's Not About Masks or Health-- It's About POWER
•Premiered 19 hours ago


ThePatriotNurse
In this informative video, Patriot Nurse discusses the well documented methodology of overlords dividing people to accomplish a political end. Throughout the nation, every manner of division is being sown between colors, between generations, and between the working and non working portions of the populace. Overwhelming, the people giving medical advice have exceptionally poor understandings of civics, economics and business. The Constitution doesn't just stop in a crisis. Indeed, it was drafted to protect us from government during EXACTLY these times.
 

lonestar09

Veteran Member


Where are the deaths?
The drum beat to halt the reopenings gets louder by the day. It should be resisted
Heather Mac Donald
deaths

COVID-19 testing in Inglewood, California
June 26, 2020
11:13 AM
The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday.

‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts. Osterholm had told NBC’s Meet the Press: ‘I’m actually of the mind right now — I think this is more like a forest fire. I don’t think that this is going to slow down.’

The ‘this’ is an uptick in daily new cases from 19,002 on June 9 to 38,386 on June 24. The high to date in new daily cases was on April 24 — 39,072. Since April 24, the daily case count started declining, then began rising again after around June 9. What virtually every fear-mongering story on America’s allegedly precarious situation leaves out, however, is the steadily dropping daily death numbers — from a high of 2,693 on April 21 to 808 on June 24. That April high was driven by New York City and its environs; those New York death numbers have declined, but they have not been replaced by deaths in the rest of the country. This should be good news. Instead, it is no news.

deaths


The New York Times put three reporters on a full-page article on Texas, published June 25 under the headline ‘AS NEW CASES SOAR, THE GOVERNOR FACES FALLOUT FROM A RUSH TO REOPEN.’ The story never mentioned coronavirus deaths. Texas’s daily death count has bounced around since early May without a sharp rise — a high of 63 new deaths on May 21, 42 on June 24. Arizona, another state facing media contempt, finally beat its earlier high of 67 deaths on May 8 with 79 deaths on June 24. Between those two dates, however, the curve was steady. The Arizona mortalities are concentrated on Indian reservations and to a lesser extent around the Mexican border.
https://spectator.us/subscribe-now/
In May, Georgia was the main target of expert contempt for its allegedly premature reopening. Since then, the media have gone silent, due to the state’s truly discouraging downward daily death toll from a high of 119 on April 7, long before the reopenings, to 10 on June 24.

There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections. Half the states are seeing cases decline or hold steady. Case counts are affected by more testing; the positive infection rate captured by testing is declining. The current caseload is younger, which is a good thing. The more people who have been infected and who recover, the more herd immunity is created. Meanwhile, daily deaths from heart disease and cancer — about 3,400 a day combined — go ignored in the press.

But the drum beat to halt the still far too tentative reopenings gets louder by the day. It should be resisted. The lockdowns were a mistake the first time around; to reimpose them would be disastrous for any remaining hope of restoring our economy. The damage that has been done to people’s livelihoods and future prosperity will continue to outweigh the damage done by the coronavirus. The only vaccine against poverty and resulting despair is a robust economy.
 

inskanoot

Veteran Member

STRANGE DEATHS: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
June 22, 2020 By JOSEPH P. FARRELL
There may be something fishy going on in Africa. A few days ago, you might recall that I blogged about the President of Tanzania, John Magufili, sending faked data to the World Health Organization because of his suspicions it was - to coin a pun - "doctoring" statistics to promote its various agendas on the Fauci-Lieber-virus. You might recall that he sent them samples from a goat, a papaya, and a quail for testing, and sure enough, they all came back positive, including the papaya.

Well, there's been a rather strange incident that may, or may not, be related; I'll leave it to the reader to decide. That said, I don't mind saying that my suspicion meter is in the red zone, as apparently are the suspicion meters of a lot of people in Burundi. V.T. spotted this one, and it's short, direct, and to the point:
AfricaBurundiHeadline News Burundian President Nkurunziza Dies Suddenly after Expelling WHO for False Pandemic
The questions begin in the first paragraph: fifty-five year old President Pierre Nkurunziza died suddenly of a heart attack, after recently being examined and pronounced as fit as a fiddle:
President of Burundi Pierre Nkurunziza, 55, has died “following a cardiac arrest”. The sudden death comes as a surprise as he had been evaluated recently as being in good overall health.
But then the plot immediately thickens:
Less than a month ago, the Burundian government ordered the expulsion of experts from the World Organization of Health (WHO) responsible for ‘advising’ on the false pandemic COVID-19.
Needless to say, this has "local pundits" suggesting "that his death could have been the consequence of poisoning." Perhaps the poisoning was administered in the form of a WHO-approved "vaccine"; we'll get back to that in a moment.
The article concludes with two short paragraphs, one of which raises an interesting question: Are leaders who oppose the WHO and its vaccines being deliberately "offed"?
The President and his Ministry of Foreign Affairs had declared that the WHO representatives would henceforth be ‘persona non grata’, that is not welcome on Burundian territory. For information, to date, and despite its courageous opposition to the WHO, Burundi officially declared only one COVID death. This is compared against around 30,000 dead in France, who are largely enslaved by the ‘recommendations’ of the WHO.
The unexpected death of Nkurunziza is reminiscent of the mysterious plane crash of Polish President Lech Kaczyński in 2009, in which he was killed shortly after he refused the vaccine made by the WHO against the H1N1 flu.
It's one of those "heads we win, tails you lose" sorts of things; either take our "vaccines", which may kill you, or we'll kill you. And speaking of "vaccines" and poison and killing, there's this recent interview by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which raises a few other unpleasant, disturbing, and diabolical implications:

Now, I don't know about you, but it seems pretty plain and clear to me that if the ghouls in Big Pharma are willing to slaughter babies in order to stuff their "vaccines" with fetal tissue, they won't hesitate to off the odd African president or two, or three, or n leaders not going along with the agenda. And one wonders, have any long term studies on such "vaccines" containing such "ingredients" been done to see what the effects might be? Might such effects include the "cannibalism" disease kuru, a neuro-degenerative disease with effects similar to mad-cow (Creutzfeldt-Jacobs) disease? I doubt it. And come to think of it, can one really call these diabolical concoctions "vaccines" at all? I doubt it; whatever they are, they're not vaccines in any normal sense I can think of. What they are is a kind of "cannibalism by IV drip" or "cannibalism by injection," but they're not "vaccines."

And while we're talking about kuru and mad cow and such, imagine whole populations being forcibly injected with this crud, and one has a real zombie apocalypse and a lot of dead people. Could this be why Baal Gates is interested in "over-population" and "vaccines" all at the same time? It does make one wonder.

As for the "local pundits" in Burundi, go ahead with your suspicions. I, for one, share them.
See you on the flip side...https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/06/strange-deaths-who-is-responsible/
 

inskanoot

Veteran Member

THE 5G PROBLEM

June 10, 2020 By JOSEPH P. FARRELL

If you've been following the 5G phenomenon and the growing opposition to it, you'll want to spend some time with this article that was spotted by P.A.I. Before we get to that article, however, I want to mention why I include it in this week's blogs, which - if you've been following them - are about strange stuff, from the Golden Gate Bridge getting a refurbishment to improve its aerodynamic qualities (and which now makes it "whistle"), to ships at sea sailing in circles. In this case, over the past several months, I've heard from various readers of this website, who follow the 5g rollout, that they've either experienced, or know of someone who's experienced, strange and unusual symptoms. I myself have experienced a few weird things, namely, that while watching certain DVDs or Blue Ray disks, I experienced sudden, and almost narcoleptic sleepiness. This never happens to me outside, driving, or walking, but always and exclusively when watching certain DVDs in my collection.
Similarly, this article is mostly taken up with the people who've reported breathing difficulty, and/or heart palpitations, for no apparent or explicable reason, other than, perhaps, some sort of physiological response to 5G rollout:

PUTTING THE EARTH INSIDE A HIGH-SPEED COMPUTER

These symptoms, notes the article and some of the commenters, began shortly after Space X's launch of several 5G satellites in the last month. The article itself notes what some covering the corona virus narrative have also noted, a potential connection of 5G to the story, only here, the article suggests the virus narrative might be a cover for 5G-related physiological problems:
The full extent to which the 420 satellites are being tested is unknown to me. They are communicating with ten earth stations located in the United States. They are being tested by the U.S. Air Force for use by military aircraft. SpaceX intends to keep launching 60 satellites at a time every couple of weeks. The next launch is scheduled for tonight, May 3, 2020, at 9:25 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. SpaceXplans to begin what it calls beta testing with perhaps 10,000 private customers about three months from now when it has about 840 satellites in orbit. Beta testing alone could have devastating consequences. If and when Starlink signs up millions of paying customers, it is possible that nothing will survive --no humans, no animals, and no insects. It is likely that it will be blamed on COVID-19, unless this world wakes up in time.
The article then explains its reasoning:
Very briefly, all animals and plants are polarized positive to negative from head to feet, or from leaves to roots.An electric current of picowatt per square meter amplitude flows from the positively charged sky to the negatively charged earth in fair weather, courses through the earth beneath our feet, and returns to the sky via lightning bolts during thunderstorms. Every living thing is part of this circuit. The current enters our heads from the sky, circulates through our meridians, and enters the earth through the soles of our feet. This current provides the energy for growth, healing, and life itself. We do not live by bread alone, but by the energy provided to us by the biosphere. Oriental medicine calls it qi or ki, Ayurvedic medicine calls it prana, and atmospheric physicists call it electricity. It provides us energy for life, and information that organizes our bodies. If you pollute this circuit with billions of digital pulsations, you will destroy all life. It is one thing to sit in front of a computer all day, or hold one in your hand. It is quite another to live inside of one.
In short, adding thousands of satellites "muddles" this circuit, and that muddling may lead to unknown or unpredicted physiological and neurological complications and side effects.

All of which brings me to today's high octane speculation: over the past few weeks, as the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan-Baal Gates virus hysteria gradually petered out, I advanced the idea almost at the outset that what we may have been watching was the emergence of a kind of bio-electronically activated virus. I found it suspicious, and still find it suspicious, that precious little propatainment media attention was paid to Dr Fauci's own researches into corona viruses, which, incidentally were shut down by the Obama administration; Fauci then simply moved them to...China. Similarly, Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard's arrest for allegedly not disclosing his financial ties to China's Wuhan laboratories fell right off the radar screen. Lieber's research into nanotechnology and association with the Wuhan laboratory were, indeed, what made me entertain the bio-electronically activated virus narrative. I even went so far as to suggest that the "sudden bird flu deaths" of previous years might have been related to the corona virus story and to some of this research. The fact that the "bird flu" mimicks in some respects electromagnetic effects on cells is an important factor here.

But now with this article I have to wonder, high-octane-speculation-style, if in fact these effects of a 5G rollout were known all along, and if, in fact, the race to acquire a "vaccine" that will alter - by Baal Gates' own admission - the rDNA of humans, was in fact a "vaccine" not against the corona virus itself, but against those 5G effects? If so, then it may be another case of the "cure" being as bad as the "disease:...

See you on the flip side...https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/06/the-5g-problem/
 

Dozdoats

On TB every waking moment

Potemkin Villagers

6/25/20 ESPN:

The San Francisco Giants are doing their part to ensure their fans' presence will be felt when baseball returns next month -- at least in print form.
In a letter sent to season-ticket holders Thursday, the Giants announced that games at Oracle Park will be played without fans due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the team will allow season-ticket holders to send in an image of themselves to be placed onto a cutout that will be displayed in the stands during home games.
Imagine the roar of the crowd!
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
I don't think it is so much that lots of countries are "lying" about their results (some are, most probably are not) but the problem is the number of tests that a country can afford to do or manage on a practical basis to do.

If a country/health system has a limited supply of tests and/or labs to read them; they are going to focus only on testing people who are sick and not worry about finding "asymptomatic carriers."

So a country with a lot of sick people, testing a lot of sick people, is going to show a higher portion of those tested who are sick with XYZ disease;
rather than a country with resources and a better health system that can afford to start testing the "worried well" or even "the worried kinda sick" as opposed to people already presenting in the ER with dangerous conditions.

That's the kind of nuance my best friend in college had to look at getting her degree in epidemiology and there is a lot more and complex stuff that goes into real disease tracing the more you look into it.

A lot of what is reported is pretty much "apples and oranges" because the testing in each country or area isn't done the same way and really can't be, given the modern world and the different economies involved.

Agree, this is an excellent point. If you only test sick, the percentages are going to be higher. That's why the percentages were generally higher here in the USA back in March and April. So much fewer people being tested, and mostly they had to pass so many criteria to get the test, so more of them were coming back positive. Now they are testing tons of people and the percentages are going back up - that's disconcerting because you would think with so many being tested, the percentage positive would be really low. And in FL -with all the additional testing - it's not anymore.

HD
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
Please be aware that there are ways that elected officials can get the percentage of positive lowered. For example in my states that shit hole that is known as oregonistan. Oregon State veterinary lab has the ability to do several thousand covid test a week. when I found out about it I was happy because that means that people who are symptomatic will be able to get test. But no, we or still running at no test no tell. In fact healthcare workers who are showing symptoms are still being denied if they aren't symptomatic enough.

Our governor is using those several thousand test a week, on totally symptom-free people in rural counties. Which dropped or symptomatic rate from 5% to 3%. She's calling it a survey.

She also shipped several of the rapid test to the state hotspot. This was after it was proven that the rapid test had a 48% false negative rate. Overnight the testing positive numbers in my area dropped.

Very interesting. .... they have all kinds of ways to try to manipulate percentages. I think DeSantis in Fl was hoping that if he tested more people the percentages would go down just because so many were being tested who probably weren't sick, but that's not how it turned out.

HD
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Heart, kidneys, pancreas: Scientists just starting to understand health effects of COVID-19
Jun 27, 2020

Scientists are only starting to grasp the vast array of health problems caused by the novel coronavirus, some of which may have lingering effects on patients and health systems for years to come, according to doctors and infectious disease experts.

Besides the respiratory issues that leave patients gasping for breath, the virus that causes COVID-19 attacks many organ systems, in some cases causing catastrophic damage.

“We thought this was only a respiratory virus. Turns out, it goes after the pancreas. It goes after the heart. It goes after the liver, the brain, the kidney and other organs. We didn’t appreciate that in the beginning,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.

In addition to respiratory distress, patients with COVID-19 can experience blood clotting disorders that can lead to strokes and extreme inflammation that attacks multiple organ systems. The virus can also cause neurological complications that range from headache, dizziness and loss of taste or smell to seizures and confusion.

And recovery can be slow, incomplete and costly, with a huge impact on quality of life.

The broad and diverse manifestations of COVID-19 are somewhat unique, said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

With influenza, people with underlying heart conditions are also at higher risk of complications, Khan said. What is surprising about this virus is the extent of the complications occurring outside the lungs.

Khan believes there will be a huge health care expenditure and burden for individuals who have survived COVID-19.

Patients who were in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator for weeks will need to spend extensive time in rehab to regain mobility and strength.

“It can take up to seven days for every one day that you’re hospitalized to recover that type of strength,” Khan said. “It’s harder the older you are, and you may never get back to the same level of function.”

While much of the focus has been on the minority of patients who experience severe disease, doctors increasingly are looking to the needs of patients who were not sick enough to require hospitalization, but are still suffering months after first becoming infected.

Studies are just getting underway to understand the long-term effects of infection, Jay Butler, deputy director of infectious diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters in a telephone briefing on Thursday.

“We hear anecdotal reports of people who have persistent fatigue, shortness of breath,” Butler said. “How long that will last is hard to say.”

While coronavirus symptoms typically resolve in two or three weeks, an estimated 1 in 10 experience prolonged symptoms, Dr. Helen Salisbury of the University of Oxford wrote in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday.

Salisbury said many of her patients have normal chest X-rays and no sign of inflammation, but they are still not back to normal.

“If you previously ran 5k three times a week and now feel breathless after a single flight of stairs, or if you cough incessantly and are too exhausted to return to work, then the fear that you may never regain your previous health is very real,” she wrote.

Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious diseases at Northwestern Medicine, reviewed current scientific literature and found about half of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 had neurological complications, such as dizziness, decreased alertness, difficulty concentrating, disorders of smell and taste, seizures, strokes, weakness and muscle pain.

Koralnik, whose findings were published in the Annals of Neurology, has started an outpatient clinic for COVID-19 patients to study whether these neurological problems are temporary or permanent.

Khan sees parallels with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Much of the early focus was on deaths.

“In recent years, we’ve been very focused on the cardiovascular complications of HIV survivorship,” Khan said.

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Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Severe COVID-19 can damage the brain, preliminary study finds
Jun 26, 2020

LONDON – A preliminary study of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has found the disease can damage the brain, causing complications such as stroke, inflammation, psychosis and dementia-like symptoms in some severe cases.

The findings are the first detailed look at a range of neurological complications of COVID-19, the researchers said, and underline a need for larger studies to find the mechanisms behind them and assist the search for treatments.

“This (is) an important snapshot of the brain-related complications of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients. It is critically important that we continue to collect this information to really understand this virus fully,” said Sarah Pett, a University College London professor who co-led the work.

The study, published in the Lancet Psychiatry journal on Thursday, looked in detail at 125 cases from across the U.K. Co-lead researcher Benedict Michael, from Liverpool University, said it was important to note that it focused on severe cases.

Data was collected between April 2 and April 26 — when the disease was spreading exponentially in the U.K.

The most common brain complication seen was stroke, which was reported in 77 of 125 patients. Of these, most were in patients over 60, and most were caused by a blood clot in the brain, known as an ischaemic stroke.

The study also found that 39 of the 125 patients showed signs of confusion or changes in behavior reflecting an altered mental state. Of these, nine had unspecified brain dysfunction, known as encephalopathy, and seven had inflammation of the brain, or encephalitis.

Michael said the findings were an important early step towards defining COVID-19’s effect on the brain. “We now need detailed studies to understand the possible biological mechanisms … so we can explore potential treatments,” he said.

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Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

5 possible reasons why coronavirus hospital mortality rates may be declining
June 27 2020 1:27 p.m.

New research from Italy published in Pathogens and Global Health found the mortality rate of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 declined from 24 percent in March to just 2 percent in May at a hospital in Milan. In even more positive news, there wasn't a significant change in the patients' age.

New research from Italy: Hospital mortality rates are falling https://t.co/ZqKCr5fnc8
Between March and May, the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients admitted to hospital in Milan declined from 24% to 2%—"without significant changes in patients’ age." pic.twitter.com/K2K3PTR3JJ
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) June 27, 2020

One reason is likely that doctors have improved at treating the novel and confounding disease over time. The study mentions that treatments specifically targeting issues associated with COVID-19 like hyper-inflammation and microvascular thrombosis may have played a big role. Another explanation is that Italy's lockdown measures were effective at curbing the spread of the virus, which subsequently helped lessen the strain on the health-care system.

The study also proposes that co-infections of other respiratory viruses like the flu and air pollution have both decreased in the timeframe, leading to fewer severe cases. Finally, there's a small chance that a viral mutation is a factor, although scientists have largely dismissed the notion that the virus has been or will be significantly altered enough to result in a change in lethality for better or worse anytime soon.

As always, it's important to remember this is just one study and not a definitive statement, but it's worth following especially as the United States continues to grapple with the pandemic. Read the full study here. Tim O'Donnell

In the US, new COVID cases have spiked to all-time highs, but deaths have not. Why?
Well, there's a lag between confirmed cases and deaths, we're testing more, and the new cases seem to be younger.
But it's also possible that this is partly about better hospital outcomes.
- Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) June 27, 2020

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Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Virus Fatality Picture Is Obscured by Ultimate Lagging Indicator
Robert Langreth, Emma Court, Michelle Cortez
June 26, 2020, 5:49 PM

The Trump administration has highlighted an apparent disconnect between rising cases and declining mortality as proof the Covid-19 pandemic is under control.

“Fatalities are declining all across the country,” Vice President Mike Pence said at a coronavirus task-force briefing in Washington on Friday. He called the rise in new cases in people under 35 “very encouraging news,” saying they aren’t as likely to die from Covid-19.

However, the mismatch appears to be more an anomaly caused by quirks in how deaths data is collected and reported, along with a greater number of younger people catching the contagion, than a sign the coronavirus is becoming less lethal or easier to treat.

Nationally, the death toll is rising by around 600 to 700 a day, even as record numbers of new cases were diagnosed this week. That’s far below the height of the pandemic when more than 2,500 deaths were reported some days. Medical experts say it’s too soon to know for sure that deaths are still declining.

That disparity has health experts and the public asking questions: Is it because those getting sick now are younger than those who fell ill in March and April? Are we getting smarter about the use of ventilators? Are new drugs like Gilead Sciences Inc.'s remdesivir helping? Are cases milder because of warm weather?

“The uncertainty right now is as high as it has ever been since the very scary early days in mid-March,” said James Scott, a professor of data science at the University of Texas in Austin. He’s part of a University of Texas modeling team that predicts that deaths will tick up in July.

Complicating matters, there can be a weeks-long lag in many states between when someone dies and when that’s included in the daily reports. That means deaths could be on the rise days before states say they are.

It’s not just the fatality statistics that can’t be relied on completely: Basic information such as daily new Covid-19 related hospitalizations isn’t reported by many states, among other key data points that could help scientists predict which direction the death tolls are heading.

“We have a very heterogeneous pandemic experiment right now -- different parts of the country and different states are experiencing very different things,” said Jeffery Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “It is kind of a paradox.”

So while it’s too early to see what the recent surge’s death toll will be, if the exponential growth in cases continues unabated, increased deaths are all but inevitable.

“This particular part of the epidemic is just taking off, and we’re still on the runway,” said Thomas Giordano, chief of infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “The last thing to happen is the death. We just aren’t that far along with this one yet.”

Time Lag

Deaths are the ultimate lagging indicator, especially with Covid-19. It takes several weeks after a diagnosis for a patient to die. Then it takes more time, sometimes weeks, for doctors to fill out death certificates and health officials to adjudicate the deaths. Only then are they finally added to the official state tally.

“You can’t look at deaths as an indicator of where the outbreak is at this particular period of time,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Waiting for data to roll in requires “patience that is hard to muster during a crisis,” said Joe Gerald, an associate professor of public health policy and management at the University of Arizona. But “if you want reliable, complete data, you have to wait for it, especially on deaths.”

In Arizona, the time between diagnosis and death from Covid-19 now is about 14 or 15 days, up from four or five days early in the pandemic. Then the state health department must verify the death, so there can be a three-plus week lag between a new case and a fatality being reported, Gerald said.

Half of the deaths reported for the week ending June 14 were more than a week old, so he expects it to take at least another week before he can reach any conclusions about the mortality rate for this surge. A modest bump could be expected with younger patients being hospitalized at a higher rate of hospitalization, Gerald said.

Younger Age

Roughly 80% of deaths have been people 65 and older, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than 10% have been under 45. That’s led people like Pence to predict there won’t be many deaths as the virus is now infecting more younger adults.

In Florida, where reported cases shot up 7.8% Friday while deaths rose 1.2%, the median age of patients dropped to 37 in mid-June from over 60 in mid-March. Deaths have plateaued due to a “drastic shift in the age of people being infected,” said Jill Roberts, an associate professor at the University of South Florida College of Public Health who specializes in emerging diseases. “The healthy people who are less likely to suffer severe consequences are accounting for the majority of cases.”

She blamed it in part on the crowds at reopened bars. “Inside, where nobody is wearing masks, where people are maybe yelling or screaming over music, all those things create the perfect scenario” for viral spread.

On Friday, the state banned drinking alcohol in bars.

But if elderly people being more cautious and younger people less so drove down the average age of patients, it would generate fewer hospitalizations. So far, they’re rising in Florida, suggesting this isn’t the only thing going on.

The big danger is that as more younger people get infected, it will spread to the elderly. That’s especially true in Florida, where one in five residents are over 65. Did younger Floridians, with asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic cases, visit their parents or grandparents on Father’s Day and infect them?

“My biggest concern is what happens two weeks from now,” Roberts said. “Individuals who are seeing spiking cases right now, they could infect other people. And if they infect other people, we’re going to see hospitalizations and deaths follow.”

Improved Care

Better treatments could also explain the gap. Remdesivir, approved on an emergency basis in May, helps hospitalized patients recover about four days faster. One study suggests it may also lower the death rate. It’s now used in hospitals alongside convalescent plasma, a type of blood that’s collected from survivors that may contain virus-fighting antibodies. And just this month, the steroid dexamethasone was shown to keep those on ventilators alive in a trial led by the University of Oxford.

As doctors have learned more about the disease, they’ve discovered better strategies. Severely ill patients have been found to benefit from being prone on their side or stomach.

“We have learned best practices from around the world, and there’s been a real global sharing around areas that have faced this epidemic in large portions and what they’ve learned,” said Bill McKeon, president and chief executive officer of Houston-based Texas Medical Center, which has seen its intensive-care unit beds fill up as cases rise.

Milder Summer Cases or Weakened Virus

There’s also the possibility that cases may be getting milder, either due to changes in transmissibility in warmer weather, or changes in the virus itself. The warm weather theory holds that hot, humid temperatures cause viral particles to drop to the ground faster.

Most of the attention has focused on whether the heat will reduce the total number of cases. But a subtler effect of weather may be that many patients are initially infected with a lower dose of the virus, leading to less severe symptoms, says David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Some researchers also think Covid-19 may be getting less potent as it replicates. The hypothesis has gained wide attention since it was put forth by Italian doctors a few weeks ago, but the claims are highly controversial.

The World Health Organization has disputed that the virus has mutated in any significant way.

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Coronavirus updates: US tops 2.5 million confirmed cases
The U.S. coronavirus death toll has surpassed 125,000.

By Ella Torres, Christina Carrega, William Mansell and Justin Doom
June 27, 2020, 6:32 PM

A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed more than 494,000 people worldwide.

Over 9.8 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some governments are hiding the scope of their nations' outbreaks.

The United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 2.5 million diagnosed cases and at least 125,039 deaths.

Here's how the news is developing today. All times Eastern. Please refresh this page for updates

6 p.m.: Confirmed cases in US top 2.5 million


At least 2,501,244 Americans have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally.

Earlier on Saturday, the U.S. death toll reached 125,169, according to Johns Hopkins.

Florida, Georgia, Nevada and South Carolina all reported record-high numbers of daily cases.


4:30 p.m.: Texas reports 5th straight day of 5,000 cases


Texas, in reporting the state's fifth straight day of at least 5,000 new COVID-19 cases, now has recorded 143,371 positive cases.

There have been 2,366 fatalities statewide and 5,523 people hospitalized, with the testing positivity rate rising to nearly 13.3%.


3:14 p.m.: Pence's campaign events postponed in Florida, Arizona

Vice President Mike Pence's campaign events in Arizona and Florida this coming week have been postponed "out of an abundance of caution," a Trump campaign official confirmed to ABC News.

Both states are seeing an increase in rates of positivity, hospitalizations, and deaths, according to an ABC News analysis.

The vice president was scheduled to continue his "Faith in America" tour in Tucson, Arizona, on Tuesday and Sarasota, Florida, on Thursday.


2:56 p.m.: 85 people test positive after contracting virus at restaurant

At least 85 people have tested positive for COVID-19 after contracting the virus at a restaurant in Michigan, officials said.

The Ingham County Health Department told ABC News that they have "85 cases associated with Harper’s Restaurant & Brew Pub in East Lansing. Of those 85, five are secondary, which means they were in close contact with someone who went to Harper’s, but did not go themselves."

Those who have tested positive have been asked to self-quarantine. However, officials warned anyone who was at the establishment between June 12 to June 20 to also self-quarantine.

On Monday, the restaurant announced it would close the restaurant to install air purifying technology in the HVAC system.


2:20 p.m.: South Carolina reports highest number of new COVID cases

South Carolina recorded its single highest number of new COVID-19 cases, with 1,599 new confirmed cases, according to the state's department of health.

The previous high was 1,293.

There were also 15 new confirmed deaths and two probable deaths related to COVID-19.

The total number of confirmed cases now stands at 31,850, while confirmed deaths reached 707. There are 89 probable cases and four probable deaths.


11:12 a.m.: NY health officials investigating possible spread at high school graduation

New York's Department of Health will investigate a potential COVID-19 spread at a high school graduation ceremony in Westchester County, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office.

Five people who attended the ceremony have tested positive for the virus, the governor's office said. The first person to test positive was someone who had recently traveled to Florida.

The four others then had contact with that person and subsequently tested positive. A person who had recently traveled to Florida attended the ceremony and then began showing symptoms, the governor's office said. That person then tested positive for the virus.

"We're prepared to do the aggressive testing and contact tracing required to slow and ultimately control any potential clusters of new cases like the one in Westchester County," Cuomo said in a statement.

He also said he was issuing an executive order that says any New York employee who voluntarily travels to a high-risk state will not be eligible for the COVID protections created under paid sick leave.

The graduation was for Horace Greeley High School and was a drive-in ceremony on June 20.

All the individuals who have tested positive are self-isolating, the governor's office said.

However, one of the people who tested positive also attended a "Field Night" event on June 20, which was also attended by juniors and seniors and students from surrounding school districts.

Cuomo's office recommended anyone who attended that event or any events associated with graduation go into quarantine and remain there until July 5.


10:59 a.m.: More than 9,600 new cases in Florida

The Florida Department of Health reported a total of 132,545 cases of COVID-19, marking an additional 9,636 new positive cases.

The rise marks a one-day record for Florida.

There were 76,129 tests conducted Friday, with a 12.7% positivity rate, according to the health department.

The rise in cases comes as Miami-Dade County announced that it's closing all beaches for the July 4 holiday weekend.


7:02 a.m.: Reopen Maryland co-founder tests positive

The co-founder of ReOpen Maryland, who organized rallies to pressure Gov. Larry Hogan to lift the state's stay-at-home order, said he has tested positive for COVID-19.

Tim Walters, a former Republican candidate for the General Assembly, said that he had a dry cough for months but it recently worsened. He said he then began to experience an excruciating headache, a fever and the inability to focus with one of his eyes, which led to vertigo.

Walters, 53, a diabetic who has had mini-strokes, said he went to an emergency room Monday and was diagnosed with the virus.

“Here I am months after not wearing a mask at rallies, churches and so on, and so it’s funny how capricious this thing is,” he said in a Facebook video.

Walters said he doesn't plan to provide health officials with the people he's had close contact with for the contact tracing program.


5:40 a.m.: HHS 'actively working' on the idea of group testing

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to ABC News Friday night that the agency is pushing the idea of “pooling” tests, which is when officials pull together samples from large groups and test them at once to see if individual testing is needed.

The White House coronavirus task force is actively talking about trying to push it at the local level as a surveillance tool. The primary reason is because so many people are carrying the virus without symptoms.

“HHS is actively working with a number of collaborators to validate pooling so that it can be used generally as a technique,” HHS said in a statement to ABC News.

“Pooling is a public health surveillance strategy in which samples from more than one person are 'pooled' in the same test," Adm. Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary of HHS put in charge of coordinating testing, said. "Depending on the underlying prevalence of the disease, this can be extremely beneficial. For example, if five samples are pooled into a single test, and the test is negative, then all five individuals are negative."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said Friday test pooling might be needed because the current testing strategy of contact tracing hasn't been working.

One issue with contact tracing for COVID-19, Fauci said, is that there are too many asymptomatic people, which means you can't identify them if they don't have symptoms. Fauci also said since many people don't trust the government, people are not answering contact tracing calls.


4:53 a.m.: Miami set to close beaches


As the number of coronavirus cases in the state of Florida continues to increase, Miami-Dade County announced that it's closing all beaches for the July 4 holiday weekend.

Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced he will be signing an executive order Saturday to close all beaches starting July 3 through at least July 7, though he said that could be extended "if conditions do not improve and people do not follow New Normal rules requiring masks to be worn always inside commercial establishments and outdoors when social distancing of at least 6 feet is not possible."

Particularly worrisome in the recent spikes, the mayor said, is the area is seeing a higher hospitalization rate with its younger population.

"As we continue to see more COVID-19 positive test results among young adults and rising hospitalizations, I have decided that the only prudent thing to do to tamp down this recent uptick is to crack down on recreational activities that put our overall community at higher risk," Gimenez said in a statement Friday.

In his order, the mayor is also banning any gatherings of more than 50 people and is closing all parks and beaches to limit fireworks viewing. He said fireworks displays must be viewed from one’s home or parked vehicle.

"After all the success we have had tamping down the COVID-19 curve, we cannot turn back and overload our hospitals, putting our doctors and nurses at greater risk with more emergency room cases," Gimenez said Friday. "Everyone must do their part and follow the rules."

Florida is one of several states across the U.S. to recently see a significant increase in diagnosed cases of COVID-19. Its coronavirus positivity rate jumped to 13% Friday, according to new numbers from the Florida Department of Health.

Florida has more than 122,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19, with at least 3,366 deaths.

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Safer reopening will require millions more Covid-19 tests per day. One solution: ‘pool testing’
By Andrew Joseph
June 26, 2020

If the country wants to crank up its Covid-19 testing capacity into the millions — the range that could be required for safer reopenings of businesses and universities — experts say it’s time to ramp up a technique known as “pool testing.”

It’s a simple construct: combine — or pool — samples from multiple people and test them as a group for the coronavirus. It’s a way to dramatically and efficiently increase volume, to churn through what you expect to be a lot of negative samples at a fast clip.

“Pooling would give us the capacity to go from a half a million tests a day to potentially 5 million individuals tested per day,” Deborah Birx, who is helping lead the White House’s coronavirus response, told an American Society for Microbiology virtual conference this week.

Despite progress after a notoriously fumbled rollout, the U.S. testing landscape continues to face challenges. There remain shortages of swabs and reagents; machines can’t keep up with demand as local outbreaks increase; and some places lack adequate testing sites. Those will have to be addressed in order for testing capacity to expand to the levels experts say is necessary to allow people to return to work and keep the virus at bay.

Pool testing isn’t meant to verify whether or not a person has Covid-19, the way an individual diagnostic test does.

Rather, it’s part of a broader disease surveillance strategy, one that allows for regular screening of people who are not experiencing Covid-19 symptoms. Testing asymptomatic people is important because a large portion of people with the coronavirus either show no symptoms or take a few days to start feeling sick, but they can still spread the virus.

Take a warehouse with 100 employees. Every so often (experts are still weighing how frequently this testing should occur), the company could test the staff, and instead of running 100 separate analyses, it could group 10 samples into a pool and only run 10 analyses.

“You could test everyone as they walk into the door,” said Paul Sax, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has written about the challenges of returning to work during the pandemic.

If one of those pools came back positive, those 10 employees could be retested individually to see who was infected and could remain out of work in the interim. The 90 other employees, in the pools that tested negative, wouldn’t need to be retested. The goal would be to try to detect a case before the person potentially spread the coronavirus to others. Scientists are increasingly finding that such large-scale superspreading events at workplaces, restaurants and bars, and places of worship are driving a large amount of transmission.

Identifying asymptomatic and presymptomatic people could also enable a more aggressive contact tracing approach, Birx said in her talk this week.

Beyond workplaces and universities, regularly testing groups of people in a given community could also provide a harbinger of increased spread if suddenly a higher portion of pools came back positive. That could serve as an early signal to local officials that they may need to increase distancing strategies, before hospitalizations started to increase.

“It allows you to test more frequently in a population that may have a low prevalence of disease,” said Benjamin Pinsky, the medical director of Stanford’s Clinical Virology Laboratory, who has led pooling studies for the coronavirus. “That would allow you to test a lot of negatives, but also identify individuals who are then infected, before they develop symptoms.”

As Pinsky noted, pooling only makes sense in places with low rates of Covid-19 where you expect the large majority of tests to be negative; otherwise, too many of the pools would come back positive for it to work as a useful surveillance tool.

“You wouldn’t want to be doing it right now in Texas, but you could do it in Massachusetts,” Sax said. Texas this week has been reporting record levels of new cases — several thousand each day; Massachusetts, meanwhile, reported 226 on Thursday and has been trending downward.

Pool testing relies on the same PCR technology as individual diagnostic tests. The number of people’s samples that can be grouped together depends on which machine is running the test, but scientists say that up to 10 samples could be pooled in some cases. (These are different from the rapid, point-of-care tests that researchers hope to roll out in the coming months. Results from pool testing could still take hours to days, depending on the demand on local labs.)

For all the advantages in efficiency that pooling offers, there is a downside: It increases the risk of a false negative. That is, if someone does have the virus, the viral level in that individual sample will be diluted when combined with other samples, perhaps to the point where the machine can no longer detect it.

“The goal is to increase the capacity of testing in a relatively straightforward fashion,” Pinsky said. “The caveat is that by pooling the sample, you’re going to reduce the sensitivity of the test.”

One way to compensate for that risk of false negatives is to conduct testing frequently, experts say.

The Food and Drug Administration recently released guidance describing what labs need to do to validate their pooling strategies and is sponsoring its own validation studies, Brett Giroir, an assistant health secretary who has served as the Trump administration’s point person for testing, said on a call with reporters this week.

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Miami-Area Beaches To Shut Down Again Amid Coronavirus Surge
Miami-Dade county's mayor announced he plans to shut down Miami-area beaches during the upcoming July 4 holiday weekend and possibly longer.

By Paul Scicchitano
Jun 26, 2020 10:15 pm ET | Updated Jun 26, 2020 11:04 pm ET

MIAMI, FL — Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced late Friday night he plans to shut down Miami-area beaches during the upcoming July 4 holiday weekend and possibly longer in response to the recent surge in coronavirus cases.

"After consulting with our county's public health experts, I will be signing an emergency order on Saturday to close all beaches in Miami-Dade County starting Friday, July 3, and ending Tuesday, July 7," the mayor said in a statement released Friday night.

Florida experienced its largest one-day coronavirus spike by far on Friday with 8,942 new cases and state officials ordered all consumption of on-premises alcohol suspended at bars statewide.

"As we continue to see more COVID-19 positive test results among young adults and rising hospitalizations, I have decided that the only prudent thing to do to tamp down this recent uptick is to crack down on recreational activities that put our overall community at higher risk," Gimenez said.

He said his order will also ban any gatherings, including parades of more than 50 people throughout the country for whatever reason between July 3 to 7. He said masks and social distancing will be required with a maximum of five groups of no more than 10 people each.

"The Miami-Dade County Police Department will continue to be out in force this weekend to close establishments that are flaunting the social distancing and masks rules and capacity limits," Gimenez said. "Violators face a second-degree criminal penalty of up to $500 and 180 days in jail."

The mayor of Florida's most populous county said all parks and beaches will also be closed to the public for viewing fireworks in all cities and unincorporated areas of the county.

"Fireworks displays must be viewed from one's home or parked vehicle," he said.

Miami-area beaches sprang back to life on June 10 after being shut down since March to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

The mayor said county officials are training strategic urban response to guideline education teams to reach out to residents in areas most significantly affected by the virus with testing information, masks and hand sanitizer.

"This new order will be targeting those who are being most irresponsible and endangering our community's health and our economic recovery," Gimenez added.

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Texas mayor orders curfew, as states hard-hit by COVID-19 backtrack on reopening
By Gary McWilliams (Reuters)
Saturday, 27 June 2020 14:45 GMT

HOUSTON, June 27 (Reuters) - A small city on the outskirts of Houston, Texas has instituted a curfew starting Saturday night due to surging cases of the novel coronavirus, the latest move by officials in some southern and western states to backtrack on their reopening plans.

The mayor of Galena Park, a community of 10,000 people east of Houston, said she was heeding a warning from Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who on Friday raised the public threat level to its most severe, a sign people should shelter at home.

"It is crucial to continue to practice good hygiene, stay home as much as possible, avoid unnecessary trips, gatherings, and wear a face-covering at all times when you leave your home," Mayor Esmeralda Moya said in a statement late on Friday.

Galena Park's curfew will run from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily.

The United States recorded more than 45,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, the largest single-day increase of the pandemic, according to a Reuters tally, bringing the total number of Americans who have tested positive to at least 2.48 million. COVID-19 is the illness caused by the coronavirus.

The new record for positive COVID-19 tests came as Texas and other states at the center of a new surge in infections took steps back from efforts to ease restrictions on businesses, threatening a hoped-for economic recovery and jobs.

In a reversal of his early moves to relax restrictions, Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Friday ordered bars across the state to close and required restaurants to limit indoor seating capacity to 50%. Florida, another state that reopened its economy relatively quickly, told bar owners in the state to immediately stop serving alcohol on their premises.

Florida issued its new rules after recording 8,942 new cases on Friday, eclipsing the state's one-day record of 5,511 reached on June 24.

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US 'likely' to see shortage of pharmaceutical drugs if coronavirus outbreak continues, intelligence report finds
A decrease in generic drugs would hurt low-income and unemployed Americans.

By Olivia Rubin and Josh Margolin
June 27, 2020, 10:04 AM

With coronavirus outbreaks continuing to spread across the world, the United States is "likely" to see a shortage of generic pharmaceutical drugs, according to a new federal intelligence report obtained by ABC News.

The report, prepared by the Department of Homeland Security and distributed Thursday to law enforcement and government agencies around the country, warned that the U.S. is already seeing shortages of more than 200 drugs and medical supplies due to strains on the supply chain caused by international shutdowns early on in the pandemic.

Those shortages would only be made worse should unchecked outbreaks force yet another round of widespread shutdowns, the analysts concluded, further straining the system in a way that many U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies would be "unable to quickly offset."

"Chinese factories that produce raw ingredients for common antibiotics closed for weeks as of March and India's lockdown extended until the end of May," the report said, citing news reports. "France, Germany, and China have also considered re-imposing lockdown measures as COVID-19 cases have begun to re-emerge."

The warning comes as officials in some states have already halted some reopening plans or closed back down as coronavirus cases rise in at least 29 states, according to an ABC News analysis. Florida reported just under 9,000 new cases on Friday, the highest number since the start of the pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease official, made what he called a "plea" to the country on Friday to understand that the outbreaks, which are mainly in the South and West, could potentially spread to the entire country.

"If we don't extinguish the outbreak, sooner or later, even ones that are doing well are going to be vulnerable to the spread," Fauci said. "So we need to take that into account because we are all in it together, and the only way we're going to end it is by ending it together."

Vice President Mike Pence, however, said the country has made "truly remarkable progress" in moving forward and commended "all 50 states in this country are opening up safely and responsibly" before acknowledging some increases.

Dr. Jay Bhatt, former medical chief at the American Hospital Association, called the report "extremely concerning" -- especially in the middle of a pandemic.

"Accessing affordable generic medications for vulnerable populations can mean the difference between a good outcome and a bad outcome," said Bhatt, an ABC News contributor. "As infections and hospitalizations rise, our patients can't endure shortages from lifesaving medications. We have to apply our lessons from several months ago so we don't end up in dire straits."

The report further warned drug shortages would have a disproportionate effect on low-income Americans.

A decrease in generic pharmaceuticals, which are significantly less expensive than their brand-name counterparts, would "most risk the health of low-income and unemployed Americans," who have already been hard hit by the economic hardships of the pandemic, the report found.

"Individuals who cannot afford generic pharmaceuticals are unlikely to switch to brand-name prescriptions because they can cost as much as 95 percent more," the report said, citing data from a U.S. pharmaceutical research company and a Food and Drug Administration study.

"I am worried about underserved communities and safety net hospitals without significant resources in urban and rural communities as well," Bhatt said. "I hope hospitals and states not facing shortages can share with those that are to meet the need."

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Florida, Arizona hit daily highs for COVID-19 cases
By Gary McWilliams and Nathan Layne (Reuters)
Saturday, 27 June 2020 16:16 GMT

HOUSTON, June 27 (Reuters) - Florida and Arizona recorded daily highs for cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, highlighting the worsening spread of the virus in several southern and western states, some of which are taking steps to roll back their reopening plans.

Florida on Saturday morning reported 9,585 new infections in the last 24 hours, a record for a second day, while Arizona recorded 3,591 new cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, matching its prior record on June 23.

The United States recorded more than 45,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, the largest single-day increase of the pandemic, according to a Reuters tally. More than 2.5 million Americans now have tested positive.

The surge in cases has been most pronounced in southern and western states like Florida and Texas, which are now taking steps to reinstate restrictions on businesses, threatening a hoped-for economic recovery and jobs.

The mayor of Galena Park, a community of 10,000 people east of Houston, said she was heeding a warning from Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who on Friday raised the public threat level to its most severe, a sign people should shelter at home.

"It is crucial to continue to practice good hygiene, stay home as much as possible, avoid unnecessary trips, gatherings, and wear a face-covering at all times when you leave your home," Mayor Esmeralda Moya said in a statement late on Friday.

Galena Park's curfew will run from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily.

In a reversal of his early moves to relax restrictions, Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Friday ordered bars across the state to close and required restaurants to limit indoor seating capacity to 50%. Florida, another state that reopened its economy relatively quickly, told bar owners in the state to immediately stop serving alcohol on their premises.

Earlier this week New York joined New Jersey and Connecticut in imposing a 14-day mandatory quarantines on travelers from states with high infection rates.

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The Latest: More virus cases in Seoul as new clusters emerge
By The Associated Press
yesterday

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has reported 51 more confirmed coronavirus cases as new clusters emerge in the densely populated Seoul area where people have been increasingly venturing out despite government warnings against complacency.

Thirty-five of the new cases are in the capital region, which is at the center of a COVID-19 resurgence threatening to erase earlier gains against the virus.

Authorities are struggling to trace contacts and predict infection routes as new clusters pop up. Hundreds of infections have been linked to nightspots, church gatherings, restaurants and low-income workers who couldn’t afford to stay home.

Officials are resisting calls to reimpose stronger social distancing guidelines, concerned about hurting the economy.

HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:


BEIJING — China has reported an uptick in new coronavirus cases a day after national health authorities said they expected an outbreak in Beijing to be brought under control soon.

The National Health Commission said Saturday that 21 more cases had been confirmed nationwide in the latest 24-hour period, including 17 in the nation’s capital.

City officials have temporarily shut a huge wholesale food market where the virus spread widely, re-closed schools and locked down some neighborhoods. Anyone leaving Beijing is required to have a negative virus test result within the previous seven days. Many Chinese are traveling during a four-day holiday weekend that ends Sunday.

China has reported 83,483 cases and 4,634 deaths in the pandemic. It does not include in the numbers people who test positive but don’t show symptoms.

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CANBERRA, Australia — Australian health officials are expecting more cases of COVID-19 as hundreds of nationals return from overseas to begin mandatory quarantine.

About 300 people are due to arrive in Adelaide this weekend from Mumbai, India, while hundreds are expected to follow from South America and Indonesia.

People in hotel quarantine will be tested for the coronavirus at the start and end of their 14-day isolation.

South Australia state Health Minister Stephen Wade says he is preparing for about 5% to 10% of returnees being infected, as was the case when people arrived from Indonesia in other states.

Melbourne reported 30 new cases Friday, continuing a run of double-digit increases that has more than tripled Victoria state’s active cases to 183 in just over a week.

In all, Australia has had 104 COVID-19 deaths and nearly 7,600 confirmed cases.

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AUSTIN, Texas — Texas has surpassed 5,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients for the first time as Gov. Greg Abbott continues a dramatic retreat in his aggressive reopening of America’s second-biggest state.

In Houston, county officials Friday elevated a public threat warning system to the highest level. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said “We never brought the curve all the way down. We only flattened it.”

Hospitalizations in Texas, reported by state health officials, have now skyrocketed more than threefold over the past month. New records are set daily, and Abbott has brought back a ban on elective surgeries to free up beds.

His latest orders shuttered bars indefinitely and ordered restaurants dining rooms to scale back on seating customers.

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RANCHO CORDOVA, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday that he wants an agricultural Southern California county to reimpose stay-home orders amid a surge in positive coronavirus tests there and through much of the state.

Imperial County, with a population of 175,000 people on the state’s border with Mexico, has been the slowest in the state to reopen amid continued high positivity rates, which have averaged 23% in the last week, compared with 5.7% statewide.

The Imperial Valley, which provides many of the vegetables in U.S. supermarkets in the winter, lies across the border from Mexicali, a sprawling industrial city of 1 million people that has enormous influence on its economy and culture.

Newsom said San Francisco is also pausing plans to reopen businesses that were expected to open Monday, such as hair salons, museums and outdoor bars.

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NEW YORK — A federal judge has blocked New York state from enforcing coronavirus restrictions limiting indoor religious gatherings to 25% capacity when other types of gatherings are limited to 50%.

Judge Gary Sharpe acted Friday to enjoin Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Attorney General Letitia James from enforcing some of the capacity restrictions put in place by executive order to contain the spread of the virus.

A spokesperson for Cuomo said the governor’s office will review the decision. A spokesperson for the New York City law department said city lawyers would review the ruling as well.

—-

NEW ORLEANS -- The number of reported COVID-19 cases in Louisiana took another large one-day jump, increasing Friday by more than 1,300 as the number of people hospitalized with the disease caused by the new coronavirus continued upward.

The state reported a total of 54,769 confirmed cases as of midday. The death toll was 3,077, up by 26 from Thursday.

Some of the growth in known case numbers can be attributed to increased testing. However, the number of people sick enough to be hospitalized — considered a key indicator that the virus is spreading — went up to 700. The figure is down from nearly 2,000 in April but up from a low of 542 on June 13.

The increasing numbers led Gov. John Bel Edwards this week to delay plans to further lift restrictions on public gatherings and some business activity. Edwards has promised stepped up enforcement on businesses that aren’t complying with virus-related restrictions on capacity and requirements that employees dealing with the public wear masks.

Friday marked Louisiana’s second one-day spike of more than 1,300 this week.

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida banned alcohol consumption at its bars after its daily confirmed coronavirus cases neared 9,000, almost double the previous record set just two days ago.

The Florida agency that governs bars announced the ban on Twitter, minutes after the Department of Health reported 8,942 new confirmed cases, topping the previous record of 5,500 set Wednesday.

More than 24,000 cases have been reported since Saturday, more than a fifth of the 111,724 cases confirmed since March 1. The department had not updated its death total, which still stood at 3,327.

The seven-day average for positive tests dropped slightly to 13.4%, down 1 percentage point from Thursday but still triple the rate of 3.8% of June 1. State officials have attributed much of the new outbreak to young adults flocking to bars after they reopened about a month ago.

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UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations is marking its 75th anniversary with a scaled-down event because of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of many challenges a deeply divided world must tackle along with poverty, inequality, discrimination and unending wars.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Friday’s virtual commemoration of the signing of the U.N. Charter that “global pressures are spiraling up” and “today’s realities are as forbidding as ever.”

He said people continue to lose trust in political establishments and has spoken of rising populism threatening multilateralism and denounced xenophobia, racism and intolerance.

“Today’s marches against racism were preceded by widespread protests against inequality, discrimination, corruption and lack of opportunities all over the world – grievances that still need to be addressed, including with a renewed social contract,” he said in a video address.

“Meanwhile,” Guterres said, “other fundamental fragilities have only grown: the climate crisis, environmental degradation, cyberattacks, nuclear proliferation, a push-back on human rights and the risk of another pandemic.”

He stressed the urgent need for global cooperation.

“One virus ... has put us on our knees, and we have not been able to fight it effectively,” Guterres told reporters Thursday. “It’s spreading now everywhere. There was no control, no effective coordination among member states. We are divided in fighting COVID-19.”

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ROME — Italy registered 30 more deaths of people with coronavirus infections on Friday, with 16 of them in Lombardy, the northern region that continues to still have by far the highest daily tally of new confirmed cases.

According to Health Ministry data, the nation confirmed 259 new cases since Thursday, raising to 239,961 the number of known coronavirus infections since Italy’s outbreak began in late February.

Deaths now total 34,708. Authorities say the number of overall cases and deaths is certainly higher, since many without serious symptoms didn’t get tested, and many died in nursing homes without being tested.

Meanwhile, Premier Guiseppe Conte said Italy’s classrooms will be receiving students starting on Sept. 14, more than six months after the government’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 shuttered schools, forcing millions of students to have lessons remotely.

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Clemson football sees 14 new coronavirus cases; team total now 37
So far, 430 tests were administered, resulting in 47 positive cases, since student-athletes have returned to campus.

Paulina Dedaj
Published 4 hours ago

The number of coronavirus cases at Clemson University in South Carolina continues to rise, as the school announced 14 new cases on Friday.

The school said the new cases are all football players, bringing the team’s total to 37 since student-athletes returned to campus on June 8. So far, 430 tests were administered, resulting in 47 positive cases, three of which were staff members.

Other teams reportedly affected include men's basketball, volleyball, men's soccer and women's soccer.

More than half of those infected have already undergone a 10-day isolation period, while anyone who came in close contact with the infected was advised to self-quarantine for two weeks, the school said.

Dr. Joan Duwve, director of public health at the state's Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), said South Carolina is now a hot spot in the United States. On Friday, DHEC announced the second-highest number of virus cases since the outbreak began, with 1,273 cases.

The spike in cases among college athletes has raised serious concerns about whether fall sports can safely begin on time.

Morehouse College, an NCAA Division II school, announced Friday it has canceled its college football season along with the rest of the fall athletics schedule amid fears over coronavirus.

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Cuomo says NY to probe coronavirus outbreak in town after student visits Florida
The outbreak was tied to a high school student who visited a coronavirus hotspot in Florida.

By Robert Gearty
Published 11 hours ago

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took steps Saturday to squelch a coronavirus outbreak in the Westchester town where Bill and Hillary Clinton have a home.

Cuomo directed the state Department of Health to investigate the outbreak tied to a high school student who attended a June 20 high school graduation “drive-in” ceremony in Chappaqua after visiting Florida, where a new coronavirus surge has forced officials to shutter bars and beaches.

Cuomo said the student began showing symptoms after the event at the Chappaqua train station. Since the event, four others in attendance have tested positive for COVID-19.

“New Yorkers have controlled the spread of this unprecedented virus by being smart and disciplined, and our progress to-date is illustrated by the current low numbers of new cases and hospitalizations,” Cuomo said in a news release.

“But as we are seeing in other states who reopened quickly, the pandemic is far from over and we need [to] stay vigilant. We’re prepared to do the aggressive testing and contact tracing required to slow and ultimately control any potential clusters of new cases like the one in Westchester County," the governor added.

The infected Horace Greeley High School student also attended an unofficial graduation-related “Field Night” event on June 20 that was open to Horace Greeley juniors and seniors, and to students from surrounding school districts, Cuomo said.

The governor said those who attended the ceremony or other graduation events, which continued into June 21, were told to quarantine until July 5 and to expect a call from a contract tracer. Those sickened were self-isolating.

Horace Greeley held the graduation at the Chappaqua train station.

Chappaqua’s most famous residents, the Clintons, addressed the graduates via a video call.

Cuomo also said Saturday that he issued a new executive order that makes New York employees who voluntarily travel to high-risk states after June 25 ineligible for COVID-19 paid sick leave.

It wasn't immediately clear if the order was tied to the Horace Greeley graduation.

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'We opened too quickly': Texas becomes a model for inadequate Covid-19 response
State shuts down again after seven weeks with coronavirus cases soaring, after ignoring inconvenient data and fighting party-political turf wars

Tom Dart
Sat 27 Jun 2020 09.39 EDT | Last modified on Sat 27 Jun 2020 12.46 EDT

When Donald Trump welcomed Texas governor Greg Abbott to the White House in May, the US president hailed his fellow Republican as “one of the great governors” and lauded the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and predicted boom times ahead.

“When you look at the job he’s done in Texas, I rely on his judgment,” Trump said.

Seven weeks later, as the state once again closes businesses with virus cases skyrocketing and hospitals running out of intensive-care beds, Texas indeed appears to be a model: for how to squander a hopeful position through premature reopening, ignoring inconvenient data and fighting party-political turf wars.

On 7 May, the day of Abbott’s visit to Washington, the state reported 968 new cases among its 29 million residents. Daily numbers have soared this week – to 5,996 on 25 June – prompting doctors in Houston to sound the alarm.

On Friday, Abbott ordered a halt to Texan experiences such as bar-hopping along Austin’s raucous Sixth Street and floating lazily on an inner tube along a tree-lined river. Bars – which were open at up to 50% capacity – must close again, restaurants must reduce from 75% to 50% capacity and rafting operations must close.

Harris County, which includes Houston, moved to its highest Covid-19 threat level, signalling a “severe and uncontrolled” outbreak.

“The harsh truth is that our current infection rate is on pace to overwhelm our hospitals in the very near future,” Lina Hidalgo, the county judge, said at a press conference on Friday. “We opened too quickly.”

It was not her choice. Hidalgo, a Democrat, issued a mandatory mask order in April that was swiftly rendered toothless by Abbott, who said masks were strongly recommended but local authorities could not impose penalties for non-compliance.

Abbott said in the Oval Office that Texas’ phased reopening was based on data-driven strategies that would reduce the spread of the virus and enable the economy to recover. But he was cherry-picking numbers; the statistics did not meet federal criteria for relaxing a lockdown and Texas’ per-capita testing rate is among the worst in the nation.

That same day, Abbott diluted his own authority in order to mollify his conservative base. He eliminated jail as a punishment for violating his coronavirus restrictions, in a response to right-wing outrage over the imprisonment of a Dallas hair salon owner who had illegally reopened, refused to close again and was sentenced to seven days behind bars for contempt of court.

“Abbott tries to play the moderate but in reality he’s almost on a leash with the extreme right,” said Mustafa Tameez, a Houston-based Democratic strategist.

Tameez said that Abbott and Trump have sown confusion through mixed messages. “We’re not going to be able to make policy unless we root it in facts and science,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to make it through this on soundbites and political positioning.”

Republicans control Texas politics at state level largely thanks to support from white rural and suburban voters. But Democrats dominate in the biggest cities, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. This has long led to policy conflicts, with the state overriding municipalities on issues from banning plastic bags to immigration enforcement. Greg Casar, an Austin city council member, said that Abbott placed appeasing his core voters ahead of the health of urban communities of color.

“The governor at the very beginning of this chose to prioritize politics over public health,” Casar said, noting the state’s attempt to suspend abortions. He added that if cases continue to spike, Austin would probably pass laws that go beyond Abbott’s limits, risking a court fight.

“The overwhelming majority of our hospitalizations are Latino and of course black Austinites are being hospitalized at a disproportionate rate as well,” Casar said. “Generations of racist practice and policies are really exposing those communities at the moment no matter how much we try to mitigate it.” Austin was blocked earlier this month from implementing mandatory paid sick leave after a long-running legal challenge backed by leading Texas Republicans.

“Hopefully the leadership of this state now knows that they’ve got to put public health first, we’ve got to flatten the curve all the way,” said Royce West, a state senator in Dallas and Democratic US senate primary candidate. “Leaders in this state have got to look at whether or not what the model was in New York should be replicated here.” That would underline the dramatic reversal in fortunes from the spring, when New York was the national epicentre – but severe actions seem unlikely.

Dan Patrick, the 70-year-old Texas lieutenant governor, declared in March that he was willing to risk death to help the economy.

On Friday, Patrick dismissed the idea of a fresh lockdown and accused hospitals of providing misleading information. “Yes, positive rates are up, mostly young people, they’re not dying,” he told Fox News. “We’re still moving forward, with a slight pause.”

Nor is the pandemic causing state leaders to reconsider their most cherished policy goals. As hospitals scramble to find more ICU beds, Texas, the state with the highest number of uninsured people, filed a brief on Thursday urging the US supreme court to scrap the Affordable Care Act, which would threaten access to healthcare for millions.

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Texas' coronavirus surge is 'absolutely horrifying,' infectious disease doctor says
Peter Hotez expresses concern over the national response to the pandemic.

By Alexandra Kelley | June 26, 2020

Story at a glance

  • Peter Hotez, a doctor, believes Texas needs to enforce stronger social distancing measures to combat the rampant virus spread.
  • Texas, Arizona, and California are among the states experiencing a dramatic surge in new cases and hospitalizations.

Two days before Texas reported its highest daily case count since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist headquartered in Houston, urged the state to take action immediately as new cases ravaged the city — one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country.

On Tuesday, Texas reported a record-high daily new case count of 5,489. Hotez called the figure “horrifying” when speaking to reporters at The Houston Chronicle. Daily new case data on Wednesday and Thursday would rise even further, hitting 5,551 and 5,996, respectively.

“It's absolutely horrifying,” Hotez said. “I'm terribly upset about what I see happening. There were some predictive models out of Pennsylvania that actually showed this. This is why I didn't want Texas to open up as early [as] it did.”

Texas was one of the first states to reopen, having seen a relatively low case number at the onset of the pandemic. As community spread enabled the virus to travel, the state continued to reopen, despite public health officials offering stricter guidelines when doing so.

Now, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has officially paused reopening efforts until cases can be further controlled.

For Hotez, social distancing is the best and quickest solution immediately available.

“We have to implement a significant level of social distancing. Now, we have no choice. We have to take action before the weekend,” he said. “At the minimum, we must focus on the metropolitan areas –– Houston, San Antonio and Austin. We are already reaching a dire health crisis in Houston, and it will only get worse.”

His comments precede Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo moving the county’s pandemic status to the highest threat level, which will ban gatherings of more than 100 people. The judge is urging other counties to follow suit.

This is a necessary step although one that will also bring hardship. The sharp aggressive vertical rise in #COVID19 cases (that might soon double or triple), did not really leave any choice. It was a mater of saving lives. Many thanks to @LinaHidalgoTX Hidalgo urges Harris County, now at max threat level, to stay home
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) June 26, 2020

When asked what his message to Texans and all Americans would be regarding the dramatic rise in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, Hotez says that the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a failure.

"Nationally, this is one of the biggest public health failings in the history of the U.S. We have a vaccine that we are hoping to advance this time next year,” he said. “This pandemic is not getting better on its own. This is a public health crisis that we share with Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. We need to make an urgent plan to take action before the weekend."

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Tyson Foods says 371 additional workers have tested positive for COVID-19 at Missouri chicken plant
Harrison Keegan
Published 12:33 p.m. ET June 27, 2020 | Updated 12:36 p.m. ET June 27, 2020

Tyson Foods announced Friday that 371 employees at its chicken plant in Noel, Missouri had tested positive for COVID-19.

Friday's announcement confirms suspicions that the recent spike in McDonald County's reported COVID-19 numbers was the result of large-scale testing at the chicken plant.

In a news release, Tyson said it tested 1,142 employees from June 17 to June 19, and 291 tested positive for COVID-19. Of those 291, Tyson said 249 or 85% were asymptomatic or didn't show any symptoms.

Tyson said that an additional 80 Noel employees tested positive for COVID-19 in separate tests that were performed by their health care providers or the Department of Health and Senior Services.

The employees who tested positive for COVID-19 will receive paid leave during the quarantine period and can only return to work once they have met the criteria established by Tyson and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the release.

Tyson officials said they hope their large-scale testing and the discovery of these asymptomatic positive cases will help slow community spread of the virus.

The company has said it already had several protective measures in place at the Noel facility, like screening its employees for symptoms before every shift, requiring masks and instilling a variety of social distancing measures.

McDonald County, a sparsely populated area located in Missouri's extreme southwestern corner, caught national attention for its recent spike in COVID-19 cases.

The testing in Missouri follows news out of northwest Arkansas last week that 481 people at Tyson's Benton and Washington County facilities had tested positive for COVID-19. Of those 481 people, 95% were asymptomatic.

On Sunday, China's General Administration of Customs office announced it had suspended poultry imports from Tyson Foods facility in Springdale, Arkansas where hundreds have tested positive for the coronavirus.

There have been COVID-19 outbreaks at several meat processing plants across the country since March when the virus was characterized as a pandemic. In late April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at keeping the facilities open.

Tyson said it has done large-scale testing at more than 40 facilities across the country.

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This is from the NYT and it's a hit piece on Trump so take with a huge grain of salt, but I do think there may be some truth to the premise. Maybe not as much as the NYT hopes, but I do think there's some disillusionment. It doesn't mean these women won't ultimately vote for Trump though; that part is wishful thinking on the part of the NYT imho. I just hope they just don't stay home on election day instead of actually voting for Bide and that at the end of the day, they realize how important it is to go to the voting booth and vote Trump no matter how upset they may be. He will need every vote, so if you know of someone who voted Trump in 2016 who is thinking of sitting out 2020 or worse, voting Biden, you need to remind them of what is ultimately at stake.

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Working-class white women are turning on Trump
By Janet HookStaff Writer
June 26, 2020 9:48 AM

President Trump’s storied grip on the white working class is weakening among women, threatening both his reelection prospects and his party’s efforts to improve its standing with female voters.

While working-class men remain among Trump’s most loyal backers, defections among their wives, sisters and daughters are a big part of the president’s recent slide in opinion polls. That gives Democrat Joe Biden a shot at winning a swath of female voters that have long favored the GOP.

White working-class women heavily favored Trump in 2016. But recent polls show they are being driven away by his combative style, his erratic handling of the coronavirus crisis and his effort to quickly reopen the economy despite health risks.

“These women will be a real battleground,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who is working with the Biden campaign. “These women are also cross-pressured, because they are surrounded by Trump-supporting men in their lives.”

Four years ago, Trump won among white women of the working class — which pollsters typically define as people without a college degree — by a 27 percentage-point margin over the white woman at the head of the Democrats’ ticket, Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls. His edge over Biden in that group, however, was just six points in a Washington Post/ABC News poll in late May.

If those numbers hold, Brookings Institution scholar William Galston calculated it could cut two percentage points from Trump’s popular vote total and likely sink his reelection hopes.

“It took a near-miracle for him to win the electoral college with only 46% of the popular vote in 2016,” said Galston, who has advised six Democratic presidential campaigns. “With 44% of the vote, it would not be possible.”

Surveys in some battleground states have found Biden not just slashing Trump’s lead among working-class white women but overtaking him. In Wisconsin, where Trump beat Clinton among white women without college degrees by a 16-point margin, Marquette University Law School polling has found the president trailing Biden in eight of the nine polls conducted since August 2019.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have launched a major effort to recapture the support of women who were with him in 2016 but did not show up for Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. “They are called ‘downshifters,’” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in an interview with 19th, an online women’s news outlet. “They were with us, they lapsed and they are easier to get back.”

The goal is to hold on to women like Connie Logerfo, an 83-year-old retired baker in New York who is supporting Trump even though she is unhappy with his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, including his refusal to wear a face mask to halt the spread of the virus.

“I do like Trump; I think what he is doing is good,” said Logerfo. “But I think he should set a better example.”

It will be hard, however, for Trump to win over women like McKaelyn Henderson, a 22-year-old Republican in San Diego who liked his business policies, but lost patience with his Twitter tirades and what she believes is a cavalier attitude toward the pandemic.

“If he’s not taking issues like this seriously, what else is he not taking seriously?” said Henderson, who is considering voting for Biden or a third-party candidate. “Honestly, I think he needs to stay off Twitter and not let his emotions get the better of him.”

Republicans have suffered from a yawning gender gap for years. The party saw its share of the female electorate dwindle from 42% in 1994 to 37% in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump drew 42% of the female vote against Hillary Clinton, exit polls found, despite his big margin among white working-class women.

His election spawned a backlash among female voters that was evident with the massive Women’s March after his inauguration and helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018. Women voters favored Democratic candidates by 19 points.

“When you are losing a majority of the electorate by 19 points, that’s a pretty difficult position to be in,” said Republican pollster David Winston. “You just can’t do that.”

To try to recapture support among women, the RNC and the Trump campaign are using a sophisticated data operation to target the downshifters, inviting them to Women for Trump events and other new outreach programs that have gone online during the pandemic. The RNC said it has hosted 110 women’s events since the shutdown began.

“There are so many women who support Trump all over the country, but I feel like we don’t always get to meet each other,” Danielle D’Souza Gill, a conservative writer, said during an online event for young Republican women. “So sometimes it kind of feels like you’re the only one.”

One party official said the online format has helped in reaching working-class women who might otherwise struggle to get to an actual meeting because of child-care demands or because they are in a remote town.

A Trump campaign official shrugged off troubling poll findings and insisted that the president is “making strides” with women. The official pointed to an increase in the share of campaign donations that come from women. According to the campaign, roughly half of its fundraising comes from women compared with just over a quarter in 2016.

Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg found signs of waning support for Trump among working-class women long before the country was socked with the pandemic, economic crisis and civil unrest over police brutality against Black Americans.

In focus groups of working-class voters he conducted a year ago in Maine and Wisconsin, Greenberg found that the president had consolidated the support of men. But one-third of the women who had voted for Trump in 2016 said they were considering voting for someone else.

“They pulled off because his ego makes him impulsive and a bully, healthcare remains unaffordable, he’s dividing the country, he doesn’t care about the working class, only the 1 percent, he’s corrupt and out for himself and he doesn’t respect women,” said a report on the focus groups.

Since then, the coronavirus crisis and the resulting economic woes have driven a wedge between working-class men and women: Female voters are more critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, men are more eager to reopen the economy, polls show.

“If there were an example in politics of women coming from Venus and men coming from Mars, it’s now in the response to the COVID crisis,” said Lake, the Democratic pollster.

The Washington Post/ABC poll in May found that 71% of white men without a college degree approved of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with 51% of women without a degree.

Asked whether it was more important to control the virus or open the economy, 57% of white noncollege women gave priority to controlling the virus even if it hurts the economy, while 59% of working-class men said restarting the economy was more important, even if it hurt efforts to control the virus.

As most polls find that voters trust Trump more than Biden to handle the economy, the Biden team is trying to cut into that support by telling working-class women that Trump’s policies benefit the wealthy and big corporations, not small businesses and consumers.

“We are the party of the working people,” Rep. Haley Stevens said at a virtual Michigan Women for Biden event that drew 1,200 online participants. “Joe Biden — a man from Scranton [Pa.] — he knows what hard work is. He knows what the values of work means. That’s how we’re going to get out of this. He’s going to get us fair pay, he is going to protect women’s rights.”

Ruy Teixeira, a political demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress, said it might be hard for Trump to win back working-class women because they not only tend to favor more liberal policies than men, but they’ve also tired of Trump’s behavior.

“In 2016, maybe they weren’t yet sick of his style. They are pretty sick of it now,” said Teixeira. “What was keeping some of them in the Trump camp was the need to try something new. But women are more likely than the men to have concluded he’s a divider, not a uniter.”

With Trump struggling to hold on to the working-class women who voted for him, he surely won’t win back Republicans like Teresa Frey, 60, a Navy veteran in Lapeer, Mich., who voted for Clinton in 2016 and cannot imagine coming back into the party fold to vote for Trump.

Said Frey: “It’s the lump sum of his inability to focus on anything but the mirror.”

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Tiny antibodies found in ALPACAS could help suppress a second wave of coronavirus and allow countries to safely lift lockdown, researchers claim
By Amelia Wynne
Published: 19:09 EDT, 27 June 2020 | Updated: 19:16 EDT, 27 June 2020

  • Scientists in Sweden and South Africa have used 'nanobodies' from an alpaca
  • The experts have claimed that their research 'potently neutralises the virus'
  • The small antibody targets the spikes of the virus which in turn interferes with its ability to infect its host

Tiny antibodies found in alpacas could help suppress a second wave of coronavirus and allow countries to safely lift lockdown, researchers have claimed.

Scientists in Sweden and South Africa have used 'nanobodies' from an animal immunised against the virus to prevent it from binding or infecting a human being.

The small antibody targets the spikes of the virus which in turn interferes with its ability to infect its host.

The experts have claimed that their research 'potently neutralises the virus'. Due to the fact that the nanobodies are cheap and easy to reproduce they could be a widely accessible option.

The nanobodies are also a lot easier to clone and change, according to the scientists.

The authors, from the department of microbiology, tumour and cell biology at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, told The Telegraph: 'The current coronavirus pandemic has drastic consequences for the world's population, and vaccines, antibodies or antivirals are urgently needed.

'Neutralising antibodies can block virus entry at an early step of infection and potentially protect individuals that are at high risk of developing severe disease.'

The nanobody developed was called Ty1 - named after Tyson who was a 12-year-old alpaca from Germany who was immunised.

The antibodies were then isolated.

Gerald McInerney, Karolinska's team leader, said: 'In principle, all the evidence would suggest that it will work very well in humans, but it is a very complex system.'

The academic paper has not been peer reviewed yet. It was published earlier this month.

It comes as Britain today announced 100 more coronavirus deaths, in a record-low Saturday total that will cool fears about the latest lockdown-loosening measures.

Today's figure is down by almost a quarter from last Saturday's 130 deaths, and marks the lowest Saturday total since March 21, two days before lockdown, when 56 people were killed.

It means the UK's official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 43,514 — but more grim estimates by the Office for National Statistics put the tally in the region of 55,000 when suspected virus deaths are included.

A total of 890 more people were diagnosed with the viral disease in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of infected to 310,250.

But millions of cases have went missed because of a lack of widespread testing, and the ONS predicts around 3,000 people are still catching Covid every day in England alone.

Meanwhile, holidaymakers will be able to travel abroad for summer holidays next month under a 'traffic light' system that ranks countries based on their coronavirus risk, it emerged today.

Britons visiting nations that are 'green' or 'amber' - which includes most tourist hotspots in Europe, including Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and France - will not have to self-isolate when they return.

Only those flying to 'red' countries - such as the US, Brazil and India, where the virus is still rife - will have to quarantine indoors for 14 days after flying back.

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Pictured: How Covid-19 causes infected human cells to sprout tentacles loaded with viral venom to help it spread around the body in a process scientists call 'sinister'
By Connor Boyd
Published: 12:26 EDT, 27 June 2020 | Updated: 17:55 EDT, 27 June 2020
  • Study led by University of California saw researchers take microscopic images
  • Showed infected human cells sprouting tentacle-like spikes, known as filopodia
  • Appears to litter them with viral particles and 'surf' to healthy cells to infect them

The coronavirus zombifies human cells and causes them to sprout tentacles in order to spread around the body, scientists have discovered.

A study led by the University of California saw researchers take microscopic images of this process, which they have described as 'so sinister'.

Images show infected cells growing tentacle-like spikes, known as filopodia, which appear to be littered with viral particles.

The researchers believe the disease uses the tentacles to 'surf' to healthy cells, where it injects its viral venom into them and creates more zombie cells.

Until now, researchers believed Covid infected like most other viruses - by latching onto healthy cells and turning them into copying machines.

But, in people with healthy immune systems, the body can fight off the majority of the virus and prevent it from replicating in high amounts in the body.

The latest discovery appears to show that Covid has, at some point in its evolution, developed a back-up plan to get round the immune system.

The finding has been described as an 'amazing leap' in the fight against coronavirus and may open the door to a host of new treatment options.

Nevan Krogan, a professor in cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California and lead researcher, told the LA Times: 'It’s just so sinister that the virus uses other mechanisms to infect other cells before it kills the cell.'

Other viruses — including HIV and vaccinia, a member of the virus family that causes smallpox — also use filopodia as way to spread infection through the body.

But Professor Krogan said the way Covid-19 can grow the tentacles so rapidly is highly unusual.

He also said their shape - protruding out of the cell towards other cells like branches on a tree - was also strange.

Columbia University microbiologist Professor Stephen Goff admitted the finding was 'intriguing' but said it did not necessarily mean the tentacles were behaving as a seond mode of spreading.

He told the LA Times: 'It’s intriguing and a really cool observation. But we don’t yet know what stage [of infection] is affected. It will be great fun to find out.'

Scientists behind the study - published in the journal Cell - believe the discovery could open the door to new treatments.

They have now identified seven existing cancer drugs that block the growth of filopodia.

Among the seven drugs are gilteritinib, sold as Xospata, which is used to treat acute myeloid leukemia and Silmitasertib, an unproven drug being trialled as a treatment for bile duct cancer and a form of childhood brain cancer.

Reacting to the findings, Professor Andrew Mehle, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told SFist: 'This paper shows just how completely the virus is able to rewire all of the signals going on inside the cell. That's really remarkable and it's something that occurs very rapidly (as soon as two hours after cells are infected).'

Lynne Cassimeris, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, said the discovery was an 'amazing leap'.

The study included scientists from Mount Sinai in New York, Rocky Mountain Labs in Montana, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the University of Freiburg in Germany.

It was launched in February to rapidly identify existing drugs that had the potential to treat the then-brand new disease.

They monitored how the virus responded to drugs under laboratory settings in test tube experiments.

One of Britain's leading experts said last week that the coronavirus has lots of 'immunological tricks up its sleeve' that make it hyper-infectiou.

Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, said the virus is 'surprisingly' good at ducking the human immune system — despite only jumping from animals six months ago.

He said normally it takes years of co-existing with humans for any virus to evolve these traits.

Professor Openshaw told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee last week: 'In terms of durability, viruses often have a way of modulating the host's immune response.

'It's the way they've evolved to tune down the immune response that's generated by the virus. That would usually be particularly strong in virus that's had long time to co-evolve with human host.

'What surprises us about this novel virus that's only recently jumped from bats to humans, is already seems to have a lot of immunological tricks up its sleeve and is able to interfere with the immune response and in a way disseminate in a way that you wouldn't really expect a virus that has only just moved into the human population.

'We wonder why that is. We wouldn't have thought that a virus could behave in such a complex way when its only just been introduced into a new species.'

He added: 'So maybe there are tricks it has learned while evolving in another species that have cross over effect.'

Professor Openshaw shot down theories that the virus had already infected humans before. He also ruled out the possibility that had been manufactured or interefered with in a laboratory in China, as has been heavily insinuated by US President Donald Trump.

Professor Openshaw told the committee that he thought it was 'just chance' that the virus has learnt to trick the immune system.

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Is this the mutation that made coronavirus spread like wildfire in NYC, Italy and the UK? D614G strain has four-times as many 'spikes' that latch onto human cells

A mutated strain of coronavirus that has decimated the US, UK and Italy is nearly 10 times more infectious than the original virus that emerged from China, a study suggests.

The potent version of SARS-CoV-2 - called D614G - has four to five times more 'spikes' that protrude from the viral surface allow it to latch onto human cells.

Not only does this trait make it more infectious, but it also makes the virus more stable and resilient.

Scientists have been puzzled about why coronavirus has seemed to hit some states and countries harder than others.

Previous research had highlighted that the potent D614G strain was circulating in high numbers in Italy, the UK and New York City - where infection and death rates are among the worst in the world.

Now, a study by scientists at Scripps Research has confirmed that the mutated coronavirus latches onto receptors more easily than other strains.

Although the research only looked at D614G in tightly controlled laboratory settings, experts told DailyMail.com it's 'plausible' the strain's viral structure makes it more infectious in people.

Professor Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading in England, said: 'Yes it is plausible. The work is good quality and it would mean that the virus could successfully infect at a lower dose and so spread more widely.'

Researchers there isolated various strains of coronavirus that have been identified by their genetic signatures around the world.

They then put each into a sort microscopic cage match, testing how aggressively the respective strains attacked human cells in petri dishes.

One strain was the clear winner - the iteration of the virus with the mutated gene that gave it more 'spike' proteins.

'Viruses with this mutation were much more infectious than those without the mutation in the cell culture system we used,' said virologist Dr Hyeryun Choe, PhD, senior author of the study.

The 'spike' is a protein on the surface of the coronavirus - known as SARS-CoV-2 - that allows it to latch onto receptors on human cells' surfaces.

Specifically, it binds to ACE2 receptors, which are prevalent on the surface of lung cells as well as blood vessels - making these systems prime targets for coronavirus.

The more spikes it has, the more opportunities the virus has to stick to a human cell, and hijack its machinery to make more of itself.

And the mutant strain that's spread in the US, Italy and Britain has them in spades.

'The number - or density - of functional spikes on the virus is 4 or 5 times greater due to this mutation,' said Dr Choe.

Not only did it have more spikes, it had particularly well-adapted ones.

Its protein spike was flexible rather than rigid. That gives it the same advantage that modern suspensions bridges have. Swaying and jostling might bend it - but it won't break.

And the longer and more stabley it can hang onto receptors, the better the opportunity for viral particles to march into the human cell and take it over, without the virus falling to pieces.

'Our data are very clear, the virus becomes much more stable with the mutation,' Dr Choe said.

That mutation belongs to a strain of coronavirus known as D614G.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said in March that the mutant strain started spreading in early February in Europe.

It has since made its way to the US, where it became the most common - and aggressive - strain on the East Coast by March, and the scientists there said it's now the world-dominating strain.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Britain's top vaccine scientists say Covid-19 has lots of 'tricks' to deceive the immune system

The coronavirus has lots of 'immunological tricks up its sleeve' that make it hyper-infectious, according to one of Britain's top vaccine scientists.

Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, said the virus is 'surprisingly' good at ducking the human immune system — despite only jumping from animals six months ago.

He said normally it takes years of co-existing with humans for any virus to evolve these traits.

Professor Openshaw told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee last week: 'In terms of durability, viruses often have a way of modulating the host's immune response.

'It's the way they've evolved to tune down the immune response that's generated by the virus. That would usually be particularly strong in virus that's had long time to co-evolve with human host.

'What surprises us about this novel virus that's only recently jumped from bats to humans, is already seems to have a lot of immunological tricks up its sleeve and is able to interfere with the immune response and in a way disseminate in a way that you wouldn't really expect a virus that has only just moved into the human population.

'We wonder why that is. We wouldn't have thought that a virus could behave in such a complex way when its only just been introduced into a new species.'

He added: 'So maybe there are tricks it has learned while evolving in another species that have cross over effect.'

Professor Openshaw shot down theories that the virus had already infected humans before.

He also ruled out the possibility that had been manufactured or interefered with in a laboratory in China, as has been heavily insinuated by US President Donald Trump.

Professor Openshaw told the committee that he thought it was 'just chance' that the virus has learnt to trick the immune system.

.
 

Heliobas Disciple

TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)

Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized
By Melissa HealyStaff Writer
June 26, 2020 8 AM

The new coronavirus’ reputation for messing with scientists’ assumptions has taken a truly creepy turn.

Researchers exploring the interaction between the coronavirus and its hosts have discovered that when the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects a human cell, it sets off a ghoulish transformation. Obeying instructions from the virus, the newly infected cell sprouts multi-pronged tentacles studded with viral particles.

These disfigured zombie cells appear to be using those streaming filaments, or filopodia, to reach still-healthy neighboring cells. The protuberances appear to bore into the cells’ bodies and inject their viral venom directly into those cells’ genetic command centers — thus creating another zombie.

The authors of the new study, an international team led by researchers at UC San Francisco, say the coronavirus appears to be using these newly sprouted dendrites to boost its efficiency in capturing new cells and establishing infection in its human victims.

Their research was published Friday in the journal Cell.

The scientists also believe they have identified several drugs that could disrupt the viral takeover of cells and slow the process by which COVID-19 takes hold. These compounds, many of which were designed as cancer treatments, seem likely to work because they block the chemical signals that activate filopodia production in the first place.

Among the seven drugs they identified as potentially useful against COVID-19 are Silmitasertib, a still-experimental drug in early clinical trials as a treatment for bile duct cancer and a form of childhood brain cancer; ralimetinib, a cancer drug developed by Eli Lilly; and gilteritinib (marketed as Xospata), a drug in use already to treat acute myeloid leukemia.

The new research emerges from an ambitious effort to identify promising COVID-19 treatments using the science of “proteomics,” the interactions among proteins. Scientists set out to identify the chemical signals and cascading chain of events that take place when a virus meets and overtakes a host cell. Then, they look for drug compounds that could scramble those chemical signals and disrupt the process of infection.

Until now, the process by which the coronavirus was thought to infect cells was pretty run-of-the-mill for a virus: It found receptors on the surface of the cells that line humans’ mouth, nose, respiratory tract, lungs and blood vessels.

Like space invaders in a science fiction tale, the tiny virus was known to dock on the surface of the much larger cell. A viral landing party came aboard and hijacked the cell’s usual function, making it a factory for its replication.

The discovery that the coronavirus initiates the sprouting of filopodia in infected cells suggests that it has, at some point in its evolution, developed more than one way to ensure it gets passed quickly from cell to cell.

Typically, a rapid rise in infected cells will raise a victim’s viral load, make her feel sick and promote the transmission of the virus to other people. UC San Francisco’s Nevan Krogan, one of the paper’s senior authors, said there is much about the coronavirus that doesn’t match scientists’ expectations.

But the discovery of filopodia in coronavirus-infected cells suggests that this virus has developed more than one way to wheedle its way into cells and establish itself as a force to be reckoned with.

“It’s just so sinister that the virus uses other mechanisms to infect other cells before it kills the cell,” Krogan said. Other researchers include scientists from Mt. Sinai in New York, Rocky Mountain Labs in Montana (where these electron microscopy images were made), the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the University of Freiburg in Germany.


Cells sprouting filopodia not only look creepy. They keep some pretty nasty company as well.

Vaccinia, a member of the poxvirus family that causes smallpox, uses filopodia that sprout from infected cells to “surf” toward those cells and inject them with more viral particles, a 2008 study found. HIV and some influenza viruses have been known to use filopodia to enhance their ability to break and enter into cells. Many viruses alter the exoskeleton of the cells they infect, and inducing filopodia is one way they do it, said Columbia University virologist Angela L. Rasmussen. And while enhancing infection is one role they often play, there are many others.

But Krogan said even those viruses do not seem to set off the prolific growth of filaments that was seen by his colleagues on coronavirus-infected cells. The branching tentacles protruding from those cells were highly unusual, he said.

Columbia University microbiologist Stephen P. Goff urged caution in assuming that filopodia are necessarily behaving as a second mode of infecting cells with virus.

“It’s intriguing and a really cool observation,” Goff said. The study’s striking images show that the filopodia contain a lot of virus and that in the lab, inhibiting their growth seemed to reduce viral replication. This strongly suggests that filopodia are somehow amping up the virus’ ability to infect cells, he acknowledged.

“But we don’t yet know what stage [of infection] is affected” by the strange protrusions, he said. “It will be great fun to find out.”


.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
oyster.jpg
Copps Island OystersLike Page
・・・
During the 1918 influenza epidemic, oysters were the hoarder equivalent of today's toilet paper—stockpiling was ubiquitous, prices skyrocketed, black markets developed. Poachers raided oyster beds—you can often still see the remnants of single-room guard houses built in the middle of the bay where guards with shotguns stood lookout.⠀

Why the hysteria? Legend had it that oysters could fend off the flu, especially the rich, briny broth locked inside. As legends go, it was fairly sound science. Zinc has been proven to be an immunity booster, and oysters are zinc powerhouses—pound for pound, these bivalves might be the best possible source of zinc.⠀

Back then, oysters weren’t raised as cocktail-sized delicacies. Before steaks and
chicken breasts, oysters were harvested at full size, providing a major source of protein for communities close to the shore. (Think: oyster stew for dinner.) Full-sized oysters—4 or 5 years old, like the oyster on the right (versus the typical 1 year olds on the left)—are a relic, as out of fashion as shoulder pads; but now that restaurants are on intermission (and restaurants account for 90% of oyster sales), maybe more of these beloved bivalves will be given the space to grow into maturity. Savor the benefits of the adult oyster? I think so. If not now, when?⠀
 

Troke

On TB every waking moment
This is from the NYT and it's a hit piece on Trump so take with a huge grain of salt, but I do think there may be some truth to the premise. Maybe not as much as the NYT hopes, but I do think there's some disillusionment. It doesn't mean these women won't ultimately vote for Trump though; that part is wishful thinking on the part of the NYT imho. I just hope they just don't stay home on election day instead of actually voting for Bide and that at the end of the day, they realize how important it is to go to the voting booth and vote Trump no matter how upset they may be. He will need every vote, so if you know of someone who voted Trump in 2016 who is thinking of sitting out 2020 or worse, voting Biden, you need to remind them of what is ultimately at stake.

~~~~~~~~~

(fair use applies)

Working-class white women are turning on Trump
By Janet HookStaff Writer
June 26, 2020 9:48 AM

President Trump’s storied grip on the white working class is weakening among women, threatening both his reelection prospects and his party’s efforts to improve its standing with female voters.

While working-class men remain among Trump’s most loyal backers, defections among their wives, sisters and daughters are a big part of the president’s recent slide in opinion polls. That gives Democrat Joe Biden a shot at winning a swath of female voters that have long favored the GOP.

White working-class women heavily favored Trump in 2016. But recent polls show they are being driven away by his combative style, his erratic handling of the coronavirus crisis and his effort to quickly reopen the economy despite health risks.

“These women will be a real battleground,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who is working with the Biden campaign. “These women are also cross-pressured, because they are surrounded by Trump-supporting men in their lives.”

Four years ago, Trump won among white women of the working class — which pollsters typically define as people without a college degree — by a 27 percentage-point margin over the white woman at the head of the Democrats’ ticket, Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls. His edge over Biden in that group, however, was just six points in a Washington Post/ABC News poll in late May.

If those numbers hold, Brookings Institution scholar William Galston calculated it could cut two percentage points from Trump’s popular vote total and likely sink his reelection hopes.

“It took a near-miracle for him to win the electoral college with only 46% of the popular vote in 2016,” said Galston, who has advised six Democratic presidential campaigns. “With 44% of the vote, it would not be possible.”

Surveys in some battleground states have found Biden not just slashing Trump’s lead among working-class white women but overtaking him. In Wisconsin, where Trump beat Clinton among white women without college degrees by a 16-point margin, Marquette University Law School polling has found the president trailing Biden in eight of the nine polls conducted since August 2019.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have launched a major effort to recapture the support of women who were with him in 2016 but did not show up for Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. “They are called ‘downshifters,’” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in an interview with 19th, an online women’s news outlet. “They were with us, they lapsed and they are easier to get back.”

The goal is to hold on to women like Connie Logerfo, an 83-year-old retired baker in New York who is supporting Trump even though she is unhappy with his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, including his refusal to wear a face mask to halt the spread of the virus.

“I do like Trump; I think what he is doing is good,” said Logerfo. “But I think he should set a better example.”

It will be hard, however, for Trump to win over women like McKaelyn Henderson, a 22-year-old Republican in San Diego who liked his business policies, but lost patience with his Twitter tirades and what she believes is a cavalier attitude toward the pandemic.

“If he’s not taking issues like this seriously, what else is he not taking seriously?” said Henderson, who is considering voting for Biden or a third-party candidate. “Honestly, I think he needs to stay off Twitter and not let his emotions get the better of him.”

Republicans have suffered from a yawning gender gap for years. The party saw its share of the female electorate dwindle from 42% in 1994 to 37% in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump drew 42% of the female vote against Hillary Clinton, exit polls found, despite his big margin among white working-class women.

His election spawned a backlash among female voters that was evident with the massive Women’s March after his inauguration and helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018. Women voters favored Democratic candidates by 19 points.

“When you are losing a majority of the electorate by 19 points, that’s a pretty difficult position to be in,” said Republican pollster David Winston. “You just can’t do that.”

To try to recapture support among women, the RNC and the Trump campaign are using a sophisticated data operation to target the downshifters, inviting them to Women for Trump events and other new outreach programs that have gone online during the pandemic. The RNC said it has hosted 110 women’s events since the shutdown began.

“There are so many women who support Trump all over the country, but I feel like we don’t always get to meet each other,” Danielle D’Souza Gill, a conservative writer, said during an online event for young Republican women. “So sometimes it kind of feels like you’re the only one.”

One party official said the online format has helped in reaching working-class women who might otherwise struggle to get to an actual meeting because of child-care demands or because they are in a remote town.

A Trump campaign official shrugged off troubling poll findings and insisted that the president is “making strides” with women. The official pointed to an increase in the share of campaign donations that come from women. According to the campaign, roughly half of its fundraising comes from women compared with just over a quarter in 2016.

Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg found signs of waning support for Trump among working-class women long before the country was socked with the pandemic, economic crisis and civil unrest over police brutality against Black Americans.

In focus groups of working-class voters he conducted a year ago in Maine and Wisconsin, Greenberg found that the president had consolidated the support of men. But one-third of the women who had voted for Trump in 2016 said they were considering voting for someone else.

“They pulled off because his ego makes him impulsive and a bully, healthcare remains unaffordable, he’s dividing the country, he doesn’t care about the working class, only the 1 percent, he’s corrupt and out for himself and he doesn’t respect women,” said a report on the focus groups.

Since then, the coronavirus crisis and the resulting economic woes have driven a wedge between working-class men and women: Female voters are more critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, men are more eager to reopen the economy, polls show.

“If there were an example in politics of women coming from Venus and men coming from Mars, it’s now in the response to the COVID crisis,” said Lake, the Democratic pollster.

The Washington Post/ABC poll in May found that 71% of white men without a college degree approved of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with 51% of women without a degree.

Asked whether it was more important to control the virus or open the economy, 57% of white noncollege women gave priority to controlling the virus even if it hurts the economy, while 59% of working-class men said restarting the economy was more important, even if it hurt efforts to control the virus.

As most polls find that voters trust Trump more than Biden to handle the economy, the Biden team is trying to cut into that support by telling working-class women that Trump’s policies benefit the wealthy and big corporations, not small businesses and consumers.

“We are the party of the working people,” Rep. Haley Stevens said at a virtual Michigan Women for Biden event that drew 1,200 online participants. “Joe Biden — a man from Scranton [Pa.] — he knows what hard work is. He knows what the values of work means. That’s how we’re going to get out of this. He’s going to get us fair pay, he is going to protect women’s rights.”

Ruy Teixeira, a political demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress, said it might be hard for Trump to win back working-class women because they not only tend to favor more liberal policies than men, but they’ve also tired of Trump’s behavior.

“In 2016, maybe they weren’t yet sick of his style. They are pretty sick of it now,” said Teixeira. “What was keeping some of them in the Trump camp was the need to try something new. But women are more likely than the men to have concluded he’s a divider, not a uniter.”

With Trump struggling to hold on to the working-class women who voted for him, he surely won’t win back Republicans like Teresa Frey, 60, a Navy veteran in Lapeer, Mich., who voted for Clinton in 2016 and cannot imagine coming back into the party fold to vote for Trump.

Said Frey: “It’s the lump sum of his inability to focus on anything but the mirror.”

.
"... they’ve also tired of Trump’s behavior.

“In 2016, maybe they weren’t yet sick of his style. They are pretty sick of it now.."

I heard this while traveling last summer. Never gave it a thought then, but now that I think about it, the complainers were all women.
 

Zagdid

Veteran Member

‘Incredibly concerned’: El Paso virus cases, hospitalizations and ICU numbers all surge to new records
By Jim Parker UPDATED today at 9:59 am Published June 28, 2020 9:17 am

EL PASO, Texas — El Paso's Health Authority expressed "incredible concern" as the county tallied 284 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, which he grimly noted marked "the largest spike since the introduction of the virus to the (El Paso) community."

The county also set troubling new records Sunday for both hospitalizations, with 147 patients, and the number of those in the ICU at 68. At least 25 of those intensive care patients were on ventilators as of Sunday morning. The surge in El Paso's hospitalization rate now mirrors record increases across Texas that have been taking place for 16 straight days.

Sunday's dramatic hike in new infections brought the total number of cases in El Paso during the pandemic thus far to 5,614 - with nearly 1,300 of those occurring since last Sunday. That means almost a quarter of all virus infections have happened in the last eight days.

“This jump in positive cases is incredibly concerning, and calls for a renewed focus by each person to be stricter towards taking care of themselves and their loved ones,” said Health Authority Dr. Hector Ocaranza, who urged El Pasoans to wear face masks and practice social distancing among their precautions.

Fortunately, no additional deaths were reported Sunday, so the total number of fatalities in El Paso remained at 127. There have been only seven deaths recorded since last Sunday, the lowest number in more than two months. But observers warned that the growing numbers of both cases combined with hospitalizations was an ominous sign.

"Deaths and hospitalizations are lagging indicators of Covid-19 impact because it generally takes time for people to get so sick that they require hospitalization or succumb to the disease. The lethality of the current spike in cases likely won’t be known for several weeks," explained Bob Moore of El Paso Matters, after examining the health department's data from the past week.

While outbreaks at a nursing home and a detention facility - both of which Dr. Ocaranza refused to identify - contributed to Sunday's soaring case increase, he blamed the bulk of the recent caseload growth on community spread involving those under the age of 40.

“While we are still investigating the details behind the cause of the spikes recorded over the last week; we’ve seen a trend in cases among those in their teens, 20s and 30s and likely a haphazard approach to health prevention," he said.

Dr. Ocaranza added that "collectively, more than 40% of our positive cases are individuals in their 20s and 30s. However, the larger concern is that these individuals may be in contact with at-risk family members who are vulnerable and may become the next Covid-19 fatality.”

The explosion of infections among younger adults is occurring not only in El Paso, but across the state of Texas. It was a key factor in Gov. Greg Abbott's decision late last week to order all bars closed again, and his acknowledgement in an ABC-7 interview that he allowed them to reopen too soon.

We're "now seeing in the aftermath of how quickly the coronavirus spread in the bar setting," the governor admitted. "A bar setting, in reality, just doesn't work with a pandemic."

Moore said his analysis of the El Paso health department data also showed "the illness is spreading fastest among young adults," who accounted for over 50% of all new cases in the past week. But he added, "it’s growing among virtually all age groups in El Paso."

One reason for the current unprecedented spread of the virus, the county's top doctor indicated, may be explained by the numbers of El Pasoans who are infected but don't feel sick and thus, are unlikely to know that they are carriers of the virus.

"It is estimated that more than 20 percent of the total positive cases are asymptomatic, meaning the patients reported showing no Covid-19 symptoms," Dr. Ocaranza concluded, adding that's why it is important for everyone to take virus precautions.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jdYYGQXXn8
23:29 min
Global Update and US focus
•Jun 28, 2020


Dr. John Campbell
Global Cases, Recovered, 4,903,500 Deaths, 196 countries and territories US Cases, Deaths, South and West R values https://rt.live https://www.theguardian.com/world/liv...

Texas Greg Abbott, regrets on bars reopening https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavir... Cases, + 5,102 + 5,285 = 148,050 Immigration centres, ‘on fire’

California Cases, + 5,972 Florida Cases, + 9,585 Bars closed NBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=159MP...

Dr Craig Meek, why, loved ones sitting in an emergency room Houston area ITUs at capacity Long lines for testing Young people driving infections

Carlos Gimenez, Miami beaches closed July 3rd – 7th Memorial Day, 2 week delay Arizona Cases,+ 3,591 People ‘urged’ to stay home Sometimes days delay on testing ITUs nearing capacity NBC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcaMS...

South Carolina Cases, + 1,604 https://www.worldometers.info/coronav... Georgia Cases, + 1,990 Nevada Cases, + 1,099

Anthony Fauci Government’s current strategy for finding and isolating ‘not working’ Significant asymptomatic spread (40%) Mike Pence Cancelled campaign events in Florida and Arizona next week

_______________________

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmy3Urxr0C0
32:27 min
Global Update, Australia, UK
•Jun 28, 2020


Dr. John Campbell

Global Update, Australia, Egypt, Ethiopia, West Bank, Ireland, Brazil, India, Pakistan, UK Global Cases, 10, 005, 970 Recovered, 4,903,500 Deaths, 499,306 196 countries and territories

Australia https://www.australia.gov.au Victorians urged to get tested if symptomatic Cough, fever, sore throat, shortness of breath, runny nose, or loss of sense of smell or taste Dashboard for Australia https://www.health.gov.au/news/health... Health checker page https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/sympt...

Egypt Cases, 63,923 Deaths, 2,708 Lifted many restrictions Rising number of cases Cafes (25%), clubs, gyms, theatres after more than three months of closure Mosques and churches were reopened (not for main services) Night-time curfew lifted Ethiopia Cases, 5,570 Deaths, 94 Oldest survivor https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-he...

Tilahun Woldemichael, aged 114 Hospital for 3 weeks Oxygen and dexamethasone Ethiopia's health minister, recommends dexamethasone in patients who require ventilation or oxygen

West Bank Increases Bethlehem, 48-hour closure from Monday Hebron and Nablus were closed last week for a time

Dominican Republic Cases, + 855 = 30,619 Deaths, 718 Face masks mandatory since 16 April Today, a strict curfew lifted after three months No limits on movements Ireland Population 4.9m Recent rapid reopening New infections increasing Growing infections in under 35s Cases, + 23 = 25,437 Deaths, 1,734

Brazil Cases, + 38,693 = 1,313,667 Deaths, + 1,109 = 57,070

India Cases, + 17,000 = 528,859 Deaths, 16,095 Delhi Hospitals filled beyond capacity, turning patients away Hotels, wedding halls, an ashram and railway coaches, repurposed for coronavirus care Health experts are urging the government to prioritise keeping mortality down ‘Numbers are going to increase’, (Dr Manoj Murhekar, of India’s main coronavirus task force) Pakistan Cases, 202,955 Deaths, 4,118 10 members of national cricket team tested positive

Positive people arriving in England UK Cases, 311,739 Deaths, 43,598 New cases, 2,341 https://covid19.joinzoe.com/post/covi... If 5% (3.3m) of the UK population has been infected, IFR = 1.3% 70% of the UK population =46,200,000 For 70% of UK population at 1.3%, deaths = 600,600 Results from these antibody tests provide information about past infections https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020...

Liverpool, 15 arrested Two raves in London Pop-up bike lanes in central London and Leicestershire Imported cases Half of Britain’s imported cases, from Pakistan 65,000 people since March 1 from Pakistan 2 flights per day 30 cases imported from Pakistan since June 4 Some go to hospital as soon as arriving Emirates suspended flights out of Pakistan after positive passengers Concerns that the influx has led to localised clusters Risk of possible spread to Europe via air bridges Good outcomes https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati...
 
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