Category: Breaking News

United States President Donald Trump stated on Wednesday that the WIDE distribution of the first coronavirus vaccine could start in mid-October or “maybe a little bit later.” He added that the US could supply at least 100,000,000 doses by the end of the year, as well as that all the necessary supplies for vaccination had been manufactured. Trump contradicted the Center for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield, who said in his testimony to Congress that it would take six to nine months before a vaccine could be distributed nationally. Trump repeatedly speculated that Redfield “misunderstood the question” when he was asked about vaccine distribution. The president launched another attack on his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, alleging that he “promotes anti-vaccine theories.” He called on states with Democratic governors to “open them up,” claiming that the measures against the coronavirus were “hurting people far more than the disease itself.”

(Bloomberg) — New York City officials know Covid-19 cases will climb this fall. The question they are watching as the city moves to reopen is, just how much? For months, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been working with academic groups at Columbia University and New York University. The academic teams have been asked to model case numbers, help predict needed hospital resources and to advise the city on how to open up workplaces, schools, restaurants and more. The disclosure Tuesday of a Covid-19 case at the New York offices of JPMorgan Chase & Co. is likely just the latest example of what will happen as businesses push to get workers back to the office, and people begin going back to school and returning to restaurants and gyms. In interviews, experts from two academic groups working with New York described what’s likely to be a significant increase in cases this fall, but with the opportunity to stop the worst with careful public-health measures like masks and social distancing. “If you do these types of phased reopenings, there are going to be certain increases in transmission activity,” Columbia University’s Jeff Shaman, who is part of a team working with the city to predict the path of the outbreak. “Every model will tell you you’re going to see increases in cases.” The city is likewise planning for a resurgence, according to a top adviser to the mayor, while trying to restore as much normal business as possible. “Even independent of having any mathematical backing for this, we have been planning around the assumption that there will be resurgences of this infection,” said Jay Varma, senior advisor for public health in the New York City Mayor’s Office. That likely means continued social distancing practices, mask-wearing and limited capacity, said Scott Braithwaite, a professor at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine who has led the other academic effort advising the city. “Forget about normalcy,” Braithwaite said in a telephone interview. “If things were back to normal, quote unquote, and we weren’t social distancing we weren’t wearing masks, a hundred people coming in one day could restart a disastrous wave.” The infection at JPMorgan’s 383 Madison Ave. building came a week after workers began returning following the Labor Day holiday, and shortly before a deadline for senior traders to come back to their desks. The bank, which has been among the most aggressive in pulling people back to the office, has now sent some Manhattan workers home, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The decision was an echo of steps taken by workplaces around the city when cases first started expanding in the spring.

While JPMorgan has moved ahead, Americans have expressed caution about reopening too quickly. A September Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that an even number of Americans thought the worst of the outbreak was yet to come, versus already behind them. The poll split along party lines, with Democrats being more pessimistic. The groups at Columbia and NYU began working with the city at the start of the outbreak. In weekly meetings, they’ve helped project how many hospital beds would be needed, how many cases were likely happening despite limited testing, and what the coming weeks would hold. The Columbia team has been led by Wan Yang, an epidemiology professor, and Shaman, the director of the climate and health program at the university’s Mailman School of Public Health. The work was confidential at first, Shaman said, but the researchers pushed the city to allow them to discuss it publicly. “People have a right to see this,” Shaman said. One of the Columbia models, released in June as the city was beginning to reopen, predicted tens of thousands of additional hospitalizations by the end of the year, though the estimates vary widely based on how quickly services were opened and how effective public-health measures are. “It’s inherently crude. We just don’t know the nuance of what’s going to happen,” Shaman said. “You open up more, you’re getting it worse.” Varma said the models have been useful in decision-making, but aren’t to be taken as hard estimates. “Infectious-disease models are not really designed to predict the future,” Varma said. “What they’re designed to do is to give you information to help you change the future.” New York City is currently reporting around two hundred new cases a day, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. That’s likely only a portion of the actual infections, though the number has been coming steadily down since a peak of more than 5,000 cases a day in April. The city is also testing in schools. As of Monday, the city had found 55 positive Covid-19 cases out of 17,000 school teachers and staff who had been tested, for a positivity rate of 0.32%, Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a Monday news briefing. The city has been weighing how to get people back to their regular lives, while also limiting new cases, Varma said. Across the border in New Jersey, the state this month reported a rise in cases as it has reopened indoor dining, theaters and prepared to bring children back to school. Social-distancing measures play a crucial role, said Braithwaite. Early on in the outbreak, his group built models under two scenarios, one in which people followed public health guidelines and social distancing measures, and one in which they didn’t. “Under that scenario, we were having hundreds of thousands of deaths in New York City. And under the scenario where people did pay attention to social distancing, you were having tens of thousands of deaths,” he said. So far, there have been 27,750 confirmed and probable Covid-19 deaths in New York City, according to the health department. “We are presenting data to them that are suggesting this is problematic,” he said, though he noted the city was engaged in a very difficult balancing act between controlling cases, and reopening schools and preventing businesses from going bankrupt. Reopening is good for the city, but it’s also good for the virus, Shaman said: “There’s a huge potential for growth, even in a place like New York City, because 75% to 85% of the population has yet to be infected.”

Curfews could be imposed in the capital to fight a second wave of Covid-19, a public health chief reported today as he called on Londoners to “come together” to limit a feared increase in case. With the epidemic set to hit the city with much more force in the coming weeks, Professor Kevin Fenton, London director of Public Health England, has made it clear that more restrictions could be imposed, possibly including in the capital, to avoid tighter lockdown. In an exclusive interview with The Evening Standard, he also made an urgent appeal to Londoners, hailing them for their “phenomenal” efforts to crush the first wave and urging them to “start over” now.

• About 500,000 students are coming to London from across the country and around the world for the start of the term, which is likely to increase infections.
• Demand for tests is exceeding capacity, with the number of tests in London at around 150,000 per week, as they are focused on hot spots in the North and Midlands. The number of positive tests announced yesterday for the city was 278, although that may be an underestimate given the shortages.
• Some clusters of coronaviruses are occurring in nursing homes, particularly in the outskirts of London.
• Around 10 London boroughs have coronavirus rates of around 30 cases per 100,000 people on a seven-day moving average.
• Young people in the capital are fueling the rise, although there are other factors as well.
• It is not known where people got the virus when asked about the “clusters” of cases in the workplace.
• Schools now “understand their role much more effectively” in dealing with suspected cases.
• The tube is “safe”.
• Optimism expressed on a vaccine but warned of a difficult fall and winter.

The PHE chief stressed that the aim was to avoid lockdowns in London given their economic, health and welfare impact. “Before you get to this point, there are a lot of other things you can do to help reduce the risk of transmission and contain your outbreak,” explained Professor Fenton. “In some areas that have experienced a resurgence, limits have been placed on the time you can spend socializing. In some cases, it may be local curfews, so you don’t drink until the wee hours of the morning. “By limiting that, you also limit the time people spend in close contact with others. “ A curfew in Bolton has seen pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues limit themselves to take-out and get closer to customers between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Other measures cited by Professor Fenton include the promotion of mask wear, stricter public health warnings, and a greater focus on making workplaces safe by Covid. He also stressed that all Londoners have a role to play in tackling a second wave. “It’s phenomenal what we have done as a city in terms of responding to the national lockdown, the degree of repression we were able to achieve when the time restrictions were lifted… very low death and case rates” , did he declare. 1As we see the resurgence happening in different parts of the country, we need to call on this resolution… let’s actually say we’ve done it before and we can do it again. “As we move into the winter period, when it is inevitable that the number of cases will increase, this vigilance and commitment is really going to be required of all of us no matter our age, whatever your background, wherever you are in. the city – we need to pull together. ”

New restrictions

If needed, they can be ordered across London, rather than just targeted and localized measures given population flows. He said: “We will be working with our partners in London to identify what is the best approach, and some of these could intensify activity at the district and sub-regional levels, and for some things this may require a pan-London approach, simply because of the feasibility of implementing some of these interventions. “

Covid-19 test

“The demand is currently well above the capacity we have,” he said, with tests available in London going “where they need to be”.

Nursing homes

“For some wards, where you have a large number of nursing homes, especially some of the boroughs on the outskirts of London, you will tend to see clusters of cases happening in those nursing homes.” With over 100,000 tests per day allocated to nursing homes across the country, it was now possible to “get back on track with asymptomatic testing.”

Universities

Getting the students back was a “challenge,” he said. “We anticipate that more than 500,000 students will return to the city in the coming weeks.” But many universities were planning their own testing systems.

young people

Covid transmission rates are higher in people aged 17 to 29.

“The return to normal life for young Londoners is associated with increased transmission,” he said.

Transport public

He explained how “safe” the tube was, with thorough cleaning and high mask compliance.

“We have certainly learned the lessons from the first phase on how to create a safe transport system.”

Market recovery is contingent on a COVID-19 vaccine before year-end

Exactly seven weeks before Election Day and two weeks before the first presidential debate, President Donald Trump faced uncommitted voters in a 90-minute town hall special hosted by ABC News from the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos anchored the “20/20” event — “The President and the People” — from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The forum provided uncommitted voters, the opportunity to ask the president their questions on issues affecting Americans from the coronavirus pandemic and economic recovery to protests for racial justice. ABC News offered to host a similar town hall with Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden, but ABC News and the campaign were not able to find a mutually agreeable date.

Big landlords increased the number of eviction cases they filed after President Donald Trump announced his recent moratorium, signaling the struggle tenants face getting protection from the federal order. Institutional landlords filed more than 900 eviction cases across eight metropolitan areas from Sept. 2 to Sept. 8, according to data compiled by Private Equity Stakeholder Project, an activist group partly funded by organized labor. Landlords filed 165 cases in the same markets during the week of Aug. 3. Fears of an evictions crisis have swirled since expanded unemployment benefits and an original moratorium included in the federal CARES Act expired, with advocates worrying that millions of Americans will lose their homes. The Trump ban, enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to avert homelessness during a pandemic, was seen by tenant advocates as a way to delay evictions. But it provides no funding to cover unpaid rent, putting both landlords and tenants at risk and making it difficult to avert a rental crisis. “We’re quite surprised by the number of filings we saw,” Jim Baker, executive director at the Private Equity Shareholder Project, said in an interview. “What’s striking is that we’re not talking about mom-and-pop landlords. We’re talking about gigantic companies.” A wide range of institutional landlords, defined as those that own thousands of units, brought eviction cases during the first week of September. That includes industry giants Starwood Capital Group and Invitation Homes and lesser-known companies like Onni Group, a Vancouver-based developer that manages more than 7,200 apartments. Tenants who complete necessary paperwork should be protected by the moratorium, but that leaves a big hole if they’re not aware of the legal steps required to get protection and very few have lawyers to help. Baker’s organization started compiling eviction data in April to determine whether landlords were complying with the original moratorium, which was limited to buildings with federally backed financing. The research covers 10 large counties covering parts of Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix and five other large metro areas, offering a glimpse into how landlords proceeded in the week after the moratorium was announced on Sept 1. Baker wasn’t expecting to see a jump in evictions because Trump’s new ban goes beyond the old one and applies to all rental buildings. In more than half of the 17 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, cases filed by landlords of all sizes surged after the CARES Act moratorium effectively expired Aug. 24, said Peter Hepburn, a research fellow for the group. While some building owners may not have been aware of the new tenant protections, others “might have been hoping that they could get under the wire, or that the local courts might take a landlord-friendly approach to enforcement,” Hepburn said. Baker’s research shows eviction cases were still being brought to court Sept. 8, when Invitation Homes, which owns roughly 80,000 single-family rental houses, filed three cases. “We have been doing what the CDC order directs since early in the pandemic – working with our residents facing COVID-related financial hardships and offering a variety of payment options so they can stay in their homes,” the company said in a statement. “As always, we will continue to follow all government directives.” Starwood Capital and Onni Group didn’t respond to requests for comment. The increase in evictions during the first week of September highlights key challenges to implementing the ban, according to John Pollock, coordinator for the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, an organization that seeks to establish a right to legal representation for defendants in housing court. One problem, he said, is the form tenants have to fill out to get protection, attesting that they’re eligible.“The moratorium is obviously a good thing and it’s going to help people if they know it exists,” he said. “But they have to learn the thing exists, get a copy, fill it out properly and get it to their landlord before the landlord rams an eviction through the court.”

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can sometimes hijack brain cells, using the cells’ internal machinery to copy itself, according to a new study. The research, posted Sept. 8 to the preprint database bioRxiv, has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can directly infect brain cells called neurons. Although the coronavirus has been linked to various forms of brain damage, from deadly inflammation to brain diseases known as encephalopathies, all of which can cause confusion, brain fog and delirium, there was little evidence of the virus itself invading brain tissue until now. To see whether SARS-CoV-2 could break into brain cells, the study authors examined autopsied brain tissue from three patients who died of COVID-19. They also conducted experiments in mice infected with COVID-19 and in organoids — groups of cells grown in a lab dish to mimic the 3D structure of brain tissue. “This study is the first to do an extensive analysis of SARS-CoV-2 [brain] infection using three models,” said Dr. Maria Nagel, a professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. In the organoids, the team found that the virus could enter neurons through the ACE2 receptor, a protein on the cell surface that the virus uses to enter the cell and trigger infection. They then used an electron microscope, which uses beams of charged particles to illuminate the tissue, to peer inside infected cells. They could see coronavirus particles “budding” within the cell, demonstrating that the virus had commandeered the neurons’ internal machinery to build new copies of itself. While setting up shop in infected cells, the virus also caused metabolic changes in nearby neurons, which were not infected. These nearby cells died off in large numbers, suggesting that the infected cells might steal oxygen from their neighbors in order to keep producing new virus, the authors noted. in the autopsied tissue, the team found SARS-CoV-2 had infected some neurons in the wrinkled cerebral cortex. Near these infected cells, they found evidence of “small strokes” having taken place, hinting that the virus might steal oxygen from nearby cells in the brain just as it did in the organoids, Iwasaki said. Notably, the infected brain tissue was not flooded with immune cells, as might be expected. So it’s possible that when SARS-CoV-2 manages to infiltrate the brain, it may somehow escape the body’s typical defense against such invasions. It’s not yet known how this unusual immune response might affect the course of the infection, but it may make the virus more difficult to clear from the brain. And though few immune cells flock to the site of infection, dying neurons nearby can trigger a chain-reaction in the nervous system that still leads to harmful inflammation, the authors noted.

Finally, in the mouse experiments, the authors genetically modified one group of mice to express human ACE2 receptors in their brains, while another group of mice only bore the receptor in their lungs. The first set of mice rapidly began losing weight and died within six days, while the second set did not lose weight and survived. In addition, in the mice with brain infection, the arrangement of blood vessels in the brain changed dramatically, presumably to redirect nutrient-rich blood to “metabolically active hot spots” where the virus had taken over, the authors wrote. “Virus may be present in specific brain regions or may have more indirect effects on neurological function,” Nagel added. In particular, some patients experience symptoms reminiscent of chronic fatigue syndrome for months after their initial COVID-19 infection takes hold; it’s been suggested that the syndrome arises from changes in hormone function regulated by the specific parts of the brain, she noted. Another key question is whether the “virus affects the respiratory center in the brainstem — contributing to respiratory failure in critically-ill COVID patients,” she said. When scientists learned that COVID-19 can disrupt people’s ability to smell and taste, some theorized that the virus might infect the brain directly by traveling through nerves in the nose, Live Science previously reported. The virus may invade the brain through the nose, Iwasaki agreed, or it might enter through the bloodstream by crossing compromised regions of the blood-brain barrier — a wall of tissue that normally separates brain tissue from circulating blood and allows only certain substances through. Learning what route the virus takes into the brain will be key to preventing and treating the infection, the authors noted.

Originally published on Live Science.

(Bloomberg) — Policy makers are facing the most economically challenging part of the Covid-19 crisis in avoiding the creation of “zombie” companies, according to the Bank for International Settlements Ultra-easy monetary and fiscal support is helping companies avoid a liquidity crunch after the pandemic closed down businesses and demand collapsed. But that stance bears risks longer-term, said Claudio Borio, head of the Basel-based institution’s Monetary and Economic Department. “There’s a delicate balance to be struck between on the one hand withdrawing it too early, which will obliviously have short-term costs in terms of economic activity, and withdrawing it too late, which will mean that it will not favor necessary structural adjustments,” he said on Monday. Officials in Europe and the U.S. have unleashed unprecedented easing in response to the Covid-19 outbreak, which has pushed up equity markets even as economies face their deepest recession in decades. While the liquidity measures have helped companies stay afloat, there are concerns they may also be creating a swathe of uncompetitive firms that hold back investment and innovation. “The real challenge is to distinguish between viable and non-viable firms, which, given the uncertainty about future demand patterns, is not straightforward,” Borio said.