Category: Breaking News

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WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday alerted Americans to begin preparing for the spread of coronavirus in the United States after infections surfaced in several more countries.

The announcement signaled a change in tone for the Atlanta-based U.S. health agency, which had largely been focused on efforts to stop the virus from entering the country and quarantining individuals traveling from China. “The data over the past week about the spread in other countries has raised our level of concern and expectation that we are going to have community spread here,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s head of respiratory diseases, told reporters on a conference call. What is not known, she said, is when it will arrive and how severe a U.S. outbreak might be. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe” and businesses, schools and families should begin having discussions about the possible impact from the spread of the virus, Messonnier cautioned. In a teleconference later on Tuesday, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director, said that while the immediate risk in the United States was low, the current global situation suggested a pandemic was likely. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when and how many people will be infected,” Schuchat said. Separately, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar told a Senate subcommittee there will likely be more cases in the United States, and he asked lawmakers to approve $2.5 billion in funding to fight the outbreak after proposing cuts to the department’s budget. “While the immediate risk to individual members of the American public remains low, there is now community transmission in a number of countries, including outside of Asia, which is deeply concerning,” Azar said, adding that recent outbreaks in Iran and Italy were particularly worrying. Believed to have originated from illegal wildlife sold in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, the new coronavirus has infected some 80,000 people and killed close to 2,700 in China. Although the World Health Organization says the epidemic has peaked in China, coronavirus cases have surfaced in about 30 other countries, with some three dozen deaths reported, according to a Reuters tally. Growing outbreaks in Iran, Italy and South Korea have raised concerns that coronavirus will surface in other nations and worsen in those that have already reported infections, further denting a global economy that had already been hit by a dependence on China. Global and U.S. stock markets fell sharply again on Tuesday, as investors feared the epidemic would further damage an already slowing world economy.[nL1N2AP0YR][nL1N2AP11A] The White House’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said the U.S. economy would be able to ride out any disruption from the global spread of coronavirus, adding that he did not expect the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to blunt the disease’s economic impact. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, however, said Republican President Donald Trump and his administration had been caught “flat-footed” and lacked a comprehensive plan to deal with the coronavirus. He called for at least $3.1 billion in additional funding to fight it.

“The Trump administration has shown towering and dangerous incompetence when it comes to the coronavirus,” said Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat. “Mr. President, you need to get your act together now. This is a crisis.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it would be at least a year before a coronavirus vaccine could be made available to the public.

But Fauci said testing Gilead Sciences’ (GILD.O) antiviral drug remdesivir for potential treatment of coronavirus could be done in a “reasonable amount of time.”

‘DEADLY CONSEQUENCES’

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters that Iran may have covered up information about the spread of coronavirus there, and he accused China of mishandling the epidemic through its “censorship” of media and medical professionals.

“The United States is deeply concerned by information indicating the Iranian regime may have suppressed vital details about the outbreak in that country,” Pompeo told reporters as Iran’s coronavirus death toll rose to 16.

“All nations, including Iran, should tell the truth about the coronavirus and cooperate with international aid organizations,” Pompeo said.

His remarks, coming less than two months after a short-lived U.S.-Iranian military clash and the signing of a U.S.-China trade deal, could inflame tensions with Tehran and Beijing.

Beijing last week revoked the credentials of three Wall Street Journal correspondents over a column China said was racist. The United States has said it was considering a range of responses to their expulsion.

“Expelling our journalists exposes once again the government’s issue that led to SARS and now the coronavirus: namely censorship. It can have deadly consequences,” Pompeo said, referring to the 2002-2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which also emerged from China.

“If China permitted its own and foreign journalists and medical personnel to speak and investigate freely, Chinese officials and other nations would have been far better prepared to address the challenge” of coronavirus, he added.

Despite the coronavirus epidemic, Pompeo said the United States still planned to host a special meeting with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Las Vegas in March.

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Italy’s coronavirus outbreak spread south on Tuesday to Tuscany and Sicily, as the civil protection agency reported a surge in the number of infected people and Rome convened emergency talks. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has blamed poor management in a hospital in the country’s north for the outbreak, which has caused seven deaths in Italy so far and infected the largest number of people in Europe. Tuscany reported its first two cases, including one in the tourist destination of Florence, while Sicily recorded one: a tourist from the worst-hit Lombardy region, where 212 people have tested positive. The Liguria region, known as the Italian Riviera, also reported its first case, but cautioned that the definitive result for the 70-year old still needed to come from Italy’s infectious diseases institute. Health ministers from neighbouring countries were to meet in Rome as the number of confirmed infections jumped to 283, with over 50 new cases reported since Monday. News of the spike in cases came as a team from the World Health Organization in Rome said Italy had taken appropriate measures to curb the virus’s spread, with the focus on halting further person-to-person transmission. “The measures taken by the Italian government or the regional governments have been pretty strong and most likely should help in containing this virus as good as possible,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said. Lindmeier noted that based on current data, in the majority of cases – four out of every five – people experience mild or no symptoms. On Tuesday, several neighbouring countries reported their first confirmed infections. Croatia confirmed the first case in the Balkans region after a young man who recently returned from Italy – which lies across the Adriatic from Croatia – was found to have become infected. Switzerland reported its first confirmed case in the Italian-speaking Ticino canton, while Austria also saw its first two cases confirmed on Tuesday in the Tyrol province, which borders Italy. Austrian officials said one of the two patients was from Lombardy, but it was not yet clear how the person had contracted the virus. Meanwhile in the Canary Islands, hundreds of people were confined to their rooms in a Tenerife hotel after an Italian tourist was hospitalised with suspected coronavirus, health officials said. While no neighbouring country has closed its borders with Italy, several governments have announced additional measures for incoming travellers, in particular from the two northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto. They range from medical screening to special gates at airports and recommendations to self-isolate. Conte insisted however that Italy’s health protocols were “among the most rigorous” and warned it would be “unfair” for other countries to attempt to limit the movement of Italians, saying, “we wouldn’t be able to accept that.” He said it was safe for Italians to travel, both for them and for others. Wide-ranging measures to halt the spread of the virus have affected tens of millions of people in the north of Italy, with schools closed and cultural and sporting events cancelled. Several upcoming football matches in Italian Serie A and the Europa League will be played behind closed doors and production of the latest “Mission: Impossible” film starring Tom Cruise in Venice has also been stopped. The main centre of infection in Italy has been the town of Codogno, a town of some 15,000 people around 60 kilometres (35 miles) to the south of Milan. Codogno and several other towns in northern Italy have been put under isolation. A 38-year-old man, dubbed “Patient One” by Italian media, was admitted to hospital last Wednesday in Codogno, and it is thought a large number of the cases in the worst-hit region of Lombardy can be traced back to him. His heavily pregnant wife, several doctors, staff and patients at the hospital are thought to have caught the virus from him. Elsewhere in the country officials have also been recommending precautionary measures, even in areas without known infections. To avoid physical contact, bishops in the southern Calabria region have asked their worshippers not to make the sign of peace during mass, media reported. All seven of those who have died so far in Italy were either elderly or had pre-existing medical conditions.

The U.S. should prepare for community transmission of the COVID-19 coronavirus, CDC officials said on Tuesday.

“We expect to see community spread [of COVID-19] in this country. It’s not a question of ‘if’ anymore,” said Nancy Messonnier, MD, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, on a media call. Currently, the U.S. has 14 COVID-19 cases that are travel-associated or in close contacts of travelers, and 43 cases from citizens brought home from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and Wuhan, China. But she cited the “rapidly evolving and expanding” situation, including the explosion of sustained person-to-person community spread in a variety of countries, including South Korea, Italy, Iran, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore. As the world inches closer to worldwide spread, and the final criterion of a pandemic, Messonnier acknowledged the previous strategy of containing the disease at the borders may no longer be enough to stop it. The strategy would then shift from a containment strategy to mitigation, she said. In the vein of “when, not if” the U.S. will experience community spread, she advised people to ask whether their providers have telemedicine capability, and said parents should consider “what to do about childcare” if schools are closed. Messonnier outlined community mitigation guidelines, based on those outlined for pandemic influenza a decade ago. These non-pharmaceutical interventions include personal practices, including covering coughs and washing hands, as well as community and environmental measures such as surface cleaning. Community measures are the most dire, and include social distancing, or limiting contact in face-to-face settings, employing such options as closing schools, telework or teleschool for children, and recommending that cities potentially “modify, postpone, or cancel mass gatherings.” This included a special advisory for the healthcare system: triaging patients, conducting patient visits via telemedicine, and delaying elective surgeries. Obviously, this would be based on the outbreak’s severity and breadth, but CDC called on a variety of industries, including the healthcare, education, and business sectors, to start preparing now because when the virus hits the community, it hits quite rapidly. “The disruption to everyday life may be severe, but these are things we need to start thinking about right now,” Messonnier noted.She added that 12 state and local health departments currently have the diagnostic test for COVID-19, but the tests still come to CDC for confirmation. She anticipated commercial laboratories would be coming online with their own tests, as it becomes “more and more important clinicians have a full toolkit.” “We are working as fast as we can, and we understand the frustration of our partners within the healthcare sector,” Messonnier said. While the case definition of COVID-19 is still travel-associated, Messonnier said that may change based on information in other countries and when they had new information about case definitions, they would “publicize it broadly.”

She ended with the caveat that she’s not sure if community spread of COVID-19 will be mild or severe, but told a reporter it was better to be overprepared than underprepared.

“People are concerned about the situation. I would say rightfully so,” Messonnier said. “I’m concerned about the situation. CDC is concerned about the situation.”

Dow futures drop about 700 points

U.S. stock market futures sank Monday as the spread of coronavirus raised worries that global economic growth could take a hit. Authorities in northern Italy canceled some public events, including Venice’s Carnival, in an effort to reduce the spread of the virus. Italian officials said Sunday they have 152 confirmed cases, the most in any country outside Asia. European stock markets fell sharply at the open, with the FTSE MIB Italy index I945, -4.10% slumping over 4%. South Korea reported 70 more cases and Iran said the death toll from the city of Qom is 50.

On Saturday, the International Monetary Fund warned the virus outbreak could reduce global economic growth by 0.1% this year, and drag China’s annual growth 0.4 percentage points lower than January estimates.

“The world economy is facing a clear slowdown and this slowdown might be reinforced by the so-called coronavirus,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said at a G-20 finance meeting in Saudi Arabia, according to the Associated Press. But U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Sunday that it was still too early to tell how the outbreak will affect the global economy. “I think we’re going to need another three or four weeks to see how the virus reacts, until we really have good statistical data,” he told CNBC.

Still, the global spread of the virus in patients with no links to China suggests “things are about to get extremely problematic, and market conditions could get exponentially worse this week,” Stephen Innes, chief market strategist with AxiTrader, wrote in a note Sunday.

More than 760 people in South Korea have been infected, with most of the diagnoses coming in the past few days. Under the new alert level, the government has the authority to order schools to be closed, stop public transportation and to cut off flights to and from South Korea. China’s President Xi Jinping on Sunday noted the outbreak news was “grim,” but said measures must be taken to get China’s economy going again, including reopening factories in low-risk areas. Experts forecast as much as a 1% reduction in China’s economic output this quarter due to strict quarantines that shuttered businesses and factories. Nick Note: Remember me? i am the guy as those assholes on Wall Street rallied the market told you to sell the shit out of it.

New cases of the novel coronavirus continue to increase worldwide and a Global Pandemic is near according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That includes 72,528 cases in China and 804 cases in 25 countries outside of China.

Some have questioned the accuracy of the statistics released by the Chinese government regarding the reported number of cases and deaths due to the outbreak. Now there are concerns about the accuracy of the laboratory tests used to confirm diagnoses. Reports suggest some people test negative up to six times even though they are infected with the virus, according to the BBC and Chinese media. Such was the case with Dr. Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist who first identified the outbreak and was reprimanded by Chinese authorities when he tried to warn others. Dr. Wenliang developed a cough and fever after unknowingly treating an infected patient. He was hospitalized, testing negative for coronavirus several times before eventually receiving a positive result. On Jan. 30 the doctor posted: “Today nucleic acid testing came back with a positive result, the dust has settled, finally diagnosed,” according to the BBC. Dr. Wenliang passed away on February 7 in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

False-negative test results, where patients are told they do not have a condition when they actually do, cause several problems. Patients may be turned away from hospitals and medical facilities when they require care. They may infect others at home, work, school, or in the community. Patients’ conditions may also worsen without treatment.

When faced with a highly infectious, potentially deadly pathogen, even a small number of false negatives can have a potentially serious and widespread impact on the larger population Doctors use a laboratory test called RT-PCR to diagnose severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 illness. RT-PCR detects and amplifies genetic material of interest. MedicineNet author Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD notes that “RT-PCR has been used to measure viral load with HIV and may also be used with other RNA viruses such as measles and mumps.” However, RT-PCR tests for the novel coronavirus are not perfect and not always accurate. A recent study in the journal Radiology examined medical records from 167 patients with COVID-19 from Hunan province in China. Researchers found that five patients out of 167 — 3% of the study group — who had chest CT scan features suggestive of COVID-19 initially tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 infection by RT-PCR. The patients were isolated and all eventually were confirmed through repeated swab tests to have the infection False negatives comprised just 3% of the patient population in this study. However, failure to detect a small number of cases of the potentially deadly viral infection may have wide-ranging effects for patients and others who may become infected. The study authors note that RT-PCR tests may produce false negatives due to laboratory error or insufficient amount of viral material collected from the patient. Samples that are stored or handled improperly also result in false negatives. Tests may result in false negatives if the patient is tested too early in the course of infection and there is insufficient amount of virus to be detected. Improper sampling may result in a false negative. Another potential problem with test kits: Faulty reagents. The CDC recently admitted test kits they distributed resulted in inconsistent results due to a problematic reagent required for the test. They are now manufacturing the reagents using stricter quality control measures. In the middle of cold and flu season, it is possible that some people who are being tested for coronavirus do not actually have the infection. Symptoms like cough and fever are nonspecific and may occur with many conditions other than COVID-19. In addition to the possibility of false negatives, authors of the Radiology study note that lab testing for SARS-CoV-2 is time-consuming and that test kits may be in short supply due to the rising number of infections. So, what’s the solution? Doctors in Hubei recently started diagnosing COVID-19 clinically based on patients’ symptoms and lung imaging. These cases are reflected in the global tally of infected individuals. Clinically-diagnosed cases account for the approximately 15,000 new cases reported by China last week.

Professor Hunter calls for consistency in case definitions. That is what is needed to get an accurate picture of the extent of the outbreak and the true number of those who have been infected or died. Accurate numbers also help determine the potential danger for the rest of the world. Insufficient test kits, inaccurate test kits, changing definitions of what constitutes a confirmed case of COVID-19, and overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of the illness make it difficult to determine the real number of those affected. Accurate diagnosis is necessary so that hospitals and resources are allocated to real cases. COVID-19 causes flu-like symptoms that worsen to fever, coughing, and shortness of breath. “Complications may include high fever, severe cough, difficulty breathing, pneumonia, organ failure, and death,” he states. “People may prevent or lower the risk of this viral infection by good hygiene, avoiding contact with infected people, not going into an outbreak area, and by leaving an outbreak zone,” Dr. Davis concludes.

MILAN (Reuters) – Italy raced on Sunday to contain the biggest outbreak of coronavirus in Europe, sealing off the worst affected towns and banning public gatherings in much of the north as the number of those infected jumped above 100. Authorities in the wealthy regions of Lombardy and Veneto, which are the focal point of the flare-up, ordered schools and universities to close for at least a week, shut museums and cinemas and called off the last two days of the Venice Carnival. “As of this evening, there will be a ban on the Venice Carnival as well as on all events, including sporting ones, until March 1 inclusive,” the regional governor of Veneto, Luca Zaia, told reporters. He said Sunday’s festivities in the packed lagoon city would continue to prevent any public order problems. The number of certified cases of the illness in Lombardy rose to 90 from 54 a day earlier, while in Veneto some 25 people had come down with the virus, including two people in Venice. Health officials reported isolated cases in the neighbouring regions of Piedmont and Emilia Romagna, saying the total number of known infections in Italy had risen to above 130. Two elderly people have died in the past 48 hours from the illness. The regional governor of Veneto, Luca Zaia, said he had dealt with numerous natural disasters during his long career, including floods and earthquakes. “But this is the absolutely worst problem that Veneto has faced,” he told reporters. Almost a dozen towns in Lombardy and Veneto with a combined population of some 50,000 have effectively been placed under quarantine, with locals urged to stay home and special permission needed to enter or leave the designated areas.

Lombardy is home to Italy’s financial capital Milan, and together with Veneto the two regions account for 30% of national gross domestic output. Any prolonged disruption there is likely to have a serious impact on the whole economy, which is already flirting with recession.

Fashion designer Giorgio Armani has said his fashion show scheduled to take place in Milan on Sunday would go ahead, but without any press or buyers present to prevent contagion, while four Serie A soccer matches were postponed across the north. Health authorities are struggling to work out how the outbreak started. The first cases were announced only on Friday and doctors do not know the source of the illness. Initial suspicion in Lombardy fell on a businessman recently returned from China, the epicentre of the new virus, but he has tested negative. In Veneto, doctors tested a group of eight Chinese visitors who had been to the town that was home to the first fatality, but again, they all tested negative. “We are (now) even more worried because if we cannot find ‘patient zero’ then it means the virus is even more ubiquitous than we thought,” Zaia said. Prior to Friday, Italy had reported just three cases of the virus – all of them people who had recently arrived from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged last year. After the first confirmed cases, Italy suspended all direct flights to and from China, but did not keep tabs on those arriving from second countries. Italy’s far-right opposition League party has demanded that the government reintroduce border controls to try to prevent new arrivals, but Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has rejected this. Austria’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said on Sunday that officials would meet on Monday to discuss whether Austria should unilaterally re-establish border controls with Italy.