ProPublica: Nursing Homes Fought Federal Emergency Plan Requirements for Years. Now, They’re Coronavirus Hot Spots.. “The long-term care industry resisted a federal mandate to plan for disasters including pandemics. About 43% of nursing homes have been caught violating the requirement, including facilities that have now had deadly COVID-19 outbreaks.”
Washington Post: South Korea closes schools again amid coronavirus spike, days after reopening. “The country had started to stage the opening of schools in the last week, instituting social distancing and prevention measures in an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus. But according to the Korea Times, hundreds of schools were closed again because of high infection rates in their communities. It cited the Ministry of Education as saying that 838 schools of the 20,902 nationwide that were supposed to reopen on Wednesday did not, including in Seoul, and hundreds closed on Thursday in Seoul, Bucheon and other cities.”
WBTV: N.C. reports 916 new COVID-19 cases as death toll nears 900. “North Carolina reported nearly 1,000 additional COVID-19 cases on Sunday. The state says there are 916 confirmed new cases, bringing the state’s total to 28,859. The state also reported nine additional deaths, as the death toll has increased to 886.”
New York Times: It’s Not Whether You Were Exposed to the Virus. It’s How Much.. “When experts recommend wearing masks, staying at least six feet away from others, washing your hands frequently and avoiding crowded spaces, what they’re really saying is: Try to minimize the amount of virus you encounter. A few viral particles cannot make you sick — the immune system would vanquish the intruders before they could. But how much virus is needed for an infection to take root? What is the minimum effective dose?”
National Geographic: A COVID-19 vaccine has passed its first human trial. But is it the frontrunner?. “A PROMISING CORONAVIRUS vaccine candidate cleared a key hurdle this week, when Moderna Therapeutics entered phase two of clinical trials. The move signals that the company’s mRNA vaccine has passed its initial safety checks and has met an important milestone in bringing this drug closer to the public and commercial markets.”
ABC News (Australia): Queensland researchers analysing coronavirus conspiracy theories warn of social media danger. “It’s one of the major conspiracy theories to flourish during the global pandemic — that coronavirus is a biological weapon. Now, a new Australian report suggests that theory has been amplified on Twitter through the ‘coordinated’ efforts of clusters of Pro-Trump, QAnon and Republican partisan accounts.”
NBC News: ICE keeps transferring detainees around the country, leading to COVID-19 outbreaks. “In the past several months, while most Americans have been ordered to shelter at home, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shuffled hundreds of people in its custody around the country. Immigrants have been transferred from California to Florida, Florida to New Mexico, Arizona to Washington State, Pennsylvania to Texas. These transfers, which ICE says were sometimes done to curb the spread of coronavirus, have led to outbreaks in facilities in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to attorneys, news reports and ICE declarations filed in federal courts.”
Yale News: Fishy Facebook science? Yale ‘Methods Man’ gives tools to interpret data. “[Dr. F. Perry Wilson] is the instructor behind a free, online course called ‘Understanding Medical Research: Your Facebook Friend Is Wrong,’ developed before the onset of the pandemic but especially relevant in the current onslaught of science and medical news. In the seven-week Coursera course, designed to be entertaining as well as instructive, Wilson explains how medical research works and how misinformation happens through faulty study designs and bad reporting. He covers topics like medical jargon, statistics, and bias. He gives people the basic knowledge to go back to the original study and interpret it themselves, and to look at media reports about those studies with a critical eye.”
BDN Politics: Advocates want Maine to form task force combating racial disparity in virus cases. “Black Mainers accounted for 20 percent of the cases in which racial data is disclosed as of Wednesday’s data from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, while they represent only 1.6 percent of the state’s population, in an increase from the past week. White Mainers make up 75 percent of cases while comprising 94.6 percent of the population.”
AP: DC mayor: We have to be concerned about virus rebound. “As more beaches, churches, mosques, schools and businesses reopened worldwide, civil unrest in the United States over repeated racial injustice is raising fears of new virus outbreaks in a country that has more infections and deaths than anywhere else in the world. And it’s not just in the U.S. — London hosted a large anti-racism protest Sunday that certainly violated government social distancing rules.”
Asia Times: US declares a vaccine war on the world. “The United States and the UK were the only two holdouts in the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines for Covid-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. The United States explicitly dissociated itself from the call for a patent pool, talking instead of ‘the critical role that intellectual property plays” – in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines.’
Yale News: Yale doctors design tool to predict rapid COVID-19 decline. “The tool, which uses predictive modeling, is called the COVID-19 severity index and is available online. To use it, emergency room doctors input just three patient parameters: rate of breathing, oxygen level, and the amount of oxygen required from a nasal cannula, a device used to deliver supplemental oxygen. A study describing the development and validation of the COVID severity index is available as a preprint on MedRxiv and has been submitted for peer review.”
Case Western Reserve University: National Science Foundation awards grant to team developing COVID-19 mapping tool. “The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded an $84,000, one-year grant to the team behind the online mapping tool designed to provide users with a real-time, location-based risk assessment for transmission of the novel coronavirus that leads to COVID-19.”
University of Missouri: New COVID-19 tracking tool monitors continuous 14-day trends as nation, states reopen. “A new tracking tool developed at the University of Missouri provides a continuously updated 14-day snapshot of new cases of COVID-19 in every county in the nation, helping the public monitor trends in cases as local stay-at-home restrictions are lifted and other measures are gradually repealed.”
Notre Dame News: Online tool created to track development of coronavirus vaccines. “The COVID-19 pandemic has led an unprecedented number of groups to begin developing coronavirus vaccines. To track this response, researchers from the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing are recording details about the coronavirus vaccine candidates currently in development as well as the progress of those candidates via a new interactive online tool. Dubbed the Vaccine Mapper, the free tool allows visitors to visualize everything from where the different vaccines are being developed around the world to the pre-clinical or clinical stages of development the vaccine candidates are currently in.”
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