August 20 coronavirus news

Beijing residents going out in public won't have to wear a mask from Thursday, according to new government guidelines, as long as they aren't in close contact with other people.

The Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control released the new rules on Thursday, the latest sign that China's coronavirus epidemic is under control.

China reported just 22 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours on Friday, with no new infections reported in Beijing.

Under the new rules, residents in the Chinese capital only have to wear masks if they are going to have "close contact with other people."

Children should be accompanied by adults and encouraged to use proper hygiene, while spitting is not allowed.

Coronavirus deaths should start dropping around parts of the United States by next week, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield said Thursday, because people are doing more to control the virus by social distancing, staying out of crowds, wearing masks and washing hands.

“Interventions are going to have a lag of three or four weeks,” Redfield said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“You and I are going to see the cases continue to drop. And then hopefully this week and next week, you’re going to start seeing the death rate really start to drop again.” 

But Redfield said not every region is improving. “There’s a warning sign … Middle America right now is getting stuck,” he said. “We don’t need to have a third wave in the heartland.”

States have to stick with the interventions meant to slow the spread of the virus, Redfield said. 

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 5.5 million people in the US have been diagnosed with coronavirus and more than 174,000 have died, although Redfield has said testing has likely caught only about one in 10 cases.

As many as 60 million Americans could have been infected with coronavirus, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield told the Journal of the American Medical Association Thursday.

The CDC released a report in June, published in JAMA, showing an infection rate in the United States of about 10%. Redfield said at the time he believed testing had missed 90% or more of cases. 

Redfield said Thursday an infection rate of between 10-20% translates into as many as 60 million people who may have already been infected, but there’s not really any good data on the numbers yet.

“We’re in the process of obviously following up with the report that we did in JAMA that kind of let us understand that maybe for the 2 million cases we diagnosed, we had an estimated 20 million people infected,” Redfield said in the video interview.

“We've now expanded that throughout the country, so very large surveillance work in progress,” he said.

Redfield said he didn’t want to speculate on the number of Americans who may actually be infected with the virus, but he did offer an estimate.

“I really want to be data driven but there is enormous geographic variation. I can tell you that we have some areas that we're looking at less than 1% and we have other areas we're looking at 20%,” he said.

Confirmed cases: As of Thursday night, at least 5,573,501 coronavirus cases have been recorded across the US, according to Johns Hopkins University. The total includes at least 174,248 deaths.

In mid-March, as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold in Europe and the United States, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern presented her country with a choice.

They could let coronavirus creep into the community and brace for an onslaught, as other countries around the world had done. Or they could "go hard" by closing the border -- even if that initially hurt the island nation's hugely tourism-dependant economy.

Ardern opted for the second path. When New Zealand had only reported 28 cases, Ardern closed borders to foreigners, and when there were 102 cases, she announced a nationwide lockdown.

In effect, Ardern offered New Zealanders a deal: put up with some of the toughest rules in the world, and in return, be kept safe -- first from the deadly coronavirus, and later, from potential economic devastation.

For a while, it seemed that deal had paid off. New Zealand spent seven weeks under lockdown, five of them under strict rules that meant even takeaway food and traveling outside of their immediate neighborhood were off limits. But by June, life was basically back to normal -- and in August, New Zealand marked 100 days without any community transmission.

Then, last week, that changed.

Read the full analysis:

Mexico reported at least 6,775 new cases of Covid-19 on Wednesday, bringing the total to approximately 543,806. 

The health ministry also reported at least 625 new deaths yesterday, bringing the total number of fatalities in the country to approximately 59,106 since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Some context: Mexico has the third-highest number of deaths from coronavirus in the world following only the US and Brazil, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Mexico is ranked third in Latin America by Johns Hopkins in terms of its number of total coronavirus cases, behind only Brazil and Peru. 

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said people who were opposed to wearing masks in schools were "a little bit irrational."

Herbert, who said his own grandchildren would be wearing masks while at school, said the state has tried to create an environment that is safe for students to learn, and to also keep teachers who might be more susceptible to health issues safe.

Herbert said at a news conference Thursday that he understands the safety concerns and that people want zero risk when going back to school, but he said “we certainly can minimize the risk and mitigate the chances of you catching the coronavirus at school” and one of the best ways to do that is to wear a mask, he added. 

“I know people have a strong emotion about this [wearing face masks]…seems to be a little bit irrational, where all we're trying to do is help create a safe environment. I guess these same people get on an airplane and say I'm not gonna fasten my seatbelt, even though that's the (inaudible) regulation, and they may be invited to get off the plane if that's the case," he said.

While Utah does not have a statewide mask mandate, a state public health order was issued on July 17 requiring all students, teachers, staff and visitors on school property to wear a mask.

If K-12 students, teachers, staff and visitors are not wearing a mask, they can now be charged with a class B misdemeanor that is punishable by a sentence of up to six months in jail and a fine of $1,000, according to the Utah Judiciary. The class B misdemeanor for violating the masks at school order would be the same as violating any mandate. Enforcing the mask mandate in schools is left up to local jurisdictions, Herbert said.

"The mask mandate is not intended to penalize students, parents or teachers — it's intended to create a universal standard of a safe, common sense practice. All mandates make a Class B misdemeanor the default penalty, but any enforcement of this would be on the local level," Anna Lehnardt, director of communications for Herbert, said in a statement to CNN.

Herbert also announced he issued a new state of emergency order that will take effect tonight upon the expiration of the state’s current one.

Superspreading events – when one or a few infected people cause a cascade of transmissions – may be especially important in driving the coronavirus pandemic in rural areas, researchers reported Thursday.

Their study of five counties in Georgia also showed shelter-in-place orders worked fast to bring cases down – usually within about two weeks. And younger people were more likely to spread the virus than people over age 60.

Biostatistician Max Lau of Emory University and colleagues analyzed state health department data in more than 9,500 coronavirus cases in four metro Atlanta area counties plus Dougherty County in rural southwestern Georgia between March and May.

Health officials across the country have reported superspreading events related to birthday parties, funerals, conferences and other large gatherings.

People under 60 were almost three times as likely to spread the virus as people over 60, and tended to be responsible for superspreading, they said.

They also used location data from Facebook users to estimate how much people moved around and applied mathematical models to figure out how the reported cases fit in with behavior. 

But the data is likely skewed, the Emory team said. Early on in the pandemic, especially, older people were more likely to be reported with infections because they were more likely to have serious symptoms.

“Due to the lack of widely available testing, the underreporting rate was almost surely high during earlier phases of the pandemic,” they added.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, encouraged scientists to work on Covid-19 antibody treatments with the same urgency he has already seen the community bring to research during this pandemic. 

Collins’ focus in an online discussion Thursday was on the latest science behind monoclonal antibody treatments and convalescent plasma. Both are under investigation in a variety of clinical trials to treat and possible prevent Covid-19.

With monoclonal antibody treatments, scientists clone antibodies that they think will be most effective at fighting a disease and put that into a treatment.

Eli Lilly Inc., whose treatment uses one potent antibody, is currently putting its antibody treatment through a few late-stage human trials. Regeneron Inc. uses two antibodies in the treatment it’s testing in late-stage trials. Several other companies’ antibody treatments are in earlier stages of development.

In the discussion Thursday, scientists presented evidence that they think these treatments will not cause antibody-dependent enhancement – where a treatment makes a disease worse. Collins said the government will be monitoring the trials closely to see if the problem develops or if there is any evidence of viral resistance to the treatments. 

A cocktail approach reduces the risk of a treatment becoming ineffective if the virus were to mutate, studies have shown. Some companies have been reluctant to use more than one antibody in a treatment because it may slow the manufacturing process. 

Collins said if the treatment was well-designed, that may not be as much of an issue.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, therapeutic lead for Operation Warp Speed, said the government is committed to making sure these therapies work in head-to-head clinical trials.

“We hope to be testing the efficacy of a number of neutralizing monoclonal antibodies and possibly other types, so perhaps polyclonal antibodies in parallel, in randomized clinical trials,” Woodcock said. “This provides, I think, a tremendous opportunity.”

Prisons are hotspot for the spread of coronavirus, but inmates are not getting the medical attention they need, Dr. Homer Venters, former chief medical officer of New York City Correctional Health Services, said Thursday. 

“The care provided to people who are detained in the United States is completely inadequate,” Venters said during a briefing hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Venters said his investigation of Covid-19 responses in 40 jurisdictions around the country, including federal prisons, local jails and immigration detention centers, showed “systematic racism.”

Agencies such as the US Department of Health and Human Services or the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would normally provide quality assurance in care facilities, “are all essentially AWOL when it comes to the health and health care of people who are detained and that’s not an accident. It is really one of the most poignant ongoing representations of systematic racism in our nation,” he said.

Research has shown that people of color are disproportionately represented in the US prison system.