Tag Archives: Coronavirus

U.S. CDC reports 195,053 deaths from coronavirus

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday reported 6,571,867 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 34,240 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 961 to 195,053.

The CDC’s tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, was of 4 p.m. ET on Sept. 15 versus its previous report a day earlier.

The CDC figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

(Reporting by Dania Nadeem in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)

Lilly says antibody drug cuts COVID-19 hospitalization, may seek emergency use nod

By Deena Beasley

(Reuters) – Eli Lilly and Co on Wednesday said a single infusion of its experimental antibody treatment reduced the need for hospitalization and emergency room visits for clinical trial patients with moderate COVID-19.

The company said it will discuss the interim results, which have not yet been reviewed by outside experts, with global regulators. The New York Times reported that Lilly Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky said the company would talk with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about the possibility of an emergency use authorization.

The mid-stage study tested three different doses of LY-CoV555, a manufactured copy of a an antibody produced by a patient who recovered from COVID-19. Antibody treatments work by recognizing and locking onto foreign invaders to prevent infection of healthy cells.

Of the total 302 patients treated with the Lilly drug, five or 1.7%, had to be hospitalized or required an emergency room visit. That compared with 6% in the placebo group, Lilly said.

“These data are not a home run but … are among the most encouraging COVID treatment data we’ve seen, particularly given this is in mild-to-moderate outpatients where there has simply been no treatment progress until now,” Raymond James analyst Steven Seedhouse said in a research note.

Oddly, only the middle 2,800-milligram dose achieved the trial’s main goal of reducing the amount of virus detected in patients compared with a placebo 11 days after treatment. Lilly said most trial participants, including those given a placebo, had completely cleared the virus by day 11. Some analysts suggested that future studies may want to use an earlier time point than 11 days.

Most hospitalizations occurred in patients with underlying risk factors such as obesity or advanced age. Lilly said future study would focus on people in these higher-risk groups.

No drug-related serious adverse events or trial deaths were reported.

Lilly said the trial will enroll 800 patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19, with the next segment testing LY-CoV555 in combination with a second Lilly antibody, LY-CoV016, which binds to a different area of the coronavirus.

The antibodies, given by intravenous infusion, are also being tested for preventing COVID-19 in nursing home residents and staff and for treating patients already hospitalized with COVID-19.

Several companies including Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and Vir Biotechnology are also testing antibody treatments for COVID-19.

Lilly’s shares were up 1.3% to $152.

(Reporting by Deena Beasley in Los Angeles and Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Bill Berkrot)

Virtual schooling dents retail sales, Trump economic message

By Ann Saphir

(Reuters) – Slower-than-expected sales at retailers in August suggest a speed bump is emerging in the U.S. economic recovery from coronavirus lockdowns, less than two months before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Overall, retail sales have returned to their pre-crisis levels and then some, gaining 0.6% in August, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. The rebound plays into U.S. President Donald Trump’s narrative of resurgent growth after a sharp pandemic downturn. Incumbent presidents are generally helped at the polls by a strong economy, and hurt by a weak one.

But last month’s rise was driven in part by an increase in gasoline prices, not typically a cause for consumer celebration. Meanwhile core retail sales, a closer measure of underlying spending trends, fell 0.1% last month. Both readings fell short of economists’ expectations.

Back-to-school shopping season, or the lack of it, was one cause. Many students actually could not head back to the classroom because of COVID-19 restrictions, and their curbed spending on supplies helped drive down core retail spending, said Regions Financial Corp economist Richard Moody. Meanwhile, a jump in sales at restaurants and bars drove most of the gain in overall retail sales.

The softening comes as nearly 30 million Americans are on some form of unemployment insurance. An extra $600 weekly that out-of-work-adults were getting in government aid expired at the end of July; it was replaced by a program that sent out $300 payments, but stopped taking new applicants on Sept. 10.

Lawmakers have so far failed to agree to any new aid package, and without more fiscal help, economists say the recovery will stall.

“The economy is weak: there are no two sides around that,” says Eric Winograd, senior economist at AllianceBernstein. Part of a voter’s calculus in picking a president may be, “Do you think additional stimulus is necessary, and if so what do you want that to look like?”

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; editing by Heather Timmons and Nick Zieminski)

New York mayor furloughs himself, staff for week to ease pandemic budget gap

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Everyone in the New York City mayor’s office, including the mayor himself, will be furloughed for one week without pay beginning Oct. 1 to close a budget shortfall created by the pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday.

The coronavirus outbreak had caused the city to lose $9 billion in revenue and forced a $7 billion cut to the city’s annual budget, de Blasio told reporters.

The furloughs will save only about $1 million, the mayor said, but may serve as a useful symbol as he continues to negotiate with labor unions representing municipal employees over broader payroll savings. De Blasio plans to work without pay during his own week-long furlough, the New York Times reported.

“It was not a decision I made lightly,” he told reporters. “To have to do this is painful for them and their families, but it is the right thing to do at this moment in history.”

With the furloughs and other savings, the mayor’s office budget this fiscal year will be 12% smaller than it was last year, de Blasio said, though he did not provide absolute totals.

The policy will affect 495 staff, the Times reported, and the week-long furloughs will be staggered among them between October and March 2021. De Blasio has warned he may have to lay off 22,000 city employees if savings cannot be found in the negotiations with the labor unions.

He is also seeking greater borrowing power from state lawmakers in Albany, New York state’s capital, who have been resistant so far.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. plans to distribute COVID-19 vaccine immediately after regulators authorize it

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. government on Wednesday said it will start distributing a COVID-19 vaccine within one day of regulatory authorization as it plans for the possibility that a limited number of vaccine doses may be available at the end of the year.

Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense on Wednesday held a call with reporters and then released documents on the distribution plans that it is sending to the states and local public health officials.

The federal government will allocate vaccines for each state based on the critical populations recommended first for vaccination by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That group is expected to include essential healthcare workers.

The document, called the COVID-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook, said that “limited COVID-19 vaccine doses may be available by early November 2020 if a COVID-19 vaccine is authorized or licensed by FDA by that time, but COVID-19 vaccine supply may increase substantially in 2021.”

Officials also said they were working to make sure there was no cost to patients for the vaccine.

(Reporting by Michael Erman and Caroline Humer in New York and Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Pandemic ‘hero’ Filipino nurses struggle to leave home

By Karen Lema and Clare Baldwin

MANILA (Reuters) – From across the Philippines, they gathered to pray by Zoom.

They were praying to be allowed to leave: To be allowed to take up nursing jobs in countries where the coronavirus is killing thousands in hospitals and care homes. In recent months, these care workers have taken to calling themselves “priso-nurses.”

With infections also surging in the Philippines, the government in April banned healthcare workers from leaving the country. They were needed, it said, to fight the pandemic at home.

But many of the nurses on the two-hour Zoom call on Aug. 20, organised by a union and attended by nearly 200 health workers both in the Philippines and abroad, were unwilling to work at home. They said they felt underpaid, unappreciated and unprotected.

Nurses have been leaving the Philippines for decades, encouraged by the government to join other workers who send back billions of dollars each year.

With COVID-19 sweeping the globalized economy, the Philippine ban squeezed a supply line that has sent hundreds of thousands of staff to hospitals in the United States, the Gulf and Britain, where some commentators have called the nurses “unsung heroes” of the pandemic.

The Philippines’ healthcare system is already short-handed. In Germany there are 430 doctors and nurses per 10,000 people, in the United States 337 and in Britain 254, International Labor Organization data shows.

The Philippines – where the coronavirus death rate is one of the highest in Southeast Asia – has 65.

The April ban has stopped more than 1,000 nurses from leaving the country. Of those, only 25 have applied to work in local hospitals, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told journalists late last month. The Department of Health did not reply to a request for an updated figure.

The government has since partially eased the restrictions, but sometimes also tightens them, so nurses are still clamoring to get out.

On the Zoom call in August, someone played a recording of the Philippine national anthem. A Catholic priest prayed and a man with a soft voice crooned a song about passing off your burdens to God.

One nurse, 34-year-old April Glory, had already spent years away from her young son and had been about to leave again when the ban kicked in. Even before the pandemic, she told Reuters separately, she was better off in a war zone in the Middle East than at home.

Soon after she arrived in Yemen in 2011, a bullet pierced the wall of her private hospital, she said. Staff moved patients to safety.

Still, she said, “we were insured, we had free lodging so my salary was intact and I could send more to my family.” Abroad, there was no need to do any work outside her job description: “You are not expected to sweep the floor.”

SIMPLE MATH

It’s mainly money that drives the Filipinos abroad.

A nurse in the United States can earn as much as $5,000 per month; in the Middle East it’s $2,000 per month, tax free. In Germany, nurses can earn up to $2,800 per month, and get language training, labor organizers, recruiters and the Philippine government’s overseas employment agency say.

Even with its emergency hiring efforts, the Philippine Department of Health is only offering nurses a starting salary of $650 per month. It says it will pay another $10 per day as COVID-19 hazard allowance.

Private nurses sometimes make just $100 per month.

“I felt that I was not earning enough,” said Glory, explaining why she left. Her son, now 11, was a year and a half old at the time. “My mother told me: Better to leave now because my child will not really remember.”

Abroad, Glory’s shifts were a standard eight hours and she only looked after one or two patients at a time in intensive care. Working in Yemen and then Saudi Arabia, she said she bought a house and a car.

Nurses have recently left faster than they are trained. Last year, 12,083 new nurses graduated in the Philippines. That same year, 16,711 signed contracts to go abroad, data from the Commission on Higher Education and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration shows. Those renewing foreign contracts are counted separately. So far this year there have been 46,000 such renewals.

The Philippine government wasn’t able to provide figures for the total number of nurses overseas, or say which countries they are working in.

Filipinos are the biggest group of foreign nurses in the United States. In 2018, there were 348,000, an analysis of U.S. government data by Washington D.C.-based think tank Migration Policy Institute showed. Even with the pandemic, another 3,260 Filipinos have passed the U.S. nurse licensing exam this year.

A report to Britain’s House of Commons Library in May said more than 15,000 of the National Health Service nursing jobs held by foreigners went to Filipinos – nearly a third of the total and more than any other nationality. The NHS employs a further 6,600 Filipinos in other healthcare jobs.

Labor brokers say that, besides the UK and US, Filipino nurses are sought-after in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.

36-HOUR SHIFTS

Nine months into the pandemic in the Philippines, reported coronavirus infections in the Philippines have soared to around 270,000. Not all hospitals allow family members to visit, so nurses must feed and clean patients as well as giving health care, said Filipino Nurses United President Maristela Abenojar.

Some nurses are working up to 36-hour shifts because relief staff are calling in sick or not reporting for duty, she said, and sometimes nurses are issued just one set of protective gear per shift. Nurses can’t get tested regularly and if they get sick, there aren’t always hospital beds reserved for them, she said.

At least 56 healthcare workers have died in the Philippines, Department of Health data shows.

“It seems they don’t really value our contributions,” said Jordan Jugo, who works at a private hospital in the Philippines. “It hurts.” He had a contract to work in Britain, but the ban prevented him from leaving.

He said he could sometimes only eat two meals a day and could no longer support his siblings.

The Philippine Department of Health said its healthcare workers work long hours and “it is natural for them to feel tired and overwhelmed with their immense responsibilities.” It said it had arranged for “substitution teams” in some areas.

It said hospitals should provide sufficient protective gear and that healthcare workers should not go on duty without it. Healthcare workers should be prioritized for regular COVID-19 testing, it said, and the Department would ensure there are enough beds for everyone.

Health Secretary Duque has said previously that the government was appealing to the nurses’ “sense of nation, sense of people and sense of service.”

“I DON’T WANT TO BE A HERO”

Foreign countries have gone all-out to show Filipino nurses they are valued.

Saudi Arabia sent chartered planes to help them return to work, and only partly filled them so the nurses could maintain social distance.

British ambassador to the Philippines Daniel Pruce went on an 11-minute segment on Philippine television to praise the “incredible commitment and dedication” of Filipino healthcare workers in Britain.

When nurse Aileen Amoncio, 36, got trapped by a lockdown and then the travel ban during a vacation to the Philippines in March, Britain’s NHS granted her a special “COVID leave” and kept paying her, she said. The NHS said staff stuck abroad due to COVID-19 could qualify for such leave.

Amoncio got out of the Philippines in June, after the government eased the ban slightly.

Working at an NHS neurological rehabilitation hospital in the UK, she said she sympathized with the nurses back home, where she once handled as many as 80 patients on a surgical ward at a small hospital. Now she looks after no more than 10 at a time.

Not only are the pay and conditions better in Britain, she said, but she also hopes her daughter will one day be able to join her and get free treatment on the NHS. The hearing implant she needs would cost $20,000 in the Philippines.

“I’ve served my country already,” said Amoncio. “I don’t want to be a hero again. I am looking out for the future of my children.”

On the Zoom call, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III dialed in with an update: Some of those who had existing contracts could leave, he announced. Cheers went up.

Nurse Glory was one of them. She wept.

“I hope the government will not take it against us that we are leaving,” she said. “We are looking forward to helping the government with this fight in other ways. When we are able, when we’ve risen out of poverty, we will.”

Hours later, on the pavement outside the airport, she quickly hugged her son, then raced to board her flight in case the government changed its mind.

(Additional reporting by Eloisa Lopez; Edited by Matthew Tostevin and Sara Ledwith)

U.S. COVID-19 death analysis shows greater toll on Black, Hispanic youth: CDC

(Reuters) – A disproportionate percentage of U.S. COVID-19 deaths have been recorded among Black and Hispanic people younger than 21, according to a U.S. study, a reflection of the racial and ethnic make-up of essential workers who have more exposure to COVID-19.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that from Feb. 12 through July 31, there were 121 deaths among people younger than the age of 21 in 27 states.

Hispanic, Black, and non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaskan Native people accounted for about 75% of the deaths in that age group, even though they represent 41% of the U.S. population aged under 21.

The researchers looked at data from 47 of 50 states. Among the 121 deaths, 63% were male, 45% were Hispanic and 29% were Black.

Deaths among children younger than one accounted for 10% of the total, 20% of the deaths were among one-to-nine-year olds, while those aged between 10 and 20 years accounted for the rest.

A quarter of the 121 deaths were in previously healthy individuals with no reported underlying medical condition, while 75% had at least one underlying medical condition, including asthma.

The researchers said children from racial and ethnic minority groups, whose parents were likely to be essential workers, could also be over represented because of crowded living conditions, food and housing insecurity, wealth and educational gaps and racial discrimination.

The study appeared in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The findings of this study could be limited by incomplete testing and delays in reporting COVID-19-associated deaths, among other things, the researchers said.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

U.S. CDC reports 194,092 deaths from coronavirus

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday reported 6,537,627 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 34,597 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 387 to 194,092.

The CDC’s tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, is as of 4 p.m. ET on Sept. 14 compared with its previous report a day earlier.

The CDC figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

(Reporting By Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Vinay Dwivedi)

COVID-19 cases rise in Canada, schools to put pressure on testing system

By Allison Martell and Moira Warburton

TORONTO/VANCOUVER (Reuters) – Canada’s three biggest provinces are seeing a pick-up in new COVID-19 cases, as officials do little to slow the virus beyond urging people to be more careful, and doctors warn school reopenings will boost demand for testing.

The country reported no deaths for one day on Friday, an echo of earlier success in controlling the virus that may already be slipping away, even before the impact of school reopenings is clear.

Demand for tests is already up in some Ontario hot spots, and will rise further as more children return to school. Students with symptoms will generally have to isolate at home until they are well and have a negative test, so any backlogs will trap families at home.

McMaster University infectious disease expert Dr Zain Chagla said assessment centers need to stop testing asymptomatic people who have no known exposure to the virus, before labs become overwhelmed.

Canada’s 5 million school children average about eight upper respiratory tract infections a year, said Chagla. Even if that falls to two this year, some 27,000 will need to be tested on any given day.

Last week, Canada averaged 47,807 tests per day.

“It’s not minor, the actual demands that are going to be put on the system as part of children going back to school,” he said. “It’s going to be paramount that the turnaround time be relatively quick.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he discussed testing with Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday morning.

“All provinces, not just Ontario, are going to start ramping up for more testing,” he said.

Federal officials have said they are aiming for a “slow burn” of infection.

Dr. Irfan Dhalla, vice president of physician quality at Unity Health, which operates two hospitals in Toronto, has argued that the country should instead try to come as close as possible to eliminating the virus, following New Zealand and Canada’s own Atlantic provinces, with testing, tracing, isolation and support.

“It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing hospitalizations increase, and before we start seeing more people dying again,” said Dhalla.

Infections in Ontario, the most populous province, charged through the 300 mark on Monday, after dropping to below 100 a day in early August with the government blaming the spread on private social gatherings like weddings.

British Columbia, which imposed fresh curbs on nightclubs last week, reported its highest-ever case count of 139 on Sept. 10. Cases are also rising in Quebec, where classes resumed first.

Quebec teachers’ union Fédération autonome de l’enseignement (FAE) filed a lawsuit on Monday, seeking more information about a promised plan to ensure teachers and students have access to accelerated testing, and on the number of COVID-19 cases in schools.

“The government is currently giving the impression that it is improvising, while the virus doesn’t give second chances,” FAE president Sylvain Mallette said in a statement.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his message on Monday, asking people to remain vigilant: “The last thing anyone wants is to go into this fall and lock down, similar to this spring,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Mahad Arale in Toronto, Allison Lampert in Montreal and Steve Scherer in Ottawa; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Pandemic preparedness panel slams collective failure to heed warnings

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – A collective failure by political leaders to heed warnings and prepare for an infectious disease pandemic has transformed “a world at risk” to a “world in disorder,” according to a report on international epidemic preparedness.

“Financial and political investments in preparedness have been insufficient, and we are all paying the price,” said the report by The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).

“It is not as if the world has lacked the opportunity to take these steps,” it said. “There have been numerous calls for action … yet none has generated the changes needed.”

The GPMB, co-convened by the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), is co-chaired by former WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland.

The board’s 2019 report, released a few months before the novel coronavirus emerged in China, said there was a real threat of “a rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen” and warned such an event could kill millions and wreak havoc on the global economy.

This year’s report – entitled “A World in Disorder” – said world leaders had never before “been so clearly forewarned of the dangers of a devastating pandemic”, and yet they had failed to take adequate action.

“Tragically and catastrophically, we have seen our worst fears realized,” Brundtland told a media briefing on Monday. “The impact of COVID-19 is even worse than we anticipated.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed “a collective failure to take pandemic prevention, preparedness and response seriously and prioritize it accordingly,” the report said.

“Pathogens thrive in disruption and disorder. COVID-19 has proven the point.”

The report noted that despite calling a year ago for heads of government to commit and invest in pandemic preparedness, for health systems to be strengthened and for financial risk planning to take seriously the threat of a devastating pandemic, little progress had been made on any of these.

A lack of leadership, it said, was exacerbating the current pandemic. “Failure to learn the lessons of COVID-19 or to act on them with the necessary resources and commitment will mean that the next pandemic, which is sure to come, will be even more damaging,” it said.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity and a member of the monitoring board, urged leaders not to repeat the same mistakes. “This needs more than warm words of solidarity,” he said. “This needs a moment of visionary, historic, political and financial leadership.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, Editing by William Maclean and Alex Richardson)