Tag Archives: COVID-19

Pediatric use of COVID-19 antibody drugs not advised by experts; disinfectant use can cause asthma flares

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Experts advise against antibody drugs in pediatric COVID-19

As of now, antibody therapies for COVID-19 should not be used to treat infections with the new coronavirus in children or adolescents, “including those … at high risk of progression to hospitalization or severe disease,” according to a panel of experts from 29 hospitals across North America who reviewed the available evidence. The antibody drugs – bamlanivimab from Eli Lilly and Co and the combination of casirivimab plus imdevimab from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc – were authorized in November by the U.S Food and Drug Administration for emergency use in certain groups of adolescents and adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19. But in a paper published on Sunday in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the panel of experts said: “The course of COVID-19 in children and adolescents is typically mild and there is no high-quality evidence supporting any high risk groups. There is no evidence for safety and efficacy of monoclonal antibody therapy for treatment of COVID-19 in children or adolescents, limited evidence of modest benefit in adults, and evidence for potential harm.” (https://bit.ly/3b2kVyG)

Disinfecting during pandemic puts asthmatics at risk

Increased cleaning by people with asthma during the pandemic may be triggering flares of their disease, a new report suggests. Researchers who surveyed 795 U.S. adults with asthma between May and September found the proportion who disinfected surfaces with bleach at least five times a week rose by 155% after the pandemic started. Use of disinfectant wipes, sprays, and other liquids also increased, the researchers reported in Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology: In Practice. After accounting for other behaviors and risk factors, higher odds of having uncontrolled asthma were linked with greater household use of disinfectant wipes, disinfectant sprays, bleach and water solutions, and other disinfecting liquids. The study does not prove that increased frequency of disinfecting caused uncontrolled asthma. Still, the authors say, people with asthma need safer cleaning options. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises asthmatics to ask someone else to clean and disinfect surfaces and to stay in another room when cleaners or disinfectants are used and right afterward. It also said soap and water may be sufficient for surfaces and objects that are seldom touched.

News reports paint overly rosy picture of blood treatment

News reports about critically ill COVID-19 patients treated with a last-ditch procedure known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, may be painting an unrealistic picture of outcomes, a study suggests. During ECMO, blood is pumped outside of the body through a machine that removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen before returning the blood back to the body. In a review of media reports about ECMO treatment of COVID-19, doctors found that 92% of patients in the stories survived, whereas average survival rates after ECMO in large studies have ranged from 53% in children to 63% in young and middle-aged adults. Patients receiving the ECMO treatment “remain at substantial risk” of complications and death, but most news reports of COVID-19 patients treated with ECMO did not address these risks, the researchers said on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. They say recognition of the exaggerated benefit suggested by media reports may help intensive care unit doctors, patients and families have more realistic discussions about prognosis after ECMO.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

New York, Florida tell hospitals to speed COVID-19 vaccinations or lose supply

By Carl O’Donnell and Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The governors of New York and Florida sought to accelerate the slower-than-expected rollout of coronavirus vaccines by warning hospitals on Monday that they would reduce future allocations to those that fail to dispense shots quickly enough.

In New York, hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of receiving them or face a fine and loss of future supplies, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

“I don’t want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in somebody’s arm,” the governor said. “If you’re not performing this function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of the hospital.”

The U.S. federal government has distributed more than 15 million vaccine doses to states and territories around the country, but only around 4.5 million have been administered so far, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Monday.

The U.S. government has fallen far short of its target of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. Officials said they expect the rollout will pick up significantly this month.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News that there are 15 million to 20 million doses of vaccine available.

“We should be hopeful about that while acknowledging we have got to do better and we are going to keep doing better,” Adams said. “And I promise you, you will see in these next two weeks numbers increase substantially.”

The United States had reported a total of 20.5 million COVID-19 cases and 351,480 deaths as of midnight on Sunday. On a seven-day rolling average, it is reporting 210,190 cases and 2,636 coronavirus deaths per day.

In Florida, where officials have put senior citizens ahead of many essential workers for getting the vaccine, Governor Ron DeSantis announced a policy under which the state would allocate doses to hospitals that dispense them most quickly,

“Hospitals that do not do a good job of getting the vaccine out will have their allocations transferred to hospitals that are doing a good job at getting the vaccine out,” DeSantis said at a briefing.

“We do not want vaccine to just be idle at some hospital system,” he added, though he did not say they would face fines.

Florida will also deploy an additional 1,000 nurses to administer vaccines and will keep state-run vaccination sites open seven days a week, he said.

New York has dispensed about 175,000 doses of the 896,000 it has received since mid-December, according to CDC data. Florida has dispensed 265,000 of the 1.14 million doses it received.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said obstacles were slowing his goal to have 1 million residents receive a first of two vaccine doses by the end of January. A little over 110,000 residents have received their first dose so far, according to city data.

De Blasio urged the state to broaden early eligible groups beyond healthcare workers and nursing home residents to include essential workers such as teachers, police officers, fire fighters, grocery store personnel and people who are more than 75 years old.

New York City currently has 125 vaccination sites and plans to double that by the end of the month, the mayor said.

“This has got to be a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour reality going forward,” de Blasio said.

Monday also marked the first day when some Americans were due to receive their second vaccine shot, three weeks after getting the first dose. Among them was Maritza Beniquez, a healthcare worker in Newark, New Jersey.

“I now have body armor,” she said after receiving the dose in a video posted on Facebook by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who was part of a small gathering that witnessed the event.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen, Carl O’Donnell, Rebecca Spaulding and Peter Szekely in New York; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg, Anurag Maan, Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

In deadliest week so far, U.S. loses more than 18,400 lives to COVID-19

(Reuters) – December was the deadliest month of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States with nearly 78,000 deaths, and health officials warned that even more people will likely die in January despite the rollout of vaccines.

In the week ended Jan. 3, more than 18,400 people died from COVID-19, bringing the pandemic’s total to over 351,000 deaths, or one in every 930 U.S. residents, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county reports.

The country reported nearly 1.5 million new infections last week, up 16.5% from the previous seven days.

Many testing centers were closed for the year-end holiday, likely reducing the number of cases reported last week. Health officials have warned that figures this week may be abnormally high due to a backlog of data.

More than 126,000 COVID-19 patients are currently in hospitals, up 25% from one month ago. The rise in hospitalizations, which have hit new records almost every day in recent weeks, is the main reason health experts predict further increases in deaths in coming weeks.

Despite pleas to avoid traveling for the holidays, U.S. airports screened 1.3 million people on Sunday, the highest since mid-March.

Arizona, Tennessee and South Carolina reported the most new cases per capita last week, according to the Reuters analysis. In terms of deaths per capita, Kansas, Wyoming and New Mexico were the hardest hit last week.

Across the United States, 13.6% of tests came back positive for the virus, up from 10.3% the prior week, according to data from the volunteer-run COVID Tracking Project. The highest rates were in Iowa at 64%, Idaho at 56% and Alabama at 47%.

The World Health Organization considers positive test rates above 5% concerning because it suggests there are more cases in the community that have not yet been uncovered.

(Graphic by Chris Canipe, writing by Lisa Shumaker, editing by Tiffany Wu)

15.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines distributed, 4.5 million administered: U.S. CDC

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had administered 4,563,260 first doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country as of Monday morning and distributed 15,418,500 doses.

The tally of vaccine doses distributed and the number of people who received the first dose are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, vaccines as of 9:00 a.m. ET on Saturday, the agency said.

According to the tally posted on Jan. 2, the agency had administered 4,225,756 first doses of the vaccines and distributed 13,071,925 doses.

A total of 2,533,925 vaccine doses were distributed for use in long-term care facilities and 365,294 people in the facilities got their first dose, the agency said.

The agency also reported 20,558,489 cases of the coronavirus, an increase of 212,117 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 1,418 to 350,664.

The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4 p.m. ET on Jan. 3 versus its previous report a day earlier.

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

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Amy Caren Daniel)

Italy reports 348 coronavirus deaths on Monday, 10,800 new cases

ROME (Reuters) -Italy reported 348 coronavirus-related deaths on Monday against 347 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 10,800 from 14,245.

However, the number of swab tests also fell, as often happens at the weekend, amounting to just 77,993 against a previous 102,974.

Italy has registered 75,680 COVID-19 deaths since its outbreak came to light on Feb. 21, the highest toll in Europe and the fifth highest in the world. The country has also reported 2.166 million cases to date, the health ministry said.

Patients in hospital with COVID-19 stood at 23,317 on Monday, up 242 on the day before. There were 136 admissions to intensive care units, compared with 154 on Sunday.

The current number of intensive care patients fell by four to 2,579, reflecting those who died or were discharged after recovery.

When Italy’s second wave of the epidemic was accelerating fast in the first half of November, hospital admissions were rising by about 1,000 per day, while intensive care occupancy was increasing by about 100 per day.

(Reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Angelo Amante)

Sturgeon orders Scots to stay at home as new variant advances

By Kate Holton and Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) – Scotland on Monday imposed the most stringent COVID-19 lockdown since last March and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would shortly impose tougher curbs in England to contain a rapidly spreading outbreak of a new variant of the coronavirus.

The United Kingdom has the world’s sixth-highest official coronavirus death toll – 75,024 – and the number of new infections is soaring across the country.

As Johnson mulled tougher measures for England, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the new variant accounted for nearly half of new cases in Scotland and is 70% more transmissible.

Scots, she said, would be legally required to stay at home for January from midnight. Schools will close for all but the children of essential workers.

“I am more concerned about the situation that we face now than I have been at any time since March,” Sturgeon told the Scottish parliament.

“As a result of this new variant, (the virus) has just learned to run much faster, and has most definitely picked up pace in the past couple of weeks,” Sturgeon said.

Visiting a hospital to see the first people receive the vaccine made by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, Johnson said the country faced “tough, tough” weeks to come.

“If you look at the numbers, there’s no question that we’re going to have to take tougher measures and we’ll be announcing those in due course,” Johnson said. “We’ve got the virus really surging.”

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland implement their own COVID-19 responses though they are trying to coordinate more across the United Kingdom.

SCHOOLS

England is currently divided into four tiers of restrictions, depending on the prevalence of the virus, with the vast majority of the country in Tiers 3 and 4 where social mixing is restricted and restaurants and pubs are closed.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said earlier that the rules in Tier 3 were clearly not working.

With England moving back towards the strict lockdown of the first wave in March, Johnson was also asked if schools would have to close once again and return to online learning.

He said that would remain a last resort for primary schools given the social and educational damage that can be done to isolated children.

But he indicated they may need to rethink a plan to reopen secondary schools for pupils aged between 11 and 18.

“It looks as though secondary schools probably play more of a role in the spread of the epidemic than primary schools, so we’ll have to look very hard at what we do with secondary schools later in the month,” he said.

The government has spent the year trying to balance the need to shut down the country to contain the virus without hammering the economy.

The first national coronavirus lockdown in May last year prompted a 25% drop in economic output – unprecedented in modern records – leaving Britain’s economy harder hit by the pandemic than most others.

While the economy recovered partially in the third quarter, renewed lockdown measures threaten to cause a double-dip recession at the start of 2021.

(Reporting by Kate Holton and Guy Faulconbridge, Andy Bruce; Editing by Sarah Young and Hugh Lawson)

U.S., EU criticize China for jailing citizen-journalist who reported on COVID-19

BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The European Union and United States on Tuesday criticized the jailing of a citizen-journalist in China who reported on the early outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic from Wuhan.

A Chinese court handed down a four-year jail term on Monday to Zhang Zhan, who reported at the peak of the crisis in the city where the coronavirus first emerged. Her lawyer said Zhang was jailed on the grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that he strongly condemned Zhang’s conviction and called for her immediate and unconditional release, accusing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of restricting and manipulating information about the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

“Her hasty trial, to which foreign observers were denied access, shows how fearful the CCP is of Chinese citizens who speak the truth,” Pompeo said, adding that the United States would always support the right of Chinese citizens to express themselves freely.

U.S.-China relations have plunged to their worst level in decades as the world’s top two economies spar over issues ranging from the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing’s national security law for Hong Kong, trade and espionage.

The EU also called for Zhang’s immediate release, as well as for freedom for jailed human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng, and several other detained and convicted human rights defenders and individuals who engaged in reporting in the public interest.

“According to credible sources, Ms. Zhang has been subject to torture and ill-treatment during her detention and her health condition has seriously deteriorated,” an external affairs spokesman for the 27-nation EU said in a statement.

Separately, the EU called on China to “guarantee procedural fairness and due process of law” for 10 Hong Kong activists on trial in China after being caught at sea and accused of trying to flee to Taiwan.

In a statement it called for the immediate release of the group and their swift return to Hong Kong from Shenzhen, where they went on trial on Dec. 28 in a closed court and without appointed lawyers of their choice.

The EU criticism over the cases comes a day before EU and Chinese leaders are expected to clinch a deal to give European companies better access to the Chinese market.

Citizen-journalist Zhang was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicenter than the official narrative.

Critics say that China deliberately arranged for Zhang’s trial to take place during the holiday season in the West, to minimize scrutiny.

“The restrictions on freedom of expression, on access to information, and intimidation and surveillance of journalists, as well as detentions, trials and sentencing of human rights defenders, lawyers, and intellectuals in China, are growing and continue to be a source of great concern,” the EU spokesman said.

(Reporting by John Chalmers in Brussels and Daphne Psaledakis in Washingtond; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Israel speeds vaccines, locks down in hope of February exit from pandemic

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel began what officials hope will be its last coronavirus lockdown on Sunday as they ramp up vaccinations to a pace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said may allow an emergence from the pandemic in February.

If realized, that could help Netanyahu’s re-election hopes after missteps that include lifting a first lockdown with a premature declaration of victory in May, inconsistent enforcement of curbs and sluggish economic relief.

Since beginning vaccinations a week before Sunday’s European Union roll-out, Israel’s centralized health system has administered 280,000 shots, the world’s fastest rate.

The opening of 24/7 vaccination stations is under consideration. Netanyahu wants the daily rate doubled to 150,000 shots by next weekend.

That would enable, by the end of January, administering both first and follow-up shots to the elderly and other vulnerable groups that make up a quarter of Israel’s 9 million citizens and have accounted for 95% of its COVID-19 deaths, Netanyahu said.

“As soon as we are done with this stage … we can emerge from the coronavirus, open the economy and do things that no country can do,” he said in a televised address.

Sunday’s lockdown – the country’s third – will last at least three weeks and aims to tamp down contagions that are currently doubling in scale every two weeks, the Health Ministry said.

The vaccines mean “there is a very high chance that this is our final lockdown,” Sharon Alroy-Preis, acting head of the ministry’s public health services division, told Army Radio.

Israel has logged almost 400,000 COVID-19 cases and 3,210 deaths.

(Editing by Kirsten Donovan, Larry King)

U.S. loses one life every 33 seconds to COVID-19 in deadliest week so far

(Reuters) – In the United States last week, someone died from COVID-19 every 33 seconds.

The disease claimed more than 18,000 lives in the seven days ended Dec. 20, up 6.7% from the prior week to hit another record high, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county reports.

Despite pleas by health officials not to travel during the end-year holiday season, 3.2 million people were screened at U.S. airports on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Health officials are worried that a surge in infections from holiday gatherings could overwhelm hospitals, some of which are already at capacity after Thanksgiving celebrations.

And while the country has begun to administer two new vaccines, it may be months before the inoculations put a dent in the coronavirus outbreak.

The number of new COVID-19 cases last week fell 1% to nearly 1.5 million. Tennessee, California and Rhode Island had the highest per capita new cases in the country, according to the Reuters analysis. In terms of deaths per capita, Iowa, South Dakota and Rhode Island were the hardest hit.

Across the United States, 11.3% of tests came back positive for the virus, down from 12% the prior week, according to data from the volunteer-run COVID Tracking Project. Out of 50 states, 31 had a positive test rate of 10% or higher. The highest rates were in Iowa and Idaho at over 40%.

The World Health Organization considers positive test rates above 5% concerning because it suggests there are more cases in the community that have not yet been uncovered.

(Graphic by Chris Canipe, writing by Lisa Shumaker, editing by Tiffany Wu)

Latest on worldwide spread of the coronavirus

(Reuters) – The $2.3 trillion COVID-19 aid and spending package signed by U.S. President Donald Trump buoyed the stock and oil markets on Monday, while more countries detected their first cases of a new variant of the coronavirus.

EUROPE

* The distribution of an initial 200 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech across the European Union will be completed by September, a spokesman for the EU Commission said.

* Some German districts will not use the COVID-19 vaccine received over the weekend over the suspicion that the cold chain could have been interrupted during its delivery, a district administrators told Reuters TV.

* Russia’s first big international shipment of its vaccine – 300,000 doses sent to Argentina last week – consisted only of the first dose of the two-shot vaccine, which is easier to make than the second dose, sources told Reuters.

AMERICAS

* Democrats in the U.S. Congress on Monday will try to push through expanded $2,000 pandemic relief payments for Americans.

* The U.S. Transportation Security Administration said it screened 1.28 million passengers at U.S. airports on Sunday, the highest number since mid-March, when the pandemic slashed travel demand.

* Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourao is taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as part of an unproven treatment after contracting COVID-19, his office said.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* South Korean officials are vowing to speed up efforts to launch a public COVID-19 vaccination program as the country announced it had detected its first cases of the virus variant linked to a rapid rise in infections in Britain.

* International visitors will be barred from entering Indonesia for a two-week period to try to keep out the potentially more contagious variant of the virus.

* A Chinese court handed down a four-year jail term to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of this year’s outbreak on the grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said.

* Authorities in Kazakhstan said they had signed a preliminary agreement with Pfizer to potentially buy the vaccine it developed with its partner BioNTech.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Lebanon has secured about 2 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, which will cover 20% of the country’s nationals, the health minister said.

* Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry extended a ban on entry to the kingdom by air, land and sea for another week amid concerns over the variant of the virus.

* South Africa’s total infections crossed a million on Sunday, days after another new variant of virus – which UK officials have said appears to have mutated further than the variant in Britain – was confirmed to be present in the country.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* Russia will begin trials of an antibody treatment for COVID-19 patients next year, according to the head of the Moscow institute that developed the country’s first vaccine against the disease, Sputnik V.

* The Serum Institute of India, the local maker of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, said it expected the British and Indian governments to approve shots for emergency use within a few days.

* Novavax Inc has begun a large late-stage study of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, the drug developer said.

(Compiled by Linda Pasquini and Veronica Snoj; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)