Coronavirus in the US

Parent Cafe
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People in Alberta, Canada, asked not to leave country

The province of Alberta is asking residents to cancel all large gatherings and advising them against traveling outside of the country in an effort to mitigate the spread of novel coronavirus, officials said in a news statement.

The total number of presumptive positive cases in the province is 23 as of Thursday, the statement said.

There are at least 147 cases of coronavirus, including one death, in Canada. (CNN)

New Mexico to close all K-12 public schools for 3 weeks
From CNN’s Andy Rose

New Mexico will close all public elementary and secondary schools starting Monday, according to a press release from the office of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

The shutdown will last three weeks to try to slow the spread of coronavirus.

The governor’s office says more details about the closure will be released Friday, but the state wanted to get the word out earlier so parents can begin planning for child care next week.

The school closure announcement came shortly after the state announced its sixth confirmed coronavirus case.

Pennsylvania Department of Corrections suspending most prison visits starting tomorrow
From CNN’s Carolyn Sung

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is suspending all prison visits, with some exceptions, starting tomorrow for two weeks, according to a tweet from the organization.

“Only staff, vendors and contractors will be allowed to enter any of the state prisons—pending results of a screening,” the department said in the tweet.

NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers to compensate all stadium employees regular wages
From CNN’s Homero DeLaFuente

The NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers announced today that they plan to compensate all Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse employees, hourly and event staff team members, as if every game and every event is still taking place.

The announcement comes after the team’s Kevin Love announced a $100,000 donation to the arena’s staff.
<3

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I was wondering when this would happen


Disney World, Disneyland Paris Resort to close over coronavirus concerns
From CNN’s Frank Pallotta

Due to concerns over the coronavirus outbreak, Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and Disneyland Paris Resort will close at the end of the business day Sunday through the end of the month, the company said in a statement tonight.

Disney Cruise Line will also suspend all new departures beginning Saturday through the end of the month, the company added.

Disney cast members will be paid during the closure period, and hotels and dining complexes at both Disney World and Disneyland Paris will stay open until further notice, according to the company statement.

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Is the Senate really about to adjourn and leave Washington? Do they plan on doing this before the House emergency Corona virus bill vote?

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@“Cardinal Fang” I don’t know what’s going on in Santa Clara County, but here in San Diego County, my husband has 2 co-workers with suspected covid19 who have been instructed by doctors to self quarantine for 14 days. They’ve both tested negative for flu, strep and pneumonia, but for some reason, the doctors can’t or won’t test them for covid-19 until next week!! So frustrating. I’m starting to wonder if there is some sort of coordinated effort to delay or obstruct testing in order to keep people from panicking?

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I’m not sure what’s going on in Santa Clara County. It would be helpful if they told us how many tests were negative. Maybe a lot? I know that Stanford has developed a test, and I don’t know why the county wouldn’t use it.

It’s absolutely unforgivable that people who have good reason to be tested can’t get tested.

Ah. On the Santa Clara County Department of Health website:
“The Public Health Lab has a limited capacity of specimens it can test each day. As the availability of testing has expanded significantly, including commercial laboratories Lab Corp and Quest now being able to test, we expect data to increase significantly over the next few weeks.  Public Health strongly supports and has been urging significantly increased testing capacity.​”

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But another nugget from the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health.

66 identified cases
31 are in the hospital right now
1 has died
1 has recovered

If half the cases they find are in the hospital, they’re not testing widely enough.

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Here it is:

This is a big deal with molecular tests - differentiation of live and dead pathogens. The tests look for a piece of NA and can be so sensitive that they detect this sequence present in a small chunk of non-functional NA.

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-sheds-early-in-disease.html

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1.full.pdf

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It’s arrived in San Diego County, although two cases are from Princess cruise ships. One case appears to be community transmission.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/at-least-5-presumptive-positive-cases-of-coronavirus-in-san-diego-county-hhsa/2284267/

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The study from NIH/Princeton/UCLA about the virus persisting in environments has not been peer reviewed or published yet. Also, the part about “aerosols” has been taken to mean that the virus is “airborne” but the study only says that airborne transmission is “plausible”.

Note: “fomite” transmission is transmission through touching contaminated objects:

For the study, they aerosolized the virus using a nebulizer device. Nebulizers works by atomizing liquids into gas form. By definition, this gas is going to remain in the air for a period of time because the particles are so tiny. The virus in that air was apparently still viable after three hours. However, that is not necessarily the same as what happens to the virus when people cough, sneeze, laugh or breathe.

Healthcare workers have already been warned that upmost precautions are needed for procedures which can aerosolize the virus, like intubation and nebulization. However, there is evidence suggesting that an airborne level of precaution is not necessary to be in the same room as a patient with COVID-19. The patterns of infection that doctors are seeing so far suggest that the virus is spread by close contact, meaning droplet precautions are enough.

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PSA: Wash your hands!

https://people.com/music/gloria-gaynor-coaches-fans-coronavirus-musical-hand-washing-demo/

Gloria Gaynor posts a video washing her hands while singing “I Will Survive”. :slight_smile:

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More from France, a good idea:

France will have 1° free priority child care provisions for all health care workers and other priority workers whose children are in nursery or elementary school 2° small-group care facilities will be set up for parents who can’t stay home. In addition, companies will be required to offer 2 paid weeks off for all workers with children under 15, for which they’ll be compensated if arranging for telecommuting is not possible. A 2-parent family would thus have a full month of child care.

The US could have a more decentralized, entrepreneurial initiative but should plan at the very least for health care and “priority” workers’ child care.

A 50 billion package is planned. (Right now, France can borrow at negative rates). And I thought the 8 billion package from Congress was big


President Macron is treating this as a “mobilisation gĂ©nĂ©rale” or call to arms (at least officially - there can of course be a gap between what’s announced and what’s actually done).

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No deal reached tonight on coronavirus response package, Pelosi says
From CNN’s Phil Mattingly

No deal was reached tonight on House Democrats’ legislative coronavirus response package, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Democrats plan to announce a deal in the morning, but there are still outstanding issues in reaching an agreement, Pelosi said.

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Perfection!

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Virgin Australia has confirmed that a cabin crew member has tested positive for coronavirus. The airline company is not confirming the flight or route today.

Argentina is going into virtual shutdown with the announced suspension of the arrival of all flights from the US, EU, UK, China, South Korea, Japan and Iran for the next 30 days. The measure goes into force starting tomorrow Friday. It’s not clear yet what will happen with flights already on their way to Argentina today arriving Friday.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Argentina jumped Thursday from 21 to 31, authorities announced. For the first time three of these cases were locally contracted, as opposed to all the cases until now, which involved persons arriving from abroad, mostly from Italy.

There has been one death so far, a 64-year-old man arriving from France.

Argentina is also cancelling all concerts and sports events, among them Argentina’s Lollapalooza where Gun’s N Roses, Travis Scott, The Strokes, Gwen Stefani and Lana del Rey were scheduled to perform. Sports matches will be permitted as long as they are played without public present

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is temporarily halting his trademark rallies as his campaign bows to the coronavirus outbreak that is rapidly reshaping the nation’s political landscape.

The two leading Democratic contenders, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, canceled their scheduled rallies earlier this week.

New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman has just reported that US President Donald Trump’s campaign staff have been told to work remotely while a “deep cleaning and sanitation” of campaign offices takes place. Dates given are Friday through Monday, returning on Tuesday.

Maggie Haberman
:heavy_check_mark:
@maggieNYT
Here’s the email Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale sent to the campaign staff, which a source shared. Officials say they will reassess after the weekend when to reopen the HQ (see her twitter to see the email)

All from Gaurdian

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@menloparkmom

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20030502v1.full.pdf+html

No live (infectious) virus after 8 days, though virus remained in patients for weeks. Testing for presence of virus is easy, testing for live infectious virus is more difficult and time consuming.

Virus replicating inside a patient causes high viral load and viral shedding, but is not able to be transmitted to another unless it is packaged in protein. This study showed that these patients were not infectious after 8 days, but it was only 9 patients. Don’t know if the Chinese looked at live virus.

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Yes, and I personally know of 2 more cases that have not even been given the test for presumptive positive (I referenced them in a previous post). There are likely many more here. It’s scary how slowly the testing is being done.

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And people think we don’t have fun on this thread. :lol:

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One other factor is that wearing face masks is common cultural practice in S Korea, but not in Italy or any Western country.

There haven’t been any studies on the effectiveness of masks across a population that I’m aware of, but it’s something to consider. In the West they say, “don’t wear face masks” while in many Asian countries it’s quite common under normal circumstances and then encouraged during outbreaks. And in the US they actually don’t want us buying masks, they don’t really care if we wear them or not.

In a few years maybe we’ll see some post-mortem studies on whether or not masks were a factor. Not necessarily in an individual sense but more a “herd immunity factor” kind of sense, in reducing the rate of spread. So for example just making up numbers, if wearing a mask reduces an individual’s propensity to spread a disease by 50%, then factored across a population of millions it adds up.

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I’ve been singing that song all day–even when I’m not washing my hands (and it’s a lot more fun than “Happy Birthday”!).

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I was thinking about that when reading the article and the difference we’ve seen in death rates between different countries.

One reason they tell us not to wear masks is because there aren’t enough of them. I wonder if we’d be hearing a different story if there were plenty available.