Today’s update will start with some good news.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo indicates his state is “controlling the spread” of the coronavirus, and it appears that “the worst is over if we continue to be smart going forward.”
At the same time, Cuomo revealed that the death toll from Covid-19 in New York — which is the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States — has topped 10,000 people.Cuomo called the death tally a “horrific level of pain and grief and sorrow.”But he pointed to a flattening of the daily death toll, the flattening in the net number of hospitalizations and a drop in the number of people on ventilators as evidence that radical measures such as the shuttering of nonessential businesses have helped to contain the virus.He said the death toll for Sunday was 671, versus 758 on Saturday.“We’re controlling the spread,” Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany. “The worst can be over, and is over, unless we do something reckless.”
The next phase in the battle against the coronavirus may begin shortly.
New York, New Jersey and four other Northeastern states are forming a working group to keep a close watch on the coronavirus outbreak throughout the region and coordinate plans to reopen parts of the economy as soon as it’s safe to do so.Calling the region the “Covid corridor,” the governors said they would carefully weigh the public health risks before allowing companies to resume operations. Commerce throughout the region and much of the U.S. has ground to a halt after states shuttered nonessential businesses and issued orders requiring most residents to stay indoors to slow the pandemic.“I think this regional compact is premised on the idea that you’re not going to have a healthy economy if you have an unhealthy population, so we’ve got to do both,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf said on a conference call Monday led by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
US regulators have given emergency use permission for a device to filter coronavirus patients’ blood in an effort to combat the devastating effects of severe inflammation.Doctors believe that many of those who die of coronavirus die as a result of the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ – a deluge of inflammation meant to help fight the infection that ultimately overwhelms and damages the body itself.In an effort to clear some of this dangerous inflammation from COVID-19 patients, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Terumo BCT’s blood filtering device.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to Rutgers’ RUCDR Infinite Biologics and its collaborators for a new collection approach that utilizes saliva as the primary test biomaterial for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the first such approval granted by the federal agency.The new saliva collection method, which RUCDR developed in partnership with Spectrum Solutions and Accurate Diagnostic Labs (ADL), will allow for broader population screening than the current method of nose and throat swabs.“The impact of this approval is significant,” said Andrew Brooks, chief operating officer and director of technology development at RUCDR, who also is a professor in the School of Arts and Sciences Department of Genetics at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “It means we no longer have to put health care professionals at risk for infection by performing nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal collections. We can preserve precious personal protective equipment for use in patient care instead of testing. We can significantly increase the number of people tested each and every day as self-collection of saliva is more quick and scalable than swab collections. All of this combined will have a tremendous impact on testing in New Jersey and across the United States.”
Sadly, it looks like not all patients will be completely cured.
People with severe COVID-19 may experience neurological symptoms, including confusion, delirium and muscle pain, and could be at higher risk for a stroke, a new study out of Wuhan, China has suggested.Nearly 40 percent of people with the disease caused by the new coronavirus suffered brain-related complications, according to findings published Friday in JAMA Neurology,Among those with serious infection as a result of the virus, nearly 6 percent experienced a stroke or stenosis, roughly 15 percent had dementia-like symptoms and roughly 20 percent reported severe muscle pain, researchers in China reported.
It’s like we’re living through an episode of the History Channel show, “Life After People.” Wildlife is swarming the nearly empty Yosemite National Park.
“You couldn’t ask for a better place to be isolated,” said Warren McClain, a saucier at the Ahwahnee Hotel who has worked in the park since 2017.He and his co-workers, Dane Peterson and Billy Sanchez, were skateboarding and cycling along Northside Drive, just east of Horsetail Fall, soaking in the bright, warm sun.Wildlife is coming out of hiding now, they said, as it did during previous government shutdowns of the park — in 1990, 1995, 2013 and 2019. The difference is that this park closure is expected to be the longest on record.“The bear population has quadrupled,” said Peterson, noting a surge of large megafauna into the fields, thoroughfares and open spaces of the park.“It’s not like they aren’t usually here,” he said of the bears, bobcats and coyotes that he and other employees now see congregating outside their cabins and apartments. “It’s that they usually hang back at the edges, or move in the shadows.”
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