US reports daily case record of 52,000 after Trump says Covid-19 will 'disappear.' The fifth single-day case record in eight days.
Dire figures follow Anthony Fauci’s warning that the US is ‘going in the wrong direction’
The United States reported over 52,000 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the fifth single-day case record in eight days, according to a New York Times database.
North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas hit daily records, with Texas reaching more than 8,000 new infections. In Texas, where some hospitals near capacity, officials have been forced to bring in health care reinforcements from out of state. Ambulances in Houston have been waiting up to an hour to unload patients at emergency rooms, officials said.
As new cases rise, states and localities have reversed course on reopenings. New York City decided not to let its restaurants resume indoor service next week as originally planned. Miami Beach said that it would reinstate a nightly curfew beginning Thursday at 12:30 a.m., extending until 5 a.m., to try to curb the spread. And California shut down bars and halted indoor dining at restaurants in 19 counties that are home to more than 70 percent of the state’s population.
New outbreaks are erupting in the South and West, and areas that have made progress against the virus are showing signs of resurgence. Several Republican-led states that moved quickly to reopen this spring at the urging of President Trump are now reimposing some restrictions.
Arizona, which Mr. Trump visited in May and praised for its reopening plans, is now seeing record numbers of new cases, and Gov. Doug Ducey decided this week to close its water parks and to order bars, gyms and movie theaters in the state to close for 30 days.
Credit...Rockland County GovernmentIn Rockland Cty, Party Guests Won’t Talk After 9 Test Positive. Now They Face Subpoenas.
Rushing to contain a coronavirus cluster tied to a big party in a New York City suburb, officials turned to an unusual legal strategy.
On June 17, a crowd of up to 100 people, most of them in their early 20s, attended a party at a home in Rockland County, N.Y., just north of New York City.
The event violated a state order in effect at the time that capped gatherings at 10 people in an effort to slow the coronavirus’s spread.
For local officials, that was just the start of the problem.
The party’s host, who was showing signs of being sick at the time, later tested positive for the virus. So did eight guests. County officials, eager to keep the cluster from growing, dispatched disease tracers to try to learn who else might have been exposed to the virus at the party.
The tracers hit a wall.
“My staff has been told that a person does not wish to, or have to, speak to my disease investigators,” Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, the county’s health commissioner, said on Wednesday. Of those being contacted about the party, she added: “They hang up. They deny being at the party even though we have their names from another party attendee.”
Frustrated by the response, county officials on Wednesday took the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to eight people who they believe were at the June 17 party. Those who do not comply and share what they know by Thursday will face fines of $2,000 a day, officials said.
In addition to the June 17 party, in West Nyack, officials said they had learned of two other recent large parties nearby where some guests might have overlapped, heightening the risk of a wider transmission. Both parties were in New City — one on June 20; the other on June 27.
Adding to the urgency of learning as much as possible about how widely the virus may have spread at the parties, officials said, was a tip from people who have cooperated about at least one more large party being planned in the area for the Fourth of July weekend.
Tracking down everyone who has had contact with an infected person is considered crucial to containing the spread of an illness, but the effectiveness of such efforts can be limited.
In New York City, where 3,000 disease detectives and case monitors had been hired by last month, early data showed that only about two in every five people who had tested positive for the virus or were presumed to have it shared information about close contacts with tracers.
This is the second time in recent years that Rockland County officials have had to resort to subpoenas to compel cooperation from residents amid a push to halt a disease outbreak. A similar step last year in the face of a measles epidemic proved to be successful, officials said.
How a plan to pool virus tests in the U.S. would work.
The Trump administration plans to adopt a decades-old testing strategy that will vastly increase the number of virus tests performed in the United States and permit widespread tracking of the virus as it surges across the country.
The method, called pooled testing, signals a paradigm shift. Instead of carefully rationing tests to only those with symptoms, pooled testing would enable frequent surveillance of asymptomatic people. Mass identification of coronavirus infections could hasten the reopening of schools, offices and factories.
“We’re in intensive discussions about how we’re going to do it,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, said in an interview. “We hope to get this off the ground as soon as possible.”
Given the many advantages, experts said, health officials should have embraced pooled testing much sooner. The United States military has used the technique at its bases worldwide, and has done so since it first tested men for syphilis in the 1940s. Health officials in China, Germany, Israel and Thailand have all deployed pooled testing for the coronavirus.
Here’s how the technique works: A university, for example, takes samples from every one of its thousands of students by nasal swab, or perhaps saliva. Setting aside part of each individual’s sample, the lab combines the rest into a batch holding five to 10 samples each.
The pooled sample is tested for coronavirus infection. If a pool yields a positive result, the lab would retest the reserved parts of each individual sample that went into the pool, pinpointing the infected student.
The strategy could be employed for as little as $3 per person per day, according an estimate from economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
By testing large numbers of people at a fraction of the cost, time and necessary ingredients, pooled surveillance could be widely adopted by workplaces, religious organizations, and schools and universities seeking to reopen.
But Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that any testing strategy was unlikely to succeed without additional measures.
“What good is testing if the results take four days to come back and infectious people aren’t isolated in the interim?” he asked. “What good is testing if contact tracing doesn’t identify and warn exposed people quickly?”
Researchers debate infecting people on purpose to test vaccines.
One way to quickly see if a coronavirus vaccine works would be to immunize healthy people and then deliberately expose them to the virus, some researchers are suggesting.
Proponents say this strategy, called a human challenge trial, could save time because rather than conducting tests the usual way — by waiting for vaccinated people to encounter the virus naturally — researchers could intentionally infect them.
Challenge trials have been used to test vaccines for typhoid, cholera, malaria and other diseases. For malaria, volunteers have stuck their arms into chambers full of mosquitoes to be bitten and infected. But there were so-called rescue medicines to cure those who got sick. There is no cure for Covid-19.
For both ethical and practical reasons, the idea of challenge trials for a coronavirus vaccine has provoked fierce debate.
In a draft report published last month, the World Health Organization said that challenge trials could yield important information, but that they would be daunting to run because of the potential of the coronavirus “to cause severe and fatal illness and its high transmissibility.”
The report, by a 19-member advisory panel, provided detailed guidelines about the safest way to conduct challenge trials, recommending that they be limited to healthy people ages 18 to 25 because they have the least risk of severe illness or death from the virus. The virus would be dripped into their noses.
But the panel also said its members split nearly in half over several major issues. They were divided over whether trials should be carried out if no highly effective therapy had been identified to treat participants who got sick; over whether studies in healthy young adults could predict the efficacy of a vaccine in older people or other high-risk adults; and over whether challenge trials could really speed vaccine development.
The W.H.O. raises alarm about the Trump administration’s deal to buy up the global supply of remdesivir.
The World Health Organization expressed concern on Wednesday over an arrangement for the United States to buy up almost all supplies of the drug remdesivir through the end of September.
Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the W.H.O.’s health emergencies program, said the agency was trying to verify the details, announced on Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services and the drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences. The deal most likely contradicts the W.H.O.’s policy that treatments and vaccines for the virus should be distributed equitably to the most needy.
“Obviously, there are many people around the world who are very sick with this disease, and we want to make sure that everybody has access to the necessary lifesaving interventions,” Dr. Ryan said.
Remdesivir has been shown to help people recover somewhat faster. On Monday, federal officials announced that more than 500,000 treatment courses would be reserved for American hospitals through September. That accounts for all of Gilead’s projected production in July, and 90 percent in August and September.