Luna Park, an amusement park in Coney Island in Brooklyn that opened on the site of the former Astroland in 2010 and was named after the original 1903 Luna Park.
Good day. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,429th day of the pandemic.
In news we cover today , three men were sentenced to prison in a $3.5 million pandemic funds fraud ring, a new study about Long Covid in children is raising concerns, and anti-maskers who sued to protect what they contended were their First Amendment rights to go maskless at school board meetings where masks were mandated found out that going maskless was not a protected form of free speech.
LONG COVID
A study coming out of England suggests that Long Covid – or at least some aspects of the multi-faceted condition – could be a brain injury.
The study from the Infection Neuroscience Lab at the University of Liverpool found that these symptoms may be the result of a viral-borne brain injury. The Liverpudlians found that 351 patients who had been hospitalized with severe Covid-19 had evidence of a long-term brain injury a year after contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Thesefindings were based on a series of cognitive tests, self-reported symptoms, brain scans, and biomarkers.
The study’s participants took a cognition test with their scores age-matched to those who had not suffered a serious bout of Covid-19.
Long Covid patients who participated in the study were “less accurate and slower” in their cognition when compared to the control group, and suffered from at least one mental health condition, such as depression, anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder, according to researchers. They were found to have brain deficits that were equivalent to 20 years of brain aging, the researchers said.
“We found global deficits across cognition,” the study’s lead author, Benedict Michael, who serves as director of the Infection Neuroscience Lab, said in a statement. “The cognitive and memory problems that patients complained of were associated with neuroanatomical changes to the brain.”
UNITED STATES
A Brooklyn woman was sentenced on Thursday to three years of probation and $650,000 in forfeiture and penalties for her part in defrauding multiple federal pandemic relief programs.
Chanette Lewis worked at a call center that was created to provide New York City healthcare workers with isolation rooms in hotels – the HotelRoom Isolation Program – to keep them from infecting family members with whom they resided. She leveraged her position to offer free rooms to people she knew were ineligible and also used them herself.
Her sentencing came after she pled guilty to defrauding the emergency programs, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said in a statement. Separately, Lewis forged legal documents purporting to come from judges, prosecutors, and doctors that were then used to get 30 people into public housing or into larger public housing apartments.
Lewis had three co-conspirators including Tatiana Benjamin and Heaven West. Those two fraudsters were sentenced last week but, while Lewis was not sentenced to prison (Benjamin was), she was required pay significantly more in forfeiture and restitution payments.
The four used stolen information from real-life healthcare workers to make the reservations for rooms under the program and then rented them out at a profit.
A federal appeals court ruled earlier this week that New Jersey residents who refused to don face masks at school board meetings in the early period of the coronavirus pandemic did not engage in protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a ruling Monday in two related cases in which lawsuits were brought against officials in Freehold and Cranford, New Jersey. The lawsuits were filed by George Falcone and Gwyneth Murray-Nolan. The plaintiffs claimed that they had faced retaliation by school board officials because they refused to wear masks during the public meetings.
“A question shadowing suits such as these is whether there is a First Amendment right to refuse to wear a protective mask as required by valid health and safety orders put in place during a recognized public health emergency,” the court said. “Like all courts to address this issue, we conclude there is not.”
GLOBAL STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Thursday, February 8.
As of Thursday morning, the world has recorded 702.88 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.02 million in the last 24 hours, and 6.98 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 673.77 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.01 million in the past 48 hours.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls as well as the occasional downward or upward adjustment as corrections to case figures warrant.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Thursday at press time is 22,128,582, an increase of 8,000 in the past 24 hours. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 22,092,489, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 36,093, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past 17 months.
Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Thursday, recorded just over 110.95 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.2 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45.03 million, and a reported death toll of 533,458.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States. Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.14 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.81 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 709,407, has recorded 38.34 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are South Korea, with 34.57 million cases, as number six; Japan, with 33.8 million cases placing it in the number seven slot; and Italy, with 26.71 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.89 million, and Russia, with 23.9 million, as nine and ten respectively.
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending January 27, 2022, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on February 2, 2024 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 6.3%, and the trend in test positivity is -4.6% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 2%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -11%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 22,636, a figure that is down 10.9% over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 3.6%, a figure is virtually unchanged over the past week.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Thursday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.57 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 4,861 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.7% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, 2023, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
If you have Long Covid and need to talk to someone, call the Long Covid Patient Peer Counseling Phone Line, or HOPELINE. The HOPELINE is our free, confidential support and information service.
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