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Good afternoon. 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 its 1,494th day.
In news we cover today, in a new study, HDL-C and ferritin emerged as leading predictors of Long Covid severity, Australia reported a record low for pandemic deaths, and a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention killed off a widespread right-wing conspiracy theory that attempted to link mRNA vaccines with sudden cardiac death.
TODAY IN COVID HISTORY
On April 14, 2020, then President Donald Trump halted the United States’ funding of the World Health Organization. Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro, who is currently in prison serving a four-month sentence for failing to comply with two Congressional subpoenas issued by the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, defended the Trump administration’s reasoning for the move in a statement: “The World Health Organization is a single failure during this epidemic. They basically hid information from the public, they failed to call this a pandemic long after others had rightfully done so. There is blood on their hands.”
In Hawaii, Honolulu’s mayor announced that the city would require people to don facial coverings when visiting essential businesses. Mayor Kirk Caldwell said the new requirement would apply to businesses like grocery stores.
Calling the coronavirus pandemic the “Great Lockdown,” the International Monetary Fund said that the global economy faced its worst downturn since the Great Depression as a result of the impact of the novel coronavirus that included national lockdowns and shuttered workplaces and factories around the world.
Meanwhile, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker praised Trump for saying during previous day’s White House press briefing that it was up to the states to decide when to reopen their economies.
“Well, it’s a good thing that the president finally recognized that it’s the Constitution that authorizes the governors to have the power to reopen their states” he said, adding that then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “had it right when he said that the president is not a king,.”
Finally, the number of coronavirus cases across the globe was nearing the two million mark at 1.95 million, of which 460,163 have recovered, based on data compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief on that day. The death toll stood at 121,787.
Put differently, as of this date in 2020, Spain had 386 deaths per million members of the population while Italy had 338. Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland had had 359, 229, 172, and 134 deaths per million respectively, while China, Germany, and the United States had reported two, 38, and 78 deaths per million respectively.
LONG COVID
A recently published study in the journal Clinics suggests that HDL-C and ferritin are linked to an increased severity in Long Covid and may be markers for same.
The study, entitled “Reduced HDL-Cholesterol in Long Covid-19: A Key Metabolic Risk Factor Tied to Disease Severity,” examined health data from 88 patients across varying degrees of initial disease severity ranging from mild to moderate to severe) compared to a control group comprising 29 healthy individuals. HDL-C and ferritin emerged as leading predictors of disease severity.
UNITED STATES
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new study that showed no link between coronavirus mRNA vaccines such as those from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech and cardiac arrest in young people.
The findings put to rest a popular right-wing vaccine conspiracy theory.
The study, entitled “Assessment of Risk for Sudden Cardiac Death Among Adolescents and Young Adults After Receipt of COVID-19 Vaccine – Oregon, June 2021–December 2022” and published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, focuses on people who got an mRNA coronavirus vaccine and died within 100 days of being inoculated. Out of 40 deaths that occurred among people who got an mRNA Covid vaccine, three occurred within that time frame and none of the death certificates attributed the fatalities to the vaccine.
GLOBAL
Health officials in Australia said that the country had recorded the lowest seven- day Covid death rate in more than two years, with a rolling 7-day average of zero deaths in the period ending March 6, 2024.
OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS
The elimination of measles is under “renewed threat” in the United States, the CDC said in a warning issued Friday.
While the United States recorded an average of five cases in the first quarter of each year in the period 2020 through 2023, the tally for the first quarter of 2024 was 97, the agency said.
Measles is a highly contagious virus that is easily preventable by vaccine. It has been considered eliminated in the country since the year 2000, although there are still occasional outbreaks.
GLOBAL STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Sunday, April 14.
As of Sunday, at press time, the world has recorded 704.75 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of less than 0.01 million in the last 24 hours, and 7.01 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 675.62 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.01 million in the same period.
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 Sunday at press time is 22,123,398, a decrease of 4,000 in the past 24 hours. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 22,088,604, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 34,785, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past 19 months.
Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Sunday, recorded 111.82 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.22 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45.04 million, and the world’s fourth highest death toll, 533,570.
The last data made available by Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service in July 2022 showed that the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic in the country was 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States. Rosstat has not released any additional data on the death toll in Russia since then.
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 38.83 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 711,380, has recorded 38.74 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 26.72 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.91 million, and Russia, with 24.12 million, as nine and ten respectively.
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending April 6, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on April 12 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 3.4%, and the trend in test positivity is -0.4% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 0.5%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -14.8%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 7,318, a figure that is down 9.8% over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 1.1%, a figure that is down 8.3% in the same period.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Sunday, 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 5,894 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.
Finally, as of April 14, 2024 , only Turkmenistan in Central Asia is only state that has not reported any cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections whatsoever, although it is strongly suspected that the virus is present there. Meanwhile, the last territory in the world to have its first ever SARS-CoV-2 infection was Tokelau, a dependency of New Zealand that reported its first five cases on December 21, 2022.
Paul Riegler 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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