Stockholm, the capital of Sweden and most populous area of Scandinavia
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 1,512th day.
In news we cover today , a New York City fraud investigator was himself charged with fraud, also in New York City, an increase in subway attacks has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had an accident with some facts in the company of Bill Maher.
TODAY IN COVID HISTORY
On May 1, 2020, the World Health Organization said that it still considers the coronavirus pandemic a public health emergency of international concern, the agency’s highest level of alarm for the world.
“Covid-19 pandemic is not finished,” committee member Dr. Didier Houssin said during a media briefing.
In the U.S. aviation sector, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Frontier Airlines separately announced that they would henceforth require their passengers to don face masks. The move came two days after JetBlue Airways began to require masks.
In the United Kingdom, Matt Hancock, the country’s Health Secretary, announced on Friday that the country had hit an ambitious coronavirus testing target that it had set itself at the beginning of the mont of 100,000 tests per day. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s national medical director of NHS England said that the country has made great progress in lowering the transmission rate.
“We have begun to get on top of this virus,” said Stephen Powis.
In Sweden, a then pop-up restaurant, Bord For En, which means “Table for One” in English, opened specifically to offer solo dining at tables for one. The restaurant, which remained open until August 1, 2020, offered a three-course meal and did not allow spectators.
In Germany, Lufthansa said it would reduce its fleet by around 100 aircraft, a move that left the German airline with 10,000 excess staff. Heathrow Airport expansion plans – which included a third runway – would be delayed by at least two years because of the effect coronavirus is having on the aviation sector, the airport said
In Washington, D.C., then President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community and claimed that he has seen evidence that gives him a “high degree of confidence” the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but declined to provide details to back up his assertion.
Finally, United States had as of this day at least 1,069,664 cases of coronavirus and 63,006 related deaths, according to data compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief at the time.
THE LEDE
Got Milk? FDA Says Pasteurized Milk is Safe and Vaccines for Humans Could Easily Be Deployed Against H5N1
One day in 1993, Jeff Goodby of Goodby Silverstein & Partners jotted down a tagline, namely “Got milk .” Then he added a question mark. And for the next two decades, the “Got Milk?” campaign by the milk industry – along with its catchy slogan – became as ubiquitous as Nike’s declaration that athletes “Just Do It.”
The headlines of recent days have caused many to think twice about milk given the presence of small amounts of the H5N1 virus in grocery store milk.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that new bird flu test results show that the milk supply in the country is safe. Tests of milk and other dairy products acquired from grocery stores show that pasteurization kills the highly pathogenic strain of bird flu that is spreading.
Now government officials are preparing for a potential scenario where H5N1 transfers zoonotically from cattle or poultry to a human being. Two vaccines are ready to be deployed should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people.
The virus has been found in at least 36 herds across nine states. This has raised concerns that the virus will mutate in order to make it easier to spill over into humans.
Federal officials said Wednesday that they could begin shipping vaccine doses widely within weeks if need be. Both vaccine candidates are already in the nation’s stockpile, albeit in limited quantities.
Studies “suggest that the vaccines will offer good cross-protection against cattle outbreak viruses,” Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on the call Wednesday.
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UNITED STATES
A fraud investigator for the New York City Department of Homeless Services stole personal information from homeless people and sold the data to another person who then stole the victims’ identities and filed for special pandemic unemployment benefits in New Jersey.
Olabanji Otufale, a Brooklyn resident, was charged with having accessed names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and photos of more than ten city homeless people, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday.
According to court filings, he then sold that info to New Jersey resident Mark Lazarre, who is the one who filed the unemployment benefits claims.
In New York City following the pandemic declaration in March 2020, there was an 84% increase in the rate of complaints to the New York Police Department Transit Bureau per rider, including a 99% increase in the rate of complaints for assault and a 125% increase in the rate of complaints for harassment. The figures align with news media reports of an uptick in subway-related crime and rates have not returned to pre-pandemic levels despite the new subway safety plan.
Television host Bill Maher took putative presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out to the woodshed over his, and his running mate’s, continual anti-vaccine misinformation campaign. Maher has spoken out in favor of Kennedy up until now but a question he asked the candidate brought out the Dilbert in Kennedy, who famously said, “Studies have shown that accurate numbers aren’t any more useful than the ones you make up.”
“Your vice presidential pick wants to recall the Moderna vaccine, that’s the one I got,” said Maher, as the audience laughed loudly. “Do you agree with that? Recall it?” “I think those vaccines need to, we need to have again true double-blind placebo controlled trials on that,” RFK JR responded. “There is 25% of Americans who believe that they know somebody who was killed by a Covid vaccine.” “Killed?” Maher replied, somewhat incredulously. “Killed. 25% of Americans. 52% of Americans believe that the vaccines are causing injuries, including death. 52%,” the candidate somewhat incomprehensively stated.
Kennedy went on to say that “I think that [if] people want vaccines, they should be able to get it, I’m not anti-vaccine.” “Well, people think you are,” Maher replied.
GLOBAL NEWS
Zhang Yongzhen, the first scientist to publish a sequence of Covid-19 in China, staged a sit-in protest outside his laboratory after authorities there locked him out of the facility. The move is the latest in a series of setbacks and demotions he and his staff have faced since the virologist first published the sequence in January 2020 without obtaining state approval.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending April 20, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on April 26 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 3.0%, 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 0.4%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -17.9%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 5,615, a figure that is down 14.4 % over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 0.9%, a figure that is down 10% in the same period.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine at press time, 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 7,024 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.
Where Has All the Data Gone?
We regret to inform that, as of April 15, 2024, the Global Daily Statistics data in the Coronavirus Daily News Brief are no longer being updated. Over the past 15 months, as more politicians and governments sought to place SARS-CoV-2 in the rear-view mirror, pandemic data reporting sputtered out and we are now at the point where it is simply not feasible to provide statistically valid case data on a global scale.
We are developing potential new and authoritative sources that we will present once they have been properly vetted, so stay tuned to this space. In the meantime, our Long Covid and pandemic coverage will remain much the same.
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Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this issue.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
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