Coronavirus Daily News Brief – May 16: Vote Fails to Overturn Rules for Pandemic Recovery Funds, ‘An Unfinished Film’ About Covid in China

The Old Senate Chamber in the Capitol
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 1,527th day.
In news we cover today , a vote in Congress to overturn rules for pandemic recovery funds failed, a filmmaker’s twice unfinished film is released, and Covid remains deadlier than the flu.
TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY
On May 16, 2020, the total number of SARS-Cov-19 cases continued its climb over 4.5 million. In addition, at least 310,000 deaths had been attributed to the virus at this point in time.
The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that retail sales in the United States fell in April by 16.4% from the prior month, seasonally adjusted, the biggest decline since the agency began to keep records in the early 1990s.
A measure of purchases at shops, online stores, and at restaurants, the drop came as consumers cut back on spending amidst lockdowns and the coronavirus pandemic outbreak.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve said separately that manufacturing output in the United States fell by 13.7%, the largest drop since record-keeping began in 1919.
The indicators moved in lockstep as social distancing, travel restrictions, shelter-at-home orders, and a high number of Covid-19 patients took hold, while malls remained shuttered, and a good cross-section of the population telecommuted.
Finally, in New Jersey, a home health aide was charged with  five counts of endangerment after an 80-year-old woman she cared for died after contracting Covid-19. The aide, Josefina Brito-Fernandez, 49, had been asked to self-quarantine by health officials after testing positive for the virus in mid-April, the New Jersey attorney general’s office said in a statement. Instead of following those instructions, she continued to treat the woman and two developmentally disabled siblings in their home without donning personal protective equipment the next day, the attorney general said.
UNITED STATES
Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who introduced a disapproval resolution under the Congressional Review Act aimed at he said had been “the U.S. Department of Treasury’s misuse of Covid recovery dollars, and their redefining of the original intention of Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds,”  loudly criticized on Thursday the failure of his measure to pass.
“Inflation is sky-high, Covid is over (sic), it’s time to stop this reckless spending,” Schmitt said in a statement.
The resolution vote failed, 49-46.
SARS-CoV-2 continues to be more deadly than influenza, researchers say. A study of Veterans Affair data that was published as a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association and led by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of the VA St. Louis Health Care System, show that patients hospitalized with Covid-19 were more likely to die than those hospitalized with the flu. The analysis covered the fall and winter of 2023 to 2024. In addition, there were twice as many hospitalizations for Covid compared to influenza for the same period, according to data from the CDC, the researchers said.
The United States halted funding to a research organization that has been linked to investigations about the novel coronavirus’ origins. Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services are seeking to block future funding to the group, EcoHealth Alliance, which worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The agency cited new evidence about EcoHealth’s actions that emerged earlier this month. The department said that the move was  “necessary to protect the public interest” given the group’s failure to monitor virus experiments in a Chinese lab before the pandemic.
GLOBAL NEWS
Lou Ye, a Chinese filmmaker, released “An Unfinished Film,” the story of how a film crew unboxes an abandoned 10-year-old movie that never even had a title. The reason for this is because Lou refused his producers’ demands to soften the content, which is about a gay man’s passion for another man who is involved with someone else. That was in 2019. The pandemic causes the film to be unfinished once again, leaving much of the film crew stranded in hotel rooms.
While the film starts off as a sophisticated comedy about the Chinese media, it evolves into an impassioned documentary homage to a whole nation’s trauma.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending May 4, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on May 10 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 3.1%, a figure is up 0.1 percentage points from the previous 7-day period, and the trend in test positivity is +0.1% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 0.3%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -7.6%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 is no longer being reported as of the end of May. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 0.7%, a figure that is virtually unchanged from the previous 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, 13.58 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 8,209 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.8% 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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