Coronavirus Weekend News Brief – May 29: $34 Million in Cars, Real Estate Seized in Pandemic Fraud Bust, Universal Covid-19 Antibodies

A panda at the Chengdu Research Base of the Giant Panda Breeding Center
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 1,540th day.
In news we cover today ,  the United States announced a global bust that broke up a major botnet criminal enterprise, seizing $34 million in luxury goods and property, and universal antibody cocktails may indeed be possible against various strains of Covid.
TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY
On May 29, 2020, officials in Moscow said that they had “improved” their count of April Covid deaths, with the result that the number of deaths had doubled.  The revised figures show that 1,561 people with the coronavirus died in the capital in April, not 639 as previously reported. Experts in other countries had long said that the numbers coming out of Russia represented a tremendous undercount.
In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order authorizing any business in the state to deny entry to people who were not wearing face coverings. “We’re giving the store owners the right to say, if you’re not wearing a mask, you can’t come in,” said the governor. “That store owner has a right to protect themselves. That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promulgated new guidelines for reopening offices.   These include temperature and wellness checks upon arrival, desks that are spaced 6’ (1.8 m) apart, no seating in common areas, and a requirement for face masks at all times.
In the travel sector, Delta Air Lines, in order to reduce staffing, began to offer employees who had been with the company over 25 years or who are nearing retirement age an “enhanced” retirement plan that included a $100,000 retiree medical account that can be used to reimburse eligible expenses as well as 24 months of health-care coverage, retiree non-revenue pas travel privileges, eight positive-space travel passes, and a cash severance payment based on years of service.
Finally, the number of coronavirus cases across the globe stood at 5.96 million, of which 2.62 million hadrecovered, based on data compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief. The death toll stood at 363,210.
In the United States and its territories, the number of confirmed cases stood at 1.77 million, while the death toll stood at 103,452.
UNITED STATES
A global cybercriminal network that facilitated pandemic-relief funds fraud was busted with the arrest of a 35-year-old Chinese man in Singapore in a court-authorized international law enforcement operation.
The criminals lavish lifestyle funded by the network “reads like it’s ripped from a screenplay,” Matthew Axelrod, a senior U.S. Department of Commerce official who was involved in the investigation, said in a statement.
Law enforcement agents seized about $4 million worth of watches, sports cars and other luxury assets, including a Ferrari and Rolls-Royce, and $30 million in real estate properties across East Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the United States, as part of the global raid on the network, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.
The group had created a botnet that had infected over 19 million different IP addresses The botnet was used by tens of thousands of people to commit pandemic and unemployment fraud as well as to for cyberattacks, child exploitation, harassment, bomb threats, and export violations.
According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, in the period 2014 through July 2022, Chinese national YunHe Wang and others created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were associated with more than 19 million unique IP addresses, including 613,841 IP addresses located in the United States. Wang then generated millions of dollars in fees by offering cybercriminals access to these infected IP addresses for a fee.
A consortium of scientists at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Columbia University have developed a promising new human monoclonal antibody that appears a step closer to a universal antibody cocktail that works against all strains of SARS-CoV-2.
“This antibody worked against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, omicron and SARS-CoV, providing strong evidence that this antibody will continue to work against future strains, especially if paired with other antibodies,” said Dr.Luis Martinez-Sobrido, a professor at Texas Biomed and co-lead author of the research, which was published as a preprint on bioRxiv.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending May 18, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on May 24 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 3.4%, and the trend in test positivity is -0.2% 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 +7%.
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 0.6%, a figure that is unchanged over the past week.
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 7,299 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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