Coronavirus Daily News Brief – June 4: Greene’s Attacks on Social Distancing Were Not Based in Science, Dr. Birx Says We Will ‘Never Know’ Covid’s Origins

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 1,546th day.
In news we cover today , Dr. Deborah Birx said in an interview that the world will “never know” Covid’s origins, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s contention that social distancing is not based in science is intrinsically false, because science.
THE LEDE
The Next Pandemic May Already Be Here: It’s Time to Take Our Heads Out of the H5N1 Sand Before it is Too Late
A third human case of H5N1 was detected on Thursday in a farmworker in Michigan and this case was dramatically different than the first too, and may be a harbinger of what’s to come.
This patient – the first human to experience respiratory symptoms from H5N1 – tells us that the current bird flu situation is at a dangerous inflection point.
“With this case, the respiratory symptoms occurred right after exposure to an infected cow,” Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. She added that the patient had not been wearing any protective gear.
Patient Nr. 3’s symptoms show us that the virus is adapting in predictable ways that increase its risk to humans, and it reflects our failure to contain the virus early on.
We’ve long since known that H5N1 was more than a bird disease: It has managed to infect 69 herds of cattle in nine states since the end of March. And these are the infections we know of. Now there have been three human cases and the newest one shows that the virus is adapting to better infect our species. It’s not just that the third patient has respiratory symptoms, namely that he is coughing. It’s that coughing is a more effective means of spreading the virus than, for example, what the first two patients had, which was an eye infection.
One line of defense has been conspicuously absent here and that is serology testing. Serology testing in the initial years of the coronavirus pandemic were crucial to containing the spread of the virus. Not knowing the spread of H5N1 is already hindering our ability to understand the spread of the virus and to respond accordingly as well as to predict the direction that this is heading.
When you lack this knowledge, you lack the ability to allocate resources or to even determine the resources needed.
Any questions? For once, I truly hope not.
TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY
On June 4, 2020, the number of cases reported on May 30, 2020, was 134,064, more than had been reported on any prior day.
Marriott International said that it had reopened all of its hotels in China and that it is seeing a recovery in business travel. The world’s largest hotel company has 350 properties across China.
Meanwhile, a casualty of the pandemic economy was the clothing store the Gap. The local Gap store near likely you hadn’t paid its rent in the first four to six months of the pandemic.  Simon Property Group, the largest mall operator in the country, filed suit against the Gap, which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy, for $66 million of unpaid rent from earlier in 2020.
Finally, the number of coronavirus cases across the globe stood at 6.66 million,  an increase of almost 100,000 people in the past 24 hours, based on data compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief. The death toll stood at 390,859.
In the United States and its territories, the number of confirmed cases stood at 1.9 million, an increase of 15,968, while the death toll stood at 109,968.
UNITED STATES
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green’s verbal attacks aimed at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 83-year-old former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease who served under seven presidents, were not, in fact, based on science.
The young lady’s (as the chairman of the committee kept referring to Greene) notion that social distancing was not based on any science is simply not accurate. Indeed, science tells us that the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 from an infected person drops the farther one is from that person. This is because the concentration of the virus gets diluted by the surrounding air. With larger droplets from coughs or sneezes which fall to the ground fairly quickly, 6’ of social distancing viewed by experts as a reasonable benchmark that would allow people to avoid exposure.
Dr. Deborah Birx said that, from the very beginning of the pandemic, U.S. health officials knew that, due to China’s lack of transparency, the country would never find out if Covid originated in a lab or from an animal spillover.
“…we didn‘t know, and we knew we would never know,” Birx said in an interview on CNN on Tuesday. “I mean, we knew with SARS that China was not transparent. We knew with the second SARS, China was not transparent, so we were not going to get an answer. But that shouldn‘t have held us back 4 1/2 years later from both ensuring that we protect against lab leaks and we protect that public.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease who spent five decades in government service, testified on Monday before the House of Representative’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci stated that, while he has an open mind as to whether the coronavirus originated in a lab or nature, the viruses used in research funded in China by the National Institutes of Health were too distance to have evolved into SARS-CoV-2.
“I feel the more likely explanation is a spillover from an animal reservoir,” he said. But absent definitive evidence one way or another, “we have to keep an open mind.”
Social distancing did save lives at the start of the pandemic, but that was before we had vaccines and immunity. The improvised strategy used to fight the novel coronavirus at the dawn of the pandemic slowed transmission of the virus and prevented almost 800,000 deaths in the United States alone, according to a recent study entitled “The Impact of Vaccines and Behavior on US Cumulative Deaths from Covid-19” that was published in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. The paper, by Andrew Atkeson of UCLA and Stephen Kissler of the University of Colorado-Boulder, is based on an epidemiological model that suggests that 1.98 million pandemic-related deaths would have occurred over the past four years rather than the 1.18 million deaths that did occur.
OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS
An experimental HIV vaccine developed at Duke University triggered an elusive type of broadly neutralizing antibody in a small group of people enrolled in a 2019 clinical trial. The findings were recently published in the journal Cell.  Since it was first identified in 1983, HIV has infected over 85 million people and caused some 40 million deaths worldwide.
A new study coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison will hopefully convinces at least some aficionados of unpasteurized milk to switch to a safer choice. Researchers there found that mice which drank raw milk from cows with H5N1 experienced systemic infections that riddled their organs.
An advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected MDMA-aided therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. The panel found that data from clinical trials did not outweigh the risks involved in using the drug commonly known as Ecstasy and molly.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending May 25, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on May 31 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 4.2%, and the trend in test positivity is +0.8% 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 +5.1%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 was 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 remains unchanged over the past two weeks.
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 5,308 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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