A photo stand-in in London with images of the Scots Guards and scenes of London, and the face of this publication’s editorial director peering through.
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 1,561st day.
In news we cover today , actress Glenn Close said that she had contracted RSV and Covid at the same time, a new study explains why some people are immune to SARS-CoV-2, and, in his new autobiography, Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote that former President Trump had a predilection for lacing their conversations with “[Expletive Deleted]s.”
TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY
On June 19, 2020, the United States began to act on what former President Donald Trump had announced at the end of May, namely that the country would withdraw its support from the World Health Organization.
Jim Richardson, the director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the State Department, Jim Richardson, told reporters Friday that the United states was “in process of notifying the WHO that we are withdrawing,”
A new study released that day found that fatal cardiac arrests had soared in the streets and homes of New York at the peak of first wave of cases there in March and April, a team of researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Health System reported.
While coronavirus likely caused many of these deaths, others were probably a consequence of an overwhelmed medical system, the researchers reported in the journal JAMA Cardiology. They found a three-fold increase in the number of people needing emergency resuscitation in 2020 as compared to the same time period last year. And 90% of these people died, the researchers found.
Meanwhile, Brazil became the second country to have reported over one million cases of SARS-CoV-2. The country’s health ministry reported 54,771 new cases of Covid-19 on the 19th, a record daily spike that brought the nationwide total to 1,032,913. The country with the most cases was and remains the United States. At the time, there were 2.2 million cases that had been reported there.
Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Committee that the issue of hydroxychloroquine “turned out to be a black eye” for the U.S.Food and Drug Administration. Lurie called the FDA’s handling of hydroxychloroquine a “disappointment” and an “embarrassment.”
Speaking to the panel on “Repurposing Therapeutic Drugs for COVID-19: Research Challenges and Opportunities,”Lurie, who used to work for the FDA, said that he didn’t think it was “ because of the career officials at FDA, who I believe are completely committed to scientific integrity and proper regulatory procedures in this pandemic. But I do think that people have turned out to be susceptible to political pressure,” he told the panel on “
The number of coronavirus cases across the globe stood at 8.6 million, an increase of over 140,528 people in the past 24 hours, based on figures compiled by the Coronavirus Morning News Brief. The death toll now was at 457,275. The number of daily deaths was 5,123.
The number of active cases was no longer declining. As of June 19, 2020, there were 3.56 million active cases worldwide, an increase of almost quarter of a million over the past 24 hours. Out of the active cases, 3.54 million were mild and 2% or 54,726 were severe. In the United States and its territories, the number of confirmed cases stood at 2.27 million, an increase of 22,765, while the death toll was at 120,723.
UNITED STATES
In an interview on CBS Tuesday morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that, while the initial school closures were a good idea, the duration for which schools were kept shuttered in some instances was a mistake.
“Shutting down everything immediately – and we didn’t shut it down completely – but essentially major social distancing and even schools was the right thing,” Fauci said. “How long you kept it was the problem, because there was a disparity throughout the country. If you go back and look at the YouTube, I kept on saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools. Open the schools as quickly and as safely as you possibly can.’ But initially to close it down was correct. Keeping it for a year was not a good idea.”
Fauci, who has an autobiography coming out soon, wrote that then President Donald Trump said [Expletive Deleted] multiple times to him in the course of a phone call just three months into the pandemic.
In the chapter in his book about the former president entitled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Fauci wrote that [T]he president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him.”
“He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse,” he continued. “He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars,’” he continued.
[Editor’s Note: The term “expletive deleted” refers to profanity deleted by an author, editor, or censor, and appears in place of the profanity. The term has been around since the 1930s, but gained popularity during Watergate in the 1970s.
Then President Richard Nixon, who had been compelled by a subpoena to provide the contents of the White House taping system to the House Judiciary Committee in April 1974, was shocked by the profanity-laced discussions amongst the White House’s inner circle. He then insisted that every use of profanity be replaced by “[EXPLETIVE DELETED].”]
GLOBAL NEWS
A group of scientists at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in the United Kingdom believes it can explain why some people appear immune to SARS-CoV-2. Using a so-called challenge study, the researchers said that the group of 16 volunteers who allowed themselves to be infected with the virus fell into three groups.
In one group, six people were symptomatic and tested positive in both of their daily tests for more than two days. In another, three participants remained asymptomatic but tested positive in one of their twice-a-day-tests, but not the other, for no more than two day. In the third group, seven people consistently tested negative for the virus
The researchers found that the people in the aforementioned second and third groups produced interferon in their blood before it was produced in their nasopharynx. Members of these groups also didn’t have active infections within their T-cells and macrophages.
The results suggest that high levels of activity of an immune system gene called HLA-DQA2 before SARS-CoV-2 exposure helped prevent a sustained infection.
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
In a video shared on social media, actress Glenn Close said that she had been sidelined after filming “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” in London for two days before she “came down with Covid and RSV both at the same time.”
Close said she had been “really hit hard” by contracting the two viruses at the same time, adding that she now felt better.
“As of today, [it] is the first day that I feel like I am getting back to myself,” she said.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending June 8, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on June 14 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 5.4%, 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 0.6%, and the trend in emergency department visits is +12.6%.
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 four 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 3,352 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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