New Coronavirus News since 24 till 25 Aug 2020

What the 2020 US Open will look like for tennis fans worldwide [ESPN, 25 Aug 2020]

by Peter Bodo

NEW YORK -- Entering the grounds of the National Tennis Center through the West Gate gave way to a surreal sight at the Western & Southern Open on Saturday, the first day of the unusual tennis doubleheader currently underway in New York.

Instead of the familiar, restless horde of fans attracted to the US Open, the walkway and open areas nearby were sparsely populated by individuals and very small groups of tennis players, a who's who of the ATP and WTA, fit, tanned and clad in tennis kits. Some were chatting. Others were working out, some incorporating the empty metal chairs and tables usually occupied by fans into strength or agility drills, creating a form of tennis parkour.

The fence flanking the five premier practice courts alongside Arthur Ashe Stadium glittered in the sunlight. Alexander Zverev, wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off, was working out with his team. Nobody paid them any attention.

For a die-hard tennis fan, it was heaven. But no fan will get to experience this up-close view of tennis professionals at work and play in the coming days. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, no spectators are allowed at the ongoing Western & Southern Open or the US Open that follows immediately after on Aug. 31. The only way to enjoy the events this year will be on television. ESPN is presenting the US Open for its sixth year as exclusive domestic media partner. Because of the unique circumstances, this is likely to be a groundbreaking and potentially paradigm-shifting viewing experience.

So what, exactly, will a viewer might see tuning in to watch the US Open?

Arthur Ashe Stadium will be virtually unrecognizable with a scrim hiding the empty seats and nine large LED screens strategically positioned to display scores and announcement and to track the path of the tennis ball with Hawk-Eye technology. The USTA also has planned to allow specially selected fans to watch the action from afar and pose questions to a winning player after a match.

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"The challenge is how will we capture what this event is known for without fans," said Jamie Reynolds, head of tennis productions for ESPN, the USTA's official broadcast partner. "How do you find the noise, the excitement, the cheering, the interactions of the tennis community that is here every day? Without that, we're in danger of being anemic."

There will be no video of energized crowds milling about in the twilight by the South Plaza Fountain, no shots of long lines of patrons at the smoky hamburger concessions. There will also be a lack of gimmicks in hopes of compensating for the lack of fans. Reynolds is adamant about not diminishing or overshadowing the fierce nature of one-on-one competition. The "first level" of coverage will focus on the intensity of the game. He has faith in the integrity of the competition and what he calls the "robustness" of the players.

The essence of the spectacle, though, will be familiar to most fans. As Coco Gauff said during her media day appearance on Friday, "I mean, it's still tennis, the same court, the same balls, regardless if there's fans or not."

The grounds outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium have been transformed into a players area complete with fitness equipment, a putting green, a court meant for "soccer" tennis and a basketball hoop. AP Photo/Frank Franklin II

There are multiple answers to what viewers will see, starting with the greater flexibility the camera operators will have with camera positions. With no concession to spectators, technicians can put cameras lower down in the stadium, closer to the court and in places reserved for premium spectator seating in normal years. The three show courts (Arthur Ashe, Louis Armstrong and Court 17) will have live cameramen, while the 10 "outside" courts will be covered by robotic cameras operated remotely. The geometry of the game demands that producers respect and maintain the traditional angles of coverage.

"There's no question the staging for the Western & Southern Open and the US Open will take on new dimensions without fans on-site," new US Open director Stacey Allaster said. "Together with ESPN and our international broadcasters, millions of fans in more than 200 countries will have the opportunity to be inspired by what I believe are the most amazing athletes to compete in sport at the highest of levels."

Some of the key elements in tennis broadcasting as we've known it will be radically different.
The US Open will be the first to use Hawk-Eye Live in place of human line judges at the US Open. The system, approved last November for use at all levels of play by the ITF, will be used on 11 of the 13 courts, the exceptions being Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong, which will still have officiating teams comprised of nine line judges working in one-hour shifts.

Viewers will still get to hear voluble shouts of "out," or "foot fault" thanks to recorded human voices ringing out over the PA system. Oliver Clough, tennis general manager at Hawk-Eye Innovations Ltd., told ESPN that the firm has collected a variety of voices making various calls during the 2019 US Opens in order to be realistic.

"There will be no challenges on outside courts," Clough added. "But close points will be shown on the screen. In trials [including the use of Hawk-Eye Live at the recent ATP Next Gen exhibition], we learned that even if challenges are allowed, the players tend to stop making them when they see how accurate the Hawk-Eye technology is."

Those robust calls will not be the only recorded voices viewers of the US Open will hear. The debate throughout sports over using canned cheering and other techniques meant to create excitement has been, as Reynolds put it, "a highly polarizing conversation." He favors letting the action speak for itself because tennis simply is too fluid for the sporting equivalent of sitcom laugh tracks to be punched up, especially during points. But cheers and chants are not the only forms of sound that accompany a match and make spectators feel that, even sitting on their sofas, they are witnessing a highly charged event. There is always something audible happening before, during and after a match -- even when the ball isn't in play.

"The question is, 'What should we do downstream,'" Reynolds said. "Not during play but throughout the broadcast. What 'comfort' audio do we want in order to make viewers feel that the arena is an alive, dynamic place."

Ball persons wearing protective masks work during the Western & Southern Open tennis tournament. AP Photo/Frank Franklin II

The challenge led technicians to harvest natural sounds from all the US Open matches in 2019.
They deleted all ambient noise, including ball strikes, calls by officials and chanting fans. With help from IBM, the team put together a catalog of true-to-life ambient sound covering all periods of a match. They learned that there's a difference between how things sound in Ashe during a day session match and what it sounds like in Louis Armstrong when the roof is closed, what you hear during changeovers, as the players are introduced or when they leave the court.

"We will not be stylizing live play, blow-by-blow or cheer-by-cheer," Reynolds said. "But we will have all these sound embeds that will be mixed in to give you that comfort that the venue is alive and authentic."

While the food court and some other open areas will be a land of countless empty tables and chairs, much of the South Plaza Fountains area has been transformed into a spacious player lounge, complete with pristine white chaise lounges shaded by canopies and a host of games including a putting green, a court meant for "soccer" tennis and -- most popular, by far -- a basketball hoop. Dazzling white globes the size of beach balls float like bubbles on the surface of the fountain pool. Various fitness devices stand in a covered area nearby. There has been no sign thus far of crowding or competition for space or equipment among the players.

"Instead of fans running around on the plaza, we'll have players and their entourages right here on the tournament footprint," Reynolds said. "My feeling is that we may have more access and the players will have a greater willingness to engage with our telecast."

Most fans are familiar with those cutaways to the luxury boxes in Ashe. This year, those suites have been reserved for top pros as a kind of home-away-from home. Those making use of them thus far include Denis Shapovalov, Naomi Osaka and Stefanos Tsitsipas.

The USTA also is devising a system intended to allow up to 50 supporters of a player to populate a virtual "player's box" on a closed video network that will be accessible from a screen on Ashe. After completing a match, the winner will be free to stroll over to the video screen and communicate with the people in his private box, with viewers of the telecast looking on.

The players, in some senses, will be a captive audience to an even greater degree than fans tuning in to the telecast. Those back at either of the two player hotels might be invited at any time to join the regular telecast via Skype or Zoom to provide additional commentary.

While six of the top 10 women chose not to compete in the US Open bubble, No. 3 ranked Karolina Pliskova had no reservations about competing in New York. AP Photo/Frank Franklin II
In the end, though, the most significant factor in the viewing experience will be the quality of the play. The early reports from the ATP and WTA pros suggest that competing without fans and observing stringent health protocols hasn't diminished their own enthusiasm to return to competition. To some, the hardships imposed by the pandemic has forced a form of self-discipline.

"It's actually not that bad, I won't lie to you," Tsitsipas said of the restrictions and demands imposed by the bio-secure environment. "It's quiet, you can just concentrate on your daily routines without having any distractions."

Reilly Opelka, one of a number of promising young American players vying to succeed John Isner as the leading pro from the U.S., cut to the chase in a slightly different way.

"We're professionals, we play for money. At the end of the day when there's a big check on the line and incentives like rankings, it's different. That's the ingredient that's been missing [during the recent exhibitions]," Opelka said after winning his first ATP match in over six months at the Western & Southern Open. "You can fault me for this, but I'm not going to bring the same intensity in an exhibition or a special event as I do to a real tournament."

Taylor Fritz, another rapidly improving young American said after he won his first match at the Western & Southern Open, "If you asked me the week after Acapulco (shortly before the game went dark) how all this would affect the players, I would have said absolutely the players aren't going to play so well. But it's been so long since anybody has really played a match that we don't really care [about the lack of fans]. I'm as pumped up as normal. This is not going to be an issue for anyone."

While six of the top 10 women chose not to compete in the US Open bubble, all-time Open era singles champ Serena Williams, No. 3 ranked Karolina Pliskova and Australian Open singles champion Sofia Kenin had no reservations about competing in New York. All are hungry for competition and primed to play.

"I don't mind not having the fans," Williams said. "I would love if the fans were here because it's so special to play with the fans and they really pull me up when I'm down, but at the same time, we need to be safe right now, so let's not have anyone -- when we are all feeling better, we can all come back and we can all have f

China Clamps Down on Xinjiang to Stop Covid, Angering Residents [The New York Times, 25 Aug 2020]

By Javier C. Hernández

The restrictions, which remain even after new coronavirus infections subsided, have ruined livelihoods and damaged Beijing’s efforts to project harmony in the troubled region.

First came the notices that Chinese officials had declared a “wartime” state. Then the authorities started going door to door, sealing off apartments and warning residents to stay inside.

The Chinese government in recent weeks has imposed a sweeping lockdown across the Xinjiang region in western China, penning in millions of people as part of what officials describe as an effort to fight a resurgence of the coronavirus.

But with the outbreak in Xinjiang seemingly under control and the restrictions still in place more than a month after the outbreak there began, many residents are lashing out and accusing the government of acting too harshly.

“There are no cases here,” Daisy Luo, 26, a fruit seller who lives in northern Xinjiang, said in an interview. “The controls are too strict.”

Ms. Luo, who said she has lost at least $1,400 in sales because of the lockdown, took to social media this week to protest the restrictions, saying she felt abandoned. “It’s useless to have opinions,” she said. “People dare not speak.”

The mounting anger poses a challenge for the ruling Communist Party. With the virus under control across most of the country and life starting to look relatively normal in many cities, the party is trying to project an image of harmony and to tout its approach to fighting the virus as a model for the world.

The lockdown, which according to government notices has affected at least four million people, has revived concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has spent years perfecting a system of mass surveillance and control in Xinjiang and has long imposed draconian social rules on the region’s largely Muslim ethnic minority groups, who make up about half the population of 25 million.

On social media sites, Xinjiang residents have in recent days circulated videos showing residents handcuffed to metal posts, purportedly for violating quarantine rules. Some residents have said that the authorities have forced them to drink traditional Chinese medicine, despite doubts about its efficacy against the virus. Another widely circulated video showed residents in Urumqi, a city of 3.5 million and the capital of Xinjiang, yelling from their homes in despair.
“Is this a prison or cage?” one user wrote on Weibo, a popular social media service. “Is this prevention or suppression?”

Chinese officials have not provided detailed information about the restrictions, their scope or rationale. At least three cities have been affected, according to official notices, but the lockdown is likely more extensive. In recent weeks, residents in at least 9 jurisdictions, covering a population of more than 10 million, have made reference to being under lockdown, according to a review of posts on Weibo and other sites. Xinjiang officials did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

As anger over the lockdown has grown in recent days, with residents of other parts of China joining in criticizing the government, the authorities have moved quickly to limit dissent, censoring scores of online posts about Xinjiang.

Local officials have tried to portray themselves as responsive and transparent. On Monday, in an unusual gesture, the state-run news media published cellphone numbers of government and party officials in Urumqi, encouraging needy residents to call them and saying they stood ready to “effectively solve the difficult demands of the people of all ethnic groups.”

One of those officials, Liu Haijiang, a district leader in Urumqi, said in an interview that there were no cases in his district and that residents were pleased with the government’s response.
“We are a pure land,” he said. “Ordinary people are all very happy.”

Mr. Liu said he did not know when the lockdown would be lifted. “This will be based on our overall plan and the opinion of the experts,” he said.

In Urumqi, the authorities on Monday said they would ease restrictions in some districts, allowing residents to leave their homes and walk inside apartment complexes, according to Chinese news reports. Officials did not say when the full lockdown would be lifted.

The restrictions in Xinjiang began in mid-July as dozens of people in Urumqi fell ill with the coronavirus. Officials dispatched thousands of police officers to impose a lockdown in Urumqi and other cities, including Kashgar, announcing a “wartime” campaign. Medical experts eventually diagnosed more than 800 cases of the coronavirus.

In recent weeks, as the government has intensified the lockdown and expanded testing, locally transmitted cases have dwindled. There have been no such cases for nine days, officials say.
Mainland experts have hinted that the lockdown will not be lifted until there have been no local cases for 14 days, the standard incubation period.

“If no new patients are found in this period, Urumqi can declare victory over this wave of the epidemic,” Zhang Yuexin, an expert who is part of a government team working to fight the outbreak in Xinjiang, told Global Times, a tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, this month.

Medical professionals said the Chinese government’s extreme approach in Xinjiang would likely prove effective but would mean trade-offs for the economy and the well-being of residents.

Siddharth Sridhar, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, said the measures in Xinjiang were consistent with the Chinese government’s strategy of restricting outbreaks “at all costs.” As the virus spread rapidly through the central Chinese city of Wuhan earlier this year, the government imposed a similar lockdown that lasted 76 days.

“The tendency is to implement extreme measures to contain outbreaks early and to relax them slowly,” he said. “Such prolonged lockdown, no doubt, entails pain.”

Some human rights activists worry that the government is repeating the mistakes of the Wuhan lockdown, when residents were stuck in homes and deprived access to health care.
Residents of Xinjiang have said on social media recently that critically ill people with other diseases in the region have been unable to get treatment.

More recently, China’s leaders have seemed to favor a more targeted approach to handling clusters of new cases, along with extensive testing. After an outbreak at a market in Beijing in June, the authorities placed dozens of apartment complexes under lockdown but kept most neighborhoods, shops and restaurants open.

Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that some of the measures taken by the government to control the outbreak in Xinjiang were “unnecessary, intrusive, inhumane, and not based on scientific evidence.”

“To Chinese authorities, containing the spread of the coronavirus has become a paramount political mission,” she said. “In order to achieve it, human rights, dignity, and, ironically, health can be arbitrarily sacrificed.”

Like many parts of China, Xinjiang has struggled to get its economy back on track after the pandemic amid weak global demand for exports and steep job losses.

The recent controls have added to a crisis among farmers, who say crops have spoiled and incomes have cratered. The restrictions have come in the middle of what is typically a very busy tourist season in Xinjiang, known for its lakes, deserts and oasis cities.

Farmers have used social media to voice their frustrations. In one popular video, a fruit seller stands in a field smashing watermelons. “Our big watermelons at the foot of Huoyan Mountain are ripe, but we are not happy,” she says. “Although it is a bumper harvest, there is no way to be happy.” The video has since vanished.

Many activists are concerned that the government might try to use the pandemic to expand its crackdown on Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group that lives in Xinjiang. As many as one million ethnic Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities have been held in internment camps in Xinjiang in recent years, drawing growing global condemnation.

Several Uighurs have been punished by the Xinjiang authorities in recent weeks for making comments about the lockdown online, according to Uighur activists abroad.

“Uighurs have no choice but to tolerate discrimination, and they will be severely punished if they express their anger,” said Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, a group in Munich that supports self-determination for Xinjiang. “During the epidemic, China has strengthened its prevention and control tactics against Uighurs, fearing that dissatisfaction might lead to confrontation.”

Why the United States is having a coronavirus data crisis [Nature.com, 25 Aug 2020]

by Amy Maxmen

Political meddling, disorganization and years of neglect of public-health data management mean the country is flying blind.

South Korea’s grip on the coronavirus faltered this month when a large church in Seoul had an outbreak — involving 915 cases as of 25 August. The government has reinstated restrictions in the city to prevent a surge, but it’s also reporting details of the outbreak publicly. For instance, it has shared that 120 people infected at the church have spread the coronavirus to people at 22 venues, including 4 call centres and 3 hospitals in Seoul.

Almost every day for the past seven months, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website with near-real-time information on local outbreaks. The site also reports several COVID-19 statistics for every region of the country.

Data dashboards in Singapore and New Zealand offer similar windows into how the coronavirus is spreading within their borders. This helps policymakers and citizens determine how to go about daily life, while reducing risks — and provides researchers with a wealth of data. By contrast, the United States offers vanishingly few details on how the disease is spreading, even as people increasingly socialize and travel, and authorities reopen schools and businesses. This state of affairs is frustrating data researchers, who want to help authorities make decisions that can save lives.

“We shouldn’t be flying blind at this point,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “We shouldn’t have to speculate.”

Experts told Nature that political meddling, privacy concerns and years of neglect of public-health surveillance systems are among the reasons for the dearth of information in the United States.

Lagging and lacking

Although information isn’t the only tool that can be used against a pandemic, South Korea’s attention to data correlates with its overall success at controlling the outbreak: the country has had about 3.5 cases per 10,000 people overall, and there have been around 2 COVID-19 deaths per week over the past month. By contrast, the United States has had 175 cases per 10,000 people overall, and about 7,000 people have died of the disease every week for the past month.

South Korea owes its detailed intel to a coordinated network of public-health centres in 250 districts that send information rapidly to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University, attributes the system’s success to this centralization of power — along with rapid hiring of ‘temporary epidemiologists’ to meet demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. These scientists have helped to lead contact-tracing investigations that produce succinct, anonymized details such as those listed about the outbreak at Sarang Jeil Church in Seoul.

The United States isn’t pursuing contact tracing for COVID-19 to nearly the same extent as South Korea, but its disease surveillance also flows from local health departments to the federal level. For years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has used this system to follow the spread of outbreaks such as a current surge in infections with the bacterium Salmonella, and to trace them back to their sources. However, the surveillance system has run into problems at several levels during the pandemic. The result is that a lot of data, such as information on where people were exposed to the coronavirus, are missing. And the data that do exist are made public only slowly.

The CDC and four US health departments declined to speak to Nature about how they’re managing COVID-19 data. However, former scientific employees and researchers who collaborate with them offered suggestions about why data is lagging and lacking in the United States.

Increased scrutiny

Some speculate that because the pandemic is politically charged, data describing the situation are guarded closely by officials in the administration of President Donald Trump. Researchers say that investigations published in the CDC’s journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports have been thorough, but are posted online long after they might influence outcomes. For example, on 31 July, the CDC reported1 that 260 staff members and children at an overnight camp in Georgia had been infected more than a month earlier. Samuel Groseclose, a public-health specialist who retired from the CDC in 2018, suggests that the reports are undergoing an unusual amount of review within the agency, and perhaps its parent agency, the US Department for Health and Human Services (HHS).

The CDC was further sidelined in July, scientists say, when the Trump administration announced that data on COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations would be diverted away from the agency, and handled instead by a new system launched at the HHS, whose head reports directly to the president. So far, the HHS’s dashboard has been up to a week behind in reporting data, and it includes information only on case counts and hospital capacity, rather than details such as the location of disease clusters. An HHS spokesperson says that the new system streamlines reporting from 6,000 hospitals in the country.

But Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) in Washington DC, says that rather than streamlining data collection, the change has confounded data collection further. Some hospital administrators are now confused about which agencies to report to, he says. He’s also frustrated because the US$10 million spent on the HHS’s system might have been put to better use improving public-health data management at the CDC and at the health departments it collaborates with across the country.
This outdated system has buckled under the pressure of 5.7 million COVID-19 cases in the United States.

Benjamin notes that many health departments still share data by fax, which is more time-consuming than digital methods. A lack of funds also means that overburdened staff don’t have enough time to analyse the data they have. The APHA and other scientific organizations have long called for resources to improve data surveillance in the US public-health system. In a report published last September, public-health epidemiologists described the current system as siloed, sluggish, manual and paper-based.

“We’ve begged for money over the years to build a solid information highway so that we can collect data rapidly and share it with the people that need it in a timely way,” says Benjamin.
“But we’ve never gotten what we needed.”

Data woes

This long-standing neglect has been exacerbated by the lack of national leadership during the pandemic, say the researchers who spoke to Nature. There are no nationwide requirements for the information that hospitals and testing laboratories must report to health departments. Ranu Dhillon, an epidemic-response specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who is currently treating people infected with COVID-19 in Vallejo, California, says that neither the local health department nor the CDC tells him to report where patients might have been exposed to the coronavirus. He records these data in their health records voluntarily, but he’s not sure whether the state or local health department use the information, which troubles him. He worked on the Ebola response in Guinea during the outbreak in 2015, and says authorities there collected data on how people were infected with the Ebola virus, to curb its spread. “This crucial information would help us drill down transmission further” for COVID-19, he says. “It’s crazy we aren’t collecting it.”

Amy Lockwood, a public-health specialist who left the health department in San Francisco, California, earlier this year, says that many departments would like such data, but struggle to get them from hospitals or labs providing tests. She says some test providers don’t collect information such as a person’s occupation, because they fear that asking such questions will deter people from being tested. Some hospitals, meanwhile, record this information, but don’t relay it to the analytical lab where samples are tested. So when the lab shares a case with a health department, the report lacks these details. “Having a fragmented health-care system prevents us from understanding what’s going on with COVID,” says Lockwood.

Epidemiologists at universities would like to help overburdened state and local health departments to analyse whatever data they have so they can help officials to direct an efficient coronavirus response. Typically, health departments share disease-surveillance data with researchers on request. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologists have been denied access. For instance, Steffanie Strathdee, an HIV epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, often requests case data broken down by parameters such as locality, race and probable exposure route, such as intravenous drug use. “Surveillance is done and it’s made transparent, and this is what we have been accustomed to,” she says. “Only for this epidemic, things have changed.”

This year, Strathdee and other epidemiologists asked for anonymized COVID-19 data from the California department of health. E-mails seen by Nature show that the researchers’ requests considered the need for individual privacy with measures such as asking the state for age ranges instead of exact ages. But the request was denied — something that had never happened to Strathdee before. The department’s director, Mark Ghaly, explained in a 3 July e-mail that releasing information from people’s records would “necessitate a careful and time-consuming analysis of each record to determine what data fields may be made public from each individual report”.

Furthermore, the United States is producing little information through contact tracing, a procedure that has the power to pinpoint an outbreak and how it moves, as well as to flag individuals who need to be quarantined. Thanks to contact tracing, Singapore’s daily report from 25 August was able to say that 94% of new cases confirmed in dormitories that house workers are linked to known cases, and that most of the new cases arose in people already quarantined. By contrast, the health department for Washington DC reported last week that only about 5% of new cases in the city had been linked to people previously identified as infected.

Without up-to-date, reliable information on who is infected, why and where, US scientists, policymakers and the public must instead rely on media reports and independent efforts to consolidate data, such as the COVID Tracking Project from magazine The Atlantic and the COVID-19 Dashboard compiled by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But the former is not comprehensive or universally trusted, and the latter doesn’t detail where transmission is happening. There is an urgent need for such information, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, because people are returning to work, to socializing and to schools. That means that precisely tailored interventions are more important than ever. “It’s not enough to just tell people to be cautious.”

References
1. Szablewski, C. M. et al Morbid. Mortal. W. Rep. 69, 1023–1025 (2020).

COVID Surge in South Korea Prompts School Closures [Voice of America, 25 Aug 2020]

South Korea is closing schools in the Seoul metropolitan area as it copes with a nearly two-week surge in coronavirus infections.

Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae said Tuesday most students will attend online classes at least until September 11, but that high school seniors would continue to attend in-person classes to prepare for national college entrance exams.

An outbreak in the southeastern region of South Korea delayed the start of the new school year for weeks before initiating phased reopenings in May.

South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control reported 280 new cases of COVID-19, increasing the 12-day total to 3,175 and the overall total to nearly 18,000.
Guidelines for children

As millions of children head back to school, the World Health Organization has issued its recommendation on whether they need to wear face masks.

The WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have broken their new guidelines into age groups, and they say children younger than 6 should not wear them.

"According to the limited available evidence, young children may have lower susceptibility to infection compared to adults, however available data suggests that this may vary by age among children," WHO and UNICEF said.

Children 6 to 11 should wear masks, but what the experts call a “risk-based control” should be considered. This includes social and cultural environments, the child’s ability to comply, and the impact mask wearing has on disabilities or underlying diseases.

Kids 12 and older need to be treated like adults when wearing masks.

But the WHO and UNICEF said no child should be denied access to an education if a mask is unavailable.

While children who are infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, generally have mild or asymptomatic symptoms, they can still spread the virus to adults.

Situation in the US

In the U.S., which continues to lead the world in infections and COVID-19 deaths, the head of the Food and Drug Administration dismissed President Donald Trump’s accusation last weekend that the agency has “deep state” employees who are working to complicate efforts to test COVID-19 vaccines ahead of the November presidential election.

“I have not seen anything that I would consider to be a ‘deep state’ at the FDA,” Dr. Stephen Hahn told Reuters on Monday. Hahn said he was completely confident that FDA employees were committed to act in the interests of all citizens during the pandemic.

As of Tuesday, 5.7 million infections and over 177,000 deaths were reported in the U.S. by Johns Hopkins University, about one-quarter of the 23.6 infections worldwide and the more than 813,800 deaths throughout the world.

Drop in cases in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong government said Tuesday it will allow some movie theaters, beauty salons and outdoor sports facilities to reopen this week following a drop in coronavirus cases.

There was a surge on coronavirus infections in Hong Kong in July, prompting the government to impose its most stringent social distancing measures to date, resulting in a gradual decline in infections.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Hong Kong said they have found the first known case of someone who was infected twice with COVID-19.

The popular belief is that catching the coronavirus once makes people immune to a second case.

But the doctors say genetic tests on a 33-year-old male COVID-19 patient found that the strain he had after returning from a trip to Spain several weeks ago is different than the coronavirus strain he had in March.

“It shows that some people do not have lifelong immunity” to the virus if they've already had it, microbiologist Dr. Kelvin Kai-Wang To said. “We don’t know how many people can get reinfected. There are probably more out there.”

Amid rising virus cases, S.Korea finds mutated strain [Anadolu Agency, 25 Aug 2020]

by Riyaz ul Khaliq

Mutated strain of COVID-19 that swept North America, Europe, Middle East also found in S.Korean patients

ANKARA

Amid increasing coronavirus cases that has raised alarm bells in South Korea, health authorities have warned of increasing mutating strain of the COVID-19.

According to Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), South Korea has found more of the mutated strain of COVID-19 that “swept North America, Europe and the Middle East”, Yonhap news agency reported. However, officials added there is no evidence to suggest that the “mutation is more infectious”.

According to the World Health Organization tagging, South Korea has detected GH strain of the virus. This strain is most common in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

South Korean health authorities first found this strain in April. Officials at the disease control center added that the mutated strain accounted for 77.4% of 685 patients who were examined.

South Korea is witnessing a new rise in virus cases which has mounted pressure on the government of President Moon Jae-in to impose strict restrictions to stem the spread of the infection.

“It has been roughly a week since we implemented the second level of the social distancing scheme. Nothing has been decided yet on when the third level of the policy will be introduced,” said Jeong Eun-kyeong, director at the KCDC.

The authorities are increasing bed capacity in hospitals for the coronavirus patients. At least 320 cases were reported on Wednesday as cases linked to churches rose. The country has reported a total of 18,265 cases so far.

The capital Seoul and neighboring Gyeonggi province account for most of the new cases. Of total cases, patients aged 60 and above account for more than 40% of cases.

“But if we fail to curb the spread of the virus this week and adopt the third-level scheme, there will be significant consequences. It will not just be a matter of new patients. There will be a major impact on society and the economy,” the Eun-kyeong added.

The country’s death toll climbed to 312 after two more patients lost their life to COVID-19.
South Korea’s fatality rate came to 1.71%. It has conducted 1,849,506 coronavirus tests since Jan. 3.

Coronavirus: South Korea closes most schools in Seoul area; first confirmed case of reinfection [CNBC, 25 Aug 2020]

The coverage on this live blog has ended — but for up-to-the-minute coverage on the coronavirus, visit the live blog from CNBC’s U.S. team.

South Korea ordered most schools in capital Seoul and its surrounding regions to shut due to a resurgence in coronavirus cases.

Scientists are expressing some doubts about the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19 patients. In a Sunday news briefing, President Donald Trump touted the treatment as a “breakthrough.” Former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC that while there was enough data to justify the authorization, the treatment is not a “home run.”

The following data was compiled by Johns Hopkins University:
• Global cases: More than 23.6 million
• Global deaths: At least 813,265
• Countries with the most cases: United States (more than 5.7 million); Brazil (more than 3.6 million); India (more than 3.1 million); Russia (at least 959,016) and South Africa (at least 611,450)

'The hardest message': American Airlines to lay off 17,500 front-line workers due to coronavirus travel slump [USA TODAY, 25 Aug 2020]

by Dawn Gilbertson

American Airlines warned in July that it would have to lay off up to 25,000 flight attendants, pilots and other front-line workers this fall due to the steep decline in travel brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

The final number came in lower thanks to voluntary employee exits and long-term leaves but the figure is still staggering: 17,500 workers. That is in addition to 1,500 management and administrative workers already laid off.

American CEO Doug Parker and President Robert Isom delivered the news to employees on Tuesday, calling it the most sobering update they've had to make since the pandemic began.

"Today is the hardest message we have had to share so far – the announcement of involuntary staffing reductions effective Oct. 1,'' the executives said in a memo.

The only thing that will stop the layoffs, the company said, is an extension of the payroll protection program the government approved earlier this year to support key industries until travel demand returned. Travel demand hasn't returned in sufficient numbers, however, and airline unions are fighting to extend the payroll protection, and thus any layoffs, through March 31.

The president's on board: Trump endorses payroll protection extension

Flight attendants will be the hardest hit, with 8,100 being furloughed. Pilot furloughs will total 1,600.The airline calls them furloughs instead of layoffs because they are unionized employees with recall rights.

Including the thousands of employees who have voluntarily agreed to leave the company, permanently or in a long-term leave of absence, American said it will be down to fewer than 100,000 employees on Oct. 1, compared with 140,000 at the start of the pandemic,a decline of nearly 30%.

American needs vastly fewer employees because it will be a significantly smaller carrier come October, at least until travel demand solidly rebounds. The industry's trade group, Airlines for America, thinks that's a long way off, recently predicting that it will be 2023 or 2024 until passenger volumes return to 2019 levels.

American, like all airlines, has been slashing flights and more cuts will occur in October as pre-pandemic service requirements tied to the payroll support program expire. The upshot: American said it will have 50% fewer seats for sale in the October-December period compared with a year ago.

That means fewer choices for travelers and potentially higher fares ahead.
"The coming weeks and months will be some of the most difficult we have ever faced,'' Parker and Isom said. "No matter how challenging they seem, remember this: The American Airlines team is no stranger to adversity, and in adversity, we always come through. We will come out on the other side of this crisis. Demand will return. Team members will be recalled. The world will find its new normal, and when it does, American is going to be there. Until then, take heart that we will get through this together. The professionalism and care this team has shown over the past six months has been nothing short of extraordinary. We are all American Airlines, and we will survive, and one day, thrive again. Thank you for all you are doing now, and tomorrow, to carry us through.''

Participate in an online study about the COVID-19 pandemic. - Harlem, NY [Patch.com, 25 Aug 2020]

By Eli Davis

Researchers at the City University of New York (CUNY) are currently recruiting participants for an IRB-approved (IRB #2020-0408; Primary Investigator: Evelyn Behar, Ph.D.) study about people’s daily thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and physical experiences. The study will take place
ONLINE over a 9-day period. On Day 1, you will be asked to complete surveys about your typical thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (40 mins). On Days 2-8, you will receive a text message three times per day and asked to follow a link to complete a short set of questions (2 mins each). On Day 9, you will be asked to answer several questions about your experiences (15 mins).

Participants will receive payment for each completed assessment, for a total of up to $15 in Amazon gift cards.

The link for the study is: https://chest.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eg3pkCFOQeOD3Qp

NYC never shut down during 1918 flu pandemic. Why is coronavirus different? (opinion) [SILive.com, 25 Aug 2020]

By Tom Wrobleski

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – What did New York leaders know a hundred years ago that we seem to have forgotten today?

New York City remains largely shut down in 2020, even though our coronavirus numbers have been falling for months now.

Indoor malls in the five boroughs are closed, including the Staten Island Mall. Indoor dining is still prohibited, with no end in sight. Gyms remain shuttered in the city because there aren’t enough inspectors to vet them for safety.

Entire industries key to the New York economy are on the brink of collapse. All because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio say so.

They tell us that they’re following the science in making their decisions about re-opening, even though their logic no longer holds water for many.

What Cuomo and de Blasio should do is look at history and see how New York City dealt with the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic. They might learn something.

That health crisis was far graver than anything we’ve seen with COVID-19.

An estimated 500 million people worldwide fell ill with the so-called “Spanish flu” in 1918, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Around 50 million died, including 675,000 in the United States.

Truly scary stuff, particularly at a time when the medical arts weren’t nearly as advanced as they are now. Antibiotics wouldn’t be in wide use for another decade, for example. Many of us would consider 1918′s medical practices to be downright primitive.

And yet New York City remained largely open throughout the pandemic. And city leaders got credit for handling the disease better than other cities did.

History has given a lot of the credit to the New York City health commissioner, Dr. Royal S. Copeland.

In a huge departure with how Cuomo and de Blasio have handled our pandemic, Copeland decided not to close businesses and entertainment venues like movie theaters and dance halls, according to a history of the pandemic compiled by the University of Michigan Center for the
History of Medicine. For one thing, Copeland was more concerned about how the flu spread on mass transit.

Store opening and closing times were staggered in 15-minute increments, save those that sold food and drugs, in order to ease crowding.

In order to spread out evening crowds at entertainment venues, each of the city’s 46 theaters and movie houses was assigned a specific opening time between 7 and 9 p.m. But the venues remained open, unlike our own.

Even though Copeland believed that dirty and crowded theaters contributed to the spread of the flu, he said the venues would be allowed to remain open as long as they were well ventilated, clean, and did not allow patrons to cough, sneeze or smoke.

Copeland also ordered that homes with flu cases be quarantined, while flu sufferers from tenements were sent to city hospitals. Importantly, healthy people were not placed in lockdown, as we saw in New York City during the coronavirus pandemic. Only the sick were isolated.

Even more amazingly, city public schools remained open during the 1918 flu pandemic. Copeland said that kids who coughed or sneezed in school should be sent home. Doctors examined the students every day. Copeland said kids were better protected in schools than on the streets.

The 1918 pandemic eventually ended, leaving calamity in its wake. But less so for New York, which had an excess death rate per 1,000 residents of 4.7, according to the National Institutes for Health’s National Library of Medicine, compared to 7.3 for Philadelphia and 6.5 for Boston.

There’s more than one way to handle a pandemic.

The coronavirus may shut down the immune system's vital classrooms [Science Magazine, 25 Aug 2020]

By Jon Cohen

At the top of the long list of uncertainties about COVID-19 is whether people who recover will develop durable immune responses to the coronavirus that causes it. A research team that has autopsied people who died from COVID-19 has now discovered they lack so-called germinal centers, classrooms in the spleen and lymph nodes in which immune cells learn to mount a long-lasting antibody response to a pathogen. Although the finding may not apply to people who have mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infections, it may help explain COVID-19 progression in the sickest cases and provide important insights to vaccine developers.

The study, led by immunologist Shiv Pillai of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and published last week in Cell, may take on increased importance as a report out yesterday provided the first compelling evidence that a person can become reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, suggesting antibody protection could be fleeting in some people.

Pillai and co-workers analyzed the spleen and the thoracic lymph nodes, which drain immune cells from the lungs, of 11 people who died from COVID-19, comparing the tissues with those of six age-matched people who died from other causes. When all goes well, these sites gather antibodymaking B cells into newly formed germinal centers, distinctive microstructures where these cells mature and refine their antibody response to the virus. But germinal centers did not form in the thoracic lymph nodes and spleens of the autopsied COVID-19 patients, the researchers reported. “This is kind of shocking that they don’t, but they don’t,” Pillai says.

The work confirms a smaller study of autopsied COVID-19 patients reported online on 7 August in Current Medical Science by Duan Ya-Qi of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and colleagues. “These two independent studies establish a profound lack of [antibody] responses in the deceased population of COVID-19 patients,” says Yang Xiang-Ping, a senior author of that paper.

Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who published a preprint that describes germinal center formation in monkeys infected with SARV-CoV-2, says Pillai and colleagues have made “an important addition to the field,” noting that “clearly the immune system didn’t do what it was supposed to do.” But Iyer cautions that the data from her monkey studies, which may more closely mirror asymptomatic or mild disease in humans as the monkeys never develop severe disease, did not find an absence of germinal centers. “The immune response to SARS-CoV-2 is extremely heterogenous,” she says.

The tissue from a person who died of COVID-19 doesn’t show any evidence of the germinal centers found in a normal immune response.

NAOKI KANEKO

A “storm” of cytokines, biochemicals that send messages to B cells and other immune system actors, occurs in response to some SARS-CoV-2 infections, contributing to inflammation and severe disease. Pillai’s team found that lymph nodes in the COVID-19 deaths had a large increase in the amount of one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), in comparison with the control autopsies. The researchers also found a lack of a type of T cell that plays a central role in forming the germinal centers and they propose the excessive TNF-α blocks its creation, as found in some mouse studies.

Yang suggests a better understanding of the lack of germinal centers in deceased patients might also help explain the cytokine storm. “The defect of [the antibody] responses may somehow be linked with the enhanced inflammation, which needs further investigations,” Yang says.

Pillai agrees with many immunologists who believe SARS-CoV-2 does not appear to be a particularly difficult virus to stop with a vaccine. “This is a piece of cake,” Pillai says. He is even confident that a properly designed vaccine could lead to durable antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2. But he hopes vaccine developers take note of his group’s findings. “If you are making too much TNF-α in the lymph nodes, maybe your vaccination won’t last that long,” he says.

Superspreading Is A Hallmark Of The Coronavirus : Goats and Soda [NPR, 25 Aug 2020]

by PIEN HUANG

A person with a high viral load walks into a bar.

That, according to researchers who study the novel coronavirus, is a recipe for a superspreading event — where one person or gathering leads to an unusually high number of new infections. And that kind of occurrence is increasingly considered a hallmark of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

"There are some really good estimates out there that suggest that between 10% and 20% of cases are responsible for about 80% of transmission events," said Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program, at a press conference on Aug. 10.

One such event has been traced to Hong Kong's Lan Kwai Fong nightlife district this spring, where an infected person (or persons) may have triggered one of the biggest coronavirus clusters in the city.

According to a preprint paper from The University of Hong Kong, the virus spread among 106 bar patrons, bar workers and musicians in that district over a period of two weeks in March.

The Hong Kong bar district had all the high-risk factors that make it easy for the coronavirus to spread, says Dr. Gabriel Leung, dean of medicine at The University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the paper. "Any setting that is an enclosed space that is poorly ventilated, that is crowded and that has unprotected behavior would tend to create a lot of clusters," he says.

Other respiratory diseases spread in clusters to some degree, says Jamie Lloyd-Smith, who researches disease transmission at University of California, Los Angeles, and has looked into a wide range of past outbreaks. But for the COVID-19 coronavirus and the closely related SARS virus, which swept through Asia in 2003, these kinds of clustered transmission events seem to be a major driving force. "Both SARS and [the COVID-19 coronavirus] are at the relatively superspready extreme," he says.

And two of the main reasons, say researchers, are the way this coronavirus spreads and the behavior of infected individuals.

A key feature that helps this virus superspread is its ability to transmit through the air in closed indoor settings, says Dr. Joshua Schiffer, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and co-author of a recent preprint paper on superspreading events. Since in a superspreader event, one person can infect many others in the same room, that likely means the spreader is breathing out infectious virus particles that can hang in clouds in the air and can disperse over a wide area, he says.

Then there's the issue of when a person is contagious. During the 2003 SARS epidemic, people were most contagious about 10 days after developing a fever or cough. So keeping sick people away from the healthy stopped the virus from transmitting.

There still were a number of superspreading events during that outbreak — primarily traced back to hospitals and housing communities where infected people lived or visited.

But this novel coronavirus, known as SARS-COV-2, is more of a party crasher. It appears to spread efficiently from people who don't yet know they're sick. Leung says research shows that 40% of coronavirus transmission is taking place before a patient shows symptoms. And people may actually be most contagious the day or two before they start feeling sick.

"Viral load actually increases a couple of days before symptoms show up," says Smita Gopinath, an immunologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. That's why so many superspreading events during this pandemic are taking place in bars, nightclubs, restaurants and factories. The virus is spreading from one person's respiratory tract to another's — even though the person who's spreading it may feel totally fine.

But just because you're infected doesn't mean you would definitely trigger a superspreading event. Some people may naturally spread the virus more effectively than others, says Seema Lakdawala, a flu researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. It may come down to differences in biology, such as how much virus a person sheds in sighs and coughs and sneezes — or even how the virus comes out from the respiratory tract.

"It could be that people who have really sticky mucus are more likely to be superspreaders," she posits, based on flu studies that have shown that viruses can live longer in some people's mucus versus others.

To learn more about this phenomenon of superspreading, scientists are working to untangle which details of person, place and time matter most. But even at this relatively early stage in the pandemic, it is clear that the novel coronavirus is suited for superspreading, from its ability to survive in the air to its spreadability even when a person is not yet symptomatic. That's "bad news," says Leung, and means that containing the coronavirus requires more intensive interventions than past disease outbreaks like SARS.

So when a person with a high viral load walks into a crowded bar — one with poor ventilation and where nobody is wearing masks or social distancing — that's a superspreading cocktail.

Dr. Anthony Fauci Appears in BrainPOP News Episode to Help Kids Understand Their Role in Slowing the Spread of COVID-19 [PRNewswire, 25 Aug 2020]

NEW YORK, Aug. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- BrainPOP, the online educational solution that makes rigorous learning experiences accessible and engaging for all students, today released the latest episode of BrainPOP News, featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In the episode, Dr. Fauci joins BrainPOP's Tim and Nat to explain vaccines, the role kids can play in slowing the spread of COVID-19, and what gives him hope. BrainPOP News, which launched in April 2020, breaks down current events in kid-friendly terms featuring characters they know and love. Recent episodes have covered timely topics such as "Flattening the Curve" and "Black Lives Matter Protests."

"Dr. Fauci is the ultimate physician educator. His clarity has been a beacon of light during this challenging and uncertain time, and his voice should be heard by all kids to help them understand the power they have to help shorten the length of the pandemic," said Avraham Kadar, M.D., founder and executive chairman of BrainPOP. Dr. Kadar is a National Institutes of Health-trained immunologist and pediatric AIDS specialist who worked under Dr. Fauci during the early years of that epidemic. "BrainPOP has always focused on teachable moments, and we encourage kids to think critically, like scientists. I am grateful to Dr. Fauci, the original explainer, for sharing his wisdom with us, and for his continued pursuit of knowledge and truth through science."

Since its founding in 1999 by Dr. Kadar, BrainPOP has been continuously innovating to prepare students to become the leaders of tomorrow. Over the last 20 years, BrainPOP has reached more than 300 million learners worldwide. From the beginning, the BrainPOP approach engaged kids' curiosity through short animated movies that make complicated ideas simple and clear, helping them experience the sudden burst of understanding that Dr. Kadar called a "brain pop." Today, schools and districts nationwide utilize BrainPOP to raise academic achievement and strengthen students' critical, computational, and creative thinking skills.

Dr. Fauci praises 'truly decent' and 'very smart' Mike Pence [New York Post, 25 Aug 2020]

By Emily Jacobs

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, views Vice President Mike Pence as “truly decent” and “very smart,” he said in a recent interview.

Speaking by email to the Washington Post in an interview published Monday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director spoke glowingly of his relationship with Pence, who chairs the coronavirus task force.

The vice president, Fauci said, is “a truly decent person, and very smart, who is trying to do his best in a very difficult and fluid situation.”

The NIAID director went on to describe Pence as “an optimist” and a “glass half full type of person” who always presents the “optimistic” side of issues to President Trump.

Despite that optimism, Fauci said, Pence never kept him from sharing the “darker side” of a problem with the commander-in-chief.

Fauci, who has served as NIAID director since 1984, self-deprecatingly told the newspaper, “I am sometimes referred to as ‘the skunk at the picnic.’

“But Pence never directly asks me, the skunk, to be quiet or leave,” he added.

“Some may say that Pence and his team are ‘too ideological’ but they are after all political people. This is not unexpected.”

As a member of the White House coronavirus task force, Fauci has maintained that he has a generally positive working relationship with Trump and others on the team.

When Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, wrote a blistering op-ed about Fauci last month over his handling of the virus, the White House denied any involvement, telling The Post at the time, “Navarro went rogue and the White House does not stand by these unauthorized opinions.”

Fauci floats major risk of rushing COVID-19 vaccine

The day the op-ed was published, the commander-in-chief was asked by reporters in the Oval Office about how he worked with the US’ top infectious disease expert.

“I get along very well with Dr. Fauci. I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci,” he said.
Pence shared similar feelings while speaking to reporters on a campaign press call that day.

“Dr. Tony Fauci is a valued member of the White House coronavirus task force. We just completed our latest meeting today, and we couldn’t be more grateful for his steady counsel as we continue to meet this moment with a whole-of-government approach, a whole-of-America approach,” he said.

‘Corona Bubble’: Photographer George Kamper unveils timely new work [WSVN 7News | Miami News, Weather, Sports | Fort Lauderdale, 24 Aug 2020]

With social distancing the new normal, people are finding new ways to be creative. Turns out a little alone time can cause inspiration to bubble up. Deco’s Alex Miranda caught up with a real-life bubble boy.

Feel like you’re living in a bubble?

Photographer George Kamper knows the feeling. His pandemic-inspired work is blowing up.
George Kamper: “Everything I saw on the news was all about ‘the bubble’: everybody was getting into a bubble or out of a bubble. We had a bubble in the closet that I had originaly purchased for a fashion shoot, and we decided, ‘Well, let’s trot it out and see what we can make with it.'”

The result? “The Corona Bubble,” a series of photos that became a quarantine dream.

George Kamper: “Our first picture was very simple, just me reaching for a beer on our dock. It turned out fun. People liked it, so I was like, ‘OK, let’s keep going.'”

George shoots the photos by remote control. Wife Sherryl helps with the art direction … and a leaf blower.

Sherryl Kamper: “Immediately I have to zip down the zipper and leave about this much open for the leaf blower and start blowing air into it right away, because otherwise…”

George Kamper: “I’ll die.”

Sherryl Kamper: “He’ll die.”

Some photos have a serious tone.

Sherryl Kamper: “I was standing next to him with my pitchfork and my hose, and he had a bouquet of sunflowers inside there with a very somber face.”

Others are just fun.

Sherryl Kamper: “I was scrubbing, and George was scrubbing from inside, and then he kind of dropped his drawers a little bit, which attracted a lot of people. They thought that was hilarious.”

George Kamper: “One of my faves that took us to another level was the Banksy bubble.”

Even the police were interested.

George Kamper: “They saw all the smoke and thought we were looting. When we told them what we were doing, they were like, ‘Oh, that’s great. Don’t worry about it.'”

While they’re having a ball with the project, living in the bubble hit close to home.

George Kamper: “As much as we are sort of making fun of this, it’s not a joke. We didn’t let our kids near us for two months.”

And “Bubble Boy” has more work on the way.

Sherryl Kamper: “His nickname has become ‘Bubble Boy.'”

George Kamper: “Clients call me up and say, ‘Hey, Bubble Boy. What’s going on?'”

Fauci says Pence listens to him even though he's 'the skunk at the picnic' [The Hill, 24 Aug 2020]

BY JOHN BOWDEN

Vice President Pence was praised by Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, for his willingness to listen to the latter's dire warnings about the scope of the U.S.'s COVID-19 outbreak in an interview published Monday.

Answering emailed questions from The Washington Post, Fauci told the newspaper that Pence was doing his best to serve in his new role as head of the White House's coronavirus task force, on which Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, is a member.

“I am sometimes referred to as ‘the skunk at the picnic’ but Pence never directly asks me, the skunk, to be quiet or leave,” said Fauci in response to the questions, adding that Pence was "a truly decent person, and very smart, who is trying to do his best in a very difficult and fluid situation."

“Some may say that Pence and his team are ‘too ideological’ but they are after all political people. This is not unexpected," Fauci added, according to the Post.

Fauci's praise for Pence comes amid criticism aimed at the Trump administration, particularly President Trump, over the U.S.'s response to the coronavirus outbreak and the effectiveness of the U.S.'s response so far. The U.S. has reported more total confirmed cases than any country, and ranks fourth behind several South American countries in terms of total deaths per 100,000 citizens.

Trump himself has been accused by Democrats and others of downplaying the number of deaths across the country as a result of the virus and has made numerous inaccurate claims about it, including the assertion that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases end up being "harmless."

There have now been more than 5.6 million confirmed cases of the virus within the U.S.'s borders, and 176,223 deaths from the disease have been reported.

Doctors warn of COVID-19 amid flu season in the fall [KOMO News, 24 Aug 2020]

by Nick Popham

It's a sobering reminder that this virus continues to spread.

As summer comes to a close and we approach the fall it's an even greater reminder to stay vigilant in order to protect loved ones and our hospitals.

"We are begging, I mean I am begging everybody to be careful and do your part," said Dr. Ali Mokdad with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
COVID-19 has claimed the lives of over 170,000 Americans and when fall rolls in, the big concern is the flu.

"When we had the surge in April, we didn't have the flu season. When we have the surge in November and December it will be at the same time as the flu season," Mokdad said.

And that's concerning because hospitals could see an influx of flu and COVID-19 patients at the same time if we don't take precautions seriously.

In King County, hospitalizations are decreasing and are currently pretty low.

But Mokdad says that won't last long.

"When you look at our state, hospitalizations will increase in the fall," Mokdad said.

Because even if it seems that COVID cases have gone down and the, so-called, “first wave” is gone but doctors say that isn't the case.

However, according to IHME's latest projections, if current mandates ease we could see as many as 420,000 deaths.

If everyone wore a mask that could be down to 240,000.

According to the institute, only 53 percent of Americans are wearing masks.

"We have to be very careful and not overwhelm our hospitals," Mokdad said.

The hope is masks will continue to be worn and people will stay socially distant so our hospitals are not full of COVID-19 and flu patients.

"We cannot allow this to happen in this country," Mokdad said.

Here in Washington the institute projects that over 5,000 people will die from COVID-19 by December 1.

If everyone wears a mask, or at least 95 percent of us, that number could drop to around 3,100.

Sweden developed herd immunity after refusing to lock down, some health experts claim, but others point to its high fatality rate [MarketWatch, 24 Aug 2020]

By Rupert Steiner

Leading Swedish health experts claim the country has a falling coronavirus infection rate because it was one of the few that didn’t go into lockdown and has rejected the need for masks.

Arne Elofsson, a professor in biometrics at Stockholm University, thinks the population has developed a form of immunity: “Strict rules do not work as people seem to break them. Sweden is doing fine.”

Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist involved in managing Sweden’s pandemic response (the Financial Times called him its architect), thinks masks give a false sense of security: “The belief that masks can solve our problem is very dangerous.”

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven thinks voluntary social-distancing rules and not closing schools but banning gatherings of more than 50 people has been the right approach: “Now there are quite a few people who think we were right,” he told a newspaper. “The strategy that we adopted, I believe is right — to protect individuals, limit the spread of the infection.”

Data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control show Sweden has a fortnightly infection rate of 37 cases per 100,000 people. This is much lower than France, with 60 cases per 100,000 and Spain at 152.7 cases per 100,000.

However, Sweden has an overall COVID-related death rate of 57.05 per 100,000, which is the ninth highest in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University. What’s more, Sweden, which has a population of just over 10 million, has had a fatality rate of 6.8%; that’s lower than those of Belgium, the U.K., Italy and Spain, but higher than the fatality rates of Brazil, the U.S., Mexico, France and Ireland.

The U.K. considered a herd-immunity approach in the early stages of the pandemic but ultimately decided against it and opted for a lockdown instead.
Supporters of Sweden’s strategy say it’s better to allow immunity to build up among members of the population who are least at risk of dying from COVID-19, thereby reducing the rate of transmission and protecting those who are most at risk of dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

That’s the theory. It would, if carried out perfectly, help countries manage the spread of the virus without overwhelming hospitals with sick people, while also mitigating the full economic impact of closing down public areas, canceling major events and introducing travel bans.
In its effort to reach herd immunity while minimizing economic damage, Sweden, critics say, failed to protect its elderly population, who make up the majority of those who died from COVID-19 there. Another chink in its herd-immunity approach: Sweden only banned care-home visits at the end of March.

“We failed to protect our elderly,” Lena Hallengren, Sweden’s health and social-affairs minister, told Swedish Television earlier this summer. “That’s really serious, and a failure for society as a whole. We have to learn from this; we’re not done with this pandemic yet.”
Sweden reported its highest death tally in 150 years in the first half of this year, the country’s official statistics office said this month.

Experts around the world cannot agree on what the right approach is to opening up schools, scaling back lockdowns or even the wearing of masks. Sweden reported that 86,068 people have contracted the coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University, Sweden’s approach has also come at a cost, having seen 5,810 deaths from COVID-19, a much higher toll than its neighbors’.

Ultimately, enough people would need to be immune to shield the most vulnerable to take a herd-immunity approach.

“With influenza, you need herd immunity of 60% to 70%. With measles, you need about 95%. With COVID-19, it’s somewhere in the middle,” Gregory Poland, who studies the immunogenetics of vaccine response in adults and children at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and expert with the Infectious Diseases Society of America, previously told MarketWatch.

A Word from the Experts:University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm: Americans will be living with the coronavirus for decades

In an interview with the Observer newspaper in London this month, Tegnell, the Swedish epidemiologist, claimed that up to 30% of the country’s population could be immune to COVID-19. “It’s very difficult to draw a good sample from the population, because, obviously, the level of immunity differs enormously between different age groups between different parts of Stockholm and so on, and that’s why when we measure one group we get 4% to 5%, and when we measure another group they’re up to 25%,” he said.

In the absence of a vaccine, Mayo’s Poland said several conditions are necessary for herd immunity to work: a very high level of population immunity, for that immunity to be durable, and for the virus to not mutate.

Critics say even Tegnell’s most optimistic forecasts for Sweden are still a long way from the 60% to 70% goal required for herd immunity to have a chance at working, and save the lives of the elderly and those with underlying conditions — those most vulnerable members of the population.

Asia Today: South Korea sees 11th day of 3-digit increases [WHEC, 24 Aug 2020]

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea counted its 11th straight day of triple-digit daily jumps in coronavirus cases Monday and health officials pleaded for people to follow guidelines or risk further restrictions or strains on hospitals.

Most of the 266 new cases reported by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in the Seoul metropolitan area, home to half of the country's 51 million people, but new infections were also reported in other major cities, including Busan, Daejeon and Sejong.

KCDC director Jeong Eun-kyeong said it's likely the country will continue to report huge infection numbers in coming days as health workers scramble to trace and test contacts of virus carriers.

She pleaded people to stay home unless for essential reasons, wear masks if they do, and maintain distance between other individuals so that "students could continue to learn, small merchants could continue to do business and to prevent the medical system from collapsing."

The 397 new cases reported on Sunday was South Korea's highest single-day total since March 7, during an outbreak that was largely limited to its southeastern region and was stabilized by April. Officials consider the current outbreak South Korea's biggest crisis since the emergence of COVID-19, given the population density of the capital region and the spread of the virus among more varied sources.

The country since Sunday has banned larger gatherings, shut down nightspots and churches and removed fans from professional sports nationwide.

Seoul, Sejong and the island province of Jeju began requiring people to wear masks in public Monday but enforcement was unclear. Seoul's existing mandate for wearing masks on mass transport has been dependent on bus drivers and subway station workers.

The country is also working to prevent hospital systems in the capital area from being overwhelmed, such as adding more temporary shelters to treat mild cases while saving hospital beds for patients who are more seriously ill. The six current shelters - including one built at a Seoul training center for Olympic athletes - could accommodate some 1,400 people, but officials are hoping to increase the capacity to 4,000, senior Health Ministry official Yoon Taeho said.

Jeong and other officials said the country could be forced to elevate social distancing restrictions if the virus doesn't slow after this week. That could possibly mean banning of gatherings of more than 10 people, shutting schools, halting professional sports and recommending private companies' employees work from home, measures that would batter an already weak economy.

Churches had been a major source of infections before authorities shut them down. As of Monday afternoon, 875 infections were linked to a northern Seoul church whose pastor led a march of thousands of anti-government protesters earlier this month.

Jeong said 176 infections have been linked to the protests so far, including seven among police officers who were deployed to watch demonstrators. The pastor, who shared a microphone with other activists on stage during the rally, has been hospitalized a week with COVID-19.

In other developments around the Asia-Pacific region:
- The lockdown of New Zealand's largest city has been extended by four days as authorities try to stamp out a coronavirus outbreak. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the two-week lockdown of Auckland, which was due to end Wednesday, will continue through Sunday. She said authorities need to be sure they have found the perimeter of the outbreak and that few cases occur outside of those detected by contact tracing. Masks will be mandated on public transit beginning next week. Ardern said the restrictions in place for the rest of the country would continue for now. New Zealand went 102 days without any community transmission of the virus before the Auckland cluster surfaced this month. Health authorities on Monday reported nine new virus cases.
- India registered 61,408 additional cases Monday, driving the country's virus tally past 3.1 million. The Health Ministry also reported 836 deaths in the past 24 hours, taking total fatalities up to 57,542. India has been recording at least 60,000 new infections per day from the last two weeks. Western Maharashtra state and three southern states of Tamil Nadu,
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are the worst-hit regions. The country has largely reopened its economy, though with restrictions mainly in place for infection hot spots.
- China has gone eight days without reporting a new local case of COVID-19, with the Beijing International Film Festival among public events that are returning. The festival being held this week was postponed from April and is being held without a red carpet for the first time. Many events are being held online, including 250 of the planned 300 screenings. Across the country, theaters have reopened after being closed for months and a Shanghai film festival that ended Aug. 2 drew almost 150,000 viewers to the city's cinemas. China's 16 new virus cases reported Monday were all in overseas travelers. The semiautonomous southern Chinese city of Hong Kong, where cases have spiked recently, added 25 new cases and one death.
- Australia's hard-hit Victoria state on Monday recorded its lowest tally of new coronavirus cases in eight weeks with the state capital Melbourne half way through a six-week lockdown. Victoria reported 116 new cases and 15 deaths. That is the lowest daily tally of new cases since 87 were reported on July 5. Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said although daily case numbers are "jumping around" he expected they were on a downward trajectory. Health authorities have warned that the daily tally would need to fall to single digits or low double digits before the Melbourne lockdown is relaxed.

South Korea’s Latest Virus Wave May Peak in August: JPMorgan [Bloomberg, 24 Aug 2020]

By Kyungji Cho

South Korea’s latest wave of coronavirus cases might infect about 7,000 people through early November with net infections to peak by the end of August, according to a report from JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The outbreak will be smaller in scale than seen previously as testing and tracing have been strengthened with stricter social distancing rules in place, insurance analysts led by MW Kim wrote in the note dated Aug. 20. JPMorgan’s previous forecast in February that Korea’s virus cases in March may peak at 10,000 in its first wave proved to be about accurate: total infections were at 9,786 at the end of March and new cases fell after that.

The Korean government is studying whether it needs to raise social-distancing restrictions to the highest level as officials warn the country is at the risk of a “massive nationwide outbreak.”
The country reported 2,150 new infections in the past week, compared with only about 200 new weekly cases earlier this month. South Korea has had more than 17,000 cases since the pandemic started.

The recent infection resurgence is largely due to large-scale economic reopening and relaxed social-distancing, the report said.

South Korea faces nationwide outbreak, Bali remains shut to tourists; US infections decline [Atlantic Council, 24 Aug 2020]

CORONAVIRUS ALERT 08/24/2020

The Atlantic Council’s Coronavirus Alert is a regular summary of policy, economic, and business events around the emergency. To stay updated, sign up to the Coronavirus Alert here.

In top stories today:
• South Korea faces a nationwide outbreak, while New Zealand extended a lockdown in Auckland, and Bali said it will remain closed to tourists. Infections fell in the United States, while France said it will soon reciprocate on a UK requirement that returning travelers quarantine for fourteen days.
• The statistics say… there are now more than 23.4 million cases worldwide in 188 countries and territories; almost 810,000 people have died.
• South Korea, once held up as a model for its response to the pandemic, is on the verge of a nationwide outbreak, as infections centered around a Presbyterian church have now spread to all of the country’s seventeen provinces for the first time, the BBC reported. While South Korea’s contact tracers can track about one thousand potentially infected patients an hour, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that an estimated 20 percent of cases are of unknown origin, the BBC added.
• QUOTE: “If we fail to flatten the curve this week we believe we will be faced with a very important crisis, that the virus will spread to the entire nation,” South Korean health ministry official Yoon Tae-ho told a briefing, Reuters reported.
• US President Donald J. Trump announced emergency approval of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 patients on August 23, The Associated Press reported. While he called it a “breakthrough,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the treatment, which uses blood plasma taken from those who have recovered from the disease, needs further study to prove its effectiveness, the news agency added.
• QUOTE: “COVID-19 convalescent plasma should not be considered a new standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19,” Denise Hinton, chief scientist for the FDA, said in a letter describing the emergency authorization, The Associated Press reported. “Additional data will be forthcoming from other analyses and ongoing, well-controlled clinical trials in the coming months.”
• New infections in the United States reached their lowest level in more than two months after a ninth day in a row of daily cases below 50,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. All states that are driving the decrease—Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana among them—have at least some mask mandates in place or have again closed bars, theaters, and gyms to contain infections,
The New York Times reported.
• The statistics say… August 23 saw 34,567 new cases, down from 44,572 the previous day and the lowest since June 22, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• The Trump administration may fast-track a UK coronavirus vaccine for use in the United States before the election in November, the Financial Times reported, citing three unidentified people familiar with the plan. One possibility is that the FDA award “emergency use authorization” in October to the vaccine developed in partnership between AstraZeneca and Oxford University if it proves to be effective, the newspaper said.
• EVENT: Public and private sector leaders join the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council to discuss what steps they have taken to secure the information space around the 2020 presidential election on Tuesday, August 26, at 1:00 p.m. EDT. Details are here.
• France will in the coming days reciprocate on the United Kingdom’s fourteen-day quarantine restriction on returning travelers, French Junior European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune told French TV France 2 on August 24, Reuters reported. UK officials have required those returning from France to self-isolate for fourteen days when they get home because of high infection rates in France, the newswire added.
• Meanwhile Hong Kong had its first single-digit daily increase in new cases since the most recent wave of infections started in early July, Bloomberg reported. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the country’s largest city, Auckland, will remain in lockdown four days longer than planned, the newswire added. After allowing public gatherings of up to five hundred people in August, Finland said on August 24 that the limit will drop to fifty in September because of a recent increase in infections, Reuters said.

DIVIDENDS DROP
• More than $100 billion was wiped off the value of dividends worldwide in the second quarter as companies ditched payouts to investors in response to the pandemic, the Financial Times reported. The decline of about a fifth was the steepest drop in a decade, the newspaper said, citing Janus Henderson, the fund manager that tracks dividends worldwide.
• “Thousands allowed to bypass environmental rules in pandemic” reads an Associated Press headline. That includes thousands of oil and gas installations, citing lockdowns and social distancing restrictions, and government facilities that secured permission to stop monitoring dangerous emissions, or otherwise bypass rules on health and the environment, the news agency added.
• A tsunami: that’s how The New York Times described a wave of job losses that, it said, will soon be hitting Europe as government-backed furlough programs, designed to mitigate the economic impact of coronavirus, come to an end in the region. As many as 59 million jobs are at risk, ranging from cuts in hours or pay, temporary furloughs, or permanent layoffs, especially in transportation and retail, the Times cited an April study by McKinsey & Co. as saying.
• The United Kingdom seems set to post a record-breaking economic recovery in the third quarter, fueled by consumer spending after lockdowns were eased and a return to schools, the Financial Times reported. Gross domestic product may increase by 14.3 percent, according to a new average of forecasts by City of London economists, the newspaper said. But beyond September, the picture is less clear because of factors including job cuts, social distancing measures, and a possible second wave of infections, the Financial Times added.
• India’s government issued guidelines allowing film and television shooting to restart nationwide in an industry that employs millions, The Wall Street Journal reported. While the industry has been mostly shuttered since India’s lockdown started on March 25, a few states including Maharashtra, home to Bollywood, have allowed some filming since June, the Journal added.

EQUITABLE ACCESS
• While 172 countries are engaging with a plan called COVAX, led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and designed to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, extra funding is needed urgently and nations now need to make binding commitments, the WHO said on August 24, Reuters reported.
• It’s a dubious honor, according to The Washington Post: China’s claim to be the first country to roll out an experimental coronavirus vaccine for use on the public. Officials in Beijing said on August 22 that they started giving the shot to some medical workers and staff at state-owned companies in late July under “urgent use” protocols, which would put China’s civilian rollout three weeks earlier than Russia’s, the Post added. Papua New Guinea said last week it turned away a group of Chinese miners who had received an experimental vaccine against coronavirus, the newspaper reported.
• Four of the world’s seven coronavirus vaccines that are in the third phase of trials are from China, Reuters reported in a fact box article that summarizes the nation’s efforts to develop a vaccine. Meanwhile, Italy started human trials of a potential vaccine on August 24, the newswire said in a separate article. Lazzaro Spallanzani Institute in Rome, a hospital that specializes in infectious diseases, will carry out trials on ninety volunteers in coming weeks, with the hope a vaccine may be available by the spring of 2021, Reuters reported.
• The University of Louisville requires students taking in-person classes to test for coronavirus between August 24 and September 4, whether they are or plan to be occasionally on campus, The Associated Press reported. The testing requirement applies to faculty and staff too as the university wants to avoid an online-only semester this fall, the news service added.

PACIFIC NATIONS
• Infections have hit almost every country in the world, but not ten nations in the South Pacific, from Palau to the Marshall Islands 2,500 miles east, the BBC reported. But in Palau, for example, the only guests in hotels are returning residents in quarantine, restaurants are empty and souvenir shops closed, the broadcaster said. While the Marshall Islands are much less dependent on tourism, coronavirus restrictions have hit the fishing industry there, the BBC reported.
• The Indonesian island of Bali postponed a plan to reopen to tourism on September 11, citing an increase in infections in the Southeast Asian country, Reuters reported. And in Cancun on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, hotel occupancy is below 30 percent, with shopping malls empty,
The Wall Street Journal said. The global tourism industry is expected to shed more than 100 million jobs because of the pandemic, the World Travel & Tourism Council has said, the Journal added. Meanwhile, more tourists visited Spain in July, but visitor numbers are still one-sixth of last year’s levels. Reuters said separately.
• QUOTE: “There are going to be opportunities to sell and the hotel chains are going to be very attentive to that,” said Javier Jimenez, head of Spain’s Association of Hotel Directors in the Costa Blanca region, which includes the resort towns of Benidorm, Denia, and Torrevieja, Bloomberg reported.
• Excess deaths in the Brazilian Amazon city of Manaus fell from around 120 per day in May to almost zero in August, with hospitalizations down too, sparking questions about immunity to coronavirus, The Washington Post said. Deaths and cases started to let up without the interventions seen elsewhere, stunning front-line doctors, the Post added. “Death and denial in Brazil’s Amazon capital” reads the title to an Associated Press photo story produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

RESOURCES:
• Johns Hopkins University interactive web-based dashboard to visualize and track reported cases in real-time.
• CDC provides frequent updates and background information on coronavirus and interim guidance on company policies.
• The World Health Organization daily situation reports.

South Korea Stops In-Person Instruction At 2,000 Schools Amid Surge in Coronavirus Cases [U.S. News & World Report, 24 Aug 2020]

By Alexa Lardieri

More than 280 students have tested positive for COVID-19 in schools across South Korea.

NEARLY 2,000 SCHOOLS IN South Korea have stopped in-person instruction due to the latest surge of coronavirus cases.

A statement from the Ministry of Education said the announcement affects its 1,845 schools across the country and it is the first time since May that more than 1,000 schools will be closed.

More than 280 students and 79 faculty members have tested positive for COVID-19 in schools across South Korea since the country began a phased reopening of in-person classes.

Health officials report more than 17,665 cases of COVID-19 in South Korea, and more than 300 people have died. Across the globe, Johns Hopkins University reports more than 23,45 million cases and 809,340 deaths.

Local artists talk about their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic [WHSV, 24 Aug 2020]

By Stephanie Penn

WAYNESBORO, Va. (WHSV) - Rose Guterbock is an oil-painter and self-taught silversmith in Waynesboro. Guterbock said she is creating a lot of art during the pandemic. Some of those creations are meant to show joy, but others show the pain and grief of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I want them to be able to look at them and remember good things and remember positive things, but at the end of the day if it was painted in 2020 that’s when it was painted,” Guterbock said. She has moved from making big portraits to smaller ones during the pandemic.

Guterbock said she is luckily still working and has created an art podcast with her husband.
They are currently working on an art and medicine piece.

Another painter from Waynesboro, Karen Rosasco, said she is truly enjoying all of the free time she’s been given while isolating in her house.

“No interruptions, hardly any phone calls, no appointments to keep or anything like that. It is a dream come true. I’ve never in my life been able to spend six hours a day painting,” Rosasco said.

With that time, she has been able to complete over forty paintings in just five months.

Rosasco said sales have been affected by gallery closings or reduced hours, but she is looking forward to three solo shows next year.