CDC says COVID19 can spread via "multiple brief" exposures to infected people
New report from a Vermont prison prompts update to guideline that defined "close contact" as 15 consecutive minutes of exposure to an infected individual.
Big change in what to consider “close contact” risk: The CDC now says that a close-contact COVID risk applies to “someone who spent a cumulative 15 minutes or more within six feet of someone who was infectious over 24 hours, even if the time isn’t consecutive,” according to STATNews. The change was spurred in part by a case report from Vermont, where a corrections officer became infected with COVID-19 after multiple but brief encounters with infected individuals.
Hospitalizations are up in more than 2/3rds of states, deaths are up, but the death rate is down across-the-board: Because the number of Americans infected with COVID-19 is so large, the number of deaths continues to climb — and will exceed 300,000 deaths by the end of the year, according to the University of Washington IHME model. For an impressive and informative visualization of the hospitalization rate trends, check out what the Boston Globe published today.
Kentucky, Idaho and North Dakota are among the states where hospital beds are filling and officials are struggling to keep up with the rapid surge of new COVID cases. In North Dakota, the governor Tuesday reassigned National Guard troops from contact tracing to helping get test results out faster.
Snapshot of COVID19 in the USA: Indiana’s governor lifted most restrictions in mid-September, although he continued a requirement for people to wear masks. While the status of restrictions varies widely from state to state, the trend lines are increasingly consistent, especially in the Midwest and Northern Plains. Since mid-September, all of Indiana’s COVID metrics are trending upward, including hospitalizations, as this clip from the state health department website shows:
