Top COVID-19 stories for Thursday June 18, 2020
Don't count on "herd immunity"; why scientists are optimistic about vaccine development; the numbers tell the stories.
Seafood concerns: Chinese scientists say they’ve found widespread contamination of a Beijing seafood market with traces of COVID-19. Although this raises concerns that the cluster of cases traced to that large market may have spread via food, COVID-19 is generally not thought to be transmitted by ingestion of contaminated food. One possibility is that the virus is on many surfaces or even in or on pieces of fish or other products and gets into a victim’s body after they handle the food.
The numbers tell the story: For the second time this week, Florida’s “second wave” keeps getting bigger, with more than 3,000 new cases reported Thursday. In addition to Florida, nine other states - Alabama, Arizona, California, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas -- “are seeing record-high seven-day averages of new coronavirus cases per day,” according to a CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
Two of the top scientists at the World Health Organization say they are optimistic about rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine because the four COVID-19 experimental vaccines proceeding to human trials and many others still in laboratories are all based on entirely new technology. All prior vaccines have been built on older immunological approaches. Another example of technology’s impact is that the genomic sequence of COVID-19 was figured out within just a few weeks after the virus’ discovery by Chinese scientists. This enabled countries around the world to develop and deploy precise tests to detect infection faster than ever before. However, even if a vaccine becomes available next year as hoped, steps to prevent new cases of COVID-19 will be needed at least for another 2 or 3 years, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan told Sree Sreenivasan on his daily COVID-19 update.
Data on racial differences among COVID-19 cases: A new dashboard by The Covid Tracking Project gathers and reports available data on COVID-19 by race. Only North Dakota isn’t publishing racial data. Meantime, a report by the Brookings Institution says the racial and ethnic gap for COVID-19 in the USA is much larger than the numbers reflect, especially when looking at the racial and ethnic data along with patient’s age.
In case you are curious: President Trump plans a huge indoor campaign rally Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Tulsa Health Department reports a steadily increasing rate of new COVID-19 infections since last month. See chart below. The 96 cases reported on Monday were the highest number of new cases on a single day to-date.
