Daily Archives: May 3, 2020

Janesvilles two hospitals are working to secure equipment and supplies needed to process COVID-19 tests on site, which would get results to patients sooner.

Both hospitals are unsure how soon they might get the equipment because of frequent changes in demand and in the supply chain for medical equipment.

Meanwhile, Beloit Health System has been processing tests at its own facility for about a week, the Beloit Daily News reported.

Beloit Health System can process about 25 tests per day with results sometimes coming back in as little as 45 minutes.

The Gazette was unable to reach representatives from Beloit Health System for further comment by press time.

Edgerton Hospital and Health Services has the capability to test on site but needs more of a chemical reagent needed to process samples, trauma manager Alison Hanaman said.

People who are tested have to be quarantined until they get results. Getting those results faster means less time in quarantine and more peace of mind for those who test negative, Mercyhealth Medical Director Mark Goelzer said.

Those who test positive have to be isolated until a public health nurse determines they have recovered.

Officials and epidemiologists nationwide have said more testing is a key step toward a return to normalcy.

Jeff Shadick, regional vice president of laboratory services for SSM Health, said more testing can help identify hot spots, such as the ones identified in meatpacking plants in the Green Bay area.

More widespread testing also helps public health workers determine how and where the disease has spread through contact tracing, he said.

State officials last week told providers to begin testing people with mild COVID-19 symptoms, leading to an uptick in the number of people tested.

In Rock County, 2,317 people have received test results since March 14. Of those, 615 have gotten results since Monday, or 27% of the total.

Mercyhealth, SSM Health and Edgerton Hospital officials said they have been able to conduct more testing but worry about the availability of testing supplies.

In the beginning, hospitals dealt with a reagent shortfall. Then the number of other supplies, primarily nasal swabs, reached critically low levels, Shadick said.

The good news is that the supply of testing materials is stabilizing as manufacturers get approval from the federal government for emergency production, Shadick said.

But hospitals, state organizations and the federal government are competing for the gear, making it difficult to get everyone what they need, Mercyhealths Goelzer said.

As of Friday, 222 Rock County residents have tested positive for COVID-19. Six people have died.

Mercyhealth

Mercyhealth is sending its tests to commercial labs and receiving results in a day or two, Goelzer said.

The system recently opened a second drive-thru site for testing, Goelzer said. Patients must be referred by a doctor before they can go to either drive-thru location.

Mercyhealth has the equipment needed to do in-house testing but is waiting to secure the appropriate supplies, Goelzer said. How soon the supplies come depends on the systems vendors, he said.

Mercyhealth also is working on attaining antibody tests to determine whether somebody might have already been infected, Goelzer said. Such testing is still in early stages of development and has varying levels of accuracy, he added.

Supply shortages prevent Mercyhealth, and most other hospitals, from doing as much testing as they want to do, Goelzer said.

SSM Health

Tests from SSM Health St. Marys Hospital-Janesville are processed at an SSM Health lab in Madison. Six couriers collect tests in Janesville each day and transport them there, Shadick said.

Patients get same-day results, Shadick said. Thats a major improvement from the beginning of the pandemic when it took six to eight days to get results.

SSM Healths regional lab can test 1,800 kits per month and serves seven hospitals in Wisconsin, Shadick said.

Tests are sent to commercial labs if the regional lab reaches capacity, Shadick said.

Equipment to test on site in Janesville has been ordered but is delayed as equipment is redirected to areas of greater need, Shadick said.

Edgerton Hospital

Edgerton Hospital is sending test results to commercial labs with results coming back in less than 24 hours, Hanaman said.

Tests are available at the hospital and at the systems clinic in Milton. Patients are evaluated upon arrival and are tested if they show COVID-19 symptoms, which include cough, shortness of breath, fever, chills, headache, sore throat, muscle pain, and loss of taste or smell.

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Janesville hospitals hoping to add on-site COVID-19 test processing - Janesville Gazette

But some scientists and legal experts say the moves reflect a dangerous disregard for science in the middle of a deadly pandemic, and could be used to further weaken protections down the road.

The main type of pollution in question -- PM 2.5 -- are microscopic particles that float in the air we breathe and measure barely a fraction of the diameter of a human hair.

The current PM 2.5 standard requires air particle levels to be limited to 12 micrograms per cubic meter.

Still, the EPA decided to leave the regulations untouched.

"Based on review of the scientific literature and recommendation from our independent science advisors, we are proposing to retain existing PM standards which will ensure the continued protection of both public health and the environment," EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an April 14 statement justifying the move.

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Poor air quality has been linked to Covid-19 impacts. Trump's EPA is still limiting pollution restrictions. - CNN

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The McHenry County Health Department reported 24 additional people who tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, bringing the total to 703, with 39 deaths.

On Saturday, the IDPH reported the death of a man in his 60s in McHenry County.

As has been the case, Woodstock (60098) continues to have the highest amount of cases in the county, with 147 people who have tested positive for coronavirus, the IDPH said on its website. McHenry (60050) is the second highest, with 100. This makes Woodstock's positive test rate 31.1% and McHenry's 23.87%.

Here is the rest of the local breakdown of cases by municipality, per the IDPH: Crystal Lake (60014), 76; Harvard (60033),54; Bull Valley, Crystal Lake and Prairie Grove (60012),49 ; Algonquin (60102) 52 ; Lake in the Hills (60156), 48; Cary (60013), 43; Johnsburg and McHenry (60051),45 ; Huntley (60142),38; Spring Grove (60081),25; Marengo (60152),22 ; Wonder Lake (60097), 19 ; Fox River Grove (60021),9 ; and Richmond (60071), 6.

Kane County reported 1,886 total positive COVID-19 cases and 57 deaths, according to its health department's website, and Lake County, according to the IDPH, has 3,975 positive cases and 141 deaths to coronavirus.

Across the state, the IDPH announced 2,450 new cases of coronavirus and 105 additional deaths.

The IDPH is currently reporting a total of 58,505 cases, including 2,559 deaths, in 97 counties in the state.

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IDPH reports one McHenry County COVID-19 death Saturday, bringing total to 39 - Northwest Herald

Apple and Google have released the first version of their exposure notification API, which they previously called the contact tracing API. This is a developer-focused release, and is a seed of the API in development, with the primary intent of collecting feedback from developers who will be using the API to create new contact tracing and notification apps on behalf of public health agencies.

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook told EU Commissioner Thierry Breton that the API would be arriving shortly, and this version is indeed now available albeit to a specific and limited group that includes select developers working on behalf of public health authorities globally, according to the companies. This is a test release thats intended to provide the opportunity for development and feedback in advance of the APIs public release in mid-May, at which time developers will be able to use the software feature on devices with publicly available apps released through the iOS and Google software stores, respectively.

Apple and Google say they will be providing this coming Friday additional details about the API and its release, including sample code to show how it operates in practice. Both are intent on providing updates to the documentation as they become available, and in adding access to new developers throughout testing, though this will be gated because the companies are limiting access to this API to authorized public health authorities only.

Already, Apple and Google have made available on their respective developer websites documents that describe the specification in detail, and provided an update with improvements to the techs functioning, including in terms of its protection of user privacy, and the ease with which developers can deploy it within their apps, as discussed during a press call last week.

This update includes an added ability for health authorities to define and calculate an exposure risk level for individuals based on their own criteria, as that varies organization to organization. This will be variable based on approximate distance of an individual to a confirmed exposed COVID-19 patient, as well as the duration of that exposure. Developers can customize notification messaging based on their defined exposure levels to ensure alerts correspond correctly to calculated risk.

The beta update also includes a new setting for users that allows them to toggle COVID-19 exposure notification access for individual apps, as pictured in the screenshot below.

Apple and Google first announced the combined API and eventual system-level contact tracing feature on April 10, and intend to release the first version of the API publicly in mid-May, with the system-level integration to follow in the coming months. The tech is designed to be privacy-preserving, ensuring that contact IDs are rotating and randomized, and never tied to an individuals specific identifying information.

Originally posted here:

Apple and Google release first seed of COVID-19 exposure notification API for contact tracing app developers - TechCrunch

Why are the origins of the pandemic so controversial?

How Covid-19 began has become increasingly contentious, with the US and other allies suggesting China has not been transparent about the origins of the outbreak.

Donald Trump, the US president, has given credence to the idea that intelligence exists suggesting the virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, although the US intelligence community has pointedly declined to back this up. The scientific community says there is no current evidence for this claim.

This follows reports that the White House had been pressuring US intelligence community on the claim, recalling the Bush administrations pressure to stove pipe the intelligence before the war in Iraq.

A specific issue is that the official origin story doesnt add up in terms of the initial epidemiology of the outbreak, not least the incidence of early cases with no apparent connection to the Wuhan seafood market, where Beijing says the outbreak began. If these people were not infected at the market, or via contacts who were infected at the market, critics ask, how do you explain these cases?

Two laboratories in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses have come under the spotlight. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is a biosecurity level 4 facility the highest for biocontainment and the level 2 Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, which is located not far from the fish market, had collected bat coronavirus specimens.

Several theories have been promoted. The first, and wildest, is that scientists at WIV were engaged in experiments with bat coronavirus, involving so-called gene splicing, and the virus then escaped and infected humans. A second version is that sloppy biosecurity among lab staff and in procedures, perhaps in the collection or disposal of animal specimens, released a wild virus.

The scientific consensus rejecting the virus being engineered is almost unanimous. In a letter to Nature in March, a team in California led by microbiology professor Kristian Andersen said the genetic data irrefutably shows that [Covid-19] is not derived from any previously used virus backbone in other words spliced sections of another known virus.

Far more likely, they suggested, was that the virus emerged naturally and became stronger through natural selection. We propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of Sars-CoV-2: natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic [animal to human] transfer; and natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.

Peter Ben Embarek, an expert at the World Health Organization in animal to human transmission of diseases, and other specialists also explained to the Guardian that if there had been any manipulation of the virus you would expect to see evidence in both the gene sequences and also distortion in the data of the family tree of mutations a so-called reticulation effect.

In a statement to the Guardian, James Le Duc, the head of the Galveston National Laboratory in the US, the biggest active biocontainment facility on a US academic campus, also poured cold water on the suggestion.

There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature, given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses, he said.

The accidental release of a wild sample has been the focus of most attention, although the evidence offered is at best highly circumstantial.

The Washington Post has reported concerns in 2018 over security and management weakness from US embassy officials who visited the WIV several times, although the paper also conceded there was no conclusive proof the lab was the source of the outbreak.

Le Duc, however, paints a different picture of the WIV. I have visited and toured the new BSL4 laboratory in Wuhan, prior to it starting operations in 2017- It is of comparable quality and safety measures as any currently in operation in the US or Europe.

He also described encounters with Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist at the WIV who has led research into bat coronaviruses, and discovered the link between bats and the Sars virus that caused disease worldwide in 2003, describing her as fully engaged, very open and transparent about her work, and eager to collaborate.

Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist who worked with Shi as part of a US-funded viral research programme, echoed Le Ducs assessment. She said she believed the lab escape theory was an absolute conspiracy theory and referred to Shi as brilliant.

While the experts who spoke to the Guardian made clear that understanding of the origins of the virus remained provisional, they added that the current state of knowledge of the initial spread also created problems for the lab escape theory.

When Peter Forster, a geneticist at Cambridge, compared sequences of the virus genome collected early in the Chines outbreak and later globally he identified three dominant strains.

Early in the outbreak, two strains appear to have been in circulation at roughly at the same time strain A and strain B with a C variant later developing from strain B.

But in a surprise finding, the version with the closest genetic similarity to bat coronavirus was not the one most prevalent early on in the central Chinese city of Wuhan but instead associated with a scattering of early cases in the southern Guangdong province.

Between 24 December 2019 and 17 January 2020, Forster explains, just three out of 23 cases in Wuhan were type A, while the rest were type B. In patients in Guangdong province, however, five out of nine were found to have type A of the virus.

The very small numbers notwithstanding, said Forster, the early genome frequencies until 17 January do not favour Wuhan as an origin over other parts of China, for example five of nine Guangdong/Shenzhen patients who had A types.

In other words, it still remains far from certain that Wuhan was even necessarily where the virus first emerged.

The pandemic has exacerbated existing geopolitical struggles, prompting a disinformation war that has drawn in the US, China, Russia and others.

Journalists and scientists have been targeted by people with an apparent interest in pushing circumstantial evidence related to the viruss origins, perhaps as part of this campaign and to distract from the fact that few governments have had a fault-free response.

The current state of knowledge about coronavirus and its origin suggest the most likely explanation remains the most prosaic. Like other coronaviruses before, it simply spread to humans via a natural event, the starting point for many in the scientific community including the World Health Organization.

Further testing in China in the months ahead may eventually establish the source of the outbreak. But for now it is too early.

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Where did Covid-19 come from? What we know about its origins - The Guardian

Mick Jagger and Will Smith will be among dozens of international and Indian celebrities performing from their homes in a four-hour concert to raise funds for the battle against coronavirus in India, where the number of cases is surging.

The countrys cricket captain Virat Kohli, actors Priyanka Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan are some of the top domestic names billed to perform or read messages during the event on Sunday.

The performances will be livestreamed by Facebook and will pay tribute to workers fighting the pandemic.

Organised by the Bollywood directors Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar, the event is intended to raise millions of dollars for more than 100 groups providing food and other essential services during the crisis.

Concert organisers said the money was needed for those who have no work and no home and do not know where their next meal is coming from.

Indias 1.3 billion people have been in lockdown since 25 March. Restrictions have recently been eased, but they are expected to last until at least 17 May.

The shutdown has stranded millions of migrant workers in cities with little food or money. Special trains were organised on Saturday to help thousands of labourers finally return home.

India has so far reported 37,335 coronavirus cases and 1,218 deaths. More than 2,000 new infections were recorded in the last 24 hours. Experts fear a lack of testing and poor reporting procedures mean the death toll is much higher.

The government has announced a series of special activities to rally support for frontline workers. The Indian air force is to stage a flypast on Sunday and military helicopters will shower petals on hospitals caring for coronavirus patients. Warships will also put on a special display.

Other participants at the concert, called I For India, are reported to include Bryan Adams, Mindy Kaling, Jack Black and the Indian stars AR Rahman and Akshay Kumar.

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Mick Jagger and Will Smith to perform in India Covid-19 concert - The Guardian