COVID-19 News from Around the Web

Another 709,000 Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week, marking another modest improvement in the number of those newly unemployed even as coronavirus cases in the U.S. continue to creep higher.

Stettner says two important federal pandemic jobless relief programs have been a lifeline for people such as Anderson who have exhausted their state unemployment benefits or didn't qualify. But with Congress stuck in a months-long stalemate over another relief bill, these programs are set to expire.

Hospitals in at least 25 states are critically short of nurses, doctors, and other staff as coronavirus cases surge across the US, according to the industry’s trade association and a tally conducted by STAT. The situation has gotten so bad that in some places, severely ill patients have been transferred hundreds of miles for an available bed — from Texas to Arizona, and from central Missouri to Iowa. Many of these hospitals spent months building up stockpiles of medical equipment and protective gear in response to Covid-19, but the supplies are of little use without adequate staffing.

Overwhelmed hospitals are converting chapels, cafeterias, waiting rooms, hallways, even a parking garage into patient treatment areas. Staff members are desperately calling around to other medical centers in search of open beds. Fatigue and frustration are setting in among front-line workers. Conditions inside the nation’s hospitals are deteriorating by the day as the coronavirus rages across the U.S. at an unrelenting pace and the death toll surpasses 250,000. “We are depressed, disheartened and tired to the bone,” said Alison Johnson, director of critical care at Johnson City Medical Center in Tennessee, adding that she drives to and from work some days in tears.

The number of hospitalizations from the coronavirus reached nearly 77,000 on Tuesday — a new record. For the country's nurses, the surge is taking a heavy toll, as they grow exhausted, worried and frustrated by disinformation and disregard for safety. … "We're seeing the worst of the worst and these patients are dying, and you go home at the end of the night and you drive by bars and you drive by restaurants and they're packed full and people aren't wearing masks," said Michelle Cavanaugh, a nurse at the Nebraska Medicine Medical Center in Omaha. "I wish that I could get people to see COVID through my eyes."

As healthcare professionals grapple with soaring numbers of COVID-19 sickened people around the country, they're also combatting another quick-spreading and frustrating contagion: misinformation. "I don't know, I can't decide if it's a conspiracy theory or not," said shopper Shauna Unger, outside of the same grocery store. "I don't know what's really happening. It doesn't seem like it's as critical as everyone's making it out to be." … To try and address conspiracy theories and doubts in the community about the virus's threat, St. Luke's is using every tool at its disposal. Employees are speaking at public hearings. They're pushing out new numbers and information as soon as they get them. On social media, they've posted accounts from frontline workers about what it's like to deal with COVID-19 patients.

More than 900 Mayo Clinic staff members in the Midwest have been diagnosed with Covid-19 in the past two weeks. A spokesperson for Mayo Clinic told NBC News in an email that the number — only from the nationwide medical system's Minnesota and Wisconsin locations — comprised almost one-third of the 2,981 coronavirus cases among its Midwest staff since the start of the pandemic in March.

The US military reported a record high number of coronavirus cases on Tuesday with 1,314 new cases, according to Defense Department statistics. There are currently about 25,000 active Covid-19 cases in the ranks, and another 44,390 service members have recovered from the virus, according to the Pentagon. … A US defense official told CNN that the US military has a positivity rate of 6.8%. That compares to about 10% among civilians taking coronavirus tests.

New York City’s public school district, the largest in the US, will halt in-person instruction starting Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced, citing soaring coronavirus infection rates there and across the country. … The move doubtless came as a relief to some teachers, many of whom have expressed fear of being placed at increased risk of exposure to the highly contagious respiratory virus. But it will cause hardship for working parents forced to make new childcare arrangements once more.

Across the U.S., the deaths of educators have torn at the fabric of the school experience, taking the lives of teachers, principals, superintendents, coaches, a middle school secretary, a security guard. The losses have forced school boards to make hard decisions of whether to keep classrooms open and have left students and staff members grief-stricken. … While children generally have mild cases or no symptoms at all, about 1 in 4 of their teachers, or nearly 1.5 million of them, have a condition that raises their risk of getting seriously ill from the coronavirus, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As more than 97,000 of the nation’s long-term care residents have died in a pandemic that has pushed staffs to the limit, advocates for the elderly say a tandem wave of death separate from the virus has quietly claimed tens of thousands more, often because overburdened workers haven’t been able to give them the care they need. … Those “excess deaths” beyond the normal rate of fatalities in nursing homes could total more than 40,000 since March. These extra deaths are roughly 15% more than you’d expect at nursing homes already facing tens of thousands of deaths each month in a normal year.

A little-known agency that keeps the U.S. federal bureaucracy running is the biggest impediment to new efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden said on Wednesday. “There’s a whole lot of things that we just don’t have available to us,” Biden said, including real-time data on personal protective equipment and the distribution plan for COVID-19 vaccines. Emily Murphy, administrator of the General Services Administration, must “ascertain” the winner of the Nov. 3 presidential election between Biden and Republican President Donald Trump. That is a condition of releasing funds and resources to the winner, but she has so far not done so.

The video conferencing platform announced free calls without a time limit to all users from midnight on Thanksgiving through 6 a.m. on Black Friday. "As a thank you to our customers, we will be lifting the 40-minute limit for all meetings globally from midnight ET on Nov. 26 through 6 a.m. ET on Nov. 27 so your family gatherings don't get cut short," Zoom tweeted on Nov. 10. "#ZoomTogether/"

Pfizer says that more interim results from its ongoing coronavirus vaccine study suggest the shots are 95% effective and that the vaccine protects older people most at risk of dying from COVID-19. The announcement, just a week after Pfizer first revealed promising preliminary results, comes as the company is preparing within days to formally ask U.S. regulators to allow emergency use of the vaccine.

The first COVID-19 diagnostic at-home self-test that provides rapid results has been approved by the U.S. FDA, the agency announced Tuesday. The Lucira COVID-19 All-In-One Test Kit is a molecular single-use test and is expected to cost $50 or less, the company said on its website. … The test, which works by swirling a self-collected swabbed sample in a vial which is then placed in a hand-held test unit, can provide results in 30 minutes or less, according to the agency. The unit's light-up display shows whether a person is positive or negative for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The US is likely in the "last big surge" before a possible Covid-19 vaccine can start to offer help in the coming months, one expert says. But for now, the country is continuing to set grim case and hospitalization records and the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down. "The months ahead are going to look better than the weeks ahead," former US FDA commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan said at a Tuesday event hosted by Duke University. … "Won't be past this for still months to come. But it will start getting better by early 2021," he said, with the help of a vaccine.