COVID-19 News from Around the Web

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWRs) are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades. But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

In open defiance of state regulations and his own administration’s pandemic health guidelines, President Donald Trump hosted his first indoor rally since June, telling a packed, nearly mask-less Nevada crowd that the nation was “making the last turn” in defeating the virus. … Relatively few in the crowd wore masks, with a clear exception: Those in the stands directly behind Trump, whose images would end up on TV, were mandated to wear face coverings.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said it could be the end of 2021 before life gets back to how it was before Covid-19. "If you're talking about getting back to a degree of normality which resembles where we were prior to Covid, it's going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021," Fauci said Friday. A vaccine will help, but there are caveats, Fauci said in a series of interviews Friday.

Children who caught the coronavirus at day cares and a day camp spread it to their relatives, according to a new report that underscores that kids can bring the germ home and infect others. Scientists already know children can spread the virus. But the study published Friday by the CDC “definitively indicates — in a way that previous studies have struggled to do — the potential for transmission to family members,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious diseases researcher.

Primary school students in China experienced more depressive symptoms and made more suicide attempts after schools closed for the pandemic, a new study found. When Covid-19 hit China in January, the Ministry of Education postponed the start of spring semester to late April. That closure separated children from their friends and their broader community network, and seems to have had an impact on their mental well-being. The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, compared reports of mental health problems in November -- before the pandemic started -- to mid-May, two weeks into the new spring semester when schools had re-opened.

With many teachers opting out of returning to the classroom because of the coronavirus, schools around the U.S. are scrambling to find replacements and in some places lowering certification requirements to help get substitutes in the door. Several states have seen surges in educators filing for retirement or taking leaves of absence.

New research suggests that COVID-19 is far from benign when it strikes young adults: Once they are hospitalized, 1 in 5 wind up in the ICU and many need ongoing medical care even after they are free of the virus, scientists report. The Harvard University doctors reviewed more than 3,200 coronavirus cases where adults aged 18 to 34 needed hospitalization. Twenty-one percent ending up requiring ICU admission and 10 percent needed a ventilator to breathe. Overall, 2.7 percent of young hospitalized patients died. Another 3 percent required care in a post-acute treatment facility even after clearing the virus from their bodies.

About three-quarters of those hospitalized for Covid-19 could become long haulers, according to a paper uploaded to the pre-print server medRxiv on August 14 without having yet been vetted by outside experts or accepted for publication. Researchers from the Academic Respiratory Unit of the North Bristol NHS Trust in the UK looked at 110 Covid-19 patients, whose illnesses required hospital stays for a median of five days between March 30 and June 3. Twelve weeks after patients were released from the hospital, 74% of them reported symptoms, including breathlessness and excessive fatigue. Despite these symptoms, however, 104 of the 110 patients in the study had normal basic blood test results, with just 12% showing an abnormal chest X-ray and 10% showing restrictive lung function through spirometry tests.

…One of three studies presented at a virtual meeting of the American Heart Association on Thursday. Among more than 11,000 people across 22 studies from eight countries, 42% of COVID-19 patients had high blood pressure, the researchers found. ... High blood pressure on its own was associated with a higher likelihood of death, the combined results showed. However, it's not high blood pressure itself that presents the most danger to COVID-19 patients. Instead, it's when their blood pressure plummets that they are at their most vulnerable, a smaller second study suggests.

Canada reported no new deaths from COVID-19 on Friday for the first time in six months. The last time the country reported no new deaths from the virus on March 15, at the start of lockdowns in North America due to the pandemic, Reuters reports.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are raising doubts about a study that estimated that a massive motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, last month led to more than 260,000 new cases of coronavirus nationwide. The study, released late last week by four economists associated with the Center for Health Economics and Policy Studies at San Diego State University, also found that the annual event resulted in more than $12 billion in health care costs stemming from the infections.

Richard Seaberry, Albert Petrocelli, John Knox, Arthur Lacker and Edward Doty were among the dozens of first responders who answered the call during one national tragedy only to die in another. And as New York and the nation Friday marked the 19th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks while in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the ranks of the nearly 200,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19 have been filled by dozens of heroes like these who risked their lives to save others when the twin towers fell.

Around the country, some communities have canceled 9/11 commemorations because of the pandemic, while others are going ahead, sometimes with modifications. The New York memorial is changing one of its ceremony’s central traditions: having relatives read the names of the dead, often adding poignant tributes. Thousands of family members are still invited. But they’ll hear a recording of the names from speakers spread around the vast plaza, a plan that memorial leaders felt would avoid close contact at a stage but still allow families to remember their loved ones at the place where they died.

By June 30, 2020, because of concerns about COVID-19, an estimated 41% of U.S. adults had delayed or avoided medical care including urgent or emergency care (12%) and routine care (32%). Avoidance of urgent or emergency care was more prevalent among unpaid caregivers for adults, persons with underlying medical conditions, Black adults, Hispanic adults, young adults, and persons with disabilities.

Adults who tested positive for Covid-19 were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant in the 14 days before becoming ill than those who tested negative, according to a new study from the US CDC. "In addition to dining at a restaurant, case-patients were more likely to report going to a bar/coffee shop, but only when the analysis was restricted to participants without close contact with persons with known COVID-19 before illness onset," the researchers wrote. The study, published on Thursday, included data on 314 adults who were tested for Covid-19 in July because they were experiencing symptoms; 154 tested positive and 160 tested negative.