COVID-19 News from Around the Web

A Florida judge on Monday blocked the state's requirement that all brick-and-mortar public schools must offer in-class education by August 31. In his temporary injunction, 2nd Judicial Circuit Court Judge Charles Dodson said Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran "arbitrarily prioritized reopening schools statewide in August over safety, and over the advice of health experts and that all districts complied in order to avoid loss of state funding."

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases linked to a wedding reception earlier this month in Maine continues to rise. At least 53 people have been infected with the virus, officials with the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported over the weekend, according to the Portland Press Herald. The paper notes that state health investigators have traced both "secondary and tertiary transmission of the virus." In other words, the virus has spread beyond the people who were at the Aug. 7 wedding reception in Millinocket Lake, located roughly 190 miles northeast of the state's most populous city of Portland. A Maine CDC spokesperson told the Press Herald that of the 53 cases linked to the wedding reception this month, 13 were secondary and 10 were tertiary. The paper also says that those affected range in age from 4 to 98 years old.

The hundreds of thousands of bikers who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have departed western South Dakota, but public health departments in multiple states are trying to measure how much and how quickly the coronavirus spread in bars, tattoo shops and gatherings before people traveled home to nearly every state in the country. From the city of Sturgis, which is conducting mass testing for its roughly 7,000 residents, to health departments in at least six states, health officials are trying to track outbreaks from the 10-day rally which ended on Aug. 16. They face the task of tracking an invisible virus that spread among bar-hoppers and rallygoers, who then traveled to over half of the counties in the United States. An analysis of anonymous cell phone data from Camber Systems, a firm that aggregates cell phone activity for health researchers, found that 61% of all the counties in the U.S. have been visited by someone who attended Sturgis, creating a travel hub that was comparable to a major U.S. city.

The presence of a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 could make daily life closer to the pre-pandemic normal than it is for most Americans right now. But the obstacles of getting Americans to accept COVID-19 vaccinations may be even greater than those in getting one developed in record time to fight this novel, contagious and deadly virus. For one, Americans' distrust in scientific experts and institutions was percolating long before COVID-19 was a global issue — and the strong anti-vaccine movement is one of the starkest symptoms of that growing distrust. The refusal to take vaccines had already been spreading across the country over the past decade; that movement has not missed its moment during the pandemic. Wild, unfounded allegations that the pandemic was in fact a “plandemic” were spearheaded by an organized group of anti-vaxxers online, determined to sow misinformation about the novel coronavirus.

Google searches for anxiety symptoms from mid-March to mid-May were the highest they've been in the history of the search engine, according to researchers at the Qualcomm Institute's Center for Data Driven Health at the University of California San Diego. The study was published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In particular, anxiety and panic attack searches corresponded to major news events, including March 16, when social distancing guidelines were put in place nationally; and March 29, when those guidelines were extended. Queries also spiked on April 3, when US President Donald Trump announced face mask recommendations; and on April 11, when the US surpassed Italy in the number of coronavirus deaths.

As the world wearies of trying to suppress the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many of us are wondering what the future will look like as we try to learn to live with it. Will it always have the capacity to make us so sick? Will our immune systems learn — and remember — how to cope with the new threat? Will vaccines be protective and long-lasting? “I don’t think we’ll be wearing masks in two to three years — for this virus,” said Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Menachery laid out four possible scenarios for how humans might interact with SARS-2 over time — in other words, what kind of immunity we might expect. As Menachery sees it, the possibilities for the future when it comes to Covid-19 and human immunity break down as follows: sterilizing immunity, functional immunity, waning immunity, and lost immunity.

Getting an antibody test to see if you had Covid-19 months ago is pointless, according to guidelines issued this week by a major medical society. Many tests are inaccurate, some look for the wrong antibodies and even the right antibodies fade away, said experts at the Infectious Diseases Society of America, which issued the new guidelines. Because current tests cannot determine if someone is immune, the society said, they “cannot inform decisions to discontinue physical distancing or lessen the use of personal protective equipment.” Antibody testing generally should be used only for population surveys, not for diagnosing illness in individuals, the panel said. But its guidelines described two situations in which antibody testing could be used when the normal diagnostic tests for the virus — called PCR tests — failed or were likely to fail.

What do crowded college parties, large weddings, family parties and busy bars all have in common? All of them have the potential to be superspreader events, where the novel coronavirus can be spread to a huge amount of people at once. While there is no scientific definition of a superspreader event, Winslow said that events that led to COVID-19 outbreaks have had several factors in common. "The big concern is that having lots of people jammed indoors, particularly when not wearing face coverings, is sort of a recipe for transmission of SARS-CoV-2," he said. "One of the things that I think is really well appreciated now is that things like speaking and singing will generate very small particle aerosols ... In an indoor environment, where you have less air circulation than outdoors, those particles can remain suspended in the air for several hours or so."