COVID-19 News from Around the Web

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on Sunday said it authorized the use of blood plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 as a treatment for the disease, a day after President Donald Trump blamed the agency for impeding the rollout of coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics for political reasons.

President Donald Trump announced emergency authorization to treat COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma — a move he called “a breakthrough,” one of his top health officials called “promising” and other health experts said needs more study before it’s celebrated. The announcement Sunday came after White House officials complained there were politically motivated delays by the Food and Drug Administration in approving a vaccine and therapeutics for the disease that has upended Trump’s reelection chances. On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump put himself at the center of the FDA’s announcement of the authorization at a news conference Sunday evening. The authorization makes it easier for some patients to obtain the treatment but is not the same as full FDA approval. The blood plasma, taken from patients who have recovered from the coronavirus and rich in antibodies, may provide benefits to those battling the disease. But the evidence so far has not been conclusive about whether it works, when to administer it and what dose is needed. In a letter describing the emergency authorization, the chief scientist for the FDA, Denise Hinton, said: “COVID-19 convalescent plasma should not be considered a new standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19. Additional data will be forthcoming from other analyses and ongoing, well-controlled clinical trials in the coming months.”

President Trump on Saturday baselessly accused the Food and Drug Administration of impeding enrollment in clinical trials for coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics for political reasons, as he broadened and escalated his attacks on administration scientists.“The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he said on Twitter. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!” He tagged FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn in the tweet. A second tweet reiterated Trump’s displeasure that the agency in June withdrew emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that is unproved as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. It has been identified as potentially risky for covid-19 patients, and yet the president still touts its use.

Lightning strikes, extreme weather conditions, dangerous levels of smoke and ash, and a deadly pandemic are pushing firefighters and the communities they're trying to save into uncharted territory. Roughly 11,000 lightning strikes over a few days spawned nearly 370 individual fires that have killed at least five people, and led tens of thousands to evacuate. Nearly 600,000 acres are burning in the eight largest fire complexes as of Friday morning, and California's firefighters have had to work in steep and difficult-to-access terrain under record-breaking temperatures. But COVID-19 adds a new dimension of risk to the job, both on and off the front lines, and poses new threats to those seeking refuge in temporary shelter. Christine McMorrow, a spokeswoman for Cal Fire, tells NPR there are several new protocols in place to prevent firefighters from getting sick. She notes that fire crews are already armed with significant personal protective equipment while they're battling active fires. That includes gloves, face and neck shrouds, and protective eyewear. When they're at base camps, firefighting personnel are required to wear face masks and maintain physical distancing, McMorrow says.

A 6-year-old girl has become the youngest person known to die of COVID-19 in Florida. Eight children under the age of 18 years old have died of the virus in Florida, according to the health department's pediatric report. The child was a resident of Hillsborough County and died of coronavirus this week, the Florida Department of Health reported Friday. It is unknown if her case was travel-related or if she had contact with a known case of the virus. Since March, 47,489 Florida residents under the age of 18 have tested positive for the virus. Nearly 600 of those patients were hospitalized.

A young child died due to complications from coronavirus in June, the first confirmed death of a minor in Iowa during the pandemic, the state health department belatedly announced Sunday evening. The Iowa Department of Public Health said the state medical examiner’s office concluded its case investigation Aug. 6 into the death of the child, who was under the age of 5. But the death wasn’t reported in the state’s statistics until Saturday, more than two weeks later. “The child’s death was publicly reported this weekend after ensuring the individual’s identity would remain protected and notifying the family,” the department said in a statement. “We have made every effort to protect the identity of this child, while the family grieves this devastating loss. Again, we send our sincerest condolences.”

Students in Los Angeles went back to school this week online. The Los Angeles Unified School District is planning for in-person classes to resume at some point during the 2020-21 school year, which will mean school nurses and licensed vocational nurses will be key to ensuring COVID-19 doesn't spread. Under the district's plan, nurses will help test more than 600,000 students and 75,000 staff members and also implement contact tracing techniques. It will cost about $300 a student per year, according to LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner. The plan means a lot of extra work for school nurses, like LAUSD school nurse Stephanie Yellin-Mednick. "Is it going to be mind boggling? It could be," Yellin-Mednick told NPR's Morning Edition. "It'll be questionnaires going home to parents where they'll go ahead and tell us what's going on with the family and the children. And then we'll go ahead and test." She says they'll also use contact tracing, which takes aggressive and widespread followup. And this comes at a time in which LAUSD schools have a massive nurse shortage.

As more universities abandon plans to reopen and decide instead to keep classes online this fall, it’s leading to conflict between students who say they deserve tuition discounts and college leaders who insist remote learning is worth the full cost. Disputes are flaring both at colleges that announced weeks ago they would stick with virtual instruction and at those that only recently lost hope of reopening their campuses. Among the latest schools facing pressure to lower tuition are Michigan State University and Ithaca College, which scrapped plans to reopen after seeing other colleges struggle to contain coronavirus outbreaks.

Thousands of oil and gas operations, government facilities and other sites have won permission to stop monitoring for hazardous emissions or otherwise bypass rules intended to protect health and the environment because of the coronavirus outbreak, The Associated Press has found. The result: approval for less environmental monitoring at some Texas refineries and at an army depot dismantling warheads armed with nerve gas in Kentucky, manure piling up and the mass disposal of livestock carcasses at farms in Iowa and Minnesota, and other increased risks to communities as governments eased enforcement over smokestacks, medical waste shipments, sewage plants, oilfields and chemical plants. The Trump administration paved the way for the reduced monitoring March 26 after being pressured by the oil and gas industry, which said lockdowns and social distancing during the pandemic made it difficult to comply with pollution rules. States are responsible for much of the oversight of federal environmental laws, and many followed with their own policies.

The Trump administration has blocked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from regulating a wide swath of laboratory tests, including ones for the coronavirus. The new policy, which was posted Wednesday and is strongly opposed by the FDA itself, stunned health experts and laboratories because of its timing, the Washington Post reported. The change could result in unreliable coronavirus tests getting on the market, potentially worsening the testing crisis in the United States, experts told the newspaper. The one thing the change won't do is solve testing shortages, because those are due mostly to a lack of the swabs and chemical reagents needed to perform COVID-19 tests, the Post reported.

The NFL had 77 positive COVID-19 tests from 11 teams re-examined by a New Jersey lab after false positives, and all those tests came back negative. The league asked the New Jersey lab BioReference to investigate the results, and those 77 tests are being re-tested once more to make sure they were false positives. Among teams reporting false positives, the Minnesota Vikings said they had 12, the New York Jets 10 and the Chicago Bears nine. The Jets canceled a walk-through Saturday night but had a full practice Sunday morning after the previously positive tests came back negative. The Bears moved their practice scheduled for Sunday morning to the afternoon. The Detroit Lions had a player with a false positive test from the same lab in New Jersey and he was held out of practice Sunday, a league source told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the league and team were not disclosing test results.

America remains in a deep downturn and is running a serious risk of a worsening recession that will last at least another year, economists warned Monday. About half of the National Association of Business Economics members expect US gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy — won't return to its pre-pandemic level until 2022. A majority of those experts also say the US job market will be back to its February level in 2022 at the earliest. Nearly 80% say there is a one-in-four chance of a double-dip recession -- an economic downturn that begins to recover and worsens again before fully recovering. NABE's findings are based on 235 responses to its August economic policy survey.