COVID-19 News from Around the Web

FHA mortgages require only a small down payment and are a path to homeownership for many lower-income, minority, and first-time homebuyers. But many are clearly in financial trouble. The Mortgage Bankers Association says nearly 16% of Federal Housing Administration-insured loans are delinquent — the highest level in records going back to 1979. … But … the Association says the vast majority of these homeowners missing payments are in forbearance plans sanctioned by Congress and are therefore protected from foreclosure.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus. Officials announced the abrupt change just a week after classes began at the 30,000-student state flagship university. They said 177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of 954 tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine because of possible exposure to the virus, they said. The remote-teaching order for undergraduate classes will take effect Wednesday, and the university will take steps to allow students to leave campus housing without financial penalty if they wish.

In Boone, North Carolina, the faculty senate at Appalachian State University — part of the 17-member UNC system — passed a vote of no-confidence in school chancellor Sheri Everts on Monday, in large part for failing to shut down the campus after a recent COVID-19 outbreak. Professors have “moved from a concern about people’s livelihoods and the institution’s reputation to, now, a concern for people’s lives,” the declaration read. Meanwhile, officials at another UNC school — East Carolina University — said Monday that they had identified a COVID-19 cluster at a dorm. They didn’t say whether they were considering switching to online classes. At Oklahoma State in Stillwater, where a widely circulated video over the weekend showed maskless students packed into a nightclub, officials confirmed 23 coronavirus cases at an off-campus sorority house. The university placed the students living there in isolation and prohibited them from leaving.

COVID-19 cases in U.S. nursing homes jumped nearly 80% earlier this summer, driven by rampant spread across the South and much of the West, according to an industry report released Monday. “The case numbers suggest the problem is far from solved,” said Tamara Konetzka, a research professor at the University of Chicago, who specializes in long-term care. She was not involved with the study. Long-term care facilities account for less than 1% of the U.S. population, but more than 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Looking back to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator said Monday she wished the United States had gone into a stricter lockdown. "I wish that when we went into lockdown (in March), we looked like Italy," Dr. Deborah Birx said Monday. "When Italy locked down, I mean, people weren't allowed out of their houses (without a pass). Americans don't react well to that kind of prohibition." In Italy as the virus spread, residents were told to stay home and only leave for essential activities. Authorities would stop people and check to make sure they had documents that said where and why they were traveling. In a roundtable discussion hosted by Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Birx said she has learned what Americans are willing to do to combat the virus, and that officials must meet people where they are.

On Saturday, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization, or EUA, to SalivaDirect, which can detect whether a person is infected with the coronavirus using saliva, rather than a sample taken from deep in the nasal cavity. The test was developed by researchers at Yale University in partnership with the NBA, which had a need for frequent testing to restart their season safely and worked with the researchers to help them validate their test. SalivaDirect uses the same method to run the samples as many other COVID-19 tests — called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR — but notably, the test eliminates one of the steps from that procedure, and can therefore be run in about half the time as traditional PCR, Wyllie said. Skipping one of the steps sets the SalivaDirect test apart from the five other saliva tests that have been granted EUAs. And bypassing the step, which entails extracting the virus’s genetic material from the sample, means the test isn’t vulnerable to shortages required for that step, Chiu said.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published on Monday is the latest to confirm that the coronavirus disproportionately impacts communities of color in the U.S. The study looked at COVID-19 cases associated with workplace outbreaks in certain industries in Utah between March and June. It found that Hispanic and nonwhite workers made up 73% of those cases — despite representing just 24% of the workforce in sectors where outbreaks occurred.

Nationwide, Hispanic or Latina mothers make up nearly half of the coronavirus cases among pregnant women, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected from Jan. 22 until last week. Among more than 14,100 pregnant women who tested positive for the novel coronavirus and provided information about race and ethnicity, 6,447 were Latina — the largest group by far. In a study in Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found the rate of virus exposure among Black and Hispanic women to be five times higher than among White and Asian women. Doctors say that, anecdotally, they are seeing this same pattern in the D.C. area. During a conference call about three months ago for local obstetricians, D.C. health officials and representatives from hospitals, it became clear that some clinics serving predominantly Latina populations were seeing some of the highest numbers of infections among pregnant women.

Black, Latino and American Indian and Alaskan Native people were disproportionately hospitalized for Covid-19, according to a new analysis of 12 states' populations published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. For Black patients -- their percentage of hospitalizations exceeded the percentage of their representative proportion of state population. This was highest in Ohio, where Black patients accounted for 31.8% of hospitalizations and are 13% of the population. Minnesota, Indiana and Kansas also had particularly high rates of hospitalizations for Black people compared to the population. Of the 11 states that reported the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations for Hispanic patients, 10 had hospitalizations for Hispanic patients that were higher than their representative proportion of the state population. This was most pronounced in Virginia, where Hispanic people accounted for 36.2% of hospitalizations, compared with 9.6% of the population. Utah and Rhode Island also had high levels of hospitalizations compared with percentage of the population. Only eight states reported hospitalization data for American Indian and Alaskan Native populations, but in some of these states there was a substantial disparity. For example, in Arizona, this group account for 4% of the state's population but 15.7% of the hospitalizations. In Utah, this group accounted for 0.9% of the state's population, but 5.0% of hospitalizations.

Indoor gyms in New York can reopen as soon as next week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday, if they meet public health requirements including inspections, mandatory mask wearing, a 33% occupancy limit and 6 feet between gym-goers. All gyms that meet the state’s health and safety standards can open by Aug. 24 or as at late as Sept. 2 if local officials say they need more time for local inspections. County governments and the mayor of New York City can also decide to delay the start of indoor fitness classes beyond Sept. 2, Cuomo said. The governor’s announcement came just over five months after the state shuttered gyms and other businesses statewide in hopes of reducing the spread of the coronavirus.

The evidence that bars are a particular problem has continued to grow, says Dr. Ogechika Alozie, an infectious disease specialist in El Paso, Texas. "If you were to create a petri dish and say, how can we spread this the most? It would be cruise ships, jails and prisons, factories, and it would be bars," Alozie says. He was a member of the Texas Medical Association committee that created a COVID-19 risk scale for common activities such as shopping at the grocery store. Bars top the list as the most risky. "You can't drink through the mask, so you're taking off your mask. There are lots of people, tight spaces and alcohol is a dis-inhibitor — people change their behaviors," Alozie says.