COVID-19 News from Around the Web

Georgia’s governor announced plans Monday to restart the state’s economy before the end of the week, saying many businesses that closed to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus could reopen as early as Friday. The governor in neighboring Tennessee planned to let businesses in most of his state begin reopening as soon as next week. Georgia’s timetable, one of the most aggressive in the nation, would allow gyms, hair salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors to reopen as long as owners follow strict social-distancing and hygiene requirements. Elective medical procedures could also resume. By Monday, movie theaters may resume selling tickets, and restaurants limited to takeout orders could return to limited dine-in service.

As White House economic reopening guidance expired on Thursday after two weeks in place, half of all U.S. states forged ahead with easing restrictions on restaurants, retail and other businesses in hopes of reviving coronavirus-stricken commerce. The enormous pressure on states to reopen, despite a lack of wide-scale virus testing and other precautions urged by health experts, was highlighted in new Labor Department data showing some 30 million Americans seeking unemployment benefits since March 21. The jobless toll amounts to more than 18.4% of the U.S. working-age population, a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says it's not out of the question that the United States could have a viable coronavirus vaccine by January. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY Thursday that the government is quickly working on getting an answer to whether a vaccine is effective before beginning to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses. "We want to go quickly, but we want to make sure it's safe and it's effective," Fauci said. "I think that is doable if things fall in the right place.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the new coronavirus was “not manmade or genetically modified” but say they are still examining whether the origins of the pandemic trace to contact with infected animals or an accident at a Chinese lab. The statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the clearinghouse for the web of U.S. spy agencies, comes as President Donald Trump and his allies have touted the as-yet-unproven theory that an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Chinese outbreak, was the source of the global pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 worldwide.

Another 3.8 million Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits in the week ended April 25. In total, more than 30 million people have filed first-time claims since mid-March as the coronavirus pandemic is forcing businesses to close and lay off workers.

This is the worst economy ever. That's according to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who previewed some truly awful economic data headed our way when he spoke to reporters Wednesday. "We are going to see economic data for the second quarter that is worse than any data we have seen for the economy," Powell said. "There are direct consequences of the disease and measures we are taking to protect ourselves from it." It's worse for minorities than for white Americans. Powell noted that a few months ago, the US labor market was the best ever for minorities. But as stay-at-home orders have shuttered restaurants, movie theaters, retailers and many other businesses, a disproportionate number of non-white Americans have lost their jobs. "It is heartbreaking, frankly, to see that all threatened now," Powell said of previous gains in non-white unemployment.

A competition between researchers is part of a $1.5 billion program that seeks to speed development of accurate, quick and easy-to-use COVID-19 tests, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced Wednesday. The NIH invites "all scientists and inventors with a rapid testing technology to compete in the COVID-19 testing challenge for a share of up to $500 million over all phases of development." The goal is to make millions of tests a week available to all Americans by the end of this summer, and to have even more in time for the flu season.

Britain’s AstraZeneca joined forces with the University of Oxford on Thursday to help develop, produce and distribute a potential COVID-19 vaccine, as drugmakers around the world race to find a solution to the deadly disease. UK Business Secretary Alok Sharma welcomed the tie-up as a vital step to making the Oxford vaccine available as soon as possible if it succeeds in clinical trials. A team of British scientists last week dosed the first volunteers, and earlier this month said large-scale production capacity was being put in place to make millions of doses even before trials show whether it is effective. Only a handful of the vaccines in development have advanced to human trials, an indicator of safety and efficacy - and the stage where most vaccines fail. “Our hope is that, by joining forces, we can accelerate the globalisation of a vaccine to combat the virus and protect people from the deadliest pandemic in a generation,” AstraZeneca Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said.

The head of British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca said now was the time to take risks by betting on a COVID-19 vaccine and he should know by June or July whether one from its University of Oxford partner will be effective or not.

In the global race to find a vaccine, Oxford University just jumped way ahead of the pack. Human testing is already underway, and scientists say they're hopeful a coronavirus vaccine will be widely available by September. Technology the lab had already developed in previous work on inoculations for other viruses, including a close relative of COVID-19, gave it a head start. "Well personally, I have a high degree of confidence about this vaccine, because it's technology that I've used before," said Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the university. The vaccine takes the coronavirus' genetic material and injects it into a common cold virus that has been neutralized so it cannot spread in people. The modified virus will mimic COVID-19, triggering the immune system to fight off the imposter and providing protection against the real thing. The experimental vaccine has reportedly worked in protecting rhesus macaque monkeys that were exposed to heavy quantities of COVID-19.

GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s largest vaccine maker, said the global push to develop an immunisation against the coronavirus would not lead to widely available products before the second half of next year. “If things go right ... to get to scale of manufacturing in the hundreds of millions (of doses) is going to be in the second half of next year,” CEO Emma Walmsley told a media briefing after the release of first-quarter results. This would require swift progress in global development efforts to show an experimental vaccine is safe, effective and dosed in the right way, she added.

Two new reports have produced conflicting results on the potential effectiveness of remdesivir, an experimental antiviral drug considered to be one of the leading hopes in the fight against COVID-19. Disappointing results emerged from the first gold-standard clinical trial for remdesivir, which found that the drug did not help patients in China with severe COVID-19. Those findings were published April 29 in The Lancet medical journal. Earlier the same day, drugmaker Gilead Sciences announced positive early findings from a U.S.-designed clinical trial being conducted at 180 sites around the world. Gilead announced that the U.S. trial will show that COVID-19 patients treated earlier with remdesivir had better outcomes than those who received the drug later in the course of their illness. The trial also will show that people who take remdesivir for five days do as well as patients who take a 10-day course, Gilead said. Based on that promising data, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration plans to announce as early as Wednesday an emergency use authorization for using remdesivir in treating coronavirus, The New York Times reported.

The top U.S. infectious disease official said Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental antiviral drug remdesivir will become the standard of care for COVID-19 after early clinical trial results on Wednesday showed it helped patients recover more quickly from the illness caused by the coronavirus. Preliminary results from a U.S. government trial showing that patients given remdesivir recovered 31% faster than those given a placebo, were hailed by Dr. Anthony Fauci as “highly significant.” “This is really quite important,” Fauci told reporters at the White House, likening it to a moment in 1986 “when we were struggling for drugs for HIV and we had nothing.”

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to trigger the sharpest recession in the United States since the Great Depression. An early signal of that came Wednesday, when the Commerce Department said the economy shrank at a 4.8% annual rate in the first three months of the year — the first quarterly contraction since 2014 and the largest since the Great Recession. … The first-quarter drop was the biggest since an 8.4% dive in the fourth quarter of 2008. It marked a reversal from the 2019 fourth quarter's 2.1% growth rate.

In not even three months since the first known U.S. deaths from COVID-19, more lives have now been lost to the coronavirus pandemic on U.S. soil than the 58,220 Americans who died over nearly two decades in Vietnam. Early Tuesday evening ET, the U.S. death toll reached 58,365, according to Johns Hopkins University. While the number of lives lost in the U.S. during the pandemic and the U.S. death toll in that war are roughly the same now, the death rate from the coronavirus in America is considerably higher. It now stands at about 17.6 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.