The latest weekly jobless claims figures were released on May 28. For the week ending May 23,
just under 2 million Americans filed to receive unemployment benefits. While this marks the first week in over two months that unemployment claims fell below 2 million, it is still a staggering figure on top of a long stream of devastating weeks for U.S. workers. After the last 10 combined weeks of jobless claims, the number of Americans filing for unemployment since the coronavirus crisis began in earnest in mid-March is now approaching 40 million, or about 25% of the U.S. labor force.
As unemployment claims have continued to surge by the millions with each passing week, 24/7 Wall St.
has been compiling a state-by-state review of jobless claims. Job losses by state range from the tens of thousands to the millions over the 10 weeks beginning on March 15, amounting to anywhere from
10% to over 40% of each state’s total labor force before the pandemic hit.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate reached 14.7% in April,
a level not seen since the Great Depression. In a number of states, the April unemployment rate was much higher, with over one-fifth of Hawaii’s labor force and over one-quarter of Nevada’s labor force unemployed.
These state rates will only worsen in May, as the jobless ranks continue to swell in every state.
Bing COVID-19 tracker: Latest numbers by country and state
The current economic downturn is largely attributable to efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Officials across the country have heeded advice from health experts and instituted a range of measures to facilitate social distancing, from shelter-in-place orders to closing nonessential businesses.
Many of those states are beginning to partially reopen their economies.
(Here are every state’s rules for staying at home and social distancing )
The places where unemployment rates are projected to be the highest in the coming months
tend to be in states that rely on industries that are bearing the brunt of the current economic downturn.
These industries include leisure and hospitality, travel services, transportation and warehousing, and oil and gas extraction. These industries also serve as the economic backbone for a number of cities across the country.
(Here is a look at the places a COVID-19 recession will likely hit hardest.)
Daily coronavirus briefing: Dangerous complication increasingly found in COVID-19 patients.
Maybe you know someone in a similar situation: CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tested negative for COVID-19,
after having it, but still doesn’t feel like himself weeks and weeks later. “I’m not 100%,”
he told Dr. Sanjay Gupta on air this week. “There is funky stuff in my bloodwork, that doctors say is
what they see in people who have had COVID. So it freaks me out a little bit.” He’s not alone—
here are 15 long-term after effects of the coronavirus everyone should know about.
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What a second peak of coronavirus could look like
By Scottie Andrew,
Coronavirus will surge again when summer ends:
infectious disease experts are almost certain of that.
But they don’t know how severe that resurgence will be.
Whether we see that rapid rise in cases in the fall depends on what we do now.
The World Health Organization offered one bleak hypothesis for what the next few months of coronavirus
could look like. While we’re still living through the first wave of the pandemic, and cases are still rising,
infections could jump up suddenly and significantly “at any time.”
“We may get a second peak in this way,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme on Monday.
A second peak wouldn’t unfold as neatly or gradually as a wave. A new peak would mean a sudden spike in cases, which could overburden health care systems again and possibly cause a greater number of deaths.
The second peak could be worse than the first.
What a second peak could look like!!
In a second peak scenario, coronavirus cases would spike sharply and quickly until they reach a new high,
likely after a period when the rate of infection remained fairly stable.
In a second wave, infections may unfold more gradually and impact different regions of the world
at different times.
But in both a second peak scenario and one in which we “flatten the curve,”
the same number of people could be infected. It’s the timing that counts.
A second peak would mean that many more people are infected with coronavirus
at the same time, and during flu season, which would overburden health care systems.
And when hospitals and health care workers are overwhelmed, there’s a higher likelihood
for preventable deaths, said Dr. Gabe Kelen, director of the department of emergency medicine
at Johns Hopkins University.
“The only real reason to try and dampen these peaks are to prevent preventable deaths,
so that the health care system can take care of everyone who needs it and give them the
best possible chance at a healthy outcome,” Kelen, who specializes in emerging infections,
told CNN. That’s why so much has been made about flattening the curve.
The steadier the rate of infection, the more manageable it is to treat the sick.
Infectious Disease Experts Answer: Is It Safe to Stay at a Hotel Right Now?
Why it’s dangerous
Like Kelen said, a peak would see a large jump in preventable deaths, and not just in
Covid-19 patients. People with diseases such as cancer and diabetes that regularly rely on hospitals
for treatment may find their health care delayed, which could threaten their health. And if hospitals are overwhelmed by coronavirus patients, the facilities may have less room for emergency patients
who are suddenly injured or sick. And more people may die unnecessarily.
Another advantage for the virus — it’s likely to surge again during flu season, so throughout the fall and winter. And with a cadre of respiratory viruses circulating at the same time, the odds you end up infected with one of them are increasingly likely, Kelen said.
In the US, there were 410,000 to 740,000 flu hospitalizations during the 2019-2020 flu season,
which ran from October to April, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s a fairly long period of heightened disease activity, and with hundreds of thousands of patients already filling up hospital rooms, there’s less room for Covid-19 patients.
Flu mortality is low — assuming 56 million people were infected with the flu this season and 62,000 of them died, the death rate is still 0.1%. In the US, where more than 1,680,000 people have been infected and nearly 100,000 have died, the death rate is closer to 5.9%.
“From a healthcare point of view, flu season is usually a very difficult time because there are so many sick people,” Kelen said. “Flu season in the face of Covid-19 — that’s going to be a real challenge.”
Coronavirus also resembles the flu and other seasonal respiratory viruses in the initial symptoms it presents. The similar symptoms may delay an accurate diagnosis or treatment,
said Dr. William Schaffner, professor in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University and a longtime adviser to the CDC. “Covid-19 is too contagious,” Schaffner said. “We anticipate that this fall will be a great struggle with influenza and, in addition, Covid.”
When it will happen and how severe it will be?
Both depend on how quickly we ease up on coronavirus restrictions.
A second peak is likely to occur during the fall or late winter to coincide with flu season.
But if states snap out of pandemic mode now, reopening on a large scale and largely returning to
pre-coronavirus life, the surge in cases could occur as early as late June.
The United States isn’t prepared for a resurgence that soon, Kelen said.
“It would be unmanageable,” he said.
Mass re-openings could affect its timing and severity, too. Many large universities and school districts
plan to reopen in the fall and host classes on campus, which could stir up transmission again.
Businesses probably won’t close again like they did in March and April, Kelen said, so with more people out,
the rate of infection could jump.
Why it’s inevitable — and what we can do to dampen it!!!
Like Kelen said, until there’s a vaccine, the same number of people will be infected no matter if people stop staying home. Coronavirus cases will grow again.
It’s just a matter of letting the disease “burn through society very quickly” over a few months or prolonging the time it takes coronavirus to spread, he said. The latter scenario buys some time for vaccine development and staggers the number of patients hospitals see so they won’t be overburdened. “It sounds as though we’re in a locked room, wanting to get out,” Schaffner said. “The door out of that locked room, we hope, is a vaccine.
But in the meantime, we can’t just be complacent.”
We can count on one vaccine being ready in the fall — the flu vaccine for the 2020-2021 flu season.
It’s more important than usual to get vaccinated this year, Kelen and Schaffner said.
If more people are protected against the flu, they’ll be protected against at least one severe respiratory viruses, which could save them a trip to the hospital. “The vaccine isn’t perfect,
it still can prevent many infections and make other infections less severe,” Schaffner said.
We know what we’re up against come the fall. Both doctors said it’s unlikely that businesses will close en masse again like they did in the spring, and more communal places like schools and places of worship will reopen. That, coupled with flu season, could make it easy for coronavirus to circulate in communities.
That makes the standard mitigation efforts — staying at home as much as possible, wearing a mask in public and maintaining at least six feet of distance — all the more important, Schaffner and Kelen said.
There’s a good chance the coronavirus will never go away.
Even after a vaccine is discovered and deployed, the coronavirus will likely remain for decades to come, circulating among the world’s population.
Experts call such diseases endemic — stubbornly resisting efforts to stamp them out. Think measles, HIV, chickenpox.
It is a daunting proposition — a coronavirus-tinged world without a foreseeable end. But experts in epidemiology, disaster planning and vaccine development say embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response. The long-term nature of covid-19, they say, should serve as a call to arms for the public, a road map for the trillions of dollars Congress is spending and a fixed navigational point for the nation’s current, chaotic state-by-state patchwork strategy.
With so much else uncertain, the persistence of the novel virus is one of the few things we can count on about the future. That doesn’t mean the situation will always be as dire. There are already four endemic coronaviruses that circulate continuously, causing the common cold. And many experts think this virus will become the fifth — its effects growing milder as immunity spreads and our bodies adapt to it over time.
The four endemic human coronaviruses HCoV-229E, -NL63, -OC43, and -HKU1 contribute
a considerable share of upper and lower respiratory tract infections in adults and children.
their clinical representation resembles that of many other agents of the common cold, their evolutionary histories, and host associations could provide important insights
into the natural history of past human pandemics.
For two of these viruses, we have strong evidence suggesting an origin in major livestock species while primordial associations for all four viruses may have existed with bats and rodents. HCoV-NL63 and -229E may originate from bat reservoirs as assumed for many other coronaviruses, but HCoV-OC43 and -HKU1 seem more likely to have speciated from rodent-associated viruses. HCoV-OC43 is thought to have emerged from ancestors in domestic animals such as cattle or swine!!!
The bovine coronavirus has been suggested to be a possible ancestor, from which HCoV-OC43 may have emerged in the context of a pandemic recorded historically at the end of the 19th century. New data suggest that HCoV-229E may actually be transferred from dromedary camels similar to Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. This scenario provides important ecological parallels to the
present pre-pandemic pattern of host associations of the MERS coro
Other human coronaviruses
MERS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS)
SARS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS)
SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)
People around the world commonly get infected with human coronaviruses 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1. Sometimes coronaviruses that infect animals can evolve and make people sick and become a new human coronavirus. Three recent examples of this are 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV.
Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic
Scientists are piecing together how SARS-CoV-2 operates, where it came from and what it might do next —
but pressing questions remain about the source of COVID-19.
But studies released over the past few months, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, suggest that SARS-CoV-2 — or a very similar ancestor — has been hiding in some animal for decades. According to a paper posted online in March 6, the coronavirus lineage leading to SARS-CoV-2 split more than 140 years ago from the closely related one seen today in pangolins. Then, sometime in the past 40–70 years, the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 separated from the bat version, which subsequently lost the effective receptor binding domain that was present in its ancestors (and remains in SARS-CoV-2).
A study published on 21 April came up with very similar findings using a different dating method. For now, though, most people have not been infected and remain susceptible. And the highly transmissible disease has surged in recent weeks, even in countries that initially succeeded in suppressing it. Left alone, experts say, it will simply keep burning through the world’s population.
DOUBLE TROUBLE: You ‘could catch coronavirus twice and will need yearly vaccines’,
says immunisation expert.
“This virus is here to stay,” said Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist
at the University of Chicago. “The question is, how do we live with it safely?”
Combating endemic diseases requires long-range thinking, sustained effort and international coordination. Stamping out the virus could take decades — if it happens at all.
Such efforts
take time, money and, most of all, political will.
Americans have only started to wrap their heads around the idea, polls show. U.S. leaders and residents keep searching for a magic bullet to bring the pandemic to an abrupt end: Drugs that show even a hint of progress in the petri dish have sparked shortages. The White House continues to suggest summer’s heat
will smother the virus or that it will mysteriously vanish.
A vaccine — while crucial to our response — is not likely to eradicate the disease, experts say.
Challenges to vaccination are already becoming clear, including limited supply, anti-vaccine opposition and significant logistical roadblocks.
Meanwhile, some states are rushing headlong into reopening their economies. Even those moving more cautiously haven’t developed tools to measure what’s working and what isn’t —
a crucial feature for any prolonged scientific experiment.
“It’s like we have attention-deficit disorder right now. Everything we’re doing is just a knee-jerk response to the short-term,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “People keep asking me, ‘What’s the one thing we have to do?’ The one thing we have to do is to understand that there is not one thing. We need a comprehensive battle strategy, meticulously implemented.”
People also keep talking of returning to normal, said Natalie Dean, a disease biostatistician
at the University of Florida. But a future with an enduring coronavirus means that normal no longer exists.
“As we find different ways to adapt and discover what works, that’s how we’re going to start reclaiming parts of our society and life,” she said.
An Urgent Intermission
America now finds itself in a moment of transition. Infections are declining in some states,
even as they rise in others with worrisome emerging hotspots.
What’s missing during this interlude, experts say, is a sense of urgency.
Arriving at this moment of transition required countrywide shutdowns, soaring unemployment and devastating blows to our economy and mental health. All that effort was supposed to buy us time to think, plan and prepare, said Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
“What’s concerning is that I don’t see any signs the federal government has learned
any lessons and is doing anything differently to prepare for the next waves,” he said.
Leaders desperately need to shift their response from short-term crisis management to long-term solutions,
he and other experts say.
Communities should be thinking about installing doors that don’t require grasping a handle,
and re-engineering traffic signals so pedestrians don’t have to push crosswalk buttons,
said Eleanor J. Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Exhausting-Very/248309
In the coming years, robots and automated lines could become ubiquitous in meatpacking plants,
which have experienced some of the country’s worst outbreaks. Families may have to make diagnostic tests routine ahead of visits to grandparents. Once-mocked office cubicles
of a bygone era may become the rage again, replacing open-floor plans now found at many companies.
Paid sick time might become a necessity for jobs of all types. And heading to work while under the weather may no longer be seen as an act of admirable American can-do spirit but instead a threat to co-workers and the bottom line.
More immediately, states should be using this time to craft quick-response systems and protocols.
With hundreds of cities and counties reopening, think of each as a mini-laboratory yielding valuable data on what will work against the virus in the coming years. But most still lack the tools to capture that data, said Cobey,
the University of Chicago epidemiologist, whose models have been used by Illinois leaders.
The metrics being employed by states remain crude: daily number of deaths, hospitalization rates and confirmations of cases long after people show symptoms. All lag behind the actual transmission of the coronavirus by at least one to three weeks.
“We desperately need better data and fast. It blows my mind that we still don’t have it,”
Cobey said.
What’s needed are more sophisticated testing strategies, say experts, that could serve as canaries in the coal mine — increasing our speed and ability to detect surges in the virus. States could select certain populations or areas to test extensively. They could establish a handful of sites that test only patients who have developed symptoms in the last four days, to increase sensitivity to sudden increases in transmission.
“You need testing strategies that allow you to put on brakes quickly enough to stop surges,”
said Cobey, who has pleaded with state leaders to implement such strategies.
Another idea researchers have proposed is universally testing pregnant women to measure
the asymptomatic spread of the virus — among people who have been infected but don’t show symptoms.
The women could be an ideal sample testing population because they already visit hospitals for delivery and maternity checkups.
One hospital in New York tested every pregnant woman who came in to deliver and found
15 percent had the coronavirus.
Most of those testing positive — 88 percent — showed no symptoms,
a sign of how crucial such testing could be.
Living long-term with the virus also means addressing the mental health effects.
There’s an assumption among many leaders, experts say, that increases in depression and anxiety
are a temporary problem that will eventually disappear along with the virus.
But for some people, the trauma, fear and stress will accumulate and fester like a wound if left unaddressed, said Paul Gionfriddo, president of the advocacy group Mental Health America.
“The psychological recovery is going to be as important as economic and logistical parts of this.”
‘Prevention always sounds easy’
America’s yearning for a quick fix has turned in recent days toward a vaccine,
now being portrayed as a solution that will quash the virus once and for all.
But the world has achieved that only once, with smallpox — a measure of just how difficult it is
for vaccines to wipe out diseases. And it took nearly two centuries after the discovery of a vaccine —
and an unprecedented international effort — to vanquish smallpox,
which stole hundreds of millions of lives.
Eventually, many experts believe this coronavirus could become relatively benign, causing milder infections
as our immune systems develop a memory of responses to it through previous infection or vaccination.
But that process could take years, said Andrew Noymer,
a University of California at Irvine epidemiologist.
Barney Graham, deputy director of the federal government’s Vaccine Research Center,
said emerging plans for vaccination are already stretching as far out as a decade.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218
“I’m thinking about things in different stages or eras,” Graham said. “We had a discussion this morning about what can be ready before this winter of 2021, what could be ready for 2021-2022, and what kind of regimen or vaccine concepts would we want after this has settled into a more seasonal virus.”
The success of those vaccines will hinge on distribution — a complicated, logistically fraught process.
In the first few years of a vaccine, global demand will far outstrip what manufacturers are able to supply. Roughly 60 to 80 percent of the world’s population needs to be inoculated to reach herd immunity —
that point when enough people have become resistant to a virus that it has difficulty spreading widely.
Without international agreements worked out beforehand, the short supply could devolve into bidding wars,
hoarding and ineffective vaccination campaigns.
In the United States, the crucial job of distribution will depend on federal and local health departments, which have already shown signs of limited capacity and competence amid this pandemic. As a preview to the chaos that might ensue, the U.S. government’s rollout of the first and only treatment for covid-19, remdesivir,
has been described by hospitals as
confusing, unfair and lacking transparency.
“We also assume that everyone will want the vaccine because of the devastation this virus
has caused, but that’s a big assumption,” said Howard Koh, a top U.S. health official during
the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. “Prevention always sounds easy, but it’s not.”
America already has vaccines for measles and the seasonal flu, which can be deadly.
And yet the health-care system struggles every year to convince people to get those shots.
Looking further down the road, many top experts believe it’s critical that U.S. leaders start planning
for the next pandemic now — even as they contend with this one — because of the short attention span,
lack of political and public support for preparedness the country has shown in past decades.
“We’ve seen this story so many times before,” Koh said. “As soon as the crisis is over,
people will go back to whatever is the new normal and they will move on.”
Our future selves…
The struggle to get people to think long-term, of course, is not new to public health.
We know that smoking can kill us.
Yet, it is still responsible for 1 of every 5 deaths in the United States.
“The problem is people putting the present ahead of the future,” said Frieden,
who led the CDC from 2009 to 2017.
To bridge the divide between present and future, the CDC launched an ad campaign during Frieden’s tenure
in which former smokers showed in graphic detail the consequences of lighting up: the removal of their jaw. Having to speak through an electronic voice box.
The emotional devastation to their families.
The campaign caused more than 16.4 million people to try to quit smoking between 2012 and 2018 and about
1 million to quit for good, the CDC estimates. “We found a way to show them their future selves,” said Frieden, now president and CEO of a health initiative called Resolve to Save Lives.
The challenge in this pandemic is few such shortcuts remain to push U.S. leaders and the
public into forward-thinking actions. The CDC has been sidelined by the White House and blocked from holding public briefings. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made clear its priority in
restarting the economy.
Increasingly, leading experts believe many Americans won’t make the shift toward long-range thinking
until the virus spreads more widely and affects someone they know.
“It’s like people who drive too fast. They come upon the scene of an accident, and for a little while,
they drive more carefully, but soon they’re back to speeding again,”
said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
“Contrast that with people who have lost someone to drunk driving,” he said.
“It mobilizes them and becomes a cause for them. Eventually, everyone is going to know
someone who got infected or died from this virus.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/
02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-coronavirus-isnt-contained/
“That’s what it may take.”
Your Options Are to Stay At Home
or get outside and catch some sunrays !!!!
Could Vitamin D Help Protect You From The Virus? | This Morning