Coronavirus live news: three White House Covid-19 taskforce members go into self-quarantine

New coronavirus infections are accelerating again in Germany just days after its leaders loosened social restrictions, raising concerns that the pandemic could once again slip out of control.

The Robert Koch Institute for disease control said in a daily bulletin the number of people each sick person now infects – known as the reproduction rate, or R – had risen to 1.1.

Chancellor Angela Merkel bowed to pressure from leaders of Germany’s 16 federal states to restart social life and revive the economy, announced on Wednesday measures that included more shop openings and a gradual return to school.

At the same time, she launched an “emergency brake” to allow for the reimposition of restrictions if infections pick up again.

Karl Lauterbach, a Social Democrat lawmaker and professor of epidemiology, warned that the new coronavirus could start spreading again quickly after seeing large crowds out and about on Saturday in his home city of Cologne.

“It has to be expected that the R rate will go over 1 and we will return to exponential growth,” Lauterbach said in a tweet. “The loosening measures were far too poorly prepared.”

The Robert Koch Institute said on Sunday the confirmed number of new coronavirus cases had increased by a daily 667 to 169,218, while the daily death toll had risen by 26 to 7,395.

“It is too early to infer whether the number of new infections will continue to decrease as in the past weeks or increase again,” the institute said in a separate daily bulletin issued on Saturday evening.

It cautioned that the R figure was subject to statistical uncertainty, adding: “The increase of the reproduction number R necessitates a close monitoring of the situation.”

Germany has the sixth-largest Covid-19 caseload in Europe but has managed to contain fatalities from the highly infectious respiratory disease thanks to widespread and early testing and a healthcare system that is well-run and well-funded.

They prepared for icy cold and trained to be on the watch for polar bears, but a pandemic just wasn’t part of the program.

Now dozens of scientists are waiting in quarantine for the all-clear to join a year-long Arctic research mission aimed at improving the models used for forecasting climate change, just as the expedition reaches a crucial phase.

For a while, the international mission looked like it might have to be called off, as country after country went into lockdown because of the virus, scuppering plans to bring fresh supplies and crew to the German research vessel Polarstern that’s been moored in the high Arctic since last year.

News of the pandemic caused jitters among those already on board, said Matthew Shupe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado and co-leader of the MOSAiC expedition.

Some people just wanted to be home with their families, he told The Associated Press in a video interview from the German port of Bremerhaven, where he and about 90 other scientists and crew have been kept in isolation to ensure they’re virus-free.

Organizers at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Ocean Research managed to fly out a handful of people via Canada last month. The rest of the crew will be exchanged with the help of two other German research ships that will meet the Polarstern on the sea ice edge.

That upcoming rendezvous will force the Polarstern to abandon its current position for three weeks at a critical time in the Arctic cycle.

“We are on the cusp right now of the onset of the sea ice melt season and that’s a really important transition,” said Shupe. “That could happen when the ship is gone,” he said. “It’s a distinct risk we face.”

To avoid missing out on key data, researchers will leave some instruments behind, including an 11-meter (36-foot) tower used for atmospheric measurements, and hope that it’s still there when they return.

The ice could just come together and destroy everything,” said Shupe. “Hopefully that doesn’t happen.”

Scientists on the 140-million-euro ($158 million) expedition have already gathered valuable data since setting out last September with 100 researchers and crew from 17 nations including the United States, France, China and Britain.

The intense interest into research about the coronavirus could have a positive knock-on effect for fields such as climate science, said Shupe.

“Everybody is now looking at the new for models of how this (virus) spreads,” he said. “Perhaps this actually opens the door to more people to understand the climate problem.”

Still, the researchers on MOSAiC are hoping to deal with one problem at a time, hence the strict quarantine to avoid any chance of carrying the coronavirus into the Arctic.

“We definitely don’t want anybody getting sick and we don’t want to take that out to the ship, said Shupe. Realistically, it’s actually one of the safest places on Earth right now.”

The Associated Press

The Sunday Times is reporting that the UK death toll could climb to 100,000 if lockdown restrictions ease too quickly. At 7pm on Sunday British prime minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce a gradual easing of lockdown restrictions, but some scientists are worried about a second wave of the virus.

According to the report the PM has been warned of having “very little room to manoeuvre” by his top scientific advisors and told Britain could suffer more than 100,000 deaths by the end of the year if ministers relax the lockdown too far and too fast, the paper reports a scientific adviser telling the government last night.

Following on from the below post, an extract from a just-published Observer feature, you may wonder what antibody testing is, and why it’s so important.

The aim of using antibody tests is to conduct what is known as serosurveillance or a serosurvey. This means testing a sample of a population to get an indication of how prevalent Covid-19 infections have been, including those who have been asymptomatic or only suffered mild symptoms

Antibody tests search for the Y-shaped proteins produced by the body in response to an infection that linger (in some cases permanently) in the blood for some time after recovery.

The hope is that policymakers will be able to obtain accurate models of how far the epidemic has spread, and what the real infection tallies are, a topic that has become increasingly heated in recent weeks.

Acquiring accurate antibody data will also be vital for vaccine developers to verify that their products are working as intended during clinical trials. Results from serosurveys will eventually help tell us whether exposure to Covid-19 provides immunity, or if we will face seasonal waves of infections. And intriguingly, they may assist in determining the importance of pre-existing immunity. Scientists have already wondered whether the differences in fatalities between various countries is due to certain populations having had greater exposure to similar viruses in the past.

But to gather truly reliable information, the antibody tests used must be shown to have a high degree of accuracy, something that has so far proven to be easier said than done.

Read more here:

At the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Marion Koopmans and a team of scientists are going throught the laborious process of verifying antibody tests for Covid-19. Over the last two months, dozens of prospective tests have hit the market, and with many governments wanting to feed the results of large-scale testing into their decisions whether to end lockdowns, biological tests have rarely carried such weight.

Most of the tests are enthusiastically marketed, boasting of their ability to accurately detect whether someone has previously been infected with the Sars-CoV-2 virus. The painstaking job of proving whether the tests do what they say has fallen to a worldwide network of 12 independent centres, of which Koopmans’s team is one.

“There are now more than 200 tests being offered and that number is increasing by the day,” she says. “Because people want to have testing up and running fast, there’s this massive, almost aggressive marketing of test kits that promise a lot, but haven’t gone through proper scrutiny.”

Read more from this Observer feature here:

After facing the existential threat of testing positive for Covid-19, these Australians describe the reactions of their communities, and the loneliness, isolation and pain many of them felt.

For Sean Sweetser, 50, the disease felt biblical: “I felt like a leper”

For Sweetser, who lives in a share house with his 18-year-old son and a roommate, isolating in his bedroom was easy enough. He plugged a throwaway kettle into his en suite, had an assortment of disinfectants on hand and kept himself entertained with streaming services. He worked sporadically as an engineer. At the height of his symptoms, he stayed in bed. After some concern about how he and his son would be fed, the problem was solved by Sikh Volunteers Australia who dropped off hot meals. Logistically, most things were there: except empathy.

“There was no compassion for me or the fact I might die, just themselves,” he says of his son and roommate, who entertained conspiracy theories about the virus.

Even after an honest conversation about their hostility, little changed, Sweetser recounts. “It felt biblical, I felt like a leper,” he says. “That was the hardest part – being ostracised in your own home.”

Sweetser was cautious and managed to recover without infecting either housemate. But when his son left the air conditioning running for too long – a pet peeve of Sweetser – he jokingly threatened to touch the remote without a glove.

As a regular blood donor in the past, Sweetser has been hoping researchers will ask him to be a part of a trial or make a blood donation.

Instead, the question he does get often is if he will write a science fiction book on a deadly virus, having already published a few e-books in the genre. His answer is firm no: “It’s boring. I like an enemy you can see … I prefer something like robots.”

Read more accounts from Covid-19 survivors down under here:

In Mexico, coronavirus patients were being turned away from hospitals on Saturday, as both public and private medical facilities quickly filled up and the number of new infections continued to rise. Of the 64 public hospitals in the capital’s sprawling metro area designated to receive Covid-19 patients, 26 were completely full, according to city government data.

Mexico announced 1,938 new cases of the virus on Saturday, bringing the total to 33,460, along with 193 additional deaths, bringing fatalities to 3,353.

Three members of the White House coronavirus taskforce have placed themselves in quarantine after contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19.

Anthony Fauci, a high-profile member of the White House coronavirus response team, is considered to be at relatively low risk based on the degree of his exposure, according to a representative for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Fauci, the 79-year-old NIAID director, has tested negative for COVID-19 and he will continue to be tested regularly.

Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will be “teleworking for the next two weeks” after it was determined he had a “low-risk exposure” to a person at the White House, the CDC said in a statement Saturday evening. The statement said he felt fine and has no symptoms.

The Food and Drug Administration confirmed that FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn had come in contact with someone who tested positive and was in self-quarantine for the next two weeks. He has tested negative for the virus.

Vice president Mike Pence’s press secretary tested positive for the coronavirus on Friday, making her the second person who works at the White House complex known to test positive this week. A member of the military serving as one of Trump’s valets tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump, who publicly identified the affected Pence aide as spokeswoman Katie Miller, said he was not worried about the virus spreading in the White House.

New Zealand police have been busy over the weekend as Kiwis break lockdown in record numbers on the eve of an announcement from the PM on restrictions easing.

On Monday Prime minister Jacinda Ardern will announce whether lockdown will effectively end, after 7 weeks of some of the strictest lockdown measures in the world confining Kiwis to their homes.

On Sunday police reported that 50 people breached Level 3 lockdown rules in 24 hours, including a family hosting a children’s birthday party, and a backyard church gathering.

Wellington City Council spokesman Richard MacLean told local media that capital city Wellington was “like rush hour” over the weekend, while the beach and walking tracks “have taken a hammering”.

The World Health Organisation has issued guidance on whether you can catch coronavirus from food packaging or food touched by an infected person.

“While there’s no evidence to date that anyone has been infected this way, it is always good to practice food safety.” WHO tweeted.