Month: June 2020

Prison officials are planning to bus as many as 150 incarcerated people out of coronavirus-ridden San Quentin State Prison to a Bakersfield-area institution as early as Monday, sources said, in a move critics and a lawmaker said is reminiscent of the botched transfer that triggered San Quentin’s outbreak in the first place. A spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed the planned transfer, but did not specify how many people would be included. “The department is very concerned with the increase in positive COVID-19 cases in San Quentin, and in order...

It's not an understatement to say that the entire nation's hopes are focused on what's happening in a Maryland laboratory – step one in manufacturing a potential coronavirus vaccine. Sean Kirk, executive vice president of Emergent BioSolutions, explained to correspondent Martha Teichner how a bioreactor is used to create the ingredients needed in the development and testing of a vaccine for clinical trials already underway in Australia. "This is where it begins, to produce the hundreds of millions of doses," he said.  Emergent BioSolutions is gearing up now, preparing 4,000-liter tanks, to have hundreds of millions of doses ready to go if and when any of its clients – Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Vaxart and AstraZenica – make it to the finish line in the race to a vaccine. Teichner ask...

Critics say the failing stems from a lack of direction from the Trump administration, which has left reopening decisions to states and released guidance on contact tracing weeks after state efforts were launched. That’s left sizable state-to-state disparities in readiness. “President Trump’s refusal to focus on testing and contact tracing and the general absence of any leadership led to disastrous failures in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement to POLITICO. Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Trump administration to quickly distribute $8 billion Congress approved weeks ago to fortify contact tracing programs. While the administration has already released $11 billion for state testing and tracing, Democrats say further d...

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the globe, the best hope for truly getting it under control is a vaccine that would protect people from contracting COVID-19. Scientists in the U.S., China, the U.K. and elsewhere are racing to develop a vaccine and there have been some promising signs that one of the many vaccine candidates under development may prove effective against the virus. In the U.S., President Donald Trump has predicted a vaccine will arrive before the end of the year. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease has said it’s a question of “when and not if” a vaccine against this coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, will be developed, and also predicted that could happen before year...

The town’s Literati Bookstore launched a GoFundMe campaign to keep from going out of business, and created a virtual site for its famed “public typewriter” so customers could keep leaving anonymous typed messages, a company tradition. (“Oh how I wish for a coffee not made by my own hands,” someone typed online in May.) In State College, Pa., an estimated 65 percent of the community is made up of students at Penn State’s main campus, a local juggernaut that enrolls 46,000 students, employs more than 17,000 nonstudents and injects about $128 million a year into rural Centre County. The university has announced plans to reopen with double-occupancy dorm rooms and at least half of its classes in person, but it is still not known how many students will return. Also in question is the future of...

Major medical centers nationwide trying to understand why some COVID-19 patients continue to have symptoms weeks and even months after having been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Amy Watson, 47, is one of those patients. She's had a fever, she said, for more than 100 days. Amy Watson.Marc Leonard"It's been maddening," said Watson, a preschool teacher in Portland, Oregon. Since mid-March, her temperature has crept up to 100 or 101 degrees almost daily by midafternoon. She was diagnosed with COVID-19 in April, about a month after her symptoms — cough, congestion and extreme fatigue — began. Now, those symptoms have evolved into weeks of low-grade fever and a burning sensation under her skin. Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak Watson's illness was never severe enough to warrant hosp...