Month: November 2020

In an attempt to keep the fast-spreading coronavirus pandemic from again disrupting its operations, Ford Motor Co. has ordered a dozen ultra-cold freezers to store vaccines globally when they become available, the company confirmed Tuesday. "It's important to Ford because the health and safety of our employees is our top priority," Kelli Felker, Ford global manufacturing and labor communications manager, told the Free Press. "What we've done is order these ultra-cold freezers so we can make the vaccine available to them on a voluntary basis when the vaccine is available." At this point, the company is looking to offer the vaccine to employees only. In the matters of COVID-19 protocol overall, Ford has been proactive about offering guidance and support to families of employees. More:Ford w...

Haunting photographs show an aerial view of freezer trucks that have been converted into makeshift morgues that hold the unclaimed bodies of 650 COVID-19 patients parked along a Brooklyn waterfront. The upsetting images show some 50 trucks lined up neatly in the parking lot of the 39th Street Pier in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. The emergency morgues were set up after the city’s mortuary facilities and private funeral homes were overflowing with dead bodies during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when New York City was America’s virus epicenter. Some 50 freezer trucks parked on the 39th Street Pier in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn have been converted into makeshift morgues that are storing 650 unclaimed bodies of COVID-19 fatalities ...

People who have been diagnosed in the past six days, based on testing date or symptom onset, are in the high priority category, as are people who visit, live in, or work in a care facility or go to a job in a high-density workplace. If more than 14 days have passed since the test, a case investigation shouldn’t be performed, he added.

Face masks slow spread of COVID-19; types of masks, length of use matter. The use of face masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19 has been widely recommended by health professionals. This has triggered studies exploring the physics of face mask use and disease transmission, as well as investigations into materials, design, and other issues affecting the way face masks work. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, investigators looked at research on face masks and their use and summarized what we know, to date, about the way face masks filter or block the virus. They also summarize design issues that still need to be addressed. One key aspect of face mask function involves the size of fluid droplets expelled from the nose and mouth when a person talks, sings, sneezes, coughs,...

WASHINGTON — Cheap coronavirus tests that ordinary Americans can administer at home, without either a prescription or any medical expertise, could significantly drive down infection rates, say researchers from the University of Colorado and Harvard. Their findings counter long-standing concerns that rapid tests are less accurate than those that are sent to laboratories. Those inaccuracies become effectively inconsequential if enough rapid tests are done with sufficient frequency, their statistical models indicate. “The critical finding of our work is that when it comes to screening tests for COVID, turnaround time is absolutely critical,” said Daniel Larremore, a computer scientist at Colorado. “That’s because stopping transmission requires telling people they’re infected early, so they c...