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Key Points: With just a few weeks remaining before schools in the U.S. are scheduled to reopen, and the federal government encouraging in-person schooling, there remain many questions about the risk COVID-19 poses to children and their role in transmission of the disease. Indeed, other countries have not reopened schools with the levels of community transmission found in the U.S., coupled with its insufficient testing and limited contact tracing. Our review of the latest available data indicates that, while children who are infected with COVID-19 are more likely to be asymptomatic and less likely to experience severe disease (though a small subset become quite sick), they are capable of transmitting to both children and adults. What remains unclear and where evidence is still need...

Florida on Tuesday hit a new statewide record high for number of coronavirus deaths reported in a single day since the pandemic began — 186 residents. And while there are signs hospitalizations may be leveling off, the virus continues to upend life there and across the country.  Nearly half of all states are now part of the government's so-called "red zone" due to rising cases, including Missouri, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Dr. Deborah Birx on Tuesday said hot spots threaten regions where cases are controlled. "We can see the virus moving North," she warned. "What we're seeing across the South right now is both rural infections, as well as small metros and major metros, simultaneously." Birx said. This week, Dr. Birx was in five states where cases are on the rise and recommended that so...

A computer rendering of the SARS-COV-2 virus. Radoslav Zilinsky/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Radoslav Zilinsky/Getty Images A computer rendering of the SARS-COV-2 virus. Radoslav Zilinsky/Getty Images On January 30, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus — then unnamed — to be a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern." The vir...

In a study presented Tuesday at the conference and published in JAMA, a blood test to detect the tau protein, one of the hallmark signs of Alzheimer's, was as accurate as a spinal tap or a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which are the current gold standards of diagnosis while a person is living. More research is required and such a test is likely still years away from being available, but researchers said the results are promising. "This research represents an exciting step towards developing a blood test that could help identify Alzheimer's disease by focusing on specific sub-types of tau, one of the key proteins that becomes abnormal as part of the Alzheimer's disease changes in the brain," said Clive Ballard, professor of age-related disease at the University of Exeter Med...

Large-scale randomized testing and contact tracing over time, which would give a more complete picture of who transmits the virus and how, hasn’t been done yet in schools. In July, in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the results of tracing more than 59,000 contacts of 5,706 coronavirus patients. Children younger than 10 were found to have transmitted the virus much less than did those between 10 and 19, whose transmission rate was equivalent to that of adults. But only 3 percent of patients in that initial cohort were 19 and younger, and their having been tested probably means they presented symptoms. It’s still unclear how asymptomatic children, who are hard to identify, might spread the virus; it’s ...