Health & Fitness

Lagging labs: Commercial laboratories like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp have warned that their turnaround times for test results are rising due to a surge in demand. Earlier this week, Quest said that it now needs an average of 3-5 days to produce results on non-priority samples, up from 2-3 days. What’s next: Giroir emphasized that young adults, who account for the majority of new cases, must be vigilant about practicing social distancing and wearing a mask. The Department of Health and Human Services is developing plans to implement surge testing in moderate-sized communities of high concern in Texas, Florida and Louisiana, to try to bring the outbreaks in those areas under control. “A blitz of testing over a few days could help to identify a lot of the under 35-year-old asymptom...

A number of California counties are worried about the future of their state-funded coronavirus testing sites as the number of new cases surges within the state, Kaiser Health News reported Wednesday. Almost two dozen county public health officials expressed concern to Kaiser Health News that the state has threatened to cut funding to underutilized testing sites. Officials from Contra Costa County, Riverside County and Mendocino County told the news outlet they felt they were at risk of losing their testing sites. Ali Bay, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health, stressed in a statement that the state has not “halted/suspended/ended any testing programs.”  The state has more than 100 community testing sites, Bay told The Hill. These sites are on contract ...

New York — A new study has found the coronavirus was in New York earlier than previously known. WABC reports researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai analyzed more than 5,000 plasma samples from patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Antibodies for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, were detected in samples from the week ending Feb. 23. That’s at least a week earlier than New York’s first confirmed case of coronavirus on March 1. Antibodies also suggest the patients were infected at least two weeks earlier, meaning it’s possible the virus was spreading in early February or January. NYC became America’s largest epicenter for the virus as the state saw more than 18,000 hospitalizations in April and a peak of 800 deaths in one day on April 14. As of Mo...

Reagents — substances used to carry out tests — and pipettes remain in short supply in many places, and the machines that run the tests are expensive and time-consuming to build. There are also limits on collection sites, exacerbated by rising summer temperatures. Staff at testing sites, standing outside in full-body protective gear, must rotate more often to avoid heat-related health problems. Some testing sites have been temporarily or permanently closed because of extreme heat. “The demand, in light of the surge — it’s overwhelmed the system,” said Marcia Katz, associate dean for clinical affairs at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine. “The lines are incredibly long. . . . There is availability for testing, there’s just limitations in terms of how many people can ...

PHOENIX (AP) — California closed bars, theaters and indoor restaurant dining all over again across most of the state Wednesday because of a surging coronavirus caseload, and Arizona’s outbreak grew more severe by nearly every measure, as the crisis across the South and West sent a shudder through the country. The run-up in confirmed cases has been blamed in part on what’s been called “knucklehead behavior” by Americans not wearing masks or obeying other social-distancing rules as restaurants and other sites reopened from coast to coast. “The bottom line is the spread of this virus continues at a rate that is particularly concerning,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in dramatically expanding the closings he first announced over the weekend. The shutdown announcement, which came just ahea...

A study of 7,155 children in the United Kingdom found that waking up frequently during the night and irregular sleep routines as babies and toddlers was linked to psychotic experiences in children ages 12 and 13. Also, children who slept for shorter periods at night were more likely to be associated with borderline personality disorder at ages 11 and 12. The research, which published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, was the first time possible links between early childhood sleep problems and adolescent psychotic experiences and borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms have been examined. "We know from previous research that persistent nightmares in children have been associated with both psychosis and borderline personality disorder," said lead author Isabel Morales-Mun...

In dengue, a mosquito-borne tropical disease, she learned, the virus appeared to destroy these cells, which produce platelets, leading to uncontrolled bleeding. The novel coronavirus seemed to amplify their effect, causing dangerous clotting. She was struck by the parallels: “Covid-19 and dengue sound really different, but the cells that are involved are similar.” Autopsies have long been a source of breakthroughs in understanding new diseases, from HIV/AIDS and Ebola to Lassa fever — and the medical community is counting on them to do the same for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. With a vaccine probably many months away in even the most optimistic scenarios, autopsies are becoming a critical source of information for research into possible treatments. When the pandemic...

NEW YORK (AP) — There is little evidence that the protests that erupted after George Floyd’s death caused a significant increase in U.S. coronavirus infections, according to public health experts. If the protests had driven an explosion in cases, experts say, the jumps would have started to become apparent within two weeks — and perhaps as early as five days. But that didn’t happen in many cities with the largest protests, including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. In what’s considered the first systematic look at the question, a team of economists determined that only one of 13 cities involved in the earliest wave of protests after Memorial Day had an increase that would fit the pattern. It was Phoenix, where experts say cases and hospitalizations surged after a dec...

I am a physician and a scientist at the University of Virginia. I care for patients and conduct research to find better ways to diagnose and treat infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Here I’m sharing what is known about which treatments work, and which don’t, for the new coronavirus infection. Keep in mind that this field of medicine is rapidly evolving as our understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus improves. So what I am writing today may change within days or weeks. Below are the treatments that have been tried and for which we have the best knowledge. Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine — no evidence they work There are three randomized controlled trials of hydroxychloroquine, all of which have failed to prove or disprove a beneficial or har...

Young people are out enjoying the warmer weather across the country, but according to health officials, they also might be spreading and contracting the coronavirus. As people pack into parks, beaches, restaurants, bars and even concerts, cases are rising in at least 37 states, with surges among young people linked to everything from fitness classes to summer fraternity parties.  "I'm not too scared of getting sick," said Chris Clarici in San Francisco.  "I just personally don't care," said a young person in Boston. "I haven't got sick yet." Experts have warned that attitude is dangerous.  "They may be indirectly hurting people by infecting someone who then infects someone, who then infects someone who's vulnerable," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said last...