Tag Archives: COVID-19

Mexican funeral homes face ‘horrific’ unseen coronavirus toll

By Drazen Jorgic

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Like many people around the world, Mexican funeral home owner Salvador Ascencio did not believe at first the coronavirus outbreak was going to be a big deal.

Then calls from grieving relatives began to pour in.

During the first 11 days of May, his small funeral parlor in a run-down part of Mexico City dealt with 30 bodies, a more than four-fold spike in daily funeral services compared to the same period last May.

“I have never experienced a situation like this,” said Ascencio, 52, encircled by shiny wooden coffins in the cramped parlour of a business his family has operated since 1973.

“The truth is that what we are experiencing is horrific.”

Reuters surveyed 18 funeral homes and crematoriums across the capital, including several belonging to Mexico’s two biggest chains. They also reported rocketing demand for their services during the pandemic.

The findings suggest that official statistics in Mexico may be far underestimating the true death toll from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Mexico’s government has acknowledged that the real number of fatalities is higher than the official tally of 5,666 coronavirus deaths nationwide, though it says it has limited tools to measure accurately how much higher because Mexico has the lowest testing rate among OECD countries.

Hugo Lopez-Gatell, Mexico’s coronavirus tsar and deputy health minister, said earlier this month in response to media reports about Mexico undercounting fatalities that people often arrive at hospital too sick for a timely laboratory test.

The federal government has also acknowledged there is sometimes a lag between coronavirus deaths and their inclusion in daily official figures due to delays in certifying deaths and processing information from hospitals and morgues.

Complicating efforts to estimate the true impact of the pandemic, Mexico has no real-time statistics on deaths nationwide: the most recent published mortality data is from 2018.

That makes it difficult to calculate ‘excess mortality’: a term used by epidemiologists to estimate the increase in deaths, versus normal conditions, attributable to a public health crisis.

Based on information from 13 funerals homes in the capital belonging to Mexico’s two biggest chains, the excess mortality rate in the first week of May could be at least 2.5 times higher than the government’s official coronavirus tally during that period, according to Reuters calculations.

While death rates could vary according to neighborhoods and over time, infectious disease specialist Alejandro Macias, an academic and Mexico’s national commissioner for influenza during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, was explained the news agency’s findings and said a calculation of more than twice the announced number of deaths sounded about right.

“In these times, saying double doesn’t sound too much to me,” said Macias, adding that it may be “even a little bigger.”

One of the funeral home chains, J. Garcia Lopez, told Reuters it had registered a 40% increase in funeral services in early May in Mexico City compared to last year and was handling an average of 50 fatalities per day. The other chain, Grupo Gayosso, saw a 70% spike.

Based on the last three years for which mortality data is available, Mexico City saw an average of 6,048 deaths in May between 2016 and 2018, or a daily rate of 195 deaths.

Taking the more conservative J. Garcia Lopez funeral data as a guideline, a 40% increase in deaths would equate to an average of 273 people dying daily in the capital in the first week of May – equivalent to an additional 78 deaths per day above the average of 2016-2018.

That would be roughly two and a half times the government’s official COVID-19 death tally in Mexico City, published on Monday, of 32 fatalities per day in the first week of May.

Excess mortality figures are a recognized means of determining the impact of a pandemic, he said, adding Mexico’s “severe underestimation” of the death toll did not indicate a conspiracy by the government to suppress numbers. “It’s a consequence of not doing enough tests,” Macias said.

Data from funeral homes and death registries has contradicted official coronavirus death tolls in other nations across the globe, including in Italy and Indonesia.

Although the Reuters estimate was only an approximation, it was broadly in line with a survey of death certificates by Mexican non-profit MCCI published this week that found three times as many confirmed, probable or suspected COVID-19 deaths.

Asked by Reuters about its findings and whether the death toll could be significantly higher than officially reported, a spokesman for the Mexico City government, Ivan Escalante, said a scientific commission established last week by the local authorities to bring more transparency to the pandemic death numbers would seek to determine that, including by examining suspected cases.

Officially, 1,108 people had died from the coronavirus in Mexico City by Monday. Mexico on May 12 reported its most lethal day yet with 353 coronavirus fatalities.

OVERFLOWING MORGUES

In the Izaz Cremaciones crematorium in Iztapalapa, the epicenter of Mexico City’s outbreak, black smoke billowed from chimneys last week whenever a coronavirus victim was cremated. The thicker smoke was due to extra layers of plastic wrapped around the bodies, workers said.

Izaz cremated 239 people in the first 11 days of May, compared with the 188 people it cremated during the whole of May last year. The increase was due in part to the government advising cremation for all suspected coronavirus cases.The company has introduced 24-hour shifts to operate its two crematorium ovens.

More than a third of Izaz’s cremations at the start of the month were confirmed or “probable COVID-19” cases, according to death certificates in the crematorium registry.

Funeral home J. Lopez Garcia also said more than a third of the daily cases in the same period were “COVID and/or atypical pneumonia.”

Workers using hearses to ferry the bodies of coronavirus victims to crematoriums around the capital have taken on the look of astronauts, sheathed in hazmat suits and gas masks.

“We had to call almost seven crematoriums to find a space,” said Francisco Juarez, whose family run a funeral business on the other side of Mexico City from Izaz.

“It’s something I’ve never seen, the hospitals are full,” he said. “The areas holding the bodies are now completely filled up.”

The surge in demand for funeral services has coincided with many public hospitals overflowing. By Monday evening, 47 of 64 hospitals in the Mexico City metropolitan areas were full and 13 were near capacity, government data showed.

Figures from Grupo Gayosso, which operates 21 funeral homes in 13 cities, point to rising coronavirus deaths elsewhere in the country too.

In the northern border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali, they more than doubled, said Alejandro Sosa, the chain’s operations director.

Ascencio said he keeps receiving calls from people who suspect their relatives have been killed by the coronavirus.

If the toll keeps rising, he said, he won’t be able to handle them all because the city does not have enough facilities to cremate the bodies of the victims, he said.

“Unfortunately, there are not enough ovens,” Ascencio said.

(This story has been refiled to change to ‘Macias’ from ‘he’ in paragraph 20 to establish who is being quoted)

(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Daniel Wallis)

U.S. CDC reports 1,504,830 coronavirus cases, 90,340 deaths

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday reported 1,504,830 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 24,481 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 933 to 90,340.

The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as COVID-19, caused by the new coronavirus, as of 4 pm ET on May 18, compared with its count a day earlier. (https://bit.ly/2SGLijD)

The CDC figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

(Reporting by Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

As in 1918, New York may use staggered work hours to keep subway safe

By Nathan Layne

(Reuters) – As New York City makes plans to reopen in the coming months, officials are dusting off the playbook from the 1918 flu pandemic, when businesses were ordered to begin their workdays at staggered times to prevent the subway from becoming a vector of disease.

The idea, then and now, is to spread riders through the day to avoid the kind of crowding health experts fear could turn the subway into a breeding ground for the novel coronavirus which has killed over 20,000 people in the city.

Talks over staggered hours and days for offices are still at an early stage, a member of the New York state’s reopening panel told Reuters. Coordination could prove complex in a city of 220,000 businesses, most of them smaller firms.

But Patrick Foye, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has been making the case to business leaders, signaling that he sees it as key to restoring confidence in the tangled web of 665 miles of track that ferried 5.5 million people a day before the lockdown in March.

Foye told a May 6 call organized by the Association for a Better New York that he sees staggered work hours and days as “part of the answer” to congestion, citing the 1918 response.

Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City and a member of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reopening committee, said businesses would support coordinated start times.

“It’s the expectation of employers that something like that will have to be worked out if they are going to get their people back on the trains,” she said.

During the 1918 pandemic, the New York City health commissioner, Royal Copeland, staggered starting and ending times for most businesses by 15-minute increments. While it is unclear what impact the move had, New York ultimately fared better than other cities – it had a death rate of 4.7 per 1,000 residents, far lower than Philadelphia at 7.3.

New York City is unlikely to reopen in a meaningful way until the fall. Even then, workers will likely return in phases, if at all. Employees of technology firms Twitter Inc and Square Inc, for example, have been given the option to keep working at home.

“As we try to reopen the economy the use of buildings is obviously going to change. We should be talking about implementing staggered shifts,” said Kyle Bragg, president of service workers union 32BJ SEIU.

MORE TRAINS

Last month Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and physician Jeffrey Harris published a paper titled “The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City” that pointed to a parallel between rider patterns and virus spread in early March.

But some officials have said they are not convinced the subway is a root cause. One skeptic is Cuomo, who has cited data showing transit workers with below-average infection rates and a hospital survey indicating most patients had not used public transit.

Sarah Kaufman, associate director at New York University (NYU) Rudin Center for Transportation said the notion that subways spread the virus was inaccurate. “It was a failure to quickly make people stay home.”

Even so, transit and health experts say the MTA needs to go beyond disinfecting cars at night, the mandating of masks and other steps already taken. One common proposal is more frequent trains, especially on lines where people stand shoulder-to-shoulder during peak times.

“That’s the only way to help with the social distancing so that you clear the platforms quickly and there are fewer riders on the trains,” said Elodie Ghedin, a former professor of global public health at NYU who is now at the National Institutes of Health.

That would require money the MTA doesn’t have. It received $3.9 billion in emergency federal funding but is asking for $3.9 billion more to compensate for the 93 percent drop in subway revenues.

For now, companies are making their own plans. Marsh & McLennan Cos, a Manhattan-based insurance and risk management group, said it instructed office leaders to make plans for staggered teams at the office and to determine whether commuters should travel at off-peak times.

Authorities were looking at how best to use technology, including apps that could direct commuters to use trains or subways at certain times based on capacity, Wylde said, a tool that did not exist in 1918.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Frank McGurty and Grant McCool)

A nurse struggled with COVID-19 trauma. He was found dead in his car

By Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) – Becoming a nurse in 2018 was a dream come true for William Coddington.

He loved helping people and feeling needed at his West Palm Beach, Florida hospital. The 32-year-old was on the upswing of a decade-long battle with opioid addiction and other substance abuse, according to friends and family, who said he was committed to his recovery.

It all started to unravel in March, as fatally ill COVID-19 patients showed up in his intensive care unit.

It rattled Coddington to see patients his age die, his mother Carolyn said. He could no longer attend his 12-step recovery meetings in person. He was scared about how little personal protective equipment he had. He had nightmares about alarms going off on ventilators in the ICU.

On the night of April 24, he spoke by phone to his best friend Robert Marks and sounded distraught, Marks said. Coddington was caught between the war zone at work and his confinement at home.

“Don’t take unnecessary risks but hang in there,” Marks texted him.

The next morning, Coddington was found dead in his car in a hotel parking lot in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

His family suspects a drug overdose. A spokeswoman for the Broward County Medical Examiner’s office said the case is pending. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said it is still investigating but does not suspect foul play.

Reuters reconstructed Coddington’s last weeks through some of his text messages, Facebook posts and interviews with his parents, brother and two close friends. Reuters could not independently verify Coddington’s cause of death.

Frontline healthcare workers are trying to cope with the trauma of treating the novel coronavirus, which has inundated U.S. hospitals with desperately ill patients and killed more than 90,000 Americans in less than three months.

Healthcare workers with histories of substance abuse may have more difficulty coping with fear, isolation and witnessing so much death during the pandemic, psychiatrists told Reuters. Those factors could provoke relapses in workers recovering from addiction, they said.

“Patients who are being treated for opioid use disorder have reported increased stress and opioid craving since this pandemic began,” said Kelly Dunn, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University who researches opioid use.

SCARED, BUT COMMITTED

Coddington grew up living with his mother, an executive assistant at a healthcare company, in Deerfield Beach after his parents got divorced in 2001.

Coddington’s family said he was addicted to opioids from a young age. It started with painkillers he received after a leg surgery, Coddington told his friend Skye Alexander, whom he met in nursing school.

Coddington entered inpatient rehabilitation at age 21, his mother said. When he emerged, he joined 12-step fellowships, self-help healing groups, and therapy.

“He was always trying different things to find the stability to interact with the world,” said Marks, a resident of Miami Beach who knew Coddington for 10 years.

When COVID-19 patients in March started arriving at JFK Medical Center’s North campus, where Coddington worked for 3 months, he volunteered for the coronavirus unit.

He did it because he was younger than some of his colleagues, and so potentially less likely to become severely ill, and because he was not a parent, said his friend Alexander.

“That was the type of person Will was,” she said.

Still, Coddington was scared, his friends said. He risked exposure and infecting his 65-year-old mother, with whom he still lived.

Palm Beach County ranks third in Florida behind Miami-Dade and Broward counties for confirmed coronavirus cases; nearly 300 people have died of COVID-19 there.

Coddington said in an April 13 Facebook post that his hospital had a shortage of protective equipment, especially crucial N95 respirator masks. He said he didn’t blame his employer because the issue was widespread.

“In my hospital we are rationing 1 n95 mask for my whole shift,” Coddington wrote. “We are running out of gowns. We are having people make makeshift face shields that end up snapping.”

Days before he died, his face shield fell off while he was helping with an intubation, which involves putting tubes into patients’ airways to assist breathing, said his father Ronald, a port engineer in Palm Beach.

“He literally felt things splash on his face,” Ronald recalled his son telling him.

Kathryn Walton, a spokeswoman for JFK Medical Center, part of the hospital group HCA Healthcare, declined to comment on Coddington’s death except to extend condolences to his family. She said the hospital’s goal was always to protect employees.

The hospital has “adequate supplies of PPE” and is “taking steps to conserve PPE because we do not know what our future needs will be,” Walton said.

She said the hospital offers mental health counseling by phone and video. Coddington’s friends and family say they don’t know if he used those services.

‘BRACING FOR IMPACT’

Coddington suffered from the social isolation imposed by the pandemic, his family and friends said.

He loved being around people, said Marks, who first met Coddington at a diner. Coddington’s “wacky” impersonations of TV characters endeared him to Marks right away.

“He was like a character all on his own,” Marks said.

Coddington relied on 12-step meetings to stay sober, but after one virtual video gathering, he told his mother it was not as helpful.

“He couldn’t meet with his sponsor,” she said. “And his friends, nobody wanted to see him because he worked in a hospital, not even to sit 6 feet apart.”

In his last weeks, Coddington came home from work, spoke little and played video games in his room, Carolyn said. His impersonations – including one of her Southern accent that always made them laugh – stopped.

His friend Alexander, of Sunrise, Florida, said she noticed the change too: “It was despair … creeping in.”

Coddington had relapsed before. In 2017, while on a break from nursing school, he had ended up on a ventilator, according to Alexander, who said she visited him in the hospital. She said Coddington told her he had overdosed on the club drug Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate (GHb).

With the pandemic weighing on Coddington, his loved ones were “bracing for impact,” Marks said. Carolyn checked on him constantly. His father and friends called and texted.

“You are so needed right now by others. You can be great,” Ronald Coddington said to his son in text messages on April 1. “Please please bury me some day. Don’t make me bury you … I love you.”

“I love you too,” Coddington replied.

CRAVING RELIEF

The night of April 24, Coddington argued with his mother, who feared a relapse was coming. They made up, but he announced he was heading to a hotel for a good night’s sleep.

Coddington kissed Carolyn and assured her she could track his location on her phone. He called Marks that evening, expressing how trapped he felt between the chaos at work and being cooped up at home.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about him because of how upset he sounded,” Marks said. Sleepless at 1:24 a.m., Marks sent his friend $20 on Apple Pay to buy himself coffee before his shift.

Coddington never responded. Carolyn checked his location the morning of April 25. He wasn’t at the hospital. She drove to the hotel and found him dead in his car.

Ronald Coddington said police told him they obtained a video, likely hotel security footage, showing his son sitting in his car in the parking lot that night when another car briefly pulled alongside. Ronald said there was “some kind of exchange” between his son and the other vehicle’s driver that he suspects was a drug deal.

The Broward County Sheriff’s office did not respond to Reuters’ request for the video.

Family members think the toxicology report, expected in a few weeks, will confirm an overdose – a temporary escape gone wrong.

“Do I think he wanted to die that night? 100% no,” said his friend Marks. “I would bet every dollar I have that it was in an effort to have some relief.”

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Ross Colvin and Marla Dickerson)

New cases? Deaths? U.S. states’ reopening plans are all over the map

By Makini Brice

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has set some distinct goals the federal district needs to meet in order for her to feel comfortable ending a stay-at-home order, she told reporters last week.

If the U.S. capital, which reported more than 7,200 cases and around 400 deaths by Monday, hits certain metrics, including a declining number of cases over 14 days and sustained low transmission rate, she could lift the order before it expires on June 8.

Neighboring Maryland, home to tens of thousands who commute to D.C. for work, is looking at a different set of data to determine whether it is ready to open up. It includes a plateau in the rate of hospitalizations and the number of cases in hospitals’ intensive-care units.

Virginia, home to tens of thousands more who commute to D.C., has another metric altogether. Governor Ralph Northam said in April the state needed to see a decrease in the percentage of positive tests over 14 days, a decrease in hospitalizations, have enough hospital beds and intensive care capacity and a sustainable supply of personal protective equipment.

This situation, with three different leaders using different criteria to decide how to reopen – has been replicated throughout the country, according to data https://www.nga.org/coronavirus-reopening-plans compiled by the National Governors’ Association.

Luisa Franzini, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, said every state seems to be using its own criteria to determine whether to reopen.

None is really meeting all the metrics set out by the federal government, Franzini said. Instead, local governments appear to be picking “what seems to be working for them.”

New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, said it would need 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 people, and 90 days of PPE stockpiles before it can “re-open.” Next-door New Jersey is looking for a “14-day trend line” of dropping cases and hospitalizations and has already allowed some beaches to reopen.

Kansas said it needed to see stable or declining case rates over 14 days, but has opened most businesses. Neighboring Missouri, which Kansas City straddles, reopened all business on May 4. South Dakota, site of one of the largest hot spots, said it could not have clusters that posed a risk to the public, and neighboring Minnesota has reopened retail shops.

As the novel coronavirus bore down on the United States, the White House on March 13 issued national state of emergency guidelines and state after state-ordered many businesses closed in a bid to curb the spread.

In April, the federal government provided a set of guidelines on when states should reopen – including declining numbers of COVID-19 cases over the course of 14 days; a downward trajectory of positive tests as a percentage of total tests; and a robust testing program for at-risk healthcare workers.

But, as with many aspects of handling the pandemic, the final say on how to reopen lies with state and local officials, who under the U.S. Constitution hold the authority to make laws related to residents’ health and welfare.

Federal lawmakers, meanwhile, have not set any new standards for workplace safety, although they could.

“There has not been the slightest hint of interest on the part of Congress in creating a national uniform set of rules on business closures and re-openings,” said Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas. None of the guidelines from the White House are legally binding, he noted.

The patchwork approach means that some states may do better than others at controlling infections, experts say.

“I hate to say it in these terms,” said Raymond Scheppach, a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, “but I think we’re in a period of experimentation.”

 

(Reporting by Makini Brice in Washington; Editing by Heather Timmons and Dan Grebler)

Coronavirus deadliest in New York City’s black and Latino neighborhoods, data shows

By Maria Caspani and Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Some New York City neighborhoods have seen death rates from the novel coronavirus nearly 15 times higher than others, according to data released by New York City’s health department on Monday, showing the disproportionate toll taken on poor communities.

The data shows for the first time a breakdown on the number of deaths in each of the city’s more than 60 ZIP codes. The highest death rate was seen on the edge of Brooklyn in a neighborhood dominated by a large subsidized-housing development called Starrett City.

Civic leaders had been pushing for the more granular data, which they said would show stark racial and economic disparities after New York City became the heart of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world in March and April.

In the wealthy, mostly white enclave of Gramercy Park in Manhattan, the rate is 31 deaths per 100,000 residents, the data shows. A long subway ride away in Far Rockaway in the borough of Queens, which is more than 40% black and 25% Latino or Hispanic, the death rate is nearly 15 times higher: 444 deaths per 100,000 residents.

“It’s really heartbreaking and it should tug at the moral conscience of the city,” Mark Levine, chairman of the City Council’s health committee, said in an interview. “We knew we had dramatic inequality. This, in graphic form, shows it’s even greater than maybe many of us feared.”

Poor black and Latino New Yorkers are much more likely to do low-paid, essential jobs that cannot be done remotely, putting them at higher risk of exposure, Levine said. They are also more likely than rich, white New Yorkers to live in smaller, more crowded apartments.

Due to inequalities in access to healthcare, they are also more likely to have underlying health conditions, such as diabetes or hypertension, Levine said.

The city had been releasing a daily update of cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, by ZIP code, but only gave a breakdown of deaths for each of the city’s five boroughs.

The coronavirus has killed at least 20,800 people in the city so far, according to health department data.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen and Maria Caspani in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Some signs children may not transmit COVID-19, two UK epidemiologists say

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) – There are tentative signs that children may not spread the novel coronavirus as much as adults, two top epidemiologists said on Tuesday, though they cautioned that the bad news was that human immunity may not last that long.

As Europe and the United States try to get back to work after the first deadly wave of the novel coronavirus outbreak, world leaders are trying to work out when it is safe for children and students can get back to their studies.

The signs are that children may not spread it as much as adults, Dr Rosalind Eggo, who is on committees that advise the British government on its infectious disease response, told members of parliament’s upper house.

“We think that children are less likely to get it so far but it is not certain, we are very certain that children are less likely to have severe outcomes and there are hints that children are less infectious but it is not certain,” said Eggo of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

John Edmunds, a member of Britain’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told the House of Lords’ science committee that it was striking how children did not seem to play much of a role in spreading the novel coronavirus.

“It is unusual that children don’t seem to play much of a role in transmission because for most respiratory viruses and bacteria they play a central role, but in this they don’t seem to,” said Edmunds, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“There is only one documented outbreak associated with a school – which is amazing,” Edmunds said.

But he added there was potentially bad news, though, that human immunity to the novel coronavirus may not last long.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Michael Holden)

Trump administration awards contract to make COVID-19 drugs in U.S

(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has awarded a $354 million contract to U.S.-based Phlow Corp to manufacture drugs being tested or used to fight the new coronavirus as well as some medicines that are in shortage.

The four-year contract, with an additional $458 million included as potential options, is a move by the administration to reduce the country’s dependency on foreign nations to support its drug supply chain.

Virginia-based Phlow Corp said it had started making pharmaceutical ingredients and finished dosage forms for over a dozen essential medicines to treat hospitalized patients with COVID-19-related illnesses.

Many of these medicines are in shortage and have previously been imported from other countries, the private company said in a statement. India and China account for a vast majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients used to make drugs in the United States.

“For far too long, we’ve relied on foreign manufacturing and supply chains for our most important medicines and active pharmaceutical ingredients while placing America’s health, safety, and national security at grave risk,” Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, said in a statement.

The funding immediately enabled Phlow to deliver to the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile over 1.6 million doses of five essential generic medicines used to treat COVID-19 patients, it said.

Phlow will partner with private sector entities that include Civica Rx, Ampac Fine Chemicals and the Medicines for All Institute to manufacture the medicines.

All pharmaceutical products by Phlow will be made in the United States, according to the company’s website.

The private company said it was also building the United States’ long-term, national stockpile to secure key ingredients used to manufacture the most essential medicines on U.S. soil.

(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee and Saumya Sibi Joseph in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

What you need to know about the coronavirus right now 5-19-20

(Reuters) – Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

On the economy, “medical metrics” rule for now

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will testify on Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee and face questions about their plans keep the world’s largest economy afloat and missteps in rolling out some $3 trillion in aid so far.

Two months into the pandemic, many analysts have concluded that U.S. policy has at best fought back worst-case outcomes on both the health and economic front.

Powell has said he sees the likely need for up to six more months of government financial help for firms and families. With regular data on the economy at best volatile and at worst outdated when it comes out, he said “medical metrics” were the most important signs to watch right now.

The presidential pill

Donald Trump surprised many on Monday by revealing that he is taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative medicine against the coronavirus – despite warnings about the malaria drug.

“I’ve been taking it for the last week and a half. A pill every day,” he told reporters. “All I can tell you is so far I seem to be OK.”

Weeks ago Trump had promoted the drug as a potential treatment based on a positive report about its use against the virus, but subsequent studies found it was not helpful. The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about it.

Glimmer of hope

That overshadowed news that an experimental COVID-19 vaccine made by Moderna Inc produced protective antibodies in a small group of healthy volunteers, according to very early data released by the biotech company on Monday.

The vaccine has the green light to start the second stage of human testing. In this Phase II trial to test effectiveness and find the optimal dose, Moderna said it will drop plans to test a 250 mcg dose and test a 50 mcg dose instead.

Reducing the dose required to produce immunity could help spare the amount of vaccine required in each shot, meaning the company could produce more of the vaccine.

Eating with your mask on

Israeli inventors have developed a mask with a remote control mouth that lets diners eat without taking it off, which they say could make a visit to a restaurant less risky.

A squeeze of a lever opens a slot in the front of the mask so food can pass through.

The process could get messy with ice cream or sauces, but more solid morsels can be gobbled up a la Pac-Man in the arcade game.

(Compiled by Karishma Singh and Mark John; Editing by Giles Elgood)

T cells play a role in fighting coronavirus; COVID-19 affects children differently

By Nancy Lapid

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The following is a brief roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Immune system’s T cells play a role in attacking the coronavirus

While the immune system’s B cells make antibodies that block the novel coronavirus, its T cells provide another line of attack, according to new research. Researchers found that T cells from recovered patients can target the virus. That is promising news for vaccine developers because it is “consistent with normal, good, antiviral immunity,” Shane Crotty, from the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, told Reuters. “The types of immune responses targeted by many candidate vaccines are now shown to be the types of immune responses seen in COVID-19 cases that successfully recovered from the disease.” Furthermore, some people who never had COVID-19 nonetheless had T cells that could attack the virus, Crotty’s team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell. This suggests that past exposure to other coronaviruses (such as those that cause the common cold) had somehow primed their T cells to recognize and attack this new coronavirus. That might influence their susceptibility to COVID-19 disease, he said, either preventing them from getting infected or from developing severe disease.

Coronavirus affects adults and children differently

Children appear to have much lower rates of infection with the new coronavirus than adults, but most reports on COVID-19 in youngsters have focused only on small groups. A team of Chinese researchers has analyzed data from 24 earlier studies involving a total of nearly 2,600 children with COVID-19, enabling them to shed light on ways in which the virus acts differently in pediatric patients. They reported on Sunday in the Journal of Medical Virology that the most common laboratory test abnormality observed in adults was a low level of immune cells called lymphocytes (B cells and T cells). This condition, known as lymphopenia, developed in up to 80% of adults but in less than 10% of children. On the other hand, children – particularly infants – were more likely to have elevated levels of cardiac enzymes that indicate heart injury. They also found additional differences. The rates of severe illness and critical illness in adults were 14% and 5%, respectively (according to earlier reports). That compared with 4.4% and 0.9% in children. Fever occurred in up to 99% of adults but in 43% of children; cough in up to 82% of adults but 43% of children. Shortness of breath and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) were rare in children, but digestive tract symptoms like diarrhea were more common in kids than in grownups.

Coronavirus can infect patients taking hydroxychloroquine

Taking hydroxychloroquine for other medical conditions might not protect against the new coronavirus, French doctors say. The drug had nearly become a standard of care for patients with COVID-19 in many hospitals, even though randomized trials have not yet confirmed its value. But people around the world use decades-old hydroxychloroquine to treat malaria as well as inflammatory conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and researchers are seeing occasional cases of coronavirus infection in these patients despite long-term use of the drug. A report on Sunday in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy describes two such patients, one with rheumatoid arthritis and the other with a condition called mixed connectivitis. The authors say they also know of at least three other patients in Italy who became sick with COVID-19 despite taking hydroxychloroquine for chronic arthritis. “Patients actually taking long-term hydroxychloroquine are potentially immunosuppressed patients since they are living with chronic inflammatory diseases and thus do not represent the general population exposed to COVID-19,” the French doctors acknowledge. “However, these observational data are not in favor of a universal protective effect of hydroxychloroquine.”

New barcoding technique can help process 100,000 screening tests per day

A big challenge in preventing the spread of the new coronavirus is to identify and quarantine infected people who do not have symptoms. Laboratory workers can test blood samples from thousands of patients per day, still not enough to efficiently screen heavily populated areas. Now researchers at the OSU James Comprehensive Cancer Center in Columbus, Ohio say they have a way to screen over 100,000 samples per day. Their system, dubbed REMBRANDT, makes copies of the virus and introduces two barcodes that simplify patient identification. Barcoding of samples for screening is not new, but the OSU method takes a unique biochemical approach, aiming for a single barcoding and virus-copying step. “Barcodes on products in the supermarket and molecular barcodes for REMBRANDT work the same way,” investigator Richard Fishel told Reuters. “In this case, each patient has a unique combination of letters that allows for their simplified identification. With ten Next Generation sequencing machines, REMBRANDT can test every Ohio resident for COVID-19 infection every 10 days – an important step in contact tracing and reducing the spread of infection.” His team’s report, published on Sunday on the preprint server bioRxiv, has not yet been peer reviewed. “Our next step,” Fishel said, “will be to collaborate with hospitals and public health departments to clinically validate REMBRANDT and make it available to a wider audience.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)