Tag Archives: United States

Proportion of youth with COVID-19 triples in five months: WHO

By Ankur Banerjee and Stephanie Nebehay

(Reuters) – Young people who are hitting nightclubs and beaches are leading a rise in fresh coronavirus cases across the world, with the proportion of those aged 15 to 24 who are infected rising three-fold in about five months, the World Health Organization said.

An analysis by the WHO of 6 million infections between Feb. 24 and July 12 found that the share of people aged 15-24 years rose to 15% from 4.5%.

Apart from the United States which leads a global tally with 4.8 million total cases, European countries including Spain, Germany and France, and Asian countries such as Japan, have said that many of the newly infected are young people.

“Younger people tend to be less vigilant about masking and social distancing,” Neysa Ernst, nurse manager at Johns Hopkins Hospital’s biocontainment unit in Baltimore, Maryland told Reuters in an email.

“Travel increases your chances of getting and spreading COVID-19,” she said, adding young people are more likely to go to work in the community, to a beach or the pub, or to buy groceries.

The surge in new cases, a so-called second wave of infections, has prompted some countries to impose new curbs on travel even as companies race to find a vaccine for the fast-spreading virus that has claimed more than 680,000 lives and upended economies.

Even countries such as Vietnam, widely praised for its mitigation efforts since the coronavirus appeared in late January, are battling new clusters of infection.

Among those aged 5-14 years, about 4.6% were infected, up from 0.8%, between Feb. 24 and July 12, the WHO said, at a time when testing has risen and public health experts are concerned that reopening of schools may lead to a surge in cases.

Anthony Fauci, the leading U.S. expert on infectious diseases, urged young people last month to continue to socially distance, wear masks and avoid crowds, and cautioned that asymptomatic people could spread the virus, too.

Indeed, health experts in several countries have urged similar measures as they report that infected youth show few symptoms.

“We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: young people are not invincible,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news briefing in Geneva last week.

“Young people can be infected; young people can die; and young people can transmit the virus to others.”

Last month, Tokyo officials said they would conduct coronavirus testing in the city’s nightlife districts, and instructed nightclubs to provide customers with enough space with good ventilation and to ask them to avoid speaking loudly.

In France last month, authorities shut down a bar where people breached hygiene rules and caused an outbreak.

(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee and Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Bernadette Baum)

Trump signs law to fund overdue maintenance of public lands

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed into law a rare bipartisan bill that will use royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling operations to fund long-overdue maintenance of public lands, national parks and Native American schools.

Trump said more than 5,500 miles of road, 17,000 miles of trails and 24,000 buildings were in critical need of repair.

“Today we’re making the most significant investment in our parks since the administration of the legendary conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt,” Trump said during a signing ceremony at the White House.

The Great American Outdoors Act will permanently direct $900 million a year to a long-standing federal program aimed at acquiring and protecting public lands.

Work on the unusual bipartisan effort was led by Republican Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana, who are both up for re-election this year and spoke at the event, and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

The law will insulate the Land and Water Conservation Fund from the congressional appropriations process, ensuring steady funding at double the level seen in recent years by tapping royalties paid by offshore oil and gas drilling operations.

The LWCF was created in 1964, but Congress in most years has diverted funding for it to other uses. It received $495 million in funding last year.

Trump said the law would provide $10 billion to address deferred maintenance needs at national parks and forests, without “bludgeoning our workers and crushing our businesses.”

He took aim at China, Russia, India and other countries that he said were continuing to pollute the environment instead of adopting costly protective measures. “We’re working with other countries to try and get them to up their game,” he said.

Vice President Mike Pence said the measure would create more than 110,000 new infrastructure jobs across the country.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Tom Brown)

Special Report: Local governments ‘overwhelmed’ in race to trace U.S. COVID contacts

By Benjamin Lesser, Dan Levine, Jaimi Dowdell and Andrea Januta

(Reuters) – The soaring number of COVID-19 cases in the United States has far outstripped many local health departments’ ability to trace the contacts of those infected, a step critical in containing the virus’ spread.

With the pandemic claiming about a thousand American lives a day, many city and county departments say they lack the money and staff to expeditiously identify people who have been exposed, according to a Reuters survey of 121 local agencies, as well as interviews with dozens of state and local officials, epidemiologists and tracers.

The United States badly lags other wealthy countries in contact tracing, including South Korea and Germany, which ramped up their programs months ago. Contributing to the faltering U.S. response is the government’s failure to provide accurate and timely diagnostic testing, something other countries were able to roll out much faster and more broadly.

On Alabama’s hard-hit Gulf Coast, health department staffers are stretched so thin they are directing individuals who test positive to notify any contacts themselves, said Rendi Murphree, director of Mobile County’s Bureau of Disease Surveillance and Environmental Services.

“Everything is overwhelmed,” she said.

Adding to the challenge has been a sharp politicization of the COVID-19 response, with many Americans, from President Donald Trump on down, often portraying mask-wearing and other measures as an infringement of personal liberty.

The United States has by far the world’s largest COVID-19 caseload, with over 4.6 million confirmed infections and more than 155,000 deaths. Yet public health measures during the pandemic have been largely decentralized, coming down to patchwork efforts by state, and especially local, governments. Federal funding has proved unreliable, caught up in fierce debate over the crisis.

Now, as part of log-jammed negotiations over new relief legislation, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are arguing over funding proposals for testing and tracing that are tens of billions of dollars apart. As of June, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said the country had 27,000 contact tracers – about a quarter of what has been recommended.

Although some local health departments told Reuters their efforts have proved successful – and many said they were worthwhile – several researchers described U.S. contact tracing overall as too little, too late.

“You don’t clean up an oil spill with paper towels,” said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard public health school.

On this point, the Trump administration does not disagree. Admiral Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told Reuters that given the spread of the disease, mask wearing and other prevention measures are more effective.

“It is really impossible to contact trace,” Giroir said, until the numbers come down.

The agencies responding to the Reuters survey serve at least 27 million residents in large cities such as Minneapolis, Boston, and Cleveland, as well as smaller communities including Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Dare County, North Carolina. Collectively, as of last week, they accounted for at least 230,000 COVID-19 cases and 7,300 deaths. The responses cover the week ending June 22. Reuters followed up in late July with several departments, such as Las Vegas and Kansas City, Kansas, where officials said circumstances had not improved.

Among the findings:

• The 40 local health departments with the highest caseloads have fallen far short in their efforts to reach patients who tested positive. Only about half the departments with more than 1,000 cases had reached close to all infected people at the time of the survey. The CDC recommends that newly positive cases be interviewed within 24 hours.

“It’s just impossible with the kind of numbers that we are seeing,” said Devin Raman, a senior disease investigator at the Southern Nevada Health District, including Las Vegas.

• Nearly half of the local departments said they lacked sufficient staff and funds. In Missouri, many said they hadn’t received any additional money for contact tracing. “Some of them are literally running out of money right now,” Diane Weber, executive director of the Missouri Association of Local Public Health Agencies, said in July.

• Local health officials in six states complained that efforts to create statewide contact tracing systems have been hampered by issues including technical problems and poor coordination. In some cases, this has led to tension and a costly duplication of efforts, with state and local tracers calling the same people.

“We’re not going to drop the ball on tracing in our county and leave it to the state. If we did that, we’d probably all be dead,” said Joni Wise, administrator of the Vigo County Health Department in Indiana.

A spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Health acknowledged that people are more likely to answer a local call from a municipal health department than an “833” number from the state’s centralized call center.

• More than three dozen public health departments said they were hindered by some residents’ failure to answer their phones or to provide accurate information when they did. Several departments said people they called had objected to contact tracing as an infringement on their privacy rights.

“We get a variety of responses from yelling and hanging up, to those telling us that they have already contacted all of their friends and will not give us those names,” said Kenosha County health director Jen Freiheit in Wisconsin.

‘A LAME EXCUSE’

From the early days of the pandemic, public health experts emphasized the importance of contact tracing, a decades-old strategy aimed at interrupting infectious disease transmission. It involves interviewing infected people, identifying people whom they may have exposed to infection and trying to keep those individuals from passing the virus to someone else.

“If any country is saying contact tracing is difficult, it is a lame excuse,” World Health Organization Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in June. He pointed to the WHO’s success in halting an Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo by tracing 25,000 contacts a day in a remote area, where some 20 armed groups were fighting.

Under the best of circumstances, contact tracing is not a panacea. It is only one of many public health tools commonly deployed against infectious disease. The approach is particularly challenging during a fast-moving epidemic in which people may be infectious but don’t fall sick right away. In addition, a culture of individualism and legal protections inhibit U.S. authorities from forcing people to stay inside and divulge their social relationships.

Still, some other democracies have devised a more coordinated testing and tracing strategy than the United States.

In Germany, a country with about 400 public health offices, contact tracing early on was part of a collaborative effort. Workers from other municipal government offices lent a hand. The national Robert Koch Institute said it deployed hundreds more “containment scouts” – mostly medical students – to help. Daily confirmed cases in Germany now number in the hundreds. Deaths per day are down to the single digits, from a peak of over 300 on April 16.

In the United States, daily case counts that had been falling since mid-April began climbing again in July, reaching a peak of 77,299 July 16.

The federal government has largely taken a hands-off approach to contact tracing, as well as other public health measures during the pandemic. Though the CDC has issued guidance for contact tracing, it is not deeply involved. And though Congress authorized billions of dollars in aid that could pay for tracing, the money is not required to be used that way.

Trump and many of his fellow Republicans in Congress have often downplayed the threat posed by COVID-19. In July, the White House tried to block new funding for testing and contact tracing – something the White House later disavowed amid opposition even from Trump’s own party. Since then, Senate Republican leaders have proposed a relief bill that would dedicate $16 billion for the effort, while a bill passed by the Democrat-dominated House would provide $75 billion for testing, tracing and hospital support. Negotiations are at a crawl.

A senior CDC official told Reuters in a statement that the agency has provided more than $12 billion across the country to address the COVID 19 crisis, including a recent grant of $10.25 billion for testing and other activities such as contact tracing. In addition, the official said, the CDC has provided staff and extensive technical support to states.

“Contact tracing is most effective when local communities embrace it and drive it,” said the official, who declined to be named. “The Administration has empowered states with funding to lead these efforts.”

REALITY SINKS IN

A few days before Las Vegas casinos reopened in June, state health officials in Nevada predicted a wave of coronavirus cases.

The state should have as many as 700 people working on contact tracing to meet the surge, the officials wrote in a May 29 COVID-19 “plan of operations,” which Reuters obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. Referring to the roughly 100 tracing staffers then aboard, the plan said staffing “falls short of what is needed to effectively manage the need.”

It took two months to staff up. As of July’s end, Nevada had 744 staffers statewide, a Nevada Health and Human Services department spokeswoman said.

Still, Las Vegas and surrounding areas have struggled. The Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) saw about 1,000 new cases a day by mid-July, up ten-fold from the first week of June (although new cases have dropped precipitously in recent days).

A SNHD official told legislators last week that the district had less than half the tracing staff needed to serve Clark County, home to Las Vegas.

Raman, the senior investigator in the southern district, estimated in mid-July that her department was able to interview between 25% and 40% of people who recently tested positive.

“Right now, unfortunately, we are just trying to keep our heads above water.,” she told Reuters.

It was a similar story in other hotspots. Health officials for Harris County, Texas, who serve the Houston suburbs, have reported about 550 cases a day since July 1, up from about 200 a day during the first half of June.

Harris County reported reaching about 60% of the newly positive people to interview about contacts. In general, epidemiologists told Reuters, the goal should be at least 75%.

Martha Marquez, a county spokesperson, described the 60% figure as “good” but said the county was “looking into how to grow our success rate.”

Other departments struggle to keep potentially infectious people in quarantine. Ideally, a tracer notifies contacts, refers them for testing and advises them to stay home and away from others. Then someone in the department follows up to see if they need anything to stay indoors – house-cleaning supplies or food, for instance. It’s no guarantee they won’t go out, but tracers say it can make a difference.

In Alabama’s Mobile County, with case counts exploding to more than 1,000 cases a week by mid-July, follow-up was next to impossible. “It is not going well,” said Murphree, the disease surveillance director.

For months, the health department in Mobile relied only on existing health staff for contact tracing – as well as a few volunteers. It took until mid-July for the department to hire two people dedicated to that work, positions that the federal government has promised to fund, Murphree said.

The county has not yet received the money, she said.

This lack of resources is being felt across the country.

Despite pleas for assistance, local health departments in Missouri have received little to no COVID-19 funding from the state. Meanwhile, the state recently announced a $15 million package to help support tourism, using funding from the federal CARES Act – a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress in March.

“Tourism is a major employer and a major boon to the economy of Missouri,” said Scott Clardy, assistant director of the Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services. “That being said, here we are not being able to investigate cases, but we’re giving $15 million to the tourism industry to bring in more people.”

Clardy said, however, that he was expecting almost $1.8 million in CARES Act funding for contact tracing and testing to become available as early as this week.

Contact tracing efforts are strained not just by the sharp rise in cases but by the long delays in getting COVID-19 test results back.

David Holcombe, the director of the Louisiana Department of Health for the central portion of that state, said that, as of mid-July, the turnaround was as long as 14 days.

The lag time makes “contact tracing virtually useless,” he said. That’s because by the time positive results come back, the infected person has potentially had many more contacts, who have potentially infected others themselves.

KEEPING UP

Not all contact-tracing efforts are in disarray.

In San Francisco, cases are rising but not spiking to the level seen in other places in the country. So far, contact tracers say they have been able to keep up – largely through the efforts of redirected city workers.

Before the pandemic, program manager Jana De Brauwere could be found at San Francisco’s main public library, using one of the four languages she speaks to help patrons without computers apply for jobs and other services online.

Since April, dozens of librarians, attorneys and other San Francisco city workers have been redeployed to trace COVID-19 contacts – though at some cost to the city’s other public services.

After about 20 hours of training, De Brauwere started calling people exposed to the disease, arranging for supplies to help them quarantine, and referring them for testing. Soon she was promoted to team leader.

A typical shift now starts at 7 am, when De Brauwere parcels out roughly 100 contacts for her eight-tracer team to interview that day. De Brauwere has given up all her library work. “This is the priority,” she said.

The city’s contact tracing program, which is getting help from nonprofit organizations, reported reaching over 80% of people with positive tests through the third week of July, an exceptionally high rate. Similarly, health officials in Vigo County, Indiana, report being able to interview nearly all positive cases. Wise, the county health administrator, said local contact tracers have been more successful at reaching people than those at the state level.

The state’s tracers often are contractors who don’t understand the area, she said. That unfamiliarity can alienate residents and make them less likely to share critical health information, she said.

‘A THREAT TO OUR PRIVACY’

Even with sufficient money and staff, health departments often have trouble convincing people to pick up the phone and cooperatively answer questions.

Playing into that problem are political divisions throughout the country over how seriously to take the pandemic and what responsibilities the government should or should not impose on the public.

In Texas, a Republican state representative in June called for ending the contact tracing program as “a threat to our privacy and individual liberties.” The Republican-controlled Kansas legislature in June passed a COVID-19 bill with bipartisan support ensuring that no civil or criminal penalties would apply to anyone who refuses to provide information to a tracer. Such penalties, to the limited extent they are allowed under public health laws, are rarely enforced.

People may be reluctant to engage with tracers for a variety of other reasons, including embarrassment for exposing themselves to infection or fear they’ll lose their job.

Sometimes, contact tracers are hindered by misunderstandings.

In early June, in Berrien County, Michigan, contact tracer Karen Kortebein received a call from a public health nurse in a neighboring county. An employee of a long-term care facility there – a resident of Kortebein’s county – had contracted the virus. Kortebein knew the woman. She’d been speaking with her since her husband tested positive in May.

Kortebein had asked the woman then if she was working outside her home. The woman said no. But in reality she had been working – possibly while infectious – with a particularly vulnerable population until her husband became ill, something contact tracers needed to know as soon as possible.

It turned out the woman, whose first language is not English, had misunderstood the question. Also, she was confused about the risk she posed because she’d had conflicting test results and had yet to develop symptoms.

For Kortebein, it was a lesson in how easily wires can get crossed.

“I was kind of blown away,” she said.

(Benjamin Lesser and Andrea Januta reported from New York, Dan Levine from San Francisco, and Jaimi Dowdell from Los Angeles. Additional reporting by Douglas Busvine in Berlin and Alexandra Alper in Washington, D.C. Editing by Michele Gershberg, Janet Roberts and Julie Marquis)

China vows retaliation if any U.S. action against journalists

By Yew Lun Tian and Brenda Goh

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China vowed on Tuesday to retaliate if the United States persisted with “hostile action” against Chinese journalists who may be forced to leave in coming days if their U.S. visas are not extended.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters at a daily briefing that no Chinese journalist in the United States had been granted a visa extension since the United States, on May 11, limited their stay to 90 days, with an option to extend.

“The U.S. has been escalating its actions against Chinese journalists,” Wang told reporters. “The U.S. should immediately correct its mistake and stop its actions.”

“If the U.S. persists, China will take a necessary and legitimate response to safeguard its rights,” he said.

Wang did not say how many Chinese journalists were affected or what retaliation China might consider, but the editor of China’s Global Times newspaper said earlier U.S. journalists based in Hong Kong would be among those targeted should Chinese journalists be forced to leave the United States.

“Chinese side has prepared for the worst scenario that all Chinese journalists have to leave,” Hu said on Twitter.

“If that’s the case, Chinese side will retaliate, including targeting US journalists based in HK.”

The Global Times is published by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party.

The two countries, whose relations have deteriorated sharply recently over various issues including trade and the novel coronavirus, have exchanged several tit-for-tat actions involving journalists in recent months.

The United States in March slashed the number of Chinese nationals allowed to work at the U.S. offices of major Chinese state-owned media to 100 from 160.

China expelled U.S. journalists working for three U.S. newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post – this year and has threatened to match any more U.S. action against Chinese journalists.

(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; writing by Se Young Lee; Editing by Gerry Doyle, Robert Birsel)

Congressional Democrats, White House set new round of coronavirus aid talks

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top White House officials and Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress will try again on Tuesday to narrow gaping differences over a fifth major coronavirus relief bill to help stimulate the economy and possibly provide new aid to the unemployed.

The two sides have reported some progress in recent days. But they remain far apart on a range of issues including unemployment benefits for workers made jobless by the epidemic, as well as liability protections for businesses and funding for schools, state and local governments and election security.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were due to meet with Senate Republicans at a midday policy lunch, before resuming negotiations with House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT).

Federal Reserve officials are urging Congress and the White House to help the struggling U.S. economy. Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the crisis.

Congress passed more than $3 trillion in relief legislation early in the epidemic. But lawmakers missed a deadline last week to extend the $600 per week in enhanced unemployment payments that have played a key role in propping up the U.S. economy.

Democrats are pressing for another $3 trillion that would retain the $600 benefit and add nearly $1 trillion in assistance for state and local governments.

Senate Republicans, who have not taken part in the White House talks with Democrats, have proposed a $1 trillion package that would slash the unemployment payment to $200 a week and eventually move to 70% of wages.

Republicans say the $600 benefit – which is on top of state unemployment payments – discourages people from taking lower-paying jobs. A Fed official on Monday said there was little evidence to support that view.

Differences also remain on whether to extend a moratorium on housing evictions and Democrats’ demand for around $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments suffering revenue shortfalls as a result of the epidemic.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Writing by David Morgan and Richard Cowan; Editing by Scott Malone, Sam Holmes and Paul Simao)

Trump: U.S. should get ‘substantial portion’ of TikTok operations sale price

By David Shepardson and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. government should get a “substantial portion” of the sales price of the U.S. operations of TikTok and warned he will ban the service in the United States on September 15 without a sale.

The turnaround came after Trump Friday he said he was planning to ban the Chinese-owned video app’s U.S. operations as soon as Saturday after dismissing a possible sale to Microsoft.

Reuters reported last week that some investors are valuing TikTok at about $50 billion, citing people familiar with the matter.

“I did say that if you buy it, whatever the price is that goes to whoever owns it, because I guess it’s China essentially … I said a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen,” Trump said.

It was not clear how the U.S. government would receive part of the purchase price.

He added it “will close down on September 15 unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it and work out a deal, an appropriate deal so the Treasury … of the United States gets a lot of money.

Daniel Elman, analyst at Nucleus Research, said a sale “could foreshadow a growing wave of U.S. company acquisition of Chinese internet properties, particularly if the geopolitical tensions continue to mount.”

Elman said that could impact Tencent’s WeChat.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referenced WeChat on Sunday and said Trump “will take action in the coming days with respect to a broad array of national security risks that are presented by software connected to the Chinese Communist Party.”

U.S. officials have said TikTok poses a national risk because of the personal data it handles. TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer said in a blog post last week that the company was committed to following U.S. laws and was allowing experts to observe its moderation policies and examine the code that drives its algorithms.

Trump’s comments confirmed a Reuters report Sunday that he had agreed to give China’s ByteDance 45 days to negotiate a sale of popular short-video app TikTok to Microsoft.

Trump, a former New York real estate developer, compared TikTok to the landlord tenant relationship, suggesting TikTok is like a tenant. “Without a lease, the tenant has nothing – so they pay what’s called key money or they pay something.”

He said he did not mind “whether it’s Microsoft or somebody else – a big company, a secure company, very, very American company buy it.”

Microsoft said Sunday that CEO Satya Nadella had spoken to Trump and “is prepared to continue discussions to explore a purchase of TikTok in the United States.”

Microsoft said Sunday it is “committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.”

Many prominent Republicans, including House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, issued statements in support of a Microsoft acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Some congressional aides are worried about a backlash by younger voters against the party if Trump banned TikTok, which has 100 million American users.

Microsoft and TikTok parent ByteDance gave the U.S. government a notice of intent to explore a preliminary proposal for Microsoft to purchase the TikTok service in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer also backed the sale, while a senior White House adviser raised concerns about a sale to Microsoft.

“A U.S. company should buy TikTok so everyone can keep using it and your data is safe,” Schumer said on Twitter, adding: “This is about privacy. With TikTok in China, it’s subject to Chinese Communist Party laws that may require handing over data to their government.”

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro suggested on Monday that Microsoft could divest its holdings in China if it were to buy TikTok.

“So the question is, is Microsoft going to be compromised?” Navarro said in an interview with CNN. “Maybe Microsoft could divest its Chinese holdings?”

Navarro said the Chinese government and military use Microsoft software “to do all the things they do.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Doina Chiacu, Susan Heavey, Alexandra Alper, Echo Wang, Greg Roumeliotis, Paresh Dave and Pete Schroeder; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Lisa Shumaker)

Teachers protest across U.S. over re-opening schools in pandemic

By Brendan O’Brien

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Teachers and support staff at more than 35 school districts across the United States on Monday are protesting the re-opening of schools while COVID-19 is surging in many parts of the country.

They are demanding in-person classes not be held until scientific data supports it, safety protocols such as lower class sizes and virus testing are established, and schools are staffed with adequate numbers of counselors and nurses, according to a website set up for the demonstrations.

On Twitter, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association showed protesters making fake gravestones that said “Here lies a third grade student from Green Bay who caught COVID at school” and “RIP Grandma caught COVID helping grand kids with homework.”

Teachers are also demanding financial help for parents in need, including rent and mortgage assistance, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures and cash assistance.

Many of these issues are at the center of a political tussle in Washington, where Congressional Democrats and Trump administration officials will resume talks on Monday aimed at hammering out a coronavirus economic relief bill after missing a deadline to extend benefits to tens of millions of jobless Americans.

The coronavirus, which first appeared in China late last year, has infected 4.6 million people in the United States and killed more than 155,000 Americans since February, according to a Reuters tally. Deaths rose by over 25,000 in July and cases doubled in 19 states during the month.

President Donald Trump has made school re-openings for classroom instruction, as they normally would in August and September, part of his re-election campaign. The Republican president is trailing in opinion polls against Democratic candidate Joe Biden ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

“Cases up because of BIG Testing! Much of our Country is doing very well. Open the Schools!” Trump tweeted on Monday.

While reported case numbers may be linked to more testing, recent increases in hospitalizations and deaths have no connection to more people being tested for the virus.

The United States is in a new phase of the outbreak with infections in rural areas as well as cities, Deborah Birx, the coordinator of Trump’s coronavirus task force, said on Sunday.

“What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Birx said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

On Monday, Trump lashed out at Birx for her comments. Trump accused Birx of capitulating to criticism from Democrats that the federal government’s response to the pandemic has been ineffective.

“So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combating the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!” Trump wrote.

House of Representatives Speaker Pelosi said on CNN on Monday that Birx has “enabled” Trump, who played down the seriousness of the virus in the early stages and pushed for a quick reopening of the economy and schools following weeks of lockdowns.

“I don’t have confidence in anyone who stands there while the President says swallow Lysol and it’s going to cure your virus,” Pelosi said in a reference to Trump at a coronavirus briefing in April with Birx present.

Trump had asked whether injecting disinfectant into the body could be a treatment for the virus, leading makers of those products to issue warnings against doing so.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago, Gabriella Borter in New York; writing by Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Long-term complications of COVID-19 signals billions in healthcare costs ahead

By Caroline Humer, Nick Brown and Emilio Parodi

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Late in March, Laura Gross, 72, was recovering from gall bladder surgery in her Fort Lee, New Jersey, home when she became sick again.

Her throat, head and eyes hurt, her muscles and joints ached and she felt like she was in a fog. Her diagnosis was COVID-19. Four months later, these symptoms remain.

Gross sees a primary care doctor and specialists including a cardiologist, pulmonologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, and gastroenterologist.

“I’ve had a headache since April. I’ve never stopped running a low-grade temperature,” she said.

Studies of COVID-19 patients keep uncovering new complications associated with the disease.

With mounting evidence that some COVID-19 survivors face months, or possibly years, of debilitating complications, healthcare experts are beginning to study possible long-term costs.

Bruce Lee of the City University of New York (CUNY) Public School of Health estimated that if 20% of the U.S. population contracts the virus, the one-year post-hospitalization costs would be at least $50 billion, before factoring in longer-term care for lingering health problems. Without a vaccine, if 80% of the population became infected, that cost would balloon to $204 billion.

Some countries hit hard by the new coronavirus – including the United States, Britain and Italy – are considering whether these long-term effects can be considered a “post-COVID syndrome,” according to Reuters interviews with about a dozen doctors and health economists.

Some U.S. and Italian hospitals have created centers devoted to the care of these patients and are standardizing follow-up measures.

Britain’s Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are each leading national studies of COVID-19’s long-term impacts. An international panel of doctors will suggest standards for mid- and long-term care of recovered patients to the World Health Organization (WHO) in August.

YEARS BEFORE THE COST IS KNOWN

More than 17 million people have been infected by the new coronavirus worldwide, about a quarter of them in the United States.

Healthcare experts say it will be years before the costs for those who have recovered can be fully calculated, not unlike the slow recognition of HIV, or the health impacts to first responders of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

They stem from COVID-19’s toll on multiple organs, including heart, lung and kidney damage that will likely require costly care, such as regular scans and ultrasounds, as well as neurological deficits that are not yet fully understood.

A JAMA Cardiology study found that in one group of COVID-19 patients in Germany aged 45 to 53, more than 75% suffered from heart inflammation, raising the possibility of future heart failure.

A Kidney International study found that over a third of COVID-19 patients in a New York medical system developed acute kidney injury, and nearly 15% required dialysis.

Dr. Marco Rizzi in Bergamo, Italy, an early epicenter of the pandemic, said the Giovanni XXIII Hospital has seen close to 600 COVID-19 patients for follow-up. About 30% have lung issues, 10% have neurological problems, 10% have heart issues and about 9% have lingering motor skill problems. He co-chairs the WHO panel that will recommend long-term follow-up for patients.

“On a global level, nobody knows how many will still need checks and treatment in three months, six months, a year,” Rizzi said, adding that even those with mild COVID-19 “may have consequences in the future.”

Milan’s San Raffaele Hospital has seen more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients for follow-up. While major cardiology problems there were few, about 30% to 40% of patients have neurological problems and at least half suffer from respiratory conditions, according to Dr. Moreno Tresoldi.

Some of these long-term effects have only recently emerged, too soon for health economists to study medical claims and make accurate estimates of costs.

In Britain and Italy, those costs would be borne by their respective governments, which have committed to funding COVID-19 treatments but have offered few details on how much may be needed.

In the United States, more than half of the population is covered by private health insurers, an industry that is just beginning to estimate the cost of COVID-19.

CUNY’s Lee estimated the average one-year cost of a U.S. COVID-19 patient after they have been discharged from the hospital at $4,000, largely due to the lingering issues from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which affects some 40% of patients, and sepsis.

The estimate spans patients who had been hospitalized with moderate illness to the most severe cases, but does not include other potential complications, such as heart and kidney damage.

Even those who do not require hospitalization have average one-year costs after their initial illness of $1,000, Lee estimated.

‘HARD JUST TO GET UP’

Extra costs from lingering effects of COVID-19 could mean higher health insurance premiums in the United States. Some health plans have already raised 2021 premiums on comprehensive coverage by up to 8% due to COVID-19, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Anne McKee, 61, a retired psychologist who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee and Atlanta, had multiple sclerosis and asthma when she became infected nearly five months ago. She is still struggling to catch her breath.

“On good days, I can do a couple loads of laundry, but the last several days, it’s been hard just to get up and get a drink from the kitchen,” she said.

She has spent more than $5,000 on appointments, tests and prescription drugs during that time. Her insurance has paid more than $15,000 including $240 for a telehealth appointment and $455 for a lung scan.

“Many of the issues that arise from having a severe contraction of a disease could be 3, 5, 20 years down the road,” said Dale Hall, Managing Director of Research with the Society of Actuaries.

To understand the costs, U.S. actuaries compare insurance records of coronavirus patients against people with a similar health profile but no COVID-19, and follow them for years.

The United Kingdom aims to track the health of 10,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients over the first 12 months after being discharged and potentially as long as 25 years. Scientists running the study see the potential for defining a long-term COVID-19 syndrome, as they found with Ebola survivors in Africa.

“Many people, we believe will have scarring in the lungs and fatigue … and perhaps vascular damage to the brain, perhaps, psychological distress as well,” said Professor Calum Semple from the University of Liverpool.

Margaret O’Hara, 50, who works at a Birmingham hospital is one of many COVID-19 patients who will not be included in the study because she had mild symptoms and was not hospitalized. But recurring health issues, including extreme shortness of breath, has kept her out of work.

O’Hara worries patients like her are not going to be included in the country’s long-term cost planning.

“We’re going to need … expensive follow-up for quite a long time,” she said.

(Reporting by Caroline Humer and Nick Brown in New York; Emilio Parodi in Milan and Alistair Smout in London; editing by Michele Gershberg and Bill Berkrot)

WHO reports record daily increase in global coronavirus cases, up over 292,000

(Reuters) – The World Health Organization reported a record increase in global coronavirus cases on Friday, with the total rising by 292,527.

The biggest increases were from the United States, Brazil, India and South Africa, according to a daily report. Deaths rose by 6,812. The four countries have dominated global headlines with large outbreaks.

The previous WHO record for new cases was 284,196 on July 24. Deaths rose by 9,753 on July 24, the second largest one-day increase ever. Deaths have been averaging 5,200 a day in July, up from an average of 4,600 a day in June.

Nearly 40 countries have reported record single-day increases in coronavirus infections over the last week, around double the number that did so the previous week, according to a Reuters tally showing a pick-up in the pandemic in every region of the world.

Cases have been on the rise also in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Bolivia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Uzbekistan and Israel, among others.

Last week, cases in Latin America for the first time surpassed the combined infections in the United States and Canada, a Reuters tally showed. Infections are surging in Brazil, which is second in the world behind the United States in cases and deaths.

Globally there are over 17.4 million infections and nearly 675,000 deaths, according to a Reuters tally.

(Reporting by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Howard Goller)

Coronavirus child care pinch in U.S. poses threat to economic gains of working women

By Jonnelle Marte and Rachel Dissell

CLEVELAND (Reuters) – Most days, Zora Pannell works from her dining room table, sitting in front of her computer, turning off the video on Zoom calls to nurse her one-year-old daughter, Savannah.

Pannell has balanced working from home and caring for her daughter and son Timothy, aged 2, since March when she started a new job as a manager for a language services company the same week that Ohio issued a “stay at home” order to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Working from home is an exhausting daily juggle but she’s more worried about being told it’s time to return to the office. Her husband cannot watch the children during the day because he has a job at a local steel mill and the couple have been unable to find a daycare center they deemed safe and affordable close to their Shaker Heights apartment on the eastern fringe of Cleveland.

“I’ve already felt penalized for being a working mother,” said Pannell, 30, who is worried she would have to quit if she is not allowed to keep working from home. “Now it’s like I’m in purgatory.”

The pandemic upended child care plans for many parents in the United States, forcing them – particularly mothers – to grapple with tough choices that are only becoming more difficult as states push return-to-work policies to try to revive the battered economy.

Do they hunt for expensive and hard-to-find child care that could expose their families to COVID-19, which is still raging across much of the country? Or do they scale back on work, or even quit, threatening their financial stability?

The barriers risk stalling or reversing the economic gains of recent years made by working women, who are more likely to take a career hit than men when they are unable to find child care, studies show.

A survey by Northeastern University between May 10-June 22 found that 13% of working parents had to resign or reduce their work hours because of a lack of child care during the health crisis, with women impacted significantly more than men. In all, of those who said they had lost a job due to child care problems, 60% were women, the survey found.

“If women don’t have child care, they can’t go back to work,” said Karen Schulman, Child Care and Early Learning Research Director for the National Women’s Law Center. If that doesn’t happen, “you end up creating a system that is going to result in vast gender inequities”.

Prior to the pandemic, the labor force participation rate for women aged 25-54 touched 77% in February, rising from 73% in September 2015 and close to the peak reached in 2000, when the share of women in the labor force began to plateau, in part because of challenges accessing affordable child care, experts say.

LIMITED OPTIONS

Pressure looks certain to mount on families in the coming weeks, as various aid programs and protections that offered relief to jobless parents expire, including enhanced unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums and a freeze on student loan payments.

“There’s this fragile, invisible thread holding the lives of our moms, holding the lives of our economy together,” said Chastity Lord, president and chief executive of the Jeremiah Program, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization that supports single mothers and their children.

Finding a way to broaden access to child care will be pivotal to helping the U.S. labor market heal from the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, with latest data showing the economy contracting an annualized 32.9% in the second quarter of 2020 and approximately one out of five workers claiming unemployment insurance in the week ending July 11.

Child care was already scarce before the coronavirus led to the shuttering of thousands of centers. More than half of all Americans lived in a child care “desert” as of 2018, defined by the Center for American Progress, a liberal nonprofit group in Washington, as an area with no licensed child care providers or less than one slot for every three children under five.

Now, in many states, care centers accept only limited numbers of children to prevent the virus from spreading. Additionally, families that relied on grandparents or other older relatives or neighbors must weigh up the risks of asking for their help again and perhaps exposing them to a disease that has proved especially deadly for the elderly.

Chantel Springer, 24, worked at Starbucks in Manhattan during the early months of the pandemic but has been on furlough since June, when the store cut back on staff to adjust to lower demand and social distancing requirements. Now that her unemployment benefits could shrink as low as $325 a week, Springer is making arrangements to get back to her job as a shift manager.

“I feel like I have to work,” said Springer, explaining that the reduced benefits would not be enough to cover the rent, food, diapers and other costs.

This month, Springer transferred to a store in Brooklyn so she could be closer to her apartment and her two-year-old. But finding someone to babysit her son is a challenge. Springer can no longer leave the toddler with her mother, who recently moved to take care of a disabled sister whose husband died from Covid-19. For now, she is looking to coordinate schedules with her son’s father, who has also returned to work at a retail store.

HOME ALONE

Under the CARES Act passed in late March, parents who lost access to child care because of the pandemic became eligible for unemployment benefits. But the process of qualifying for the program, which varies from state to state, became less clear cut as the school year ended and some day care centers began to re-open with limited capacity.

The Labor Department sought to clarify with guidance that parents should resort to their typical summer child care plans.

Many states, including New York, Missouri and Louisiana, allow parents to self-certify each week, under penalty of perjury, that their child care center was closed and that they met the requirements to continue receiving benefits. Other states, like California and Texas, make such decisions on a “case-by-case” basis.

While child care places are hard to find for toddlers, they are even scarcer for school-age children and many summer programs for this age-group went online, leaving parents facing a quandary.

Sarah Sapp is hatching plans to rig up an old cell phone for her 11-year-old son, Avery.

The 37-year-old waitress from North Olmsted, a western suburb of Cleveland, fears her son, who sometimes struggles to pay attention to instructions, isn’t quite mature enough to be left home alone while she serves food and drinks at a high-end tavern. But she feels she has little choice.

When Ohio initially ordered restaurants and bars to close in March, Sapp qualified for state unemployment. But when the state told people it was safe to return to work in May, she was informed that she would no longer be eligible. Sapp tried to sign her son up for a day camp at her local recreation center but it got canceled.

More problems are piling up on the horizon. Sapp’s school district has told parents they must choose between all online lessons or a hybrid of two days shortened days in school and three days at home when classes resume in September. Neither of these options would allow her to work her lunchtime shift.

“I feel stuck,” Sapp said. “There doesn’t seem to be a right choice no matter how I look at things.”

(Rachel Dissell is a contributing reporter with The Fuller Project, a global nonprofit newsroom reporting on issues that impact women.; Jonnelle Marte reported for this story from New York; Editing by Heather Timmons and Crispian Balmer)