Coronavirus News Roundup
Published 3:30 pm Monday, June 8, 2020
Lockdowns may have helped prevent half a billion coronavirus cases
Lockdowns and other public-health measures may have prevented about half a billion coronavirus infections in six countries, including China and the U.S.
The virus has now caused some 7 million reported cases of COVID-19, with more than 400,000 fatalities. Published Monday in the journal Nature, the first peer-reviewed analysis of the impact of health policies suggests that the toll would have been vastly worse without lockdowns, social distancing, travel restrictions and other interventions. Many coronavirus infections are relatively mild, and most of the roughly 500 million averted cases would have gone undetected, according to the study.
“Seemingly small delays in policy deployment likely produced dramatically different health outcomes” in different countries, said Solomon Hsiang, lead author on the paper from the University of California, Berkeley. The authors distinguished between prevention of cases that would have been reported and those that would never have been diagnosed.
Here’s a breakdown of estimated cases prevented by country:
• China: 37 million confirmed cases, 285 million total cases
• South Korea: 11.5 million confirmed, 38 million total
• Italy: 2.1 million confirmed, 49 million total
• Iran: 5 million confirmed, 54 million total
• France: 1.4 million confirmed, 45 million total
• U.S.: 4.8 million confirmed, 60 million total
Home isolation, business closures and lockdowns produced the clearest benefits, the study found. Travel restrictions and bans on gatherings had good results in Italy and Iran, but their impact was less clear in the U.S.
There was no strong evidence that school closures had an effect in any country, and the team said that more research should be done to inform decisions on opening or closing schools.
Most interventions took three weeks to achieve their full impact. Now that some countries are relaxing policies, “we might reasonably expect signals of any renewed spread to emerge on a similar two- to three-week time frame,” Hsiang said.
— Bloomberg News
U.S. officially entered ‘unprecedented’ recession in February
The U.S. entered an “unprecedented” recession in February as job growth and production began grinding to a halt because of the coronavirus pandemic, a trade group said Monday, ending the country’s longest economic boom on record.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is responsible for determining when recessions begin and end, said that the economic expansion that started in June 2009 hit a peak in February before dropping sharply, marking the start of the recession.
“The unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warrants the designation of this episode as a recession,” the NBER panel said in a statement.
— New York Daily News
Fauci: Chinese officials did ‘disservice’ by not letting scientists speak ‘transparently’
Dr. Anthony Fauci contended that Chinese officials had needed to be more transparent with coronavirus information at the beginning of the outbreak.
“I think the Chinese authorities that did not allow the scientists to speak out as openly and transparently as they could have really did a disservice,” the infectious diseases expert said on John Catsimatidis’ radio show on Sunday.
The first documented case of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, China, late last year.
Fauci said Sunday that there was a period of time where important information wasn’t being shared “in a timely fashion.”
He said authorities in China maintained for too long early on that the transmission of the virus was from animal-to-human, and that there was “wasn’t really any human-to-human transmission at all.”
“They held that line for a few weeks,” Fauci said. “And then it became very clear when the scientists were able to talk about it that, in fact, there was human-to-human transmission that was really very efficient.”
There have been more than 6 million cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide, and more than 400,000 deaths.
Fauci’s comments come days after the Associated Press reported that the slow release of information regarding COVID-19 by Chinese authorities early on privately frustrated officials within the World Health Organization.
— New York Daily News
New Zealand eliminates COVID-19 with zero active cases reported
New Zealand reported zero active cases of Covid-19 for the first time since the pandemic reached its shores, indicating it has achieved its aim of eliminating the virus.
The South Pacific nation said Monday that the last of its coronavirus patients has recovered. That makes it one of the few countries in the world to have successfully eradicated the pathogen, and the first among those that suffered a sizable outbreak. Only a handful of nations can make the claim, mostly small islands that had very few infections to begin with.
The development comes just hours before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is expected to announce a lifting of all remaining restrictions on people and businesses — other than strict border controls to keep the virus out — paving the way for a resumption of normal life.
New Zealand pursued an explicit elimination strategy rather than seeking to merely suppress transmission of the virus. It enforced one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, asking everyone to stay at home and allowing only essential services to operate. While this has almost certainly triggered a deep recession, the government says elimination of the virus should allow the economy to recover more rapidly than many of its peers.
It is taking a cautious approach to the elimination milestone, however. The Ministry of Health’s definition of elimination is 28 days of no new cases after the last person to have contracted the virus via community transmission left quarantine, which would be achieved on June 15.
The seven-week lockdown ended May 14 and cabinet will decide today whether to lower the nation’s alert level to 1, which would remove the last remaining restrictions, including the requirement for social distancing. Ardern is scheduled to hold a press conference at 3 p.m. in Wellington.
Ardern’s masterclass in crisis management has won her praise at home and abroad. Support for the prime minister and her Labour Party surged in recent opinion polls, forcing the main opposition party to replace its leader less than four months out from a general election.
But it is not a foregone conclusion that Ardern will sweep to victory at the Sept. 19 vote, with unemployment expected to soar in coming months.
The closed border is taking a heavy toll on the tourism sector, which was the nation’s biggest source of foreign exchange earnings before the pandemic, and there is little prospect of it fully recovering until a vaccine is found.
There has also been criticism that New Zealand’s response to the virus was too extreme, as neighboring Australia appears to have achieved similar results with less stringent measures. During its lockdown it allowed more industries to continue operating, such as construction, and consumers were still able to get a haircut or buy a takeaway meal, keeping many workers on lower incomes employed.
— Bloomberg News
