Coronavirus tracked: the latest figures as the pandemic spreads | Free to read Unless otherwise stated below, the data used for cases and deaths in these charts comes from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and reflects the date that cases or deaths were recorded, rather than when they occurred. Data for the US, its individual states, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands is calculated from county-level data compiled by the Johns Hopkins CSSE. Data for the Cook Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, North Korea, Palau, Pitcairn, St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, Tokelau, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu and Wallis and Futuna comes from the World Health Organization. Data for Sweden after April 5 2020, is calculated from the daily difference of cumulative figures published Tuesday through Fridays by the Swedish Public Health Agency. UK deaths and new cases data, and all data from that nations of the UK, comes from the UK Government coronavirus dashboard.
Republican’s TRUST Act is designed to gut Social Security and Medicare | JustCare Alex Lawson writes for The Hill about Senator Mitt Romney’s ongoing quest to gut Social Security. In October 2019, Romney introduced the TRUST Act, which would create a secret fast track for cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits. It’s a bill that flies in the face of the needs of Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom support strengthening Social Security. The TRUST Act is designed to enable Congress to quickly starve Medicare and Social Security of funds, weakening these programs. The TRUST Act would appoint “bi-partisan” commissions to look at Medicare and Social Security Trust funds and recommend actions to Congress on how to “simplify” them. As Lawson explains, ‘Republicans don’t want to “save” Social Security. In sharp contrast, the Social Security 2100 Act would increase Social Security benefits while strengthening the program for future generations. Here’s more from Just Care:
Pentagon reports what it believes is first death of someone working for DoD who tested positive for COVID-19 A Crystal City-based contractor, who worked at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, passed away on March 21, Pentagon officials said in a media release. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first death of someone working for DoD who had tested positive for COVID-19,” officials tell Military Times. “The individual normally works in Crystal City, and has not been in the Pentagon building itself since February,” officials told Military Times. The individual had tested positive for COVID-19 and had been under medical treatment at a local hospital, the release said. “The spaces in DSCA where the individual worked have been cleaned in accordance with CDC guidance when he tested positive and the person’s co-workers have been teleworking,” the release said. The agency was created to “advance U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by building the capacity of foreign security forces to respond to shared challenge,” according to its website. Sign up for the Early Bird Brief
Iowa creates six regional medical coordination centers (WGEM) — Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Public Health released additional coronavirus numbers Tuesday afternoon. The state has 102 additional positive cases for a total of 1,048 positive cases. The state also announced an additional death to bring the total to 26 total. Reynolds said there were 341 people who have recovered and 104 that are still hospitalized. During her daily press briefing in Johnson, Reynolds announced that the state has plenty of beds and ventilators at this time. Despite that, she has created a new task force to handle medical needs. Reynolds announced six regional medical coordination centers in the state. The one she highlighted was the southeast region of the state which is at the highest risk. That region includes Lee County, Iowa which has one confirmed positive case, but the governor said the reason that region is considered a hotspot is because of the rapid number of cases that continue to be reported in Iowa City.
Coronavirus New Orleans Mardi Gras… Trump administration proposes rule that would take benefits from people with SSDI | JustCare Arthur Delaney reports for The Huffington Post on a Trump administration proposed rule which would make it harder to receive Social Security disability benefits and Medicare, if you are under 65. If finalized, the rule is expected to take SSDI benefits from thousands people with disabilities. As it is, it is very difficult to qualify for Social Security Disability Income (SSDI). The majority of people who apply are denied benefits. But, some people who do qualify for benefits may now be at risk of losing them. The administration’s proposal could hurt tens of thousands of Americans. The administration argues that some of the eight million people with disabilities receiving SSDI benefits should not be receiving them. The administration claims that the proposed added reviews would identify people who no longer qualify. The Trump administration hopes to save Social Security two hundred million dollars a year in benefit outlays. At this point, the rule is not in effect.
Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60 - The Jerusalem Post Italy suffered more coronavirus-related victims than China with 4,825 confirmed deaths and 5,000 confirmed patients in the last 24 hours, Channel 12 reported on Sunday. Israeli doctor Gai Peleg, who is currently working to save lives in Parma, Italy, told Channel 12 that things are only getting worse as the number of patients keeps growing. As his department receives coronavirus patients who are terminally ill the focus is to allow patients to meet loved ones and communicate with them during their last moments despite the quarantine regulations. Peleg said that, from what he sees and hears in the hospital, the instructions are not to offer access to artificial respiratory machines to patients over 60 as such machines are limited in number. Israel is currently purchasing thousands of respiratory machines, and they are meant to arrive in the country by mid-May.
Iowa COVID-19 Information How Will the Coronavirus End? Editor’s Note:The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app. A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. So, now what? As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks, and by the losses we suffer as a result. Anne Applebaum: The coronavirus called America’s bluff “No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the Boston University School of Medicine. As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. I.
Waves of CSF Flow Into the Brain During Sleep | MedPage Today The brain's cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pulses during deep sleep and this appears to be tied to brain wave activity and blood flow, an exploratory study showed. Large oscillations of CSF inflow to the brain appeared about every 20 seconds and were tightly coupled to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals of blood flow and electroencephalogram (EEG) slow waves, reported Laura Lewis, PhD, of the Boston University College of Engineering, and co-authors, who described this activity for the first time in Science. "We've known for a while that there are these electrical waves of activity in the neurons," Lewis said in a statement. "But before now, we didn't realize that there are actually waves in the CSF, too." "It's such a dramatic effect," she added. During sleep, the brain shows large-scale waves: waves of blood oxygenation (red), followed by waves of cerebrospinal fluid (blue). Studies in animals could test for causal relationships, the team suggested.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Husband Has Been Hospitalized With COVID-19 | News Thud Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) announced today that her husband, John Bessler, tested positive for coronavirus and has been hospitalized. He is not on a ventilator yet but is on oxygen. She wrote, “I have news that many Americans are facing right now: my husband John has the coronavirus. “While I cannot see him and he is of course cut off from all visitors, our daughter Abigail and I are constantly calling and texting and emailing. “John started to feel sick when I was in Minnesota and he was in Washington D.C. and like so many others who have had the disease, he thought it was just a cold. “He kept having a temperature and a bad, bad cough and when he started coughing up blood he got a test and a chest X-ray and they checked him into a hospital in Virginia because of a variety of things including very low oxygen levels which haven’t really improved. “I love my husband so very much and not being able to be there at the hospital by his side is one of the hardest things about this disease.”
Messages From Italians Quarantined in the Coronavirus Pandemic When the Italian media began reporting on the increased community spread of the novel coronavirus across the country, Olmo Parenti, like many Italian citizens, didn’t take the threat of the pandemic too seriously. “My friends and I were almost mocking the few people who believed the issue was serious from the get-go,” Parenti, a young filmmaker, told me. Just days later, Parenti felt like he was living in a different version of reality—a dystopian one. The number of positive cases had spiked dramatically. The entire country had shut down. The economy took a nosedive. Parenti and his friends were disturbed by the fact that they had severely underestimated the situation, a perspective that perhaps contributed to the spread of the virus. Together with other members of his filmmaking collective, Parenti put out a call for citizens across the country to film themselves in quarantine. The resulting film, 10 Days, features messages from dozens of terrified Italians.
Microchimerism: how pregnancy changes the mother’s very DNA When Lee Nelson first began researching autoimmune disorders in the 1980s, the prevailing assumption was that conditions such as arthritis and lupus tend to show up more commonly in women because they are linked to female sex hormones. But to Nelson, a rheumatologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, this explanation did not make sense. If hormones were the culprit, one would expect these afflictions to peak during a woman’s prime reproductive years, when instead they typically appear later in life. One day in 1994, a colleague specialising in prenatal diagnosis called her up to say that a blood sample from a female technician in his lab was found to contain male DNA a full year after the birth of her son. Evidence that cells travel from the developing foetus into the mother dates back to 1893, when the German pathologist Georg Schmorl found signs of these genetic remnants in women who had died of pregnancy-induced hypertensive disorder.