March 28 coronavirus news

Alaska is the latest US state to order residents to stay at home unless absolutely necessary due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.

Limited outdoor activities are allowed as long as social distancing of 6 feet (1.8 meters) is maintained.

In a pair of new mandates announced Friday evening, state Health and Social Services Commissioner Adam Crum said Alaskans are also ordered to avoid travel between communities.

Travel to many rural areas of Alaska is only practical by plane, but Crum said aviation companies will not be required to ensure that their customers are traveling for essential reasons.

The prohibition on unnecessary travel goes into effect Saturday at 8 a.m. local time, while the new rule on staying at home goes into effect at 5 p.m. Crum says the mandates will be reconsidered no later than April 11.

US President Donald Trump wielded his federal powers Friday and mandated that General Motors produce ventilators because he was irked by news reports that an agreement between the company and the administration had stalled, a person familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Early Friday, aides were hopeful that the talks could get back on track after a disagreement over how much it would cost and how long it would take. And GM announced it and Ventec Life Systems would move forward with production efforts regardless of an agreement with the administration.

But the President grew irritated by reports that the talks had been put on hold, even if only briefly, and ordered aides to require General Motors to produce the ventilators.

As reported by CNN, neither GM nor Ventec were given a heads up about the move.

Internally, aides have acknowledged that the move won't change the company's timeline because it will still have to retool factories to make the ventilators. And now the government will foot the bill, something that had become a sticking point in negotiations as aides weighed whether the large price tag was worth how long it would take the ventilators to ship out.

For weeks, the President ignored requests by some officials in his administration to invoke the act. He insisted private companies had been willing to act and did not need to be coerced into doing so.

But in a potential sign of the President's changing attitude, he announced Friday that his top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is now in charge of coordinating the act.

Navarro was one of several who initially pushed Trump to sign the Defense Production Act.

China reported 54 new novel coronavirus patients Friday -- bringing the total number of active cases to 3,128, according to the National Health Commission.

All of the new cases were travelers coming into China from overseas.

On Saturday, China begins its most stringent measures to curtail inbound travelers by banning most foreign nationals – including those holding Chinese visas and residency permits. Only foreign nationals granted visas after March 26 will be allowed entry.

China, which managed to mostly halt domestic transmission, has reported 649 cases from inbound travelers.

Three additional deaths were confirmed in China Friday, taking its death toll to 3,295.

Of the total 81,349 cases in the country, 74,971 patients have recovered and been discharged from hospital.

US federal health officials on Friday green-lit a point-of-care coronavirus test that can provide results in less than 15 minutes, using the same technology that powers some rapid flu tests.

Teased by Vice President Mike Pence in a Thursday press briefing, the new diagnostic could accelerate testing in the United States, allowing for rapid results in doctors’ offices. But shortages of critical equipment used to collect patient specimens, such as masks and swabs, could blunt its impact.

The US Food and Drug Administration authorized the test for emergency use, signaling that federal regulators were satisfied with the test’s validation data and believe its benefits outweigh any risks, such as false positives or negatives.

The test’s maker, Abbott, said it expects to deliver 50,000 tests per day beginning next week. The technology behind the test looks for genes that are present in the virus, similar to PCR tests already on the market.

The platform used to run the test weighs less than 7 pounds, according to Abbott, and could be deployed “where testing is needed most,” such as at coronavirus hotspots.

More on this: Last week, the FDA authorized another rapid test – one from molecular diagnostics company Cepheid, which provides results in about 45 minutes. Most laboratory tests for the coronavirus take anywhere from a few hours to days to receive results. 

All FDA-authorized tests, however, require samples from patients – and health care facilities say they’re facing shortages of critical supplies needed to collect specimens. 

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday issued guidance allowing some patients to collect their own nasal swabs in health care facilities, which could reduce the amount of protective equipment needed for health care workers.

But some jurisdictions, such as New York City, have said that patients with coronavirus-like illness should stay home – saying that is “safer for the patients and health care workers” and doesn’t change the treatment patients receive.

There are at least 101,242 cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States, according to CNN Health’s tally of cases that are detected and tested in the country through public health systems.

At least 1,588 people have died in the US from coronavirus. 

Today there have been at least 402 new deaths reported -- the most in the US in a single day. There were 253 deaths reported yesterday, the previous single-day high.

The total includes cases from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and other US territories, as well as all repatriated cases.

The Arkansas Department of Health is recommending all travelers from New York state and foreign countries to self-quarantine for 14 days.

"This is due to high rates of COVID-19 in New York as well as in a growing number of international locations," the department said in a statement.

Any visitors showing a fever, cough, or other symptoms of coronavirus should contact their doctor for advice on where to be evaluated, the department said.

Madrid's regional government is preparing to open an improvised morgue in the next few days to increase the city's capacity to deal with Covid-19 fatalities.

The center will be set up in the Justice Campus, a building which officials said is "designed to be the headquarters of Madrid's Forensic Institute." As such, the facility will have enough mortuary refrigerators to receive about 200 bodies.

The center should be ready "in the next few days." More than 2,400 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported in Madrid, according to the Spanish Ministry of Health.

A 102-year-old woman has recovered from coronavirus in the northern Italian city of Genoa after spending more than 20 days in hospital, doctors who treated her and her nephew told CNN.

"Italica represents a hope for all the elderly facing this pandemic."

The average age of those who have tested positive for coronavirus and subsequently died in Italy is 78, according to the country's National Health Institute. 

Grondona was hospitalized at the beginning of March for "mild heart failure," Sicbaldi told CNN.

"She only had some mild coronavirus symptoms, so we tested her and she was positive, but we did very little, she recovered on her own," Sicbaldi added.

Doctors say her case impressed them so much that they decided to study it deeper.

Grondona left hospital on March 26 and is now in a care home. "I don’t know what her secret is, but I know she is a free and independent woman," her nephew Renato Villa Grondona told CNN.

Her only son died in the US decades ago. "But she loves life, dancing and music, she loves Freddy Mercury and Valentino Rossi," Villa Grondona said, referring to the multiple MotoGP World champion.