April 13 coronavirus news

President Trump has no intention of firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said Monday.

The statement comes after Trump fueled speculation about Fauci's future on Sunday, retweeting a conservative who called for the expert to be fired after he said in a CNN interview more could have been done to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Trump has disputed that his administration was slow to respond, despite increased scrutiny of his initial handling of the crisis as it's been revealed that administration and health officials were sounding alarms for weeks before the President took decisive actions such as calling for social distancing measures.

The US Food and Drug Administration has issued emergency use authorizations for two blood purification devices that may help treat coronavirus patients.

The devices perform “extracorporeal blood purification” –��� essentially taking blood from a patient’s body, removing harmful inflammatory substances and then returning it.

Elevated levels of these substances – called cytokines – may cause problems with the immune system, according to the FDA.

Use of the devices is limited to patients 18 years or older, with confirmed Covid-19, who have been admitted to the intensive care unit with confirmed or imminent respiratory failure.

But the devices comes with risks: Among other side effects, the FDA says that heart problems, blood loss, infection and allergic reactions are all possible.

Still, in letters authorizing the devices, the FDA said they may help some patients during the coronavirus pandemic.

The known and potential benefits of the systems, according to the FDA’s authorization letters, outweighed the known and potential risks.

One of the systems green-lit by the agency is made by CytoSorbents, and the other is from Terumo BCT and Marker Therapeutics AG.

How helpful the devices might be, though, remains unclear, and there is currently no FDA-approved treatment for COVID-19.

Three United Nations staffers have died of coronavirus-related complications globally, and 189 staffers have tested positive for the virus as of Sunday evening, according to the deputy spokesperson for the United Nations Secretary General, Farhan Haq.

As the pandemic impacts those within the UN, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said at a virtual briefing to member states last week that an unprecedented sense of urgency drives the UN's response to this outbreak.

Turkey will have another lockdown next weekend due to the coronavirus pandemic, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech on Monday after a meeting with his cabinet. 

The lockdown from April 17 to April 19 will apply to the same 31 provinces that were on curfew last weekend, Erdogan said. The lockdown order applies to more than 63 million people across the 31 provinces including the large metropolitan areas of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. 

The weekend lockdowns will continue as long as needed, Erdogan said. 

The last minute lockdown announcement by the interior ministry last weekend lead to throngs of people going out to stock up on essentials leading to chaotic scenes in breach of social distancing guidance. Turkey’s interior minister submitted his resignation over the events but Erdogan has not accepted the offer. 

About Turkey's coronavirus cases: The number of the cases in the country now stands at 61,049, according to the latest figures released by the Turkish health ministry. At least 1,296 people have died from the virus, the ministry said. 

Turkey has tested at least 410,556 people for coronavirus, according to the ministry. 

Three more members of the New York Police Department have died due to the novel coronavirus, according to NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea. The force has now lost 23 members.

The three members who died:

“Devastated, we mourn with their loved ones as we vow to #neverforget our fallen," the tweet said, along with an updated NPYD video which contains their photographs.

Read the tweet:

The UK’s chief scientific adviser has said Britain will likely see an increase in Covid-19 deaths this week.

“If you look at the effect on number of cases in the community, you would expect the measures in place to cause quite a sharp decrease. Unfortunately, with the deaths, there is not only a delay, but we would expect there to be a much more gradual decrease from the peak," he added.

The trajectory of the virus is expected to plateau once it peaks and that could last for “two or three weeks” before a slow decrease in deaths, Vallance explained.  

Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the chief medical officer at Partners in Health, a global health organization, says contract tracing is an important step to decreasing the number of cases of coronavirus.

Here's what happens during contact tracing:

Mukherjee said once a person tests positive for the virus, there will be a case investigation. This means public health officials call the patient and investigate who their close contacts have been. They will gather a list of everyone who came within 6 feet of the person who tested positive, starting two days before they started having symptoms.

That list of contact information then goes to a contact tracing team, Mukherjee said. The team calls each person who meets that definition of "a contact within that 6-foot radius," she said.

She said the contact team would tell them "you have been in contact of someone of COVID. These are the things you need to know. One, are you okay? Are you feeling okay? And if not connecting people rapidly to care, testing."

The team would also determine if the individual was able to self-quarantine, and if not, "we would refer that person to social support," Mukherjee said.

The third step to contact tracing is making sure the individual who is quarantining has enough food, housing or sanitation so they can isolate properly and not continue to spread the disease within families.

"We have to address those local contacts to stop transmission of this virus," she said.

South Dakota will be the first state to conduct a hydroxychloroquine trial to test against Covid-19, Gov. Kristi Noem announced Monday. 

She announced the trial in a series of tweets.

"We’ve received the initial doses we need," Noem said. "We’re now the first state to do a full clinical trial to test whether hydroxychloroquine can treat and perhaps prevent #COVID19."

About the drug hydroxychloroquine: The drug is used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Trump has touted the drug, saying it shows "tremendous promise" of working against coronavirus as well.

But the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases isn't sponsoring any studies on hydroxychloroquine, according to a statement from the agency, which added that the agency is "considering" trials that examine the drug or its analogue chloroquine as a potential treatment for Covid-19 studies.

On its website, NIAID mentions several drug therapies it is supporting to fight coronavirus, but not hydroxychloroquine. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, another federal agency, also lists its coronavirus measures on its website, but hydroxychloroquine is not among them.

Despite Trump's enthusiasm, a federal government registry for clinical trials shows only two trials in the US for hydroxychloroquine to fight coronavirus, and only one of those is up and running.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, said as the world considers getting back to normal, it’s important to remember that "masks are not an alternative to lockdown." 

Ryan continued: “Everything we do in public health or in health and policy affects something else. So the pressures on people to go back to work are going to be very strong and very appropriate, but we don't want people having to make difficult choices — and in some ways think that putting a mask on — is the same as staying home and reporting the fact that you're sick to authorities."

“There's huge pressure on people to go back to work to go back to school to participate in daily life. I don't want to be the person at home with a fever, and with a job to go to where I can make a calculation that instead of picking up the phone and phoning my health provider or phoning the public health authorities and asking for a test and a diagnosis that I think that putting a mask on, is an adequate response to that situation. And that is something we really have to be careful about,” Ryan added.