May 13 coronavirus news

South Korean authorities have traced 28 further coronavirus cases to a nightclub cluster in Seoul, bringing the total number of new infections linked to the Itaewon nightlife district to 119.

Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip said in a news briefing today that around 20,000 people had been tested in relation to the Itaewon outbreak.

According to Kim, one of those who tested positive was a private tutor in Incheon, a city bordering the capital. The patient initially hid his movement but his GPS location tracking revealed his place of work. Eight new cases were then discovered, of which six were middle and high school students, Kim said.

Two out of those eight cases had each gone to church services last weekend. Now epidemiological investigation is being conducted on the church congregations.

Kim said that Incheon city announced that it will pursue legal action against the tutor and if found guilty, he could be punished with up to two years of prison.

North Chungcheong Province office announced on Wednesday that there were at least seven members of the military who tested positive in relation to the Itaewon cluster.

Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon said today that 10,905 people were confirmed to have been near the clubs, based on phone records, and 11% of them had been foreigners.

Seoul city is texting those numbers in English to encourage testing, Park said. Six foreign English teachers reported that they have been to the clubs and the city is waiting for results of their tests.

Overall, Korea added 26 new cases to the nation's overall confirmed count on Tuesday, bringing the total to 10,962. One new fatality was reported, bringing the death toll to 259.

The patient had been relatively fine for the first 10 days he was down with Covid-19.

Just 38, he didn't fit the description of people at high risk of complications from the novel coronavirus.

"He had mild pulmonary symptoms that he was just sitting at home with," said Dr. Sean Wengerter, a vascular surgeon in Pomona, New York. "He had been diagnosed at an urgent care clinic and it was going fine at home. He just had a little cough."

Until one of Covid-19's surprising effects kicked in.

Some of the other bizarre and worrying effects of the virus include:

Read more:

RELATED

Covid-19 isn't just a respiratory disease. It hits the whole body

Colleges and universities in the US are right to think and “fret” about classes in the fall semester, in light of forecasts that there will be a substantial surge of novel coronavirus cases later this year, an infectious diseases expert said Tuesday.

Dr. William Schaffner told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that it is hard to predict whether cases will affect school openings.

“It’s not an easy decision,” said Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Much will rely on local conditions and circumstances, Schaffner said. “It’s an awful choice, because on the other side is all the financial depredation that’s been going on, the cultural and social disruption, so it’s an exceedingly difficult balancing act.” 

The California State University system announced Tuesday it was canceling nearly all in-person classes for the fall semester. The system has more than 500,000 students and 55,000 employees, according to its chancellor, who said he is concerned about the threat posed by the coronavirus coupled with the influenza season in the fall.

Prices are tumbling in America as the coronavirus lockdown drags on and people spend less.

US consumer prices declined for the second-straight month in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on Tuesday. Prices fell by 0.8% on a seasonally adjusted basis in April, marking the largest drop since December 2008.

That's an alarming drop, dragged down primarily by falling gasoline and energy prices. But excluding volatile food and energy, prices still fell by 0.4%. That's the largest monthly decline in the so-called core consumer price index since the BLS began tracking the data in 1957.

Falling prices might sound like a good thing, but economists agree that deflation -- the opposite of inflation -- would be very bad news.

When prices fall because people aren't buying things, manufacturers sometimes can't charge enough to make the product they're trying to sell. That means they'll stop making those products and lay off workers. That can start a vicious circle in which demand continues to fall as more people lose their jobs.

Read more:

RELATED

Prices are tumbling at an alarming rate

London’s transport operator is in a “critical” financial situation and needs to reach an agreement with the government in the next 48 hours, London’s Deputy Mayor for Transport Heidi Alexander said Tuesday.

Alexander told a Transport For London (TFL) finance committee that the local government body may be forced to issue a Section 114 notice, which is the equivalent of a public body going bust, if an agreement is not reached.

Across London, tube travel has been reduced by 95% and bus travel by 85% during the coronavirus outbreak, TFL said in a statement on Monday. On April 24, the organization announced it had furloughed 7,000 staff -- around 25% of its workforce -- under the government’s coronavirus job retention scheme. It said this would save it an estimated £15.8 million ($19.3 million) every four weeks.

However, a TFL document submitted to Tuesday’s committee says its loss from the "steep decline" in revenue for the full year is anticipated to be over £4 billion ($4.9 billion) and the remaining gap to balance its proposed Emergency Budget for 2020/21 is around £3.2 billion. It says TFL is in ongoing discussions around how this should be funded with the Department for Transport and HM Treasury.

CNN has contacted the Department for Transport for comment.

Immune treatments and blood thinners can help children affected by an inflammatory syndrome that might be linked with coronavirus infection, pediatricians say.

A panel called the International PICU-COVID-19 Collaboration has compared notes and released a consensus statement defining the condition, naming it “Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome Potentially Associated with COVID-19.”

Dr. Jeffrey Burns, chief of critical care medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, coordinates the panel.

The syndrome is marked by persistent fever, inflammation, poor function in one or more organs, and other symptoms similar to shock.

Kawasaki disease involves inflammation in the walls of medium-sized arteries and can damage the heart.

Smokers and former smokers, including e-cigarette users, have a significantly greater risk of developing severe cases of Covid-19 and dying from the illness than their non-smoking counterparts, according to a new study from the University of California, San Francisco. 

The meta-analysis, or study of studies, looked at 19 peer-reviewed papers from China, South Korea and the United States. It found 30% of smokers developed more severe forms of Covid-19 compared to 17.6% of non-smokers.

“Smoking and e-cigarette use increase the risk and severity of pulmonary infections because of damage to upper airways and a decrease in pulmonary immune function in general, although these effects have not yet been studied for SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” they wrote. “Smokers have a known higher risk of infection and mortality from MERS-COV, a viral respiratory illness caused by a different coronavirus.”

The analysis likely underestimated how smoking affects the risk of contracting the coronavirus in the general population, the authors said, because the studies the analysis is based on were only focused on those who had already developed Covid-19.

But the authors urged health officials to add smoking cessation for both tobacco and e-cigarette products to the list of steps needed to curb the pandemic, and are advocating for more data collection on smokers and e-cigarette users to see if they’re at greater risk of contracting the disease.

Workplace communication tool Slack is back online after being down for a short period of time this morning.

The outage was tough timing for the platform as workers have increasingly come to depend on the service for telework during the coronavirus pandemic.

Slack said Tuesday evening that it was investigating connectivity issues with the productivity app, following reports of outages on the service. 

The company acknowledged that users were experiencing failures in sending messages, in a status update on its website.

Slack has more than 12 million daily active users, according to the company's website.

A key coronavirus model often cited by the White House has again raised its coronavirus death projection, now predicting 147,000 deaths in the US by August 4.

That’s an increase of about 10,000 deaths compared to the model’s estimate from this weekend, which was already higher than earlier projections. 

On Sunday, Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, tied the earlier increase to “explosive increases in mobility in a number of states.”

Compared to Sunday, the model now projects about 2,450 additional deaths in New York, 2,000 additional deaths in Massachusetts and 1,700 additional deaths in Pennsylvania. Other states saw sizable increases as well. North Carolina, for example, is now expected to see about 3,200 more deaths, and Maryland about 1,200 more.

Some states saw decreases in projected deaths, however, including Georgia, which is now expected to see 1,500 fewer deaths. The model’s projection for Indiana has also gone down by 1,600 deaths.

On its website, IHME said exact reasons for the changes vary by state. But the institute pointed to “epidemiological indicators and key drivers of viral transmission,” like changes in testing and mobility. 

Watch: