June 10 coronavirus news

Researchers have launched a study to evaluate drugs prescribed to infants, children and adolescents with Covid-19.

The effort uses an existing trial and will be funded by the National Institutes of Health, the agency said in a statement on Wednesday.

The study is designed to gather information to refine dosing and improve safety, not to evaluate which drug is best, according to the announcement. Researchers will use blood samples to understand the movement of drugs through children’s bodies and collect information on potential side effects and outcomes. 

Physicians often prescribe drugs off-label to children, as they have not been specifically tested for use in children. Off-label use is when a US Food and Drug Administration-approved drug is used for an unapproved purpose.

The study is not a clinical trial with a control group. It will investigate a number of drugs that are already given to children with Covid-19. Health care providers who are already treating patients can enroll these patients into the study with parent or guardian approval. 

Since Memorial Day weekend, the number of patients hospitalized due to coronavirus infection has gone up in at least a dozen states that are tracking hospitalization data.

The states include:

These findings are according to data that CNN aggregated from the Covid Tracking Project from May 25 to June 9. Some of these states are seeing larger increases in hospitalizations than others. 

For instance, while hospitalizations rose slightly in California, they appear to be leveling off compared with the sharper increases seen in Arkansas, Arizona, South Carolina and Utah. In other states where the increase was small, such as Oregon and Mississippi, their hospitalization data has been fluctuating over time.

Overall, the new data mark an increase in several states that began in the past couple of weeks. The lag period between when people are exposed to the virus to the time that they may actually get tested and come back with a confirmed infection can be about two to three weeks. 

When it comes to cases alone, 19 states nationwide have seen a more than 10% increase in the number of new cases they reported between the weeks ending June 2 and June 9.

Poland has shut down 12 coal mines after the country’s health minister said most of its coronavirus cases had been identified at these “hotspots.”

The mining region of Silesia has now had more than 10,000 confirmed cases, according to Health Ministry figures compiled by a volunteer data analyst. The total number of cases in Poland is at least 27,668, according to Johns Hopkins University.

At least two coal mines have more than 1,000 confirmed cases, according to figures supplied by coal companies to Polish business daily Gazeta Prawna.

The government said miners would receive 100% of their pay — unlike many other workers in the country, after businesses had to close from mid-March under lockdown restrictions.

Health Ministry spokesman Wojciech Andrusiewicz was quoted by Polsat News saying that 98% of the cases in Silesia’s coal mines were symptom-free, and the high numbers were the result of a large number of tests being conducted. “No one before us has screened such an amount of symptom-free cases,” the spokesman said, according to Polstat.

Poland has a relatively low number of deaths per million residents, following early implementation of social distancing and lockdown measures, but in the last week of May the national R (reproduction) number, showing the spread of the virus, was 1.25. In the Silesian Voivodeship (province) it was 2.

On May 27, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced an easing of coronavirus-related restrictions. Starting on May 30, Polish people were no longer required to cover their faces in public spaces. 

Social distancing guidelines recommending that people maintain a two-meter distance from others are still in place.

However, from June 6 events such as weddings were permitted to have up to 150 participants. Theaters, swimming pools and gyms are now allowed to open at 50% capacity. 

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday addressed the confusing comments that a WHO official made earlier this week about the asymptomatic spread of novel coronavirus.

"But here is what we do know — that finding, isolating and testing people with symptoms, and tracing and quarantining their contacts, is the most critical way to stop transmission," Tedros said. "This is a new virus and we're all learning all the time. Communicating complex science in real time about a new virus is not always easy, but we believe it’s part of our duty to the world. And we can always do better. We welcome constructive debate. That's how science advances."

On Monday, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead for coronavirus response and head of its emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, said during a media briefing that "it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual."

Then on Tuesday, WHO held a live question and answer session on its social media pages where Van Kerkhove clarified her comments, saying that the asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 is possible, but more research is needed to determine how often it occurs.

The comments appeared to directly contradict guidance from public health organizations, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which have said about a third of coronavirus infections may be asymptomatic.

The CDC also estimates that 40% of coronavirus transmission is occurring before people feel sick, meaning they are pre-symptomatic.

Saudi Arabia recorded 3,717 new coronavirus cases and 36 new deaths, the country's Health Ministry said today — the highest daily number of infections, according to government statistics.

The kingdom has been recording more than 3,000 cases for the past four days, pushing the total number of coronavirus infections in the country to at least 112,288. At least 819 people have died, the ministry added.

Saudi Arabia now has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the Gulf region despite adopting one of the strongest lockdown measures in the Middle East. 

About the lockdown: The capital city of Riyadh and the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina were subject to 24-hour curfews in April and movements were restricted during Muslim Eid holidays.

The country started easing lockdown measures at the end of May, permitting mosque prayers and mall openings with plans to completely lift lockdown measures by June 20.

Last week the country reimposed a curfew on the second largest city, Jeddah due to increasing cases and hinted at possible stringent curfews on other cities, according to the Saudi Press Agency. 

Back in April, Saudi advised Muslims planning on attending the upcoming Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to put their plans on hold due to coronavirus.The Hajj attracts around 2.5 million people every year to Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia has yet to announce their plans with the pilgrimage expected to start July 28.

Major League Soccer will resume its suspended season on July 8 with a league-wide tournament in Orlando at Disney World's ESPN Wide World of Sports complex, the league announced today. 

MLS suspended its season on March 12 due to the coronavirus outbreak. July 8 will be exactly four months since the last MLS match was played on March 8.

How the tournament will work: The month-long tournament with feature all 26 MLS teams competing in a "World Cup style" format, which will begin with group stage matches where results will count toward each team's regular season points total. 

After the group stage matches, the top 16 teams will advance to the knockout stage. The tournament will culminate with the championship match on August 11.

American Airlines says it will activate more than 140 planes than have been in storage due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

He cautioned that July is still expected to be “way down” from a year ago. At its peak this July, he expects the airline will operate about 4,000 flights, compared to about 7,000 flights in July 2019, he said.

Still, activating theses planes is a sign that demand for air travel is starting to trickle back. 

Recently, TSA announced it had screened 400,000 people nationwide for the first time since March, but that is well below the levels of a year ago. 

As more states loosen coronavirus restrictions, professor of immunology and biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Erin Bromage, a CNN contributor, addressed some top-of-mind questions about the pandemic on “New Day.” 

Q: Are we ever going to shake hands again?

A: “I think we'll get back there, eventually; it’s just going to take some time and we need to understand the virus better. We need to have a better treatment before normality with that type of thing comes back again.” 

Q: Are we allowed to hug people now or not? 

A: “The infection control person in me says no. But there are ways to do it, if you're in a community where the current prevalence of the virus is quite low, where you can. A child hugging a grandparent can hug them around the waist. Their faces never come anywhere near each other. They disinfect their hands after that, we do it outdoors. There are creative ways to be able to do it and to do it responsibly and reducing the risk. … As long as you don't turn your head towards the person that you're hugging and you're wearing masks … you just make sure you wash your hands.”

Q: Can we go on airplanes now? 

A: “If you are at high risk, if you have high blood pressure, if you are overweight, it's probably not worth it under almost any circumstance. But if you have a good reason for flying, there's a necessity that you need to fly, there's a risk involved but I think that you can take that risk if your own personal risk is lower because of your health and age.”

He added that airplanes need to enforce masks across the board. “It really comes down to ‘I protect you, you protect me.’”

Q: Is it safe now to go into a hair salon and get your hair cut? 

A: “[Going] into the hair salon is definitely going to be a little bit more risky. But again, it can be managed if you think about how to do it from the employer's point of view, that we keep the number of people down, we don't wait, we don't have long haircuts, we wear masks all the way through … It can be done. You just are assuming a high level of risk, but you can mitigate that risk by just some simple steps.”  

Watch:

Consumer prices continued to fall in May even as the economy began to reopen.

Although lockdown measures eased across the country, consumers kept their wallets closed, keeping prices low.

The consumer price index declined 0.1% in May on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.

This is the third-straight month of falling prices: In April, prices declined 0.8% on a seasonally adjusted basis, the largest drop since December 2008.

America is in a recession and it will need consumer spending that can stimulate price increases to get its way out of the dire situation.

Food and shelter prices rose in May, but those increases were more than offset by drops in car insurance, energy and clothing prices. Prices for plane tickets and used cares also fell last month.

Stripping out food and energy prices, which tend to be more volatile, consumer prices fell 0.1% in May. It was the first time on record that core inflation declined for three months in a row.