July 9 coronavirus news

The US Food and Drug Administration has added more types of hand sanitizer to its growing list of products that are either confirmed or potentially contaminated with toxic methanol.

More than two dozen hand sanitizer products sold by Mexico-based 4E Global -- many carrying the Blumen label -- contain high levels of methanol and have been recommended for recall, the agency said.

The FDA said it has seen an increase in products containing ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol, that tested positive for potentially poisonous methanol contamination.

Methanol can be life-threatening if ingested and toxic if absorbed through the skin. States have also reported cases of blindness, hospitalizations and deaths in adults and children after drinking hand sanitizer products tainted with methanol, the FDA said.

Methanol, or wood alcohol as it’s often known, is used in antifreeze and fuel production. Exposure can also cause nausea, headaches, dizziness, agitation, amnesia, coma and seizures, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC advises people to frequently wash their hands with soap and water to avoid contracting the novel coronavirus. If soap and water are not available, the CDC recommends using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% ethanol.

The FDA is urging consumers to check their hand sanitizers to find out if they are on the list of bad products posted on the agency's website and to report any adverse events or quality problems.

Cloth masks are better than nothing at protecting wearers and the people around them from disease, but they are not equivalent to medical-grade masks and shouldn’t be recommended for health care workers, researchers said Wednesday.

The researchers, from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said their results showed cloth versions don’t work as well.

 “In 2015, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the efficacy of cloth masks with that of medical masks and controls (standard practice) among healthcare workers in Vietnam,” Dr. Abrar Chughtai, an epidemiologist, and colleagues wrote in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. They checked the workers for influenza-like illnesses, which include a range of respiratory infections.

 The team also reviewed 19 other studies of masks and found the fabric used is important.

The researchers said that for coronavirus, all frontline health care workers should wear medical masks or N95 respirators.  

Authorities in India have recorded more than 100,000 cases of Covid-19 in the last five days, according to figures released by the country’s health ministry.

The ministry announced Thursday it had identified 24,879 new cases in a single 24-hour period -- India's highest in a single day since the pandemic began.

A total of 767,296 cases have now been identified in the country. More than 476,000 people have recovered, while 21,129 have died after contracting it.

A steady rise: The total number of daily new infections has been steadily rising in India, with the country registering more than 20,000 new coronavirus cases daily in the past week.

On Monday, India surpassed Russia to become the world's third-worst hit nation. Only the US and Brazil have identified more cases.

A total of 3,054,699 cases of coronavirus have been identified in the United States since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University's tally. At least 132,300 people have died in the country after contracting the virus. 

On Wednesday, Johns Hopkins reported 58,601 new cases and 820 deaths. 

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as repatriated cases. 

Track cases in the US here:

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Tracking Covid-19 cases in the US

Five months into a still-raging pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 Americans, simmering tensions between President Donald Trump and the health experts who staff his government have escalated from private griping to open dispute.

The result, people at those agencies say, is a new sense of demoralization as they continue their attempts to fight a once-in-a-generation health crisis while simultaneously navigating the whims of a President who has shown little interest or understanding of their work.

That Trump does not trust nor follow the advice of experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease specialist, is hardly new. The President has not attended a meeting of his coronavirus task force in months and recently its sessions have been held outside the White House, including on Wednesday at the headquarters of the Department of Education. Fauci was told to participate in the meeting remotely by videoconference, preventing him from participating in a midday task force press briefing.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said later it's a "decision for the task force" who appears at coronavirus briefings. Asked if the President still has confidence in Fauci, McEnany said Trump "has confidence in the conclusions of our medical experts."

Still, the President has complained to aides in meetings for months that Fauci's television appearances -- which have been sharply curtailed by the White House -- often seem to contradict his own message. As early as March, Trump was growing frustrated that Fauci's forecasts for the virus seemed less optimistic than his own, but largely avoided public rebukes.

At the same time, many of Trump's aides have viewed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with deep skepticism for months, believing its role in early testing missteps to have been a critical failure and viewing more recent leaks of draft guidance from the agency as attempts to circumvent the White House.

Yet as cases surge across the country and Trump's handling of the crisis causes his reelection prospects to dim, he is taking his quarrels with Fauci and the CDC public in striking new fashion.

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Trump now in open dispute with health officials as virus rages

Authorities in Hong Kong, a city lauded for its quick and effective coronavirus response, are now warning of potential "exponential growth" in new Covid-19 cases after a surge in local transmissions.

Since Sunday, 65 patients have been diagnosed -- including 31 locally transmitted cases in what has been dubbed a "third wave" of the pandemic in the global financial center.

Taxi drivers, restaurant workers, a medical clinic employee and a retirement home resident -- some of the people most vulnerable to the virus and likely to spread it -- have been diagnosed.

"It is possible there could be a major outbreak," Dr. Chuang Shuk-kwan, the head of Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) Communicable Disease Branch said Wednesday. "There could be a sudden exponential growth of cases."

Hong Kong has recorded only 1,324 coronavirus cases and seven virus-related fatalities since the pandemic began.

The city's success in containing Covid-19 has been attributed to the government's vigilant enforcement of quarantine for overseas arrivals, efficient contact tracing and residents' willingness to practice good hygiene, wear masks and practice social distancing.

While the new caseload and total number of people diagnosed with Covid-19 is very low compared to the United States and Brazil, experts say the latest rise shows the virus still poses a threat despite even the most stringent anti-epidemic controls.

"This virus will find every chink in your armor," said Dr. Sarah Borwein, a Hong Kong-based physician experienced in infectious diseases and epidemiology. "We've seen that in Beijing, in Singapore, in South Korea and now in Israel, Australia and elsewhere."

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Authorities in Hong Kong warn of potential 'exponential growth' in coronavirus cases

As Australia shut the border between its two most populous states to contain the spread of the coronavirus, tens of thousands of people living close to the dividing line have found their community cleaved in two.

Located on each side of the Murray River separating New South Wales and Victoria, the twin cities of Albury and Wodonga, more commonly referred to as Albury-Wodonga, have long operated as one community and one economy.

Many of their 100,000 residents cross the border every day. The two cities even share the same hospital, located in Albury on the NSW side but covered by Victoria's health system.

But that border was sealed on Wednesday, as authorities scrambled to prevent a second wave of infections spreading across the country. Over the past few weeks, Victoria has struggled to contain a sudden reemergence of coronavirus in Melbourne, as case numbers there continued to rise.

Authorities blocked major roads between Victoria and NSW after midnight -- the first time the border has closed since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.

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Australian border community cleaved in two by coronavirus lockdown

The Ohio State Department of Athletics has announced that the school has paused all voluntary workouts, “following the results of its most recent Covid-19 testing of student-athletes.”

The school is not sharing infection data publicly because "it could lead to the identification of specific individuals and compromise their medical privacy," the athletics department said in its statement.

The pause affects men’s and women’s basketball, field hockey, football, men’s and women’s soccer and women’s volleyball.

Earlier Wednesday, the University of North Carolina suspended its football program’s voluntary workouts after 37 players and staff tested positive for Covid-19.

Coronavirus was probably spreading widely across the US in February, new modeling data suggests, and it only took a few imported cases from other countries to set off rapid spread inside the borders.

While direct imports from China and other countries may have been responsible for the early introduction of Covid-19 to the US, most spread was state to state, researchers led by a team at Northeastern University in Boston reported.

“We estimate widespread community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in February, 2020,” a team led by Northeastern’s Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems wrote on MedRxiv, a pre-print server. The work has not been peer-reviewed.

The US announced restrictions on travel from China on January 31. The researchers say their modeling study suggests the restrictions came far too late.

“Importations from mainland China may be relevant in seeding the epidemic in January, but then play a small role in the COVID-19 expansion in the US because of the travel restrictions imposed to/from mainland China after January 23, 2020,” they wrote.

The model contrasts with evidence from several studies that suggest there was already a significant number of infections in the US by the time the travel restrictions were announced on January 31, the researchers wrote.