August 3 coronavirus news

After dipping in July, traffic at the nation’s airports climbed to new pandemic-era highs this weekend.   

The Transportation Security Administration said it screened nearly 800,000 people on Sunday. The 799,861 people it screened that day was the most since air travel cratered in mid-April.  

Friday was the second-busiest day. The next busiest days were over the July 4 holiday weekend.  

This weekend’s numbers are just below 30% of the traffic TSA screened last year. The screening numbers include airline crew members and some airport employees.  

The air carrier industry group Airlines for America said the average flight is now about 45% full.   

Wall Street kicked off the month of August higher, with all three major stock indexes climbing at the opening bell.

Investors' hopes for more stimulus — from both Congress and the Federal Reserve — have propped up the market in recent months.

Although stocks are ticking higher Monday morning, investors will closely watch negotiations for the next stimulus package in Washington. If those talks go south, the market could take a beating.

Here's where things stood at opening:

Portuguese hotels and other types of accommodation have seen a 96.0% decline in the number of overnight stays by foreign tourists in the month of June, compared to last year, data from the country’s National Statistics Institute (INE) released on Monday shows.

Internal travel by residents helped soften the blow on the country’s tourism sector but the number of total guests was still down 81.7% from the previous year, to around 500,000, INE also said.

The number of overnight stays was 1.1 million, 85.1% less than in 2019.

According to INE, tourists from Britain, Spain and France were responsible for the largest number of cancellations by foreigners.

The number of tourists from the United Kingdom, for example, a key market for the Portuguese tourism sector, shrank by 98.2%.

 The report by INE also stated that in June, around 45.2% of tourist accommodation had to be closed or did not receive any guests.  

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted health services around the world, according to officials at the World Health Organization.

Ryan said that WHO is analyzing a recent survey that was completed by WHO member states.

It shows that three quarters of member states reported partial or complete disruption of immunization services, rehabilitation services and dental services, he said.

Two-thirds have reported partial or complete disruption of non-communicable disease, chronic diseases diagnosis and treatment, family planning and treatment of mental health disorders.

More than half reported disruptions of malaria treatment campaigns, distribution of insecticide treated nets, antenatal care, cancer diagnosis and treatment, palliative care services, and services for sick children.

“What we’re seeing is a secondary effect, in terms of both provision and access of health care,” Ryan said.

This secondary effect challenges and threatens the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, he said.

The economic impacts are also having direct impacts “on the loss of purchasing power for many people, in terms of accessing health services in countries where there are user fees,” Ryan said.

“In this case, as health services become less and less accessible, as potential costs and user fees increase, and as people’s disposable income decreases, we fear that people will be making unhealthy choices, or choices not to seek health care because the cost of doing so is so difficult for them and their family,” he said.

Halsey Beshears, Florida’s top business regulator, met with brewery and bar owners Friday and through the weekend to discuss ideas about reopening, according to Karen Smith, Director of Communications, Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. 

Beshears met with bars and breweries in Jacksonville on Friday, Tallahassee on Saturday and Pensacola on Sunday, per Smith. And he has meetings scheduled in Tampa and St. Petersburg on Monday and Ft. Myers on Tuesday. Other locations are in the works, says Smith.

 The meetings are not open to media, per Smith.

It is “very important” to get quick results from coronavirus tests in order to implement the public health measures that are needed to control Covid-19, World Health Organization officials said at a press conference in Geneva on Monday.

“It’s very important that when you have a test that is done, that you have the answers to that test quickly,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for coronavirus.

Unfortunately, she said, there are many parts of the world where it takes quite a long time to get test results back.

Once someone has been confirmed to be infected with the virus, whether they have symptoms or not, they need to be isolated – and knowing that they are infected means that contact tracing can be carried out.

“This is what breaks chains of transmission,” Van Kerkhove said. “If we have results back in four or five days, even longer, that is not going to help us.”

Having rapid tests in development is a positive thing and will help control efforts, she said.

Van Kerkhove also pointed out that WHO teams are working with their partners across the globe to quickly evaluate rapid tests to see how well they perform, and that they give accurate results.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, reiterated the importance of quick test results.

“Getting the time from testing to confirming the status of the patient is the single most important thing,” he said. “There’s no point having a test result a week later, when the public health action is late.”

In places where there is limited capacity in laboratories, Ryan said, “You must focus on trying to detect suspect cases, confirming those cases, isolating those cases, quarantining contacts, and … taking all of the measures necessary.”

He called this the most efficient use of testing at the current time.

Vietnam reported 21 new coronavirus cases on Monday afternoon, bringing the country's total number of confirmed cases to at least 642, according to Chinhphu, the official government newspaper.

At least 15 of the 21 new cases were found in the resort city of Da Nang, while six cases were found in the nearby province of Quang Nam, Chinhphu reports. All of them are linked to the Da Nang Hospital, which is one of the three medical facilities being placed under lockdown.

A total of 103,268 people who had close contact with patients or came from pandemic-hit areas are now under quarantine nationwide, according to the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA).

Vietnam's testing capacity has been double compared to the peak period in April, acting Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long said, according to Chinhphu.

Although the infection fatality ratio – or, how many people who are infected with Covid-19 die from it – sounds low, it is actually “quite high,” especially when compared with other pandemics, according to officials at the World Health Organization.

There are different ways that mortality can be calculated, and at this point, many groups are looking at the infection fatality ratio – which is the number of deaths among all the people who have been infected, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for coronavirus response, said at a press briefing in Geneva on Monday.

“Right now, we don’t know how many people have been infected because there are challenges with surveillance in detecting every single one of the cases, and certainly there are many unrecognized cases,” Van Kerkhove said.

While there are challenges, Van Kerkhove said that some studies have estimated the infection fatality ratio at 0.6%. That “may not sound like a lot, but it is quite high,” she said.

We know that mortality increase with age, and among people with underlying conditions, she said.

“We must do everything that we can to prevent ourselves, and those individuals, from getting infected,” Van Kerkhove said.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, put some perspective on the 0.6% infection mortality rate, saying “that 0.6% is just over 1 in 200 people infected, potentially dying.”

He did say that this was hugely skewed by age, with the risk being much higher in older ages groups.

Ryan compared this number with the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, where “it was more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000,” he said. “But when you think 1 in 200 versus 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000, you get a sense of just how more deadly this virus is in communities.”

This points to the fact, he said, that everyone should try to avoid getting infected.

“I hope if we focus on that exposure reduction, infection reduction, then we will be talking about mortality going down,” he said.

Key deadlines on extending a federal eviction moratorium and federal unemployment benefits have come and gone. Yet lawmakers and the White House, sources say, are as far apart as they've ever been in talks on the next emergency aid package.

As one person involved told CNN on Sunday night: "No clue how we get this done at this point. Just so much outstanding."

Here's what you need to know about the stimulus negotiations:

Bottom line: Negotiators on both sides emerged from a three-hour-plus meeting on Saturday with by far the most positive words about where things stood. What that really underscored was just how much of a mess these talks have been. The meeting was productive because negotiators left with a better understanding of the full scope of disagreements (and areas of potential agreement), according to two sources. Not because they'd made headway toward an actual deal.

What to watch: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows will be back on Capitol Hill to meet with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

The framing: To understand why the two sides remain so far apart, it's worth comparing how each is framing the scale of the crisis. Mnuchin, during the talks over the initial $2.2 trillion CARES Act, dismissed concerns about deficits due to historically low borrowing costs and the urgency of the moment. That has shifted — on Sunday he made a point of noting concerns about adding to much to the national debt in the next round.

This, on the other hand, was how Pelosi framed things in a letter to her House Democratic colleagues on Saturday night:

"All parties must understand the gravity of the situation in order to reach an agreement that protects Americans' lives, livelihoods and the life of our democracy."

There are a large number of policy differences here, but the biggest issue throughout the first week-plus of real negotiations has been the lens through which the two sides view the scale of the current crisis. And until that starts to merge, at least somewhat, there is no deal to be had.

The timing: The policy deadlines, at least up to this point, didn't spark a deal. The Senate is scheduled to leave for August recess at the end of this week, but there's zero sense something will come together before then. Neither side wants to leave town for the month without reaching an agreement, but at this point, that agreement —and then the process of actually getting it through both chambers — is a long way off.

"I'm not optimistic that there will be a solution in the very near term," Meadows said on CBS's "Face the Nation."