August 5 coronavirus news

The recent Covid-19 outbreak at a sleep away camp in Georgia is not necessarily an example of what might happen when schools open, Dr. George Rutherford, principal investigator of the state of California’s contract tracing program, said Wednesday.

Some background: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on the outbreak as a cautionary tale about what might happen at schools if they open for in-person learning. More than 40% of campers and staff at the camp became infected with coronavirus.

Both Rutherford and the CDC report pointed out that the children were not wearing masks, there was regular singing and cheering and that windows and doors were closed in the cabins. These closed windows and doors probably increased recirculated air and the risk factors, according to Rutherford.

“We’ve always known that children could get infected. We’ve always known that children could infect other people, just not at the same rates,” Rutherford said. “And if you put them into an intensive situation like this, these are the kinds of results you can expect.”

Rutherford said that bars and churches were places that worried him when it comes to transmission of Covid-19.

“If you have places with the windows all shut, people singing, it’s like Georgia summer camp, okay, it’s not a great idea,” he said. “If you’re going to do that stuff, they have to be outside and people have to be socially distant.”

The University of Louisville has announced the suspension of team-related activities for four fall sports as of Aug. 3, after 29 members of the four teams tested positive for Covid-19.

The four sports affected are men’s and women’s soccer, field hockey and volleyball.

Following athletic department policies and protocols, the university traced the exposure primarily to an off-campus party.

Student-athletes from the four sports who have not tested positive or been identified through contact tracing are being permitted to return to workouts on campus beginning Aug. 10, pending further testing results.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN that senators will “certainly be in next week,” delaying the start of the chamber's August recess.

"We'll certainly be in next week. We'll see what happens after that," McConnell said. 

White House officials Steve Mnuchin and Mark Meadows set a deadline to negotiate with Democrats for the end of the week. It’s unclear if they will meet that. 

GOP Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of leadership, argued that if there wasn’t a deal, members might as well go home. 

“If there’s not a deal by Friday, there won’t be a deal,” Blunt said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday that the White House coronavirus task force will take a "careful look" at air droplets and their role in the spread of Covid-19, to see if new guidance is warranted.

Fauci, speaking to CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta during a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health forum, said he's been in touch with experts about the possibility that there may be droplets much bigger than five micrometers that continue to float around in the air.

Fauci said the possibility of bigger droplets "gives you a greater reason for wearing a mask at all times," and that being outdoors is much better than being indoors.

He added there may be a need to rethink air circulation when indoors, including filtering air with HEPA filters.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the coronavirus testing challenges in the United States are "unacceptable — period," during an interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Gupta explained a situation last week when he was preparing for brain surgery and couldn’t get the timely result of a Covid-19 test.

“I got a CAT scan on my patient, I got coagulation numbers on my patient, I got a cardiac echo on my patient, I was doing brain surgery on this patient, and could not get a Covid result,” Gupta explained.

Gupta asked why, after so many months, do we still have this problem?

“I could bend myself into a pretzel trying to get out of that question,” Fauci answered. “It’s unacceptable – period.”

“You a real world example of why we got to do better,” he said. 

“There you were in the operating room, having to put on PPE,” because the patient’s Covid status was unknown, Fauci said. “That is totally unacceptable, and for me to say anything different is distorting reality.” 

Fauci went on to say that "the ultimate goal, is that you would have a test that you could do and get a result in 10 minutes, that's sensitive, specific and can be upscaled in the sense of – you can do it any place, in anywhere."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking to CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta during a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health forum, said coronavirus has the world in “uncharted territory.”

When it evolves, that’s when science needs to drive the recommendations, “particularly things like masks and crowds, indoor/outdoor, aerosol, not aerosol – these are things that we're learning as time goes by, and you do the best you can to make the recommendation, based on the data that you have right now,” Fauci said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday that the US had a "disparate" response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

"We live in a very big country, and we often leave the decisions about the implementation of things at the local level. And what we've seen is a great disparity in how individual states, cities, etcetera, responded," Fauci told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in a virtual forum hosted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Fauci explained that the US never got the number of new daily Covid-19 cases low enough to reopen in a safe way compared to other countries. Fauci added that states also didn't open uniformly, causing numbers to jump back up.

"We can do much better," Fauci added.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says wearing a mask should not be a political issue.

Speaking with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta during a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health forum on Wednesday, Fauci said, “There's such a divergence of how people view this [wearing masks].”

“A little while ago, you know, it depends on whether you wear a mask on how you feel politically, which was completely ridiculous,” he said.

 “The mask is a public health tool,” he added.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, warned that if the US does not have a unified response against Covid-19, the country is at risk of continuing to "smolder."

Speaking to CNN's Sanjay Gupta, Fauci used the metaphor of a rowing team, noting that while watching matches of his daughter who was on a varsity crew team in college, he learned that to "win the race" all those on the boat must be "rowing in unison."

Fauci added that he thinks this lack of unity "is the problem."