August 18 coronavirus news

Chicago’s Navy Pier will temporarily close on September 8, according to a news release posted on its website.

The pier-wide closure starts the day after Labor Day and is being done to “limit the financial burden and impact” of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. 

All pier-wide operations will be closed, according to the release, including more than 70 small local businesses. Public access to the outdoor spaces will be limited or prohibited during the closure as well.

The organization that runs the Navy Pier projects a $20 million deficit in 2020, according to the FAQs posted on the Navy Pier website. It says the pier generated close to $60 million in 2019. 

Navy Pier says it plans to reopen in the spring of 2021.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said two states – Alaska and Delaware – have been added to the Covid-19 travel advisory list, making the total at 35 states and territories.

Remember: As New York, New Jersey and Connecticut announced the travel advisory jointly – which requires anyone traveling from those areas which have significant community spread to quarantine for 14 days – we can expect the neighboring states to follow suit in updating their travel advisories based on shared metrics.

In June, the three states issued a joint travel advisory that requires people arriving from states with high coronavirus rates to quarantine for 14 days.

Here is the updated list of states on the travel advisory:

Major League Baseball announced that tonight's Cincinnati Reds game against the Royals in Kansas City, Missouri, has been postponed. The Reds previously said a player on the team had tested positive for Covid-19, forcing the postponement of two weekend games. 

Tuesday’s game has been rescheduled as a Wednesday doubleheader out of an abundance of caution, according to MLB. The league says the decision to delay the Reds return to the field will allow for additional Covid-19 testing. 

The Americas account for 64% of the world's Covid-19 deaths, Dr. Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, said in a briefing Tuesday.

"This virus is unrelenting and requires the same from us. We must be vigilant and keep transmission under control," Etienne said.

Etienne said the Americas has reached nearly 11.5 million total cases, with the US and Brazil as "the biggest drivers of the case counts."

Researchers in Germany have found possible evidence of the spread of coronavirus on a four-hour flight.

In March, early in the pandemic, two airline passengers developed coronavirus infections after sitting through a nearly five-hour-long flight, the researchers said. 

It all started with an infected hotel manager. A week before the flight, 24 travelers had contact with a hotel manager who later tested positive for Covid-19, according to research published in the journal JAMA Network Open on Tuesday. 

They all were among 102 passengers on the four-hour 40-minute Boeing 737-900 flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt. None of the passengers had received Covid-19 diagnoses before the flight. That early on in the pandemic, there were no mitigation measures in place and passengers were not asked to wear masks.

Researchers from the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany examined 24 patients from a tourist group and tested them for coronavirus. Most of the other passengers were also contacted four to five weeks later for interviews. 

Seven members of the tourist group tested positive for Covid-19. Four were symptomatic during the flight, two were presymptomatic and one remained asymptomatic, according to the researchers. 

“We discovered 2 likely SARS-CoV-2 transmissions on this flight, with seven index cases,” the researchers wrote. The two people who may have been infected on the flight were sitting at the back of the plane, directly across the aisle from the seven infected passengers seated in a cluster.

“These transmissions may have also occurred before or after the flight,” the researchers wrote.  

Just over 90% of the other flight passengers completed interviews with the researchers. One passenger reported testing positive for Covid-19 four days after the flight, but did not recall having any symptoms. 

The risk of transmission on a plane depends on a number of factors, including closeness to an index patient and movement of passengers and crew. 

At least 578 Miami-Dade County Public Schools employees have tested positive for Covid-19 since March, according to the district’s communications office.

The information was provided to CNN in response to a records request.

A total of 5,157 tests were conducted, including testing of employees, spouses and dependents, according to data provided to CNN. The total number of spouses and dependents who tested positive was not provided to CNN. 

Some more context: Miami-Dade County Public Schools currently employs 41,229 people and is scheduled to reopen for virtual instruction on Aug. 31.

If coronavirus vaccine trials want to recruit more people of color, teams will need to work on outreach and building trust, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Currently, researchers are saying they are struggling to recruit a sufficient number of minorities to join the clinical trials, which could delay the multi-billion-dollar effort to get a coronavirus vaccine to market in time.

Of the 350,000 people who've registered online for a coronavirus clinical trial, 10% are Black or Latino, according to Dr. Jim Kublin, executive director of operations for the Covid-19 Prevention Network.

That's not nearly enough, as study subjects in trials are supposed to reflect the population that's affected. Research shows that more than half of US coronavirus cases have been among Black and Latino people.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, gave the Moderna trial, the first in Phase 3 in the United States, a "C" grade for recruiting minorities.

To reach out to minorities and recruit them for clinical studies, "we have to undermine the structural foundations of racism," including housing segregation, unequal access to health care and income inequality, Benjamin said.

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About one-third of New York-area businesses would become insolvent without government support if current revenue levels persist, according to a New York Federal Reserve survey released Tuesday.

Thirty-four percent of service sector firms said their businesses would become insolvent in an average of eight months. And 32% of manufacturers said they would not be able to survive at current revenue levels without further support from government programs. Manufacturers said they would become insolvent in an average of just six months. 

The survey, which included companies based in New York, northern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut, reflects deep concerns from companies about their finances.

About three-quarters of service-sector firms and manufacturers said they were either very or somewhat concerned about collecting payments from customers. And roughly two-thirds said they were very or somewhat concerned about maintaining adequate cash flow.

Most companies surveyed said they applied for and received Payment Protection Program loans as part of the federal government’s stimulus package. 

Saliva tests are really important and the way they work makes them more amenable to surveillance testing, said Adm. Brett Giroir, the White House coronavirus testing coordinator, on Good Morning American on Tuesday.  

“I think it’s very important,” he said. 

Giroir noted some saliva tests, like SalivaDirect, which recently received emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration, and another in the works, don’t need swabs, don’t need special transport media and don’t need some of the chemical reagents used in other tests.

Giroir said that more saliva tests will be available soon.