August 18 coronavirus news

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.

Adm. Brett Giroir, the White House coronavirus testing coordinator, said on Tuesday that he is not dismissive of testing, but that it has to be part of a comprehensive plan that focuses on other coronavirus prevention measures.

“The only thing I’ve been trying to say is that it’s part of a comprehensive plan,” he said. People have to wear a mask, watch their distance and wash their hands," Giroir said, “That’s the core.” 

Still, he said, there are continued investments being made in testing, and point-of-care testing will be particularly important to supporting the reopening of schools and businesses.

Mexico's health ministry announced what it called "good news" Tuesday morning, saying the country is "in a decreasing phase" of the coronavirus outbreak.

On Monday, Mexico recorded its lowest number of new cases since June, adding 3,571 new Covid-19 cases. The rolling average of new daily cases, measured over the week since Aug. 10, stood at 5,700. The average has fallen steadily from an all-time peak of 7,022 on Aug. 1. However, the daily average of deaths (measured across one week) from coronavirus peaked only on Aug. 11 at 702, and has fallen only slightly since then. 

Mexico has 525,733 total confirmed coronavirus cases and 57,203 deaths from the virus.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, criticized the administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic in an editorial after about 130 students tested positive for Covid-19.

"We all saw this coming. In his fall semester welcome message, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz wrote, 'As always, remember that it is our shared responsibility to keep each other safe. Every person you walk by on campus will be counting on you to diligently work to prevent the spread of the virus,'" the editorial said.

"The administration continues to prove they have no shame, and the bar for basic decency keeps getting lower."

The university on Monday abruptly decided it will no longer hold in-person classes on campus. The university will shift to remote learning starting Wednesday.

The Covid-19 positivity rate among students rose to 13.6% of the 954 students tested in the past week, and five employees also tested positive, according to the university's Covid-19 dashboard. As of Monday morning, 177 students were in isolation and 349 were in quarantine, both on and off campus.

"We’re angry — and we’re scared. We’re tired of the gaslighting, tired of the secrecy, tired of being treated like cash cows by a University with such blatant disregard for our lives," the editorial said. 

With reporting from CNN's Eric Levenson

Watch:

It's 9:30 a.m. in New York and 2:30 p.m. in London, here is the latest on coronavirus cases and testing across the world:

With reporting from CNN's Madeline Holcombe

Notre Dame University is seeing a spike in Covid-19 cases since students returned to campus on Aug. 3. 

As of Tuesday morning, 58 students have tested positive, according to the school's online health dashboard.

On Sunday alone, 15 of the 30 tests were positive. Sunday had the highest number of positive cases in a single day to date for the university.

The spike started on Aug. 10, when four out of 197 people tested positive. Between Aug. 3 and 10, there were no new positive cases. The university updates its numbers at noon every day.

The university began testing students before they arrived on campus. In that batch of 11,836 tests, just 33 tests came back positive, which amounts to 0.28%.

Coronavirus and its spread vary greatly across different US states.

Los Angeles County, a hotspot in California, has seen steady progress in the fight to curb the virus, L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Monday. Daily hospitalizations have dropped 37% in the last month.

But other states are not seeing such optimism. 

Texas surpassed 10,000 coronavirus-related deaths Monday. And Florida nearly doubled the count of coronavirus deaths in just a month, bringing the total to 9,539.

However, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted on Monday that the state is reporting the lowest number of cases of Covid-19 in one day since mid-June at 2,760; adding that the number of coronavirus-positive patients currently hospitalized in the state is down almost 40% since July 21.

Months into the coronavirus pandemic the question of immunity is still unclear. As states continue to open up, schools restart in-person learning and the flu season approaches, the question of whether you can get the virus a second time is top of mind.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains what we know about this to date and the best practices going forward.

Watch:

The UK government has axed Public Health England (PHE) — the agency behind England's pandemic response — to replace it with a new national health institute.

The agency will be called The National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP) and will be headed by conservative peer Dido Harding, who has been running England’s widely criticized National Health Service (NHS) Test and Trace system.

UK media reports have likened it to Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, a federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention, which handled the country’s coronavirus response. The UK has recorded 41,454 coronavirus deaths — with the majority in England — while Germany has recorded 9,240, according to the John Hopkins University map.

NIHP will be formalized and operating from Spring 2021 but its work will start immediately “with a single command structure to advance the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to the UK government’s website.

“From today [Tuesday] it will bring together Public Health England (PHE) and NHS Test and Trace, as well as the analytical capability of the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) under a single leadership team. This is the first step towards becoming a single organization, focused on tackling Covid-19 and protecting the nation’s health,” the government statement said.

Some background: PHE has come under repeated fire for its handling of the pandemic, including testing issues and personal protective equipment procurement problems. However, ultimately it is a government agency that reports to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

Hancock announced the axing of PHE, saying the new National Institute for Health Protection "will have a single and relentless mission: protecting people from external threats to this country's health."

This includes biological weapons, pandemics and of course infection diseases of all kinds, he said.

He said the changes would strengthen the UK's response to the pandemic in a joined-up response and admitted "we did not go into this crisis with the capacity for a response to a once in a century scale event."

Hancock explained the institute will also work closely with the devolved administrations of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales "taking on existing UK-wide responsibilities and supporting all four."

"My single biggest fear is a novel flu, or another major health alert, hitting us right now in the middle of this battle against coronavirus. Even once this crisis has passed, and it will pass, we need a disease control infrastructure that gives us the permanent, standing capacity to respond as a nation and the ability to scale up at pace," Hancock said.

The NHS coronavirus tracing app Dido spearheaded was set to play a key part in helping the country out of lockdown, and government officials had said it would be rolled out nationally in mid-May. However, it was never launched nationally and was scrapped in a government U-turn in favor of a system developed jointly by Google and Apple in June. It is still in the trial stage.