August 31 coronavirus news

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp extended statewide limits on public gatherings for another two weeks.

The order continues to ban public gatherings of 50 or more people unless they can maintain six feet of social distancing. The new order announced Monday expires at the end of the day on Sept. 15.

Despite the extension, the governor’s office says the state is making progress in fighting coronavirus.

“Currently, COVID-19 hospitalizations in Georgia are at their lowest since July 6,” the governor’s office said in a statement. “Cases reported yesterday were at their lowest point since June 22.”

The governor also extended the state’s general state of emergency through Oct. 10.

British drug maker AstraZeneca – which announced Monday the US launch of Phase 3 trials for its coronavirus vaccine – said its “core values to follow the science" and "put patients first," according to a statement.

The statement come on the same day that the World Health Organization cautioned countries against rushing to develop coronavirus vaccines and to use great care in granting emergency use authorization. Those remarks appeared to be directed toward China, Russia and the United States.

Both China and Russia say they will start deploying vaccines before completing late-stage clinical trials, and US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn has said if the US gets enough data from advanced stage trials, it might be possible to authorize a vaccine before the trials are completed.

AstraZeneca, which developed the vaccine with the University of Oxford, also said it will enroll more than 50,000 volunteers globally, including 30,000 in the United States, as well as participants in “Latin America, Asia, Europe, Russia and Africa that will provide data for ethnically diverse populations.”

In US trials, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said he wants to see minorities enrolled at levels that are at least double their percentages in the population, or roughly 65%. 

Neither Moderna nor Pfizer/BioNTech – the two other drugmakers with coronavirus vaccine candidates in large-scale phase 3 trials in the US – have finished enrolling their stated goals of 30,000 volunteers each.

The city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is set to reopen cultural centers such as museums, amusement parks and libraries on Tuesday as the city enters the first part of the final phase in its reopening plan, the city announced Monday.

Theaters, stadiums and sunbathing on beaches will stay closed.

The move comes after Rio saw a decrease in new Covid-19 infections and deaths over the past two weeks. If cases and deaths continue to decline, the city expects to enter the second part of phase six, phase 6B, on Oct. 1.  

The latest numbers: On Monday, the state of Rio de Janeiro reported at least 329 new Covid-19 cases, bringing its total count to approximately 223,631.

The state’s Health Ministry also reported at least 38 new deaths, bringing that total to approximately 16,065 people.

The Rio de Janeiro state is the third-most severely impacted by the pandemic in the country, to date. Brazil is second only to the United States in terms of the highest total number of coronavirus cases and deaths globally.  

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and White House Coronavirus advisor Scott Atlas discouraged testing individuals with no coronavirus symptoms at a Monday roundtable event in Tallahassee, Florida. 

This comes after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised testing guidelines last week. The new recommendations suggest asymptomatic people may not need to be tested for Covid-19, even if they've been in close contact with an infected person.

But, some experts are still concerned about asymptomatic spread. 

Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is.”

Atlas said that although asymptomatic spread can occur, symptomatic individuals are “super spreaders” of the virus.

Brazil’s Health Ministry is reporting at least 45,961 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases in the country to approximately 3,908,272.

The ministry also reported at least 553 additional coronavirus deaths on Monday, raising the country’s death toll to approximately 121,381.

Even as new cases and registered deaths continue to rise in Brazil, a CNN analysis shows the rate of increase in both new cases and the number of deaths has notably decreased during the month of August.

Brazil continues to trail only the United States in terms of the highest number of coronavirus infections and deaths in the world, according to data held by Johns Hopkins University. 

Covid-19 patients who are obese face more serious disease than those without obesity, a new study finds. Nearly all intensive care patients who were studied ended up on a ventilator if they had severe obesity, the researchers founds.

Obesity is listed as a risk factor for severe disease by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies. Dr. François Pattou, head of the Department of General and Endocrine Surgery at Lille University Hospital in France, along with colleagues set out to quantify the risk.

Back in April, Pattou’s team began to look at Covid-19 patients across Europe. They studied 124 patients admitted to intensive care units and compared them with 306 patients in the intensive care unit for reasons other than coronavirus.

They found about half of the patients with Covid-19 in ICU had obesity, defined as a body mass index or BMI over 30. A quarter of the patients had a BMI of 35 or above, Pattou found. But only around 10% of the patients had a BMI that was under 25, considered a healthy weight. 

When researchers compared this to the non-Covid patients in ICU, fewer were obese. “A quarter had obesity or severe obesity; a further quarter were overweight, and around half fell into the healthy weight range,” the European and International Congress on Obesity, where the findings will be presented, said in a statement.

Doctors know obesity puts patients at higher risk of severe illness from infectious respiratory diseases such as flu. Pattou’s study found that the higher a patient’s BMI, the worse the symptoms.

 "Several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the increased risk posed by this virus to people living with obesity could not be clearer,” Pattou said in a statement.

“Our data show that the chances of increasing to more severe disease increases with BMI, to the point where almost all intensive care Covid-19 patients with severe obesity will end up on a ventilator."

Houston, Texas, Mayor Sylvester Turner on Monday encouraged residents to avoid large gatherings ahead of Labor Day Weekend, saying coronavirus "is still looking for you."

"You know what happened during Memorial Day and the Fourth of July weekend. People came together, and then the virus took off, and then you saw the numbers go up," Turner said during a news conference.

The latest numbers: Sylvester said the positivity rate for new Covid-19 cases in Houston has decreased to 7.8% from 9.2% the week before.

"We are moving in the right direction," Turner said, urging people to continue public health measures such as wearing masks and social distancing for the city to reach the 5% positivity rate goal. 

The only way to find those with asymptomatic infections of Covid-19 at universities is to do aggressive testing, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said over the weekend.

Birx said what she sees happening at schools “really gives us hope” that the universities will be able to find asymptomatic patients. 

Most university students won’t know that they’re infected, Birx said during a news briefing in Fargo, North Dakota, on Saturday.

Birx also said she hoped universities could use surge testing, adding that testing could be sped up through innovative methods like pool testing and new collection techniques such as using saliva instead of nasal swabs.

“That is all going to move forward here,” she said. 

University students who get infected with coronavirus should isolate where they are and not carry the virus away from campus, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said over the weekend.

Numerous coronavirus outbreaks have been detected as university and college students returned to campuses across the country to start the fall semester.

“We can prevent the spread from any university into the community and into the homes from where the students came if the students will isolate and ensure they don’t spread the virus,” Birx said.