September 10 coronavirus news

A total of 1,305 students and 25 faculty and staff members at Arizona State University have tested positive for Covid-19 since Aug. 1, the university reported on Wednesday. 

ASU's president Michael Crow had announced Wednesday the university would start releasing cumulative numbers of positive cases among students, faculty, and staff. The university was only sharing the number of current positive cases, meaning they were taking out the positive cases that have been medically cleared out of the total positive.

ASU also reported that a total of 610 students have been medically cleared since Aug. 1. A total of 138 faculty and staff members have been cleared — a number much higher than the total cumulative cases among employees. The university noted in its report this is because they have been keeping track of positive cases among employees since before Aug. 1.

Jay Thorne, the assistant vice president of media relations and strategic communications at ASU, expanded on this Thursday, telling CNN in a statement that "for employees who may have tested positive over the summer, there were – and are – very strict back-to-work protocols and there were positive cases who had not yet been released because the employee hadn’t finished their protocol process."

"Those backdated/backlogged cases cleared as we entered August – but they were not cases that were recorded as positive post-August 1, which is what our reporting covers," Thorne added.

Vaccine hesitancy isn’t just a problem in the United States; a large, global vaccine confidence survey released Thursday found that there are hesitancy hotspots around the world.

Tracking attitudes towards vaccines is especially important at a time when one or more vaccines against the novel coronavirus are expected to become available soon. The large-scale acceptance and uptake of an effective vaccine could help end the pandemic sooner rather than later.   

The new research examines the beliefs of more than 284,000 adults from 149 countries about how safe, effective and important vaccines are. Data was collected from 290 nationally representative surveys conducted between September 2015 and December 2019; some countries were surveyed just once while others were surveyed several times. 

The study was published Thursday in The Lancet. 

Among the findings: vaccine confidence in Europe remains low compared to other regions, ranging from a low of 19% in Lithuania who strongly agree that vaccines are safe to a high of 66% in Finland.

But the researchers found signs that public trust in vaccine safety is increasing, particularly in Finland, France, Italy, Ireland and the United Kingdom.  

In contrast, six countries saw substantial increases in people strongly disagreeing vaccines are safe — not just being less convinced, but actively opposing the use of vaccines—between 2015 and 2019: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Serbia.   

The researchers note that this "worrying trend” in negative attitudes mirrors trends in political instability and religious extremism. Poland saw a significant loss in confidence in vaccine safety, reflecting the growing impact of a highly organized local anti-vaccine movement. 

In the US: The percentage of respondents who strongly agree that vaccines are safe remained steady between 2015 and 2019, in the 50-59.9% range.

Those who strongly agreed that vaccines are important increased in the US to between 70 and 80% in 2019 while the percentage saying vaccines are effective went up to 60-69.9%.

At least three teachers in three states have died due to complications of Covid-19 in recent weeks, according to reports from CNN and local media outlets.

AshLee DeMarinis, a 34-year-old middle school teacher in at John Evans Middle School in Potosi, Missouri, died Sunday at Missouri Baptist Medical Center after battling complications related to Covid-19 for three weeks, CNN affiliate KMOV reported.

While McCaul would not confirm that DeMarinis, a social skills teacher, had passed away due to Covid-19, he told CNN that contact tracers had come to the school where DeMarinis taught, as was required by the local health department, and determined that she hadn’t had close contact with any teachers, staff or students. Students had not returned to the classrooms at John Evans Middle School when DeMarinis first became ill. 

Thomas Slade, a teacher at Vancleave High School in Jackson County, Mississippi, for 13 years died last week, district superintendent John Strycker said in a statement on Wednesday. 

“It is with a heavy heart that I send this letter to you. This past week, our school family lost one of our staff members — Vancleave High School teacher, Mr. Thomas Slade,” Strycker wrote. “Slade served the Jackson County School District honorably and with distinction as department chairman and history teacher at Vancleave High School. He was truly the personification of a public servant, devoting his life and career to serving the community where he was raised.”

CNN affiliate WLOX reported that Slade died on Sunday due to complications related to Covid-19.

Students began returning to the classroom in Jackson County on Aug. 6, according to the school district’s reopening guide.

CNN previously reported that a third grade teacher at Windsor Elementary School in Columbia, South Carolina, died on Monday from complications caused by Covid-19, according to a news release from Richland School District Two, which shared the information about the teacher’s death with permission from her parents, “who wish to remind others about the seriousness of this disease caused by the coronavirus.”

According to the school district, Demetria “Demi” Bannister began her teaching career five years ago and had just started her third year of teaching third grade.

Bannister’s last day at Windsor Elementary School was Aug. 28, the last workday for teachers before starting the school year teaching her students virtually from her home Aug. 31.

AstraZeneca should still be on track to have a set of data to submit for approval of a Covid-19 vaccine before the end of the year, despite having to pause the trial because of an illness in a volunteer, company CEO Pascal Soriot said Thursday.

The company has been working with Britain’s University of Oxford to develop the vaccine. The trial has shown promising early results, but was paused Tuesday because of an unexplained illness in one of its volunteers.

Regulators will review the data to determine when and if the trial can proceed. Experts said it’s common for vaccine trials to pause for investigators to review results. The World Health Organization’s chief scientist said Thursday that it is a normal procedure that is good clinical practice.

Soriot said the company will be ready to resume manufacturing once the trial starts up again. He said he believes that the late stage trials being conducted by Pfizer and Moderna could also produce results quickly and that those vaccines also have the potential to be released before the end of the year.

The standard for authorizing any eventual coronavirus vaccine will be like an “emergency use authorization plus,” a top US Food and Drug Administration official said Thursday.

FDA requirements will be stricter than for an emergency use authorization for an experimental drug, said Dr. Peter Marks, who heads FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. But it will not be as stringent as the requirements for full licensure.

Vaccines are not licensed as drugs, but rather as biologics under a Biologics License Application or BLA.

Emergency use authorization is a “relatively low bar,” Marks said. “It’s a product that may be effective,” he added.

A BLA requires substantial data from controlled clinical trials showing the product is effective. “Along that spectrum it is going to be closer to the BLA, even though that is not going to be exactly identical,” Marks said.

Usually, a full license requires details about how a product would be manufactured, along with extensive safety data from months of follow-up. “But the substantial information about efficacy and the most important information regarding safety will be there,” Marks said.

Ohio is seeing consistently high positivity rates of Covid-19 in six counties, Gov. Mike DeWine said. Overall, Ohio’s transmission rates have stabilized, but Butler, Mercer, Preble, Putnam, Montgomery and Summit counties all meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's threshold for high instances. 

The governor also reported on the status of cases at a nearby University. DeWine said Butler County has specifically been affected by numbers influenced by Miami University, stating that between Sept. 2 and 8, there were 545 student positive cases and the previous week, there were 495 cases. In addition to the Miami University student cases, DeWine said there have also been small outbreaks at workplaces and long-term care facilities in Butler County.

“Mercer County continues as red because they meet the CDC threshold for high incidence. Their number is 206 cases per hundred thousand. Their per case number sadly increased this past week from 179 last week to 206 this week, so we've seen it coming down from Mercer County for a couple of weeks now we're seeing it starting to go back up. Still a very high-level Mercer County continues to see spread throughout the community. They've had outbreaks at workplaces and long-term care facilities and they've got just pretty much spread throughout the county,” DeWine said.

Wittenberg University in Springfield is contributing to the increased number of cases in the area with an increase of more than 70 new cases this week. These cases are being associated with out of class social gatherings. To help combat the spread the university announced on Sept. 9, classes will be remote for two weeks.

White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said Thursday that when presented with data on the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration has taken it seriously.

President Trump told investigative reporter Bob Woodward that he purposely downplayed the danger of Covid-19, excerpts of interviews obtained by CNN show.

People who may have relaxed social distancing precautions over Labor Day weekend should get tested for Covid-19, White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said Thursday.

Birx said that much of asymptomatic spread is happening between and within families and in settings like neighborhood parties.

“Just because we know someone, we think that there's no way that they could have Covid, but I want to tell you, you can't tell,” Birx said.

Birx urged those who socialized closely with others over Labor Day weekend, especially without a mask, to get tested.  

An ensemble forecast published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now projects there will be 205,000 to 217,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States by Oct. 3.

Unlike some individual models, the CDC’s ensemble forecast only offers projections a few weeks into the future.

The previous ensemble forecast, published Sept. 3, projected up to 211,000 coronavirus deaths by Sept. 26.

At least 191,444 people have already died from Covid-19 in the United States, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.