By Helen Regan, Brad Lendon, Amy Woodyatt, Meg Wagner and Melissa Macaya, CNN
From CNN's Sgueglia, Kristina
New York State remains under the 1% infection rate for its 35th day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday.
The state reported 5 new Covid-19 deaths. The state added 880 new Covid-19 cases, and the total cases statewide is just over 440,000.
The New York State Liquor Authority and Police Task Force visited more than 1,300 establishments and observed 7 in noncompliance, the governor said
From CNN Health's Jacqueline Howard
Dr. Moncef Slaoui — chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's Covid-19 vaccine program — said on Friday that "it would be unethical" to not move quickly to put out a Covid-19 vaccine if it is proven to work.
"If we know a vaccine is 70% or 80% or 90% effective, it would be unethical to hold it back," Slaoui told CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in an interview Friday.
"I would frankly turn the question the other way around and say, 'What would be my ethical reason to withhold a vaccine that I could have developed faster from being developed faster?" Slaoui said.
"We are unable to control this pandemic," Slaoui said. "We know that vaccines have changed our life expectancy from 40 years to 83 or 86 years in a period of 100 years because they are truly effective in the long term against a pathogen. That's what we should do."
Watch:
From CNN's Jen Christensen
Primary school students in China experienced more depressive symptoms and made more suicide attempts after schools closed for the pandemic, a new study found.
When Covid-19 hit China in January, the ministry of education postponed the start of spring semester to late April. That closure separated children from their friends and their broader community network, and seems to have had an impact on their mental well-being.
The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, compared reports of mental health problems in November — before the pandemic started — to mid-May, two weeks into the new spring semester when schools had reopened.
Researchers from Anhui Medical University got results back from surveys for 1,241 students who were in grades 4 through 8, and in junior high. The kids lived in Chizhou, Anhui Province, an area that did not have a large number of Covid-19 cases.
Nearly 25% of the students reported depressive symptoms in May, when only about 19% did in November. Suicide attempts more than doubled — at 6.4% in May compared to the 3% who made suicide attempts in November. There were no similar increases seen in reports of children who reported feeling an increase anxiety.
Researchers hope school leaders will use this research to prepare the necessary mental health services to help children as they return to school following the lockdowns.
This study is consistent with others that have found that enforced social isolation can cause mental health challenges for children.
In a joint statement released Friday, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association announced one staff member on an unnamed team tested positive for Covid-19 out of the 11,669 tests administered to players and staff members through Sept. 10.
MLB has not had a player test positive for 12 consecutive days and 20 of the last 21 days.
Since MLB’s Covid-19 Health Monitoring & Testing Plan began, 86 of 115,337 tests returned positive, with 55 players, 31 staff member testing positive. That's a rate of 0.07%.
This season, 21 out of the 30 MLB clubs have reported a positive test.
From CNN Health’s Amanda Watts
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, said looking back at the history of past coronavirus pandemics, we really need to be developing a universal coronavirus vaccine.
“We have been living with coronaviruses forever,” Fauci said during a Friends of the Global Fight webinar on Friday. “There were four of them that cause about 15 to 30% of all of the common colds that we repetitively get in the winter.”
“In 2002, we had the first pandemic coronavirus with SARS, jumped species from a bat to a civet cat to a human — 8000 cases, almost 800 deaths. Ten years later in 2012, we had MERS — the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — which is still smoldering in Saudi Arabia. Now, in 2019-2020, we have Covid-19.” he said.
“So somebody is trying to tell us we'd better develop a universal coronavirus vaccine,” Fauci said. “Because we've already in 18 years had three pandemics associated with coronaviruses."
From CNN’s Carma Hassan
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott announced today that he is extending the state of emergency for the coronavirus crisis to Oct. 15.
While making the announcement, he credited the state’s low case numbers to the measures currently in place.
“As I've said, this is the vehicle that allows us to manage and continue to suppress this virus. It makes sure supports for workers and families remain available, things like unemployment benefits and the eviction moratorium,” he said.
From CNN's Betsy Klein
The White House coronavirus task force placed a sharper focus on colleges and universities in its recommendations to states this week, pushing the states to take measures to prevent further outbreaks as the school year begins.
CNN reached out to all 50 states for their weekly task force reports, which the White House has declined to make public, and obtained responses from 12 states as of Friday morning. This week’s report, sent to states Tuesday evening, was directed to governors and their senior staff, as well as health officials, emergency managers, epidemiologists, lab directors and preparedness directors for each state.
The reports, individually tailored to each state with information on cases and test positivity and county-specific data, show concern with spread among institutes of higher education and mitigating cases in surrounding towns. The task force stressed that students who have been infected or exposed should isolate on campus and not return home.
Of the 12 reports CNN has obtained, there are rising cases in Arkansas, Delaware, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Utah. Iowa, which was the number one state for rising cases last week, is number three this week.
There’s also an item in most of the state reports about exploring “use of focused wastewater surveillance to detect cases early and to direct diagnostic testing and public health interventions.”
From CNN's Christina Maxouris
Nearly 30 US states are reporting downward trends in Covid-19 cases, but the pandemic will likely worsen again, according to the country's leading infectious disease expert.
"We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it's not going to be easy," Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday.
The warning isn't new: Experts -- including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director -- have for long warned the months ahead will be challenging. It doesn't help that the US continues to see about 36,000 new cases each day -- which is better than where we were in August, but still too high, according to Fauci.
"I keep looking at that curve and I get more depressed and more depressed about the fact that we never really get down to the baseline that I'd like," he said.
There's a lot that could potentially help drive Covid-19 numbers up as the fall season arrives:
From CNN's Adrienne Vogt
Jenifer Johnston, a 40-year-old Oregon mother who has been battling coronavirus for six months, has been in the hospital multiple times after experiencing symptoms including extremely high blood pressure, trouble standing and loss of memory.
“I can only stand for a few minutes at a time. I turn purple, my hands and legs, and I get lightheaded,” she said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“My heart rate doubles just standing, and I have blurry eyes. I feel like I'm going to faint, in and out, most days … I can't watch TV or read, and my memory's gone,” she added.
Johnston said she tries not to go to the emergency room, “otherwise I’d be there every night,” but last weekend, her symptoms got so bad for days that she had to call a doctor.
“At night, I wake up and I gasp for air pretty often, and my whole left side goes numb, my blood pressure skyrockets to really scary ranges and my heart rate gets to like 180, which is really fast,” she said.
Doctors seem flummoxed by her situation, she said, and are treating her symptom-by-symptom. She’s on heart medication and multiple vitamins to try to help.
Watch more: