October 13 coronavirus news

Fans attended a Major League Baseball (MLB) game on Monday night for the first time since March, when the league shut down spring training due to the pandemic.

It was previously announced that MLB would make approximately 11,500 tickets available for each game at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, the site for the National League Championship Series (NLCS) and the World Series.

And the fans came on Monday, for the start of the NLCS between the Atlanta Braves and the Los Angeles Dodgers -- making this the first 2020 playoff game with fans in the stands. No fans were allowed during the 2020 regular season. 

They were treated to a good game: The teams were tied at 1-1 in the top of the ninth inning when Austin Riley, on a 1-2 pitch, blasted a solo home run 448 feet to give the Braves a 2-1 lead. Atlanta would go on to win 5-1.

“We haven’t heard anything other than fake crowd noise,” Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman said to reporters after the game.

Game 2 of the best-of-seven series will be Tuesday.

Donald Trump on Monday launched a three-week quest to save his presidency, behaving as though the pandemic that has killed 215,000 Americans was already a memory in front of a packed-in crowd -- even amid chilling new warnings about the resurgent virus.

In his first rally since his own bout with Covid-19, Trump painted a deeply dishonest picture of the nation's battle with the disease, mocked Joe Biden over social distancing and vowed victory on November 3 as he began a frantic push to Election Day, marked by multiple rallies a day that could act as superspreader events.

While some supporters at the rally wore masks behind Trump in the camera shot, many people in the big, outdoor crowd did not.

Medical experts expressed despair at Trump's decision to gather huge crowds during a worsening pandemic, ahead of a swing that Trump aides said Monday would involve multiple rallies each day in the coming weeks.

"I promise you, the virus is there, whether it is an indoor event or an outdoor event in these large gatherings," said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of health policy and preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. "Some of those people will become sick, they will spread it to others when they get home and they will become sick. These are accelerator events that promote the distribution of the virus."

Read the full analysis:

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Just three weeks out from Election Day, the Covid-19 pandemic is making its feared fall comeback across the US -- and influenza season has not even kicked in yet.

Health officials have worried the virus would take hold again as Americans returned to school and as pandemic fatigue encouraged cities, counties and states to loosen restrictions.

Now it’s happening -- and the West, Midwest, and South in particular have seen numbers going in the wrong direction. 

Denver is reporting an “alarming” increase in coronavirus cases; Montana has counted as many cases in 11 days as it reported in the first five months of the pandemic; North Dakota has broken hospitalization records for three days in a row and Arkansas has broken them for five days straight; Wisconsin consistently reports one of the country’s highest weekly average positivity rates; and Georgia has averaged more than 1,000 new cases per day -- every single day -- for 114 days.

But the city is paying for it, he said. "During the week of October 3, our seven-day average of hospitalizations was at 126. Today, just a week later, the average is 174 -- a 37% increase. We are at a fork in the road."

South Korea reported 102 new Covid-19 cases and one new death in the past 24 hours, authorities said on Tuesday, after the country announced the easing of social distancing measures.

Of the new cases, 69 are locally transmitted and 33 are imported, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).

The new figures raise the country's total to 24,805 confirmed cases and 434 virus-related deaths.

This is the first time South Korea reported more than 100 new cases in six days and since easing its social distancing measures on Monday.

On Monday, Health Minister Park Neung-hoo announced social distancing restrictions would be eased to Level 1, the lowest level.

While the Asia-Pacific region treads water until a coronavirus vaccine is found, the West's biggest economies are drowning as a second wave firmly establishes itself in Europe.

Europe is now reporting more daily infections than the United States, Brazil, or India -- the countries that have been driving the global case count for months -- as public apathy grows towards coronavirus guidelines. Several countries are seeing infection rates spiral again after a summer lull that saw measures to contain the virus and travel restrictions relaxed.

In the United Kingdom, for example, questions are being asked about whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson's decision to lift the country's lockdown in June was premature. Northern England's current high rates of Covid-19 are down to the fact that infections "never dropped as far in the summer as they did in the south," Jonathan Van-Tam, Britain's deputy chief medical officer, told a press conference on Monday.

It is just the latest problem to beset Britain's slapdash pandemic response. There are now more patients in hospital with Covid-19 in England than there were in March, when a nationwide lockdown was imposed, according to Johnson and health officials.

France and the Netherlands broke their own records over the weekend, reporting the highest numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases since the start of the pandemic.

In the US, there were more new positive cases in the White House on October 2 than in the whole of Taiwan, after President Donald Trump became the second G7 leader (after Johnson) to test positive for Covid-19. Despite his illness, Trump has continued to downplay the severity of the virus and potentially endanger the health of those around him, holding a campaign rally on Monday.

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The West is being left behind as it squanders Covid-19 lessons from Asia-Pacific

The city of Qingdao in eastern China has tested more than 3.07 million people for Covid-19 since the weekend, when 12 locally transmitted cases were reported, according to the city's information office.

No new cases have been identified by the citywide testing program from the more than 1.1 million samples already returned, the information office said in its statement on Tuesday.

Containing an outbreak: The 12 cases -- split evenly between symptomatic and asymptomatic cases -- were all linked to the Qingdao Chest Hospital, which had been treating imported infections. The cluster prompted a mass testing program of the city's 9 million residents, which began on Monday.

Some 130 testing stations have been set up in Shinan district, the city's center of political and business activity.

Authorities said the specific source of infection is still under investigation.

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Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson said Monday it was pausing the advanced clinical trial of its experimental coronavirus vaccine because of an unexplained illness in one of the volunteers.

ENSEMBLE is the name of the study.

“Adverse events – illnesses, accidents, etc. – even those that are serious, are an expected part of any clinical study, especially large studies," said the statement.

It’s the second Phase 3 coronavirus vaccine trial to be paused. AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial was paused last month because of an a neurological complication in a volunteer in the UK. While the trial resumed there and in other countries, it remains paused in the United States while the US Food and Drug Administration investigates.

Read the full story here

White House physician Sean Conley said Monday President Donald Trump has tested negative for Covid-19 on consecutive days, as the President heads to a crowded campaign rally in Florida.

That additional data, Conley said, included "viral load, subgenomic RNA and PCR cycle threshold measurements, as well as ongoing assessment of viral culture data."

PCR suggests a polymerase chain reaction test, which looks for any evidence of the virus, although Conley did not say clearly what type of test was run.

It is also unclear on which consecutive days Trump tested negative -- and the Abbott BinaxNOW test might not be completely accurate. It's only been validated in people within the first seven days of symptom onset. Trump, who first announced he tested positive on Thursday, October 1, is more than 10 days out, and the US Food and Drug Administration has said it does not know how accurate the test is at that point.

The White House still has not revealed the last time Trump tested negative prior to his positive diagnosis, offering varying justifications for withholding that information.

Trump is "not infectious to others," Conley added.

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Trump's doctor says the President has tested negative on consecutive days

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that the Trump campaign should take down the political advertisement that he's featured in, calling his presence in the spot "really unfortunate and really disappointing."

Fauci's latest comments come one day after he told CNN he did not consent to being featured in the Trump team's new advertisement and that his words were taken out of context.

The Trump campaign released the new ad last week after the President was discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center following treatment for Covid-19. The 30-second ad, which is airing in Michigan, touts Trump's personal experience with the virus and uses a quote from Fauci in an attempt to make it appear as if he is praising Trump's response.

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