September 11 coronavirus updates

Dr. Anthony Fauci said it could be the end of 2021 before we get back to how our lives were before Covid-19.

He told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell he’s been saying all along, “I believe that we will have a vaccine that will be available by the end of this year, the beginning of next year.” 

But there is a caveat: “By the time you mobilize the distribution of the vaccinations, and you get the majority, or more, of the population vaccinated and protected, that's likely not going to happen to the mid or end of 2021,” he said.

“If you're talking about getting back to a degree of normality which resembles where we were prior to Covid, it's going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci said he disagrees with Trump's remarks that the US has “rounded the final turn” of the coronavirus pandemic.  

Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday, Fauci was asked, “Thursday, you said it was time to hunker down, because the fall and the winter is ‘not going to be easy.’ The President says we’ve rounded the final turn. How do you square those two messages?”

Fauci replied, “I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with that because — if you look at the thing that you just mentioned — the statistics, Andrea, they're disturbing. 

He said he hopes we don’t see surges in cases after Labor Day, as the nation did following Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

“We’re plateauing at around 40,000 cases a day, and the deaths of around 1,000,” Fauci explained.

He warned that the country needs to get the levels down lower “so that when you go into a more precarious situation, like the fall and the winter, you won't have a situation where you really are at a disadvantage right from the very beginning.”

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's Covid-19 vaccine program, said on Friday that a Covid-19 vaccine will likely be given first to older adults and others at high risk of severe illness.

"Should it be reasonable to immunize college students at that moment, when we know that the mortality rate and the morbidity in that population is very low? I think no," Slaoui told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Slaoui added that the National Academy of Medicine has looked into a framework for equitable allocation of a Covid-19 vaccine. Slaoui also told Gupta that vaccine trials have set conditions to have people at high risk included in their studies.

Responding to a recent study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said adults who test positive for Covid-19 were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those who test negative — and the fact that many restaurants across the country have opened up more of their indoor dining — Dr. Anthony Fauci said those statistics concern him.

“If we want to get back to the normal existence of being able to enjoy being in a restaurant, the best way to do that is to get the community level of infection at the lowest level possible,” Fauci added.

Fauci expressed concern about events moving indoors into the fall and winter.

“I am concerned when I see things starting to move indoors, and that becomes more compelling when you get into the fall into winter season — when you essentially have to be indoors,” he said.

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

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.

"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:

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.

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.

“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."