July 29 coronavirus news

The United States Golf Association has announced that the 120th US Open Championship, which is scheduled September 17-20 at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York, will take place without spectators. 

Some context: The USGA announced on April 6 that the US Open, which was scheduled to be held June 18-21 on Winged Foot’s West Course, had been postponed to September.

The organization also said in June that the championship would be conducted without traditional qualifying.

Mexico recorded 485 new deaths from Covid-19 Wednesday, bringing the country's death toll to 45,361, according to the country's health ministry.

Mexico has the fourth highest death toll from the virus worldwide, behind the UK, Brazil and US.

The health ministry also reported 5,752 new Covid-19 cases, bringing Mexico's total to 408,449.

Italy has extended the state of emergency imposed in the country due to the coronavirus outbreak until Oct. 15, according to a government statement released early Thursday morning local time.

Italy was one of the first European countries to be hit by the virus and went into a state of emergency on Jan. 31.  

The legal framework gives the government special powers to curb certain freedoms and access to additional resources to stop and contain the spread of Covid-19. 

The latest numbers: The country has so far recorded 246,776 coronavirus cases and 35,129 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The resurgence in coronavirus infections in states across the south and west is now moving into Midwestern states, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC.

In Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, an increase in the percentage of coronavirus tests coming back positive signaled a later resurgence, Fauci said. “We're starting to see that in some of the states now, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and other states,” he added.

Fauci said the White House coronavirus task force warned the governors in a conference call Tuesday that they need to get out ahead of the curve. “Because what we're seeing now is what actually took place a couple of weeks ago and what we're going to see a couple of weeks from now, is what we're doing now,” he said.

“And that's one of the things that's kind of tough to comprehend, that you look around you and it looks like you're doing okay but if you're not getting your arms around and suppressing that surge that's coming up, that's just a little bit below the radar screen, before you know it, two to three weeks down the pike, you're in trouble.”

The states experiencing a resurgence need to take a look at the reopening guidelines, Fauci said, emphasizing the need to adhere to a phased reopening.

“Not all the states did that and even in the states that did, some of the people in the states didn't listen to what the suggestions in the guidelines were. So, what we're dealing with now is we want to make sure that as we start seeing these surges, you may need to go back a little,” he said.

Fauci said he didn’t believe moving back to a complete shutdown is necessary.

“I think psychologically that would be really very difficult for people to accept but what we can do is, if you're going to quickly call a pause, a timeout and think maybe you want to backtrack a little, not necessarily all the way back to shut down, but enough to regain your footing, so that you then proceed to open in a much more cautious fashion.”

The US Food and Drug Administration could issue emergency use authorization (EUA) of a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of weeks, once a vaccine meets efficacy requirements, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which approves vaccines, said Wednesday. 

An EUA would green light a coronavirus vaccine for use on an expedited basis.

Marks said the increased attention the agency is giving to coronavirus vaccine trials should speed up the process of granting emergency use authorization to a vaccine that crosses an efficacy boundary in a clinical trial.

“We'd like to hope that when that happens, it will be a matter of weeks before we could actually potentially have something like an emergency use authorization,” said Marks, who added that he hopes the EUA will apply to a relatively broad population. “Emergency use authorization will be for the population for which we have appropriate data."

Marks emphasized that safety will not be sacrificed in the race for a vaccine. 

“The first vaccines that come along may be slightly disadvantaged compared to ones that come along later,” said Marks, who suspects the “trailblazer” vaccines will reveal information that can speed up the process for subsequent vaccine candidates.

Some context: Two potential vaccines started advanced trials this week in the US.

“There are aspirational timelines, and I think that's actually wonderful here, that people have aspirations for moving forward as quickly as possible, but we all know that real life generally does not go as well as our aspirations,” Marks said.

Clarification: An earlier version of this headline failed to specify the FDA would issue an emergency authorization once a coronavirus vaccine meets safety and efficacy requirements.

Texas has now surpassed New York in total coronavirus cases, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Johns Hopkins now reports a total of 417,098 total cases across Texas since the start of the pandemic. 

New York state has 413,593 total cases across as of Wednesday.

Florida, Texas, and New York are behind California, which currently leads the country with 475,806 total cases, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The Brazilian government is allowing foreigners to enter the country by air travel, according to a decree issued hours after the country reported a record number of new coronavirus cases and deaths.

The decision will go into effect immediately. 

The decree was signed by four ministers, including Minister of Health Eduardo Pazuello, and was published Wednesday in Brazil's official gazette. 

Foreigners were previously banned from entering Brazil since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in March.

Road and water travel is still banned for the next 30 days, according to the decree.

The latest numbers: Brazil saw new records on coronavirus figures Wednesday. 

In the last 24 hours, 69,075 new cases and 1,595 new deaths were registered by the health ministry. Brazil has reported 2,552,265 Covid-19 cases and 90,0134 deaths since the pandemic began.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said "it's time for a paradigm shift" when it comes to Covid-19 testing in the US.

He said the federal government needs to step in and distribute faster antigen tests to power through the backlog of testing and get ahead of outbreaks, according to an opinion piece he penned for Time magazine.

With current Covid-19 testing results delayed by days, and in many cases more than a week, due to a critical shortage in testing supplies, Jha said testing is practically useless in identifying who has the virus.

If health officials can’t quickly determine who has the virus and where it is, they can’t prevent the spread, Jha wrote in the op-ed. 

The country needs to switch to faster antigen tests that can quickly return test results, even though the results are not as accurate as the slower polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, he said.

PCR tests require amplification of the virus, a time-consuming process, while antigen tests look for proteins made by the virus.

“By putting a premium on the accuracy of tests, we fail to test a majority of people with Covid-19 and these built in delays actually undermine our ability to timely identify cases which is the key purpose for widespread testing,” Jha wrote in the commentary.

The earliest global spread of the novel coronavirus came from travel involving mostly three countries: China, Italy and Iran, researchers reported Wednesday.

Three-quarters of cases reported outside of China in January and February were linked to travelers from an affected country, mostly those three, a team at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

“Cases with travel links to China, Italy, or Iran accounted for almost two-thirds of the first reported Covid-19 cases from affected countries,” the CDC’s Dr. Fatimah Dawood and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The team went through online reports from national ministries of health and other government agency websites, social media feeds, and news releases to tally up all coronavirus cases reported between December 31 and March 10.

Half of the early cases in Africa were linked to travel from Italy, they found. Travelers from Italy also carried the virus in a third of the earliest cases elsewhere in Europe and the Americas.

The analysis also showed that large gatherings were a source of spread.

While many studies have confirmed that the virus originated in China, genetic analysis shows that a new strain arose in Europe, likely Italy, early in the pandemic and that strain predominated in the US.