October 14 coronavirus news

The Aguirre family was living the American dream. Then came the coronavirus nightmare.

Over a course of 10 years, the Arizona family built up its business. They went from selling tamales from the back of a minivan to running a popular food truck and a successful catering business in Phoenix -- Tamales y Tacos Puebla -- with a long list of corporate and wedding clients.

The trouble began when Arizona -- like other states -- began putting restrictions on businesses and asking people to stay home in an effort to stop the coronavirus from spreading. Almost overnight, Ricardo Aguirre said, business dried up in March.

With no way to make payments, the family's food truck was repossessed, and Aguirre lost the prep kitchen, too.

And, despite all precautions against the virus, a family member got sick. Then another and another and another. Now, seven months after the shutdown, seven people in Ricardo Aguirre's extended family and his father, Jesús, 67, have died of Covid-19 complications.

Read the full story:

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Arizona family lost their business -- and eight family members -- to Covid-19

The pause in drugmaker Eli Lilly and Company’s trial of a monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid-19 this week should be “reassuring to people,” said a top US Food and Drug Administration official on Wednesday.

“Most of the trials have an independent committee of experts and they watch over the trial,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, told CNBC.

Lilly said it paused the antibody trial for safety reasons, but clinical trials are usually paused after a volunteer becomes sick or suffers a side effect. Lilly, though, has not revealed what happened.

There have been at least 7,907,677 cases of coronavirus in the US and at least 216,632 people have died from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University's tally of cases.

So far on Wednesday, Johns Hopkins has reported 51,072 new cases and 745 reported deaths.

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as repatriated cases. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that he is pleased President Trump is doing well after contracting Covid-19, but warned that not everyone who gets the virus will have the same experience. 

Trump was fortunate, said Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“We're very, very pleased that the President did so well when he was infected with coronavirus, but there are also a lot of people who are his age and his weight who did not do as well as the President did,” Fauci said.

Coronavirus precautions will result in a very different kind of Thanksgiving for many people this year, himself included, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday. 

“It is unfortunate, because that’s such a sacred part of the American tradition, the family gathering around Thanksgiving, but that is a risk,” Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, told CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that given the current spread of Covid-19 and the uptick in infections, people need to be very careful about social gatherings, especially older people and those with underlying conditions.

He added that travel on planes and public transportation could increase exposure to the virus. 

“My Thanksgiving is going to look very different this year,” Fauci noted.

He said he would love to spend the holiday with his children, but they would have to travel from out of state to come home.

“They themselves, because of their concern for me and my age, have decided they're not going to come home for Thanksgiving, even though all three of them want very much to come home for Thanksgiving,” Fauci said.

The Beverly Hills City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to prohibit trick-or-treating this year, citing concerns over Covid-19.

According to an ordinance approved by the city council, Halloween activities including trick-or-treating and “spraying shaving cream on others” is prohibited this year. In addition, several high volume trick-or-treating streets will be closed to outside pedestrian and vehicular traffic on the night of Oct. 31. Violators of the law could be fined, the city said in a news release.

Some context: The news came the same day the state of California released its recommendations for Halloween festivities, noting that in-person trick-or-treating and related activities “pose a high risk of spreading Covid-19,” but was not explicitly banned. Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies traditional trick-or-treating as a ‘”higher risk” activity.

In September, Los Angeles County had initially banned trick-or-treating, but after public outcry, downgraded it the following day to simply “not recommended.”

The decision places Beverly Hills among the first cities in the nation to prohibit in-person Halloween activities. 

“This is a fairly small price to pay to keep this trajectory down, keep the schools open,” said Beverly Hills Mayor Lester Friedman.

Brazil's health ministry reported 749 coronavirus-related fatalities on Wednesday, bringing the total number of deaths in the country to 151,747.  

The health ministry also reported 27,235 new cases from Covid-19, bringing the total number of cases to 5,140,863. 

Brazil has the world's second highest death toll after the US and the world's third highest coronavirus cases after the US and India, according to the data held by the Johns Hopkins University. 

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna on Wednesday pushed back against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's dismal of his call for her to make a deal on a stimulus bill.

"To paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda, I'm probably not in the room where it matters, but I do have a constituency I represent," Khanna told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." "In my affluent district, the food banks are longer than they have ever been."

On Tuesday, Pelosi spoke to Blitzer about the Trump administration's more recent relief proposal and in that interview dismissed some of her colleagues' call for her to compromise on a stimulus bill.

While the two men are "lovely," Pelosi said, "they know nothing about" the specifics of the White House's proposals and "they are not negotiating this situation — they have no idea of the particulars, they have no idea of what the language is here."

Khanna, who represents California's 17th congressional district, said he had a "moral obligation" to speak out for his constituents.

Khanna told Blitzer that he would not except the White House's most recent stimulus proposal.

"I have no doubt that if it's around 1.9 trillion, if there are a few edits. I think we need a national testing plan. There have to be a couple of more provisions, but no doubt the parties are close and that a deal can be made and that would have the votes in the House. And then put the ball in McConnell's court."

Nick Saban, the famed head football coach at the University of Alabama, has tested positive for Covid-19, according to a statement he released.