Free Republic

INDIANAPOLIS — Governor Eric Holcomb has ordered Hoosiers to stay home as the state and country continue to try and fight the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19. “The next two weeks are critical if we are to slow the spread of COVID-19, and we must slow the spread. You must be part of the solution, not the problem,” said Gov. Holcomb.

Pope Francis has come down with a “slight indisposition,” forcing him to cancel a planned Mass in Rome, just a day after he expressed his solidarity with coronavirus sufferers around the world — and as the disease continues to spread across Italy.

A team of researchers has hit back at rumors that the coronavirus that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year was engineered. In a paper posted on Monday on the scientific online forum Virological, the scientists – who include top epidemiologist W. Ian Lipkin from Columbia University; Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney; and Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research – said crucial genetic clues indicate that the coronavirus was not created in a laboratory. Despite scientists’ repeated efforts at debunking conspiracy theories, rumors about the still-unknown origins of the virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, have...

About 80% of novel coronavirus cases are mild, according to China's most comprehensive report about the outbreak published so far.Many patients experience only a fever or dry cough, while some never show no symptoms.The new numbers, along with the fact that 322 out of 621 confirmed cases on a quarantined cruise ship involved people who showed no symptoms, suggest that many mild cases of the new coronavirus are going unreported.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. The death toll from the novel coronavirus that originated in China crossed 2,000 this week, but new research suggests that most cases of...

China’s health authorities have decided to no longer count as confirmed cases those patients who test positive but don’t show symptoms. Skepticism was immediate. The news was abrupt and, to some, surprising: Overnight, Heilongjiang, a Chinese province near Russia, had cut its count of confirmed coronavirus cases by more than a dozen.The revision stemmed from what appeared to be a bureaucratic decision, buried in a series of dense documents from the national government. Health officials said that they would reclassify patients who had tested positive for the new coronavirus but did not have symptoms, and take them out of the...