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It is generally accepted that widespread testing will be key to successful control of Covid-19. Identifying where the virus has (and has not) spread, who is infected, and who may be immune are all important. The tracing and isolation of infected and potentially infected individuals is essential if quarantine and containment efforts are to be targeted. Yet as ProPublica reports: "The lack of testing continues to be a source of deep frustration across the country, with worried patients unable to find out whether they have the ordinary flu, the coronavirus or something else entirely. The availability of testing in regions...

(CNN) — The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an emergency use authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat patients hospitalized with COVID-19. The drugs — which are used to treat malaria and other conditions — have been called game changers by President Donald Trump. But thus far, there is little scientific evidence that chloroquine, or its closely-related analogue hydroxychloroquine, are effective in treating Covid-19. What happened? The authorization came in a letter dated Saturday, but the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acknowledged the FDA’s action in a Sunday news release. The FDA limited the...

Independent Chinese media outlet Caixin Global revealed that Chinese laboratories had in fact identified a mystery virus — later identified as COVID-19 — to be a highly infectious new pathogen by late December 2019. But they were ordered to stop further testing, destroy samples, and suppress the news to the fullest extent possible.

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday issued an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, decades-old malaria drugs championed by President Donald Trump for coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The agency allowed for the drugs to be "donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with COVID-19, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible," HHS said in a statement, announcing that Sandoz donated 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to the stockpile and Bayer donated 1 million doses of chloroquine. (Please see link, for full...

Federal law enforcement officials are reportedly investigating a series of stock market transactions that were made by U.S. lawmakers prior to the stock market tanking as a result of the coronavirus rapidly spreading throughout the U.S. “The inquiry, which is still in its early stages and being done in coordination with the Securities and Exchange Commission, has so far included outreach from the FBI to at least one lawmaker, Sen. Richard Burr, seeking information about the trades, according to one of the sources,” CNN reported. “Public scrutiny of the lawmakers’ market activity has centered on whether members of Congress sought...

With all the bad news and negativity during this time of crisis, I'm confident that some of us have experienced kind words and deeds from our fellow human beings. I'd like to start a post documenting common (or uncommon) acts of kindness amid the chaos. Please share your experiences here. I'm sure there are many. I'll start with a video.Creativity and Kindness amid Coronavirus Pandemic Music, humor, scripture, uplifting quotes and stories are all welcome here. Just no negativity. (There is plenty of that on other threads.) We can get through this with faith, hope, love, and good cheer.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said his Sandoz generics unit's malaria, lupus and arthritis drug hydroxychloroquine is the company's biggest hope against the coronavirus, Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung reported on Sunday. Novartis has pledged to donate 130 million doses and is supporting clinical trials needed before the medicine, which U.S. President Donald Trump also has been promoting, can be approved for use against the coronavirus. Other companies including Bayer and Teva have also agreed to donate hydroxychloroquine or similar drugs, while Gilead Sciences is testing its experimental drug remdesivir against coronavirus. (Please see link, for full story)

Doctors in Italy have finally began widely prescribing hydroxychloroquine in certain combinations in Rome and the wider region of Lazio with a population of around six million. According to Corriere della Sera, a well known Italian daily newspaper, Dr. Pier Luigi Bartoletti, Deputy National Secretary of the Italian Federation of General Practitioners, explains that every single person with Covid-19 that has early signs, like a cough or a fever for example, is now being treated with the anti-malaria drug. The drug “is already giving good results,” Bartoletti says while Malaysia reveals they have been using it since the very beginning....

New York State and in particular, New York City, have been the hardest-hit regions in the U.S. as the country grapples with the coronavirus pandemic. But recent data suggests that the area might be starting to see a turn that infections are slowing. Farzad Mostashari, the founder of primary care start-up Aledade and the former national coordinator for health information technology at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, tweeted that there "may" be some early signs of promise in recent data.

A top medical executive at a Buffalo hospital was fired this weekend after demanding that supporters of President Donald Trump renounce ventilators if they become critically ill with coronavirus. In a Facebook exchange, Laura Krolczyk, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center's now former vice president for external affairs, wrote, "Trump supporters need to pledge to give up their ventilators for someone else ... and not go to the hospital." Krolczyk also said Trump supporters should "barricade themselves" inside churches to ride out the coronavirus. "Also don't cash your stimulus check. It's all a hoax. Chew some ibuprofen and be on with...

It is very early days, but there is hope - we seem to have flattened the curve in the US. Looking at new cases over the last few days, March 26-28 shows that we have broken the exponential increase in the US. Moreover daily deaths dropped sharply yesterday. This means that we are on a linear growth curve and off of the exponential growth curve.

President Trump clashed with a reporter on Sunday during a press briefing on the coronavirus outbreak in the Rose Garden. "PBS NewsHour" reporter Yamiche Alcindor questioned Trump during the briefing over recent comments he made during an interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity about whether some requests from governors related to the outbreak were overblown or unnecessary. Trump responded by first denying that he had made the comments, which were reported by multiple news outlets at the time, before accusing Alcindor of acting "threatening" during the briefing. "Why don't you act in a little more positive? ... It's always get...

Berlin: The state finance minister of Germany's Hesse region, which includes Frankfurt, has been found dead. Authorities said he appears to have killed himself and the state's governor suggested Sunday that he was in despair over the fallout from the coronavirus crisis. The body of Thomas Schaefer, a 54-year-old member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, was found Saturday on railway tracks at Hochheim, near Frankfurt. German minister Thomas Schaefer commits suicide over coronavirus worries, body found on railway tracks File image of Thomas Schäfer (CDU), Minister of Finance of Hesse. AP

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said the state needs 30,000 ventilators if hospitals gets swamped with critically ill COVID-19 patients under the worst-case scenario. Yet there are only a total of 7,713 respiratory specialists licensed to operate the breathing machines in New York, plus an unknown number of highly skilled nurses and doctors trained to use them. “I read that Gov. Cuomo said that ventilators are to coronavirus what missiles were to WWII. While I am sure this is true, you would not have grabbed a front-line soldier off the battlefield, put him in the fighter cockpit and expect him to...

If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Four men were arrested outside a Greensboro, N.C., abortion clinic on Saturday. Their alleged crime? Praying in public while the county is under a stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus pandemicSeveral members of a group called Love Life, which is dedicated to praying to end the sin and tragedy of abortion, say they were detained and later arrested by Greensboro police after they gathered near an abortion clinic called "A Woman's Choice" to "pray in defense of the defenseless and minister (offering hope and help in Jesus name) to at-risk mothers and fathers." The group conducts weekly prayer walks in a...

‘In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for Covid-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them: if any of these patients dies, staff will have to record the Covid-19 designation on the death certificate – contrary to usual practice for most infections of this kind. ‘There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu,...

Posted: 5:01 PM, Mar 28, 2020 Updated: 5:08 PM, Mar 28, 2020 items.[0].image.alt BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center's Vice President for External Affairs, Laura Krolczyk, was fired Saturday after an investigation into her private Facebook posts. The screenshots of anti-Trump Facebook posts by Krolczyk, regarding COVID-19, were shared and criticized on Twitter by a local political consultant. On Friday night, Michael Caputo tweeted a screenshot of Krolczyk's Facebook post which showed an anti-Trump exchange.

Covid-19: The Reality Show has taken cable TV by storm. The plot is nominally about a war against an invisible Chinese invader that has already killed over 1,200 Americans. But on another level, it is a family sitcom, a successor to Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and The Cosby Show. The star is Daddy Donald, a brilliant if erratic father figure, who sometimes rambles on, as fathers are wont to do. He is ably supported by his younger brother, Uncle Mike, who is loyal, steady, competent, and boring. With every strand of his snow-white hair perfectly in place,...

Judicial Watch: Strzok’s ‘Weiner Timeline’ Shows Gap between Clinton Email Discovery and Search Warrant (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 180 pages of records of communications between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that include Strzok’s “weiner timeline,” which shows a time gap of almost a month between the discovery of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner and the obtaining of a search warrant.On November 3, 2016, Strzok sends an email to Page with a “weiner timeline.” The document shows that on...