Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Stay In Port: CDC Extends No-Sail Order To Cruise Lines
CNN: CDC Extends No Sail Order For Cruise Ships Through September
Cruises from US ports aren't embarking anytime soon. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an extension of its No Sail Order for cruise ships on Thursday. The extended order is in effect until September 30 or until the CDC director rescinds or modifies the order or the Covid-19 public health emergency declared by the Department of Health and Human Services expires. (Hunter, 7/16)
ABC News: At Least 24 Coronavirus Cases Linked To Church In West Virginia
A church in Charleston, West Virginia, has moved their in-person service online after at least 24 congregants tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The Kanawha-Charleston Health Department announced on Wednesday that it has tracked the two dozen cases of COVID-19 to the North Charleston Apostolic Church. (Carrega, 7/16)
CNN: Florida Coronavirus Patient Went From Diagnosis To Dying In Her Daughter's Arms In A Matter Of Days
Hortencia Laurens was nearing her 70th birthday when she was diagnosed with coronavirus on July 2. Her grandson, Diego Fereira, told CNN that her she spent her final days navigating the Florida healthcare system with a rapidly progressing illness. "My grandmother was alone, she was scared," Fereira said. More than 3.3 million people have been diagnosed with Covid-19 in the US since the pandemic began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And Florida has been hit particularly hard. (Holcombe, 7/17)
The Atlantic: Coronavirus Deaths Are Rising Right On Cue
There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19. Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July. The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up. (Madrigal, 7/15)
The Atlantic: America Should Prepare For A Double Pandemic
Seven years ago, the White House was bracing itself for not one pandemic, but two. In the spring of 2013, several people in China fell sick with a new and lethal strain of H7N9 bird flu, while an outbreak of MERS—a disease caused by a coronavirus—had spread from Saudi Arabia to several other countries. “We were dealing with the potential for both of those things to become a pandemic,” says Beth Cameron, who was on the National Security Council at the time. Neither did, thankfully, but we shouldn’t mistake historical luck for future security. Viruses aren’t sporting. They will not refrain from kicking you just because another virus has already knocked you to the floor. And pandemics are capricious. Despite a lot of research, “we haven’t found a way to predict when a new one will arrive,” says Nídia Trovão, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health. As new diseases emerge at a quickening pace, the only certainty is that pandemics are inevitable. So it is only a matter of time before two emerge at once. (Yong, 7/15)
In sports news —
AP: NCAA Lays Out Plan For Playing But Warns Of Surging Pandemic
The NCAA handed down its latest guidelines for playing through a pandemic while also sounding an alarm: The prospect of having a fall semester with football and other sports is looking grim. If the games can go on, the NCAA says college athletes should be tested for COVID-19 no more than 72 hours before they play, players with high-risk exposures to the coronavirus should be quarantined for 14 days and everybody on the sideline should wear a mask. The nation’s largest governing body for college sports released an updated guidance Thursday to help member schools navigate competition, but it comes as the pandemic rages on. Around the country, the number of COVID-19 cases are on the rise and many states have slowed reopenings or reinstated social-distancing restrictions on some businesses. (Russo, 7/16)
AP: Referees Gearing Up For Their Return To NBA Games, Too
NBA referees have not had the same opportunities as players have to knock off the rust from the shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Players have been back on the court for a few weeks, with the majority of that time spent getting in individual workouts before practices could resume when the 22 teams arrived at the Walt Disney World bubble. The referees didn’t have that chance. (Reynolds, 7/16)
In other news —
NPR: Safe Pregnancy As COVID-19 Surges: What's Best For Mom And Baby?
Carissa Helmer and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for five or six months by early April, when COVID-19 started to spike in the Washington, D.C., area where they live. Maybe, they mused, they should stop trying to conceive for a few months. But then a pregnancy test came back positive. In some ways, she says, there are a few convenient aspects to being pregnant now – starting with being able to work from home. But other aspects of the pregnancy have been tougher than she expected. For one thing, she's had to go to all of her doctor's appointments by herself. (Wamsley, 7/17)
CIDRAP: Mumps Outbreak In Chicago Disproportionately Affected Gay Men, People With HIV
In 2018, men who have sex with men (MSM) and people living with HIV made up a large proportion of the 116 cases of mumps in adults in Chicago, which surpassed the number seen during the previous 5 years combined, according to a report released today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Nineteen of the 116 mumps infections (17%) occurred in people living with HIV. Twenty-nine (31%) of 93 respondents to a supplementary questionnaire sent to adults diagnosed as having mumps in 2018 were women who have sex with men, 27 (29%) were men who have sex only with women, and 37 (34%) identified as MSM. (7/17)
Kaiser Health News: Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes Fly Free As Health Departments Focus On Coronavirus
Bug spray, swollen welts, citronella. It’s mosquito season. And in a normal year, the health department serving Ohio’s Delaware County would be setting out more than 90 mosquito traps a week — black tubs of stagnant water with nets designed to ensnare the little buggers. But this year, because of COVID-19, the mosquitoes will fly free. (Barry-Jester and Weber, 7/16)
NPR: Psychiatrist: America's 'Extremely Punitive' Prisons Make Mental Illness Worse
Psychiatrist Christine Montross has spent years treating people with serious mental illnesses — sometimes in hospitals, other times in jails or prisons. "The patients that I was seeing in my hospital were indistinguishable many times from the men and women that I was evaluating in jail," Montross says. "But the environments were so markedly different. One [is] charged with ... trying to help and heal, and the other [is] really designed to control and punish." (Davies, 7/16)
AP: US Prison Populations Down 8% Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
There has been a major drop in the number of people behind bars in the U.S. Between March and June, more than 100,000 people were released from state and federal prisons, a decrease of 8%, according to a nationwide analysis by The Marshall Project and The Associated Press. The drops range from 2% in Virginia to 32% in Rhode Island. By comparison, the state and federal prison population decreased by 2.2% in all of 2019, according to a report on prison populations by the Vera Institute of Justice. (Sharma, Li, Lavoie and Lauer, 7/16)
