corona virus alerts - Latest cruising Information for vessels/locations/rules

[Montanan]

South Korea reported on Friday that 91 recovered coronavirus patients have tested positive for the disease again, raising questions over health experts' understanding of the pandemic.

The prospect of people being re-infected with the virus is of international concern, as many countries are hoping that infected populations will develop sufficient immunity to prevent a resurgence of the pandemic.

The reports have also prompted fears the virus may remain active in patients for much longer than was previously thought.

Korean health officials reported Friday that 91 patients thought to have been cleared of the virus had tested positive again, up from 51 people on Monday.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) announced it had sent a team to the city of Daegu, the worst hit area, to investigate why patients there were testing positive again.

Some of the patients testing positive again showed no symptoms, while others were suffering from fevers and respiratory issues, according to the Financial Times.

South Korean health officials said it remains unclear what is behind the trend, with the preliminary findings from the investigation in Daegu not expected to be released until next week.

However the KCDC's director, Jeong Eun-kyeong, raised the possibility that the virus may have been “reactivated” in people, rather than the patients being re-infected.

False test results could also be at fault, other experts said, or remnants of the virus could still be in patients’ systems without being infectious or posing a risk of danger to the host or others.

“There are different interpretations and many variables,” said Jung Ki-suck, professor of pulmonary medicine at Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital.

“The government needs to come up with responses for each of these variables”.

South Korea had previously been hailed as a success story after its swift implementation of a mass-scale testing regime halted the spread of the virus and led to a far lower fatality rate than the global average.

The country had one of the worst outbreaks outside China in the early stages of the coronavirus spread, but the country has brought the situation under control over the past two months by a combination of measures including transparent reporting, mass-testing, social distancing and extensive contact tracing.

On Friday the country reported 27 new cases, its lowest figure since daily cases peaked at more than 900 in late February, according to the KCDC. The death toll rose by seven to 211, it said.

Nearly 7,000 South Koreans have been reported as recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

The city of Daegu, which accounts for more than half of all South Korea's total infections, reported zero new cases for the first time since late February.

However the new reports of recovered patients testing positive once more has sparked fears of a fresh outbreak.

“We say that a patient has fully recovered when he or she tests negative twice within 24 hours. But the fact that some of them tested positive again in a short period means that the virus remains longer than we thought,” Son Young-rae, a spokesman for the health and welfare ministry, told the Financial Times.

“The number will only increase, 91 is just the beginning now,” said Kim Woo-joo, professor of infectious diseases at Korea University Guro Hospital.

Mr Kim also said patients had likely “relapsed” rather than been re-infected.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/recovered...161747102.html

[Montanan]

Italy extended a national lockdown until May 3, rejecting calls by business leaders to allow a gradual restart of the economy.

The decision reflects a pattern playing out in many parts of Europe as health officials and politicians warn against letting up too early on restrictions to stem the spread of the coronavirus and avoid a second wave of infections.

As deaths surpassed 100,000 worldwide on Friday, the absence of public Easter holiday celebrations in Europe underscored the pandemic’s decimating impact on public life and business. Italy, Spain, France and the U.K. reported more than 3,000 new virus-linked deaths over the latest 24-hour period.

“There are clear indications that the restrictive measures are bearing fruit,” Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said at a news conference. “If we yield now we would risk, as our experts tell us, losing all the positive results we have achieved so far.”

With a ban on non-essential business crippling Europe’s weakest major economy, Conte said he was giving a limited range of business and shops a waiver to resume activity. He held out the prospect of a gradual restart of normal life after May 3, though strict health protocols would remain in force.

Conte named Vittorio Colao, former chief executive officer of Vodafone Group Plc, to head a task force that will help map Italy’s exit from the lockdown. The country “can’t wait for the virus to disappear completely,” Conte said.

The U.K. reported its biggest daily increase in deaths since the outbreak began as 980 patients succumbed to the coronavirus in the latest period, increasing the death toll to almost 9,000.

http://https://www.yahoo.com/news/it...174413700.html

[Montanan]

Los Angeles County has extended its “safer at home” order through May 15 to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Barbara Ferrer, the director of the L.A. County Department of Public Health, said at a Friday press conference she could not “definitively answer” when things in L.A. might open back up again.

“We do know that we will be lifting some of the restrictions and we do hope that we’re able to take a hard look this summer at what makes sense for us to be relaxing … some of the closures right now that are making it impossible, for example, for some people to get back to work. But it really does depend on the data,” Ferrer said.

Though all nonessential businesses will remain closed, the order still allows Angelenos to go out for essential activities like grocery shopping and going to the pharmacy. But effective on Friday, all L.A. residents must wear a face covering when going out for essential activities, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered.

The “safer at home” order is in effect alongside the statewide “stay at home” order that Gov. Gavin Newsom issued in mid-March. That order is in effect “until further notice.”

As of Thursday, there have been a total of 7,955 cases and 223 deaths across L.A. County, according to the Department of Public Health.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...205951568.html

[Montanan]

The Republic of Ireland is to extend its Covid-19 restrictions for a further three weeks until 5 May.

Taoiseach (Irish PM) Leo Varadkar made the announcement on Friday afternoon following a meeting of the National Public Health Emergency team.

Gardaí (Irish police) have set up more than 1,000 checkpoints in recent days to stop people breaking restrictions.

There have been 288 Covid-19 related deaths in the country, while the death toll in Northern Ireland is 92. On Friday, there were 25 deaths confirmed in the Republic of Ireland, while the number of confirmed cases rose by 480 to 7,054. More than half of the country's deaths - 156 - had been in nursing homes, Irish broadcaster RTÉ has reported.

Mr Varadkar thanked people for their "forbearance and sacrifice" in the efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus.

If people continued to follow the current guidelines, the lockdown would hopefully be eased after 5 May, he said, but warned restrictions "won't be eased in one go".

"They'll have to be done bit by bit," he said.

Earlier, the chairman of the coronavirus expert advisory group said people could not be complacent about the dangers of Covid-19 because "given the opportunity, this virus will run rampant".

"We are not going to return to a normal state of affairs soon", said Dr Cillian De Gascun.

While the lifting of any restrictions would be gradual, they would not happen until there was more confidence the virus would not spread further. If it did, restrictions would need to be re-introduced.

Dr De Gascun said he hoped testing would increase dramatically in the next week due to extra laboratory capacity.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52248311

[GordMay]

"Stop covid or save the economy? We can do both”
Contrary to what you’ve heard, shutting down the country is also the quickest way to get it started back up again
“... In late March, President Donald Trump warned against letting “the cure be worse than the problem itself” and talked of getting the country back to business by Easter, then just two weeks away. Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist and former member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, warned that “an optimistic projection” for the cost of closing nonessential businesses until July was almost $10,000 per American household. He told the New York Times that shutting down economic activity to slow the virus would be more damaging than doing nothing at all.
Eventually the White House released models suggesting that letting the virus spread unchecked could kill as many as 2.2 million Americans, in line with the projections of other epidemiologists. Trump backed off his calls for an early reopening, extending guidelines on social distancing through the end of April. But his essential argument remained: that in the coronavirus pandemic, there is an agonizing trade-off between saving the economy and saving lives.
Evidence from research, however, shows that this is a false dichotomy. The best way to limit the economic damage will be to save as many lives as possible ...
... any measures to slow deaths from the virus will have huge downstream economic benefits. Michael Greenstone, an economist at the University of Chicago, finds that even moderate social distancing will save 1.7 million lives between March 1 and October 1, according to disease-spread models done at Imperial College London. Avoiding those deaths translates into a benefit of around $8 trillion to the economy, or about one-third of the US GDP, he estimates, on the basis of a widely accepted economic measure, the “value of a statistical life.” And if the outbreak is less severe than predicted by the Imperial College work, Greenstone predicts, social distancing could still save some $3.6 trillion ...
... “Our choice is not whether we intervene or whether we go back to the normal economy,” says Emil Verner, an economist at MIT’s Sloan School who has recently looked at the flu pandemic of 1918 for insights into today’s outbreak. “Our choice is whether we intervene—and the economy will be really bad now and will be better in the future—versus doing nothing and the pandemic goes out of control and really destroys the economy.” ...
... In a piece called “National Coronavirus Response: A roadmap to reopening,” former FDA director Scott Gottlieb also argued for ramping up testing and then isolating those infected rather shutting in the entire population. Likewise, Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s department of medical ethics and health policy, called for increasing testing in a New York Times piece called “We Can Safely Restart the Economy in June. Here’s How.” Harvard medical experts, meanwhile, have outlined similar ideas in “A Detailed Plan for Getting Americans Back to Work.”
The proposals differ in details, but all revolve around widespread testing of various sorts to know who is vulnerable and who isn’t before we risk going back to business ...”
More ➥ https://www.technologyreview.com/202...=pocket-newtab




“National Coronavirus Response: A roadmap to reopening,”
➥ https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploa...covering-2.pdf

“We Can Safely Restart the Economy in June. Here’s How”
➥ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/o...s-economy.html

“A Detailed Plan for Getting Americans Back to Work”
➥ https://hbr.org/2020/04/a-detailed-p...s-back-to-work

“Testing for Coronavirus Infections and Antibodies”
➥ http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/

[Midnight Son]

gCaptain reporting trouble in the food distribution chain.


https://gcaptain.com/global-food-exp...port-problems/


Stay safe everyone

[Montanan]

Walmart CEO says we're in the 'hair color' phase of panic buying. First went the hand sanitizer, disinfectants and toilet paper. Now hair clippers and hair dye are flying off shelves.
In recent weeks, Americans' shopping patterns are serving as a reflection of how the coronavirus pandemic continues to evolve and affect daily lives.
"You can definitely see that as people have stayed home, their focus shifted," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said

[Montanan]

If anyone seems to be not keeping their proper social distance during this pandemic, I recommend that you take up singing this classic song as a socially correct and gentle way to remind people to not stand so close to me.

Jimmy Fallon, Sting & The Roots Remix "Don't Stand So Close to Me" (At-Home Instruments)

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbZtFKgqXIs

[Montanan]

Los Angeles County health officials warned Friday that the region needs to significantly increase social distancing to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus and that stay-at-home restrictions could remain into the summer.

Even with the dramatic social distancing the county is now seeing, officials forecast that up to 30% of residents could be infected by mid-summer without more behavioral changes, such as reducing shopping trips.

As a result, Los Angeles County is extending the stay-at-home order for California's most populous county through at least May 15.

Officials could not provide a definitive answer as to when the stay-at-home order will ease.

"Everybody wishes we could answer that and answer it definitively, and we can’t. We do know that we will reopen," said Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. "We do know that we will be lifting some of the restrictions and we do hope that we're able to take a hard look this summer at what makes sense for us to be relaxing, in terms of some of the closures right now that are making it impossible, for example, for some people to get back to work. But it really does depend on the data."

While the strict physical distancing measures in L.A. County, which have been in effect for three weeks, have clearly had an effect in saving many lives, models presented by the county Friday show troubling forecasts if officials lifted the stay-at-home order now.

There are still too many people becoming infected with the coronavirus in Los Angeles County, officials said. And there is more than a 50% chance that the current capacity of intensive care unit beds in Los Angeles County, roughly 750 beds now, could be exhausted by late April.

"There's a greater than 50% chance that if we did nothing to increase the number of ICU beds in the county relative to our normal footprint that we would run out of ICU beds near the end of April, or the beginning of May," said Dr. Roger Lewis, a biostatistician and chairman of the emergency medicine department at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Work is underway to increase the county's ICU bed capacity.

Officials outlined the stark paths ahead for Los Angeles County. If the stay-at-home order was quickly rescinded and people resumed their normal habits, an astonishing 95.6% of L.A. County residents would be infected with the coronavirus by Aug. 1, according to projections released by the county.

Staying at the current levels of physical distancing would still result in 29.8% of residents being infected by Aug. 1.

But increasing our efforts to stay apart from one another by one-third could reduce that to just 5.5% of Los Angeles County residents being infected by Aug. 1.

Put another way: Junking the stay-at-home order now would result in 18,000 people needing hospitalization in L.A. County by mid-May, in a county with fewer than 4,000 hospital beds. But maintaining the current level of physical distancing would keep the number of those needing hospitalization under 1,000 by late May, and the number would be significantly lower if we improved our physical distancing.

Officials cautioned that the forecasts will change over time as more data are fed into them. But the data indicate that now is not the time to let up on the stay-at-home order, they said.

"Physical distancing is working. It has worked to date, and it is working now, and it is important that that physical distancing remain in place in order to reduce not just the strain on the hospital system, but more importantly the overall number of infections," said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of the L.A. County Department of Health Services. "It is absolutely the single most important weapon that we have in our arsenal to fight the virus."

Still, Ghaly said, there are more infections being found every day. On Friday, there were 469 new cases of infection and 19 new deaths reported, putting the cumulative total for Los Angeles County at 8,453 cases and 244 deaths.

"Each person with the infection is still infecting more than one person,” Ghaly said. As long as that happens, the trajectory of coronavirus cases will continue to slope upward.

Even just improving physical distancing by one-third of our current efforts will have a dramatic effect, officials said. Officials are not contemplating new broad-based mandates to close down even more sectors of our society — local authorities across California have already said they think they've largely done all they can without shutting down essential sectors.

But residents can do better. Officials will be looking to see whether a new county order announced Friday requiring the wearing of cloth face coverings at essential businesses will help. And residents who continue to go to the supermarket every day are being urged to cut back on going out.

"For many people the routine is like, 'Well, I can still go to the grocery store,' and I get that ... but we're really telling people, 'No, be very sensible: Limit the amount of time that you're out and about with other people, even to do those essential purchases,'" Ferrer said.

"We’re not talking about some dramatic new set of measures and opportunities to even further close down wholesale parts of our lives," Ferrer added. "We have a lot of that in place. We just are all going to do a better job trying to stay safe, stay home, protect each other and keep our distance."

Based on current data from the county and other communities, roughly 3% of people with COVID-19 require hospitalization. One-third of those patients, or 1% of total cases, will end up in the ICU. The majority of those in intensive care need to be put on a ventilator.

Officials said there are significant activities going on now to increase the total ICU bed capacity in the county, including opening a previously closed hospital and relying on the Navy hospital ship Mercy to take non-COVID-19 patients into its intensive care facilities.

Authorities are optimistic they can increase the number of ICU beds in the coming weeks to meet projected demand. An additional 400 to 500 ICU beds may be needed even if residents continue to physically distance themselves as they have been in the last three weeks, and "I do believe that is a gap we can close," Ghaly said.

The Mercy, docked in the L.A. area, adds 80 ICU beds; the Los Angeles Surge Hospital, where the shuttered St. Vincent Medical Center campus sits, has 266 beds, a large number of which can be converted into ICU beds; four of the county hospitals run by the Department of Health Services are looking at adding 100 to 150 ICU beds; and the county is working with privately owned hospitals to boost intensive care unit capacity.

Ferrer said she wished she could give a definitive answer when the stay-at-home order can be lifted.

"If the healthcare system can't stay functional, you also will have a lot of increased mortality from other people who will die of other diseases and conditions as well," Ferrer said. "At the point we start seeing some serious significant declines in both the rate of new cases and the rate of deaths, we can talk about what's a reasonable way to particularly get people back to work."

http://https://www.yahoo.com/news/l-...200058369.html

[Montanan]

New research raises questions about coronavirus immunity: 8% of recovered patients in one study didn't develop antibodies at all

A new study from Chinese scientists on 130 recovered COVID-19 patients is raising questions about the extent to which people develop immunity to the virus.

The paper — a pre-print that has not been peer-reviewed yet — found that patients produced differing levels of antibodies . Having identifiable coronavirus antibodies in your bloodstream means you've probably built up immunity. But roughly 8% of the patients studied didn't develop any detectable antibodies at all.

"What this will mean to herd immunity will require more data from other parts of the world," Huang Jinghe, the leader of the research team behind the report, said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Interestingly, the levels of antibodies patients produced seemed to correlate with their ages: Middle-aged and elderly recovered patients had higher levels of antibodies. Nine of the 10 of the patients who did not develop detectable levels of coronavirus antibodies were 40 years old or younger.

Finding out more about how antibodies to the virus work will have major implications for both vaccine development and the potential for herd immunity.

Measuring antibodies in recovered patients

The study, from researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai, took blood samples from 175 coronavirus patients who had recovered at Shanghai hospitals and who'd had "mild" symptoms. (Patients with "severe" symptoms were excluded because many had received blood transfusions to treat their illnesses.)

The participants ranged in age from 16 to 68, and the scientists grouped them into three categories: elderly (60-85), middle-aged (40-59), and young (15-39).

They found that the patients developed antibodies around 10 to 15 days after the disease's onset and remained stable afterwards.

The researchers measured the levels of neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) in each patient's blood, and found that recovered elderly patients developed significantly higher levels of antibodies than younger patients did. But there was no difference between the lengths of the patients' hospital stays.

"These results indicated that high level of NAbs might be useful to clear the viruses and helpful for the recovery of elderly and middle-age patients," the authors wrote.

The virus seems to be more fatal for older people. In the US, patients 65 and older are seeing the highest rates of death and serious illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Not everyone developed antibodies
In the 10 patients in the study who did not develop detectable antibodies, "other immune responses, including T cells or cytokines, may contribute to the recovery," the researchers wrote.

T cells are a type of white blood cells that aid in immune response, and cytokines are a type of molecule that cells release to fight infections. However, when too many cytokines are released, they cause inflammation — which has reportedly contributed to fatal outcomes in some COVID-19 patients.

Even in patients who do develop coronavirus antibodies, scientists still aren't sure how long they'll last; the virus has not been around long enough to study long-term effects.

Generally, once your body has antibodies to fight off a particular disease, you can't get it again, though some types of antibodies weaken over time. Plus, with viruses that mutate — such as the common cold or seasonal flu — antibodies people build up against one strain aren't effective against others

The possibility of reinfection and implications for vaccines
As the US looks to roll out antibody tests that could tell people whether they've already had the virus and developed immunity, the findings of the Shanghai study could be concerning.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said it's unlikely that people would get the coronavirus more than once — at least within a short time period.

"If we get infected in February and March and recover, next September, October, that person who's infected — I believe — is going to be protected," Fauci said on Wednesday during a livestreamed conversation with Howard Bauchner, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Over 375,000 people worldwide have recovered from the coronavirus (likely more, given that many mild and asymptomatic cases are not reported in official counts). Given that a third of the world is under some kind of lockdown, those who have recovered could potentially emerge and return to work first.

"Those are the people, when you put them back to particularly critical infrastructure jobs, that you worry less about them driving an outbreak than those who are antibody-negative and very likely have never been exposed," Fauci said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/research-...121200086.html

[GordMay]

The pre-print article, Montanan cites:
“Neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in a COVID-19 recovered 1 patient cohort and their implications”
➥ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...365v1.full.pdf

[Montanan]

The Kremlin said on Saturday a "huge influx" of coronavirus patients was beginning to put a strain on hospitals in Moscow as Russia's death toll rose to more than 100.

Moscow and many other regions have been in lockdown for nearly two weeks to stem the contagion, but hospitals in the capital are still being pushed to their limit, officials said.

On Saturday a Reuters witness saw a tailback of dozens of ambulances queuing outside a hospital handling coronavirus cases in the region immediately outside Moscow, waiting to drop off patients.

One ambulance driver said he had been waiting 15 hours outside the hospital to drop off a patient suspected of having the virus.

"The situation in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, but mostly in Moscow, is quite tense because the number of sick people is growing," Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview on state television, Russian news agencies reported.

"There is a huge influx of patients. We are seeing hospitals in Moscow working extremely intensely, in heroic, emergency mode."

Russia has reported 13,584 cases of the virus, and the authorities said on Saturday that 12 new coronavirus-related deaths in the last day had pushed the casualty toll to 106.

Peskov added that it would become clearer only in the next few weeks whether the country was nearing the worst point in its outbreak. Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said on Friday that the city was far from reaching the peak of the outbreak, saying it was merely in its "foothills".

The authorities in Moscow are set to begin introducing a system of permits to control movement around the city starting next week to help enforce the lockdown.

A stronger police presence was visible on the streets of Moscow on Saturday. Traffic police had set up check points on major thoroughfares on the outskirts of the city but were not systematically carrying out checks.

In the early stages epidemic, Russia recorded fewer cases of the new coronavirus than many Western European countries, but its tally began to rise sharply this month. Until late March officials were saying the situation was under control and that there was no epidemic in the country.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/kremlin-s...165628615.html

[Montanan]

US Embassy guidance for cruisers that were at anchor or moored in the Bahamas and are departing to repatriate to their home countries. Note: The Bahamas are closed for entry or transiting. This guidance was for those that had previously been granted cruising permits and were in country. It should not be taken that you can enter The Bahamas to transit through country.

This was provided by A64Pilot in another CF thread. Thanks A64Pilot, good luck with your transit back to the USA from the Bahamas.

[rbk]

Originally Posted by Montanan

Walmart CEO says we're in the 'hair color' phase of panic buying. First went the hand sanitizer, disinfectants and toilet paper. Now hair clippers and hair dye are flying off shelves.
In recent weeks, Americans' shopping patterns are serving as a reflection of how the coronavirus pandemic continues to evolve and affect daily lives.
"You can definitely see that as people have stayed home, their focus shifted," Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said

Sex toy purchasing has surged in the past month. New Zealand made headlines last week in this regards and Japan was reporting shortages, Oh the humanity!

[Montanan]

Originally Posted by rbk

Sex you purchasing has surged in the past month. New Zealand made headlines last week in this regards and Japan was reporting shortages, Oh the humanity!

Is that a deliverable that is for same day or next day with an Amazon Prime membership?

Amazon has indicated that they are placing their focus on essentials and less so on non-essentials.

Just asking.