October 12 coronavirus news

The city of Qingdao in eastern China has tested more than 3.07 million people for Covid-19 since the weekend, when 12 locally transmitted cases were reported, according to the city’s information office.

No new cases have been identified by the citywide testing program from the more than 1.1 million samples already returned, the information office said in its statement on Tuesday.

Containing an outbreak: The 12 cases – split evenly between symptomatic and asymptomatic cases – were all linked to the Qingdao Chest Hospital, which had been treating imported infections. The cluster prompted a mass testing program of the city’s 9 million residents, which began on Monday.

Some 130 testing stations have been set up in Shinan district, the city’s center of political and business activity.

Authorities said the specific source of infection is still under investigation.

Read more about the situation in Qingdao:

China's immigration inspection officers wearing protective suits look at a cargo ship at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province on March 31, 2020. (Photo by STR / AFP) / China OUT (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Related article China to test 9 million people as coronavirus cluster detected in Qingdao

Authorities in Nashville are investigating an outdoor religious concert that took place downtown on Sunday, after videos shared by the organizer showed hundreds of people crowding together, most of them not wearing masks.

The Nashville Metro Public Health Department said the event organizers did not submit an application to the Health Department or a permit application to any Metro department. 

The event was led by Sean Feucht, a Christian worship musician from Northern California. In a tweet on Sunday afternoon, Feucht invited followers to come worship and said, “We can gather thousands. It’s officially a protest, so it’s legal.”

The Metro Public Health Department is now working with other Metro departments to investigate the event.

Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake also issued a statement abut the event, saying he was “greatly disappointed” that the organizers and attendees didn’t use protective measures like face masks or social distancing.

The organizers did not contact the police before the event, and no officers were present at the time, Drake added. 

CNN has reached out to Sean Feucht for comment.

In this undated photo provided by Johnson & Johnson in September, a woman receives an injection during phase 3 testing for the Janssen Pharmaceutical-Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States.

Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson said Monday it was pausing the advanced clinical trial of its experimental coronavirus vaccine because of an unexplained illness in one of the volunteers.

ENSEMBLE is the name of the study.

“Adverse events – illnesses, accidents, etc. – even those that are serious, are an expected part of any clinical study, especially large studies,” said the statement.

It’s the second Phase 3 coronavirus vaccine trial to be paused. AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial was paused last month because of an a neurological complication in a volunteer in the UK. While the trial resumed there and in other countries, it remains paused in the United States while the US Food and Drug Administration investigates.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says he won’t give up on fighting the coronavirus pandemic, even with annoyances like the Trump campaign’s use of his comments out of context in a political advertisement.

“I’m not going to walk away from this outbreak, no matter who’s the President,” Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNBC.

“I’ve devoted my entire professional life to fighting infectious diseases,” he said. “This is an outbreak of historic proportions, the likes of which we have not seen in 102 years. There’s no chance that I’m going to give up on this and walk away from it, no matter what happens.”

Some context: Fauci told CNN he had not consented to being featured in the Trump team’s new advertisement, and that his words were taken out of context. He said on Monday that the campaign should take down the ad, calling his presence in the spot “really unfortunate and really disappointing.”

Coronavirus cases are on the rise in 31 states, according to CNN tracking data, and Dr. Anthony Fauci says the country has to “turn this around.” 

“I think we’re facing a whole lot of trouble,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview on CNBC Monday. 

New coronavirus infections are numbering between 40,000 and 50,000 a day in the US.

“That’s a bad place to be when you’re going into the cooler weather of the fall and the colder weather of the winter,” Fauci said.

The increase in the percentage of people testing positive for the virus is also going in the wrong direction, said Fauci, who is a member of the White House coronavirus task force.

“So you combine an increase in test positivity, which is always a predictor of more cases, and ultimately more hospitalizations, and ultimately more deaths, and you combine that with a baseline of 40, 45, 50,000 new cases a day as you go into a weather system where you’re going to be spending more time indoors rather than outdoors, which is a perfect setup for an acceleration of respiratory-borne diseases — that is unquestionably a problem,” he said. 

“So that’s the concern that I have and so many of my fellow public health officials have,” Fauci added.

Chef Vikas Khanna is up late most nights connecting with colleagues in India from his home on the east side of Manhattan, New York.

The award-winning chef has been working across continents and time zones since April to organize what has become one of the world’s largest food drives.

So far, his “Feed India” initiative has fed around 50 million Indians who have struggled to provide for their families during the coronavirus pandemic.

India has the second-highest number of cases worldwide, behind the United States. As of Monday, more than seven million Indians had been infected with the virus and more than 108,000 had died.

On Monday, Khanna spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “Full Circle” about his initiative.

Watch the interview:

New York state will be deploying additional community testing resources to areas with upticks in coronavirus cases over the next days, according to a statement from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office.

The state reported 12 new Covid-19 deaths and 122 new hospitalizations with 185 patients in intensive care, according to the statement.

New York’s Covid-19 positivity rate is 1.12% while the “red zone” hotspot areas have a positivity rate of 3.70%, according to the statement.

There are at least 7,796,525 cases of coronavirus in the US and at least 215,022 people have died from the virus, according to a tally from Johns Hopkins University.

So far on Monday, Johns Hopkins has recorded 33,979 new cases and 254 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 , the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, hopes the latest data on a rising number of Covid-19 cases and projections of more deaths “jolt” the American public into reality, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper Monday. 

The latest data show that 31 states in America are seeing an upward trend of new Covid-19 cases — and the pandemic could get worse, as the latest forecast of the widely-used model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington projects another 181,000 deaths in the United States by February. 

“I think that people think that when we talk about public health, that we’re talking about shutting down. Let’s get that off the table. We are not talking about shutting down. We’re talking about simple public health measures, as simple as they sound, are really quite effective — and that’s what we say over and over again. Universal wearing of masks. Keep physical distance. Above all, avoid crowds and congregate settings,” Fauci said.

He added: “Wash your hands as often as you can. Try to do things outdoors much more preferably than indoors. If we just do those five things, Jake — we don’t have to do anything more complicated than that — and you would have a major impact on preventing surges, or even turning surges around that are ongoing.” 

Watch here:

Vanderbilt Commodores helmets are seen during a football game at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee, on November 25, 2017.

Vanderbilt University announced on Monday that due to the quarantining of individuals with positive tests and those designated as close contacts, the Commodores’ game against Missouri scheduled for Oct. 17 will be postponed.

This is the first postponement of the Southeastern Conference’s 10-game football season.

The decision is consistent with SEC Covid-19 management requirements, which includes a minimum threshold of at least 53 scholarship student-athletes available to participate.

The game has been tentatively rescheduled to Dec. 12.

Some schools can safely reopen for in-person classes, while doing so at others could lead to an outbreak of infections, infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead” Monday. 

It all depends on the level of community spread and, regardless, schools need to have a plan in place. 

“The thing that seems to be constant throughout that is that when schools are prepared, when they have a plan, when everyone is universally wearing masks, when they’re testing people in a surveillance way to get people who are infected out of the system, [and] they know what to do when they’re confronted with a person a child or older students who gets infected — it can work,” he said. 

Fauci was commenting on a study out of Brown University that found schools may not be hotbeds of infection. Brown’s data show that 0.13% of students and 0.24% of staff were infected in the last two weeks of September. 

As for how often schools should be tested, Fauci said, “It’s not one size fits all.” 

“If you are in a green or a dark green zone with a level of infection that’s extraordinarily low, you probably can be less stringent in what you do in surveillance and even in other types of mitigation. If you’re in an orange or in a red zone, where it really is likely that you’re going to wind up getting infections because of the level in the community, you may have to do that more often,” he said. 

Watch here:

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said the only way the state is going to be able to stop the spread of Covid-19 is “to identify those who are absolute spreaders, the more we test the more we find.”

During a news conference Monday, Justice said Covid-19 has continued to be a deadly virus for the elderly in West Virginia. He reported nine deaths over the weekend, all over the age of 70.

Justice said Berkeley, Doddridge, Harrison, Barbour, Upshur and Randolph counties have seen an uptick in cases, which has increased the need for testing in that cluster as well as across the state.

This July 30 image shows Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers in Madison, Wisconsin.

A circuit court judge has denied a lawsuit against Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers to overturn a mask mandate in the state, according to a court filing obtained by CNN. 

Three people had sued to challenge Evers’ authority to issue the order, declaring a public health emergency. They said in the filing that he “exceeded his statutory authority” by declaring an emergency three different times in relation to the Covid-19 health crisis. 

By state law, the governor is allowed to issue a public health emergency for up to 60 days, unless extended by the state legislature. In his ruling, Judge R. Michael Waterman said that the statute does not prohibit Evers from declaring successive states of emergency and that it allows for a declaration if it has been determined by the governor that a public health emergency exists. 

Waterman also said in his ruling that if the legislature “is unconvinced that a state of emergency does exist,” then they have the power to terminate it. He wrote that the legislature has declined to end the state of emergency. 

He said that a temporary injunction against the order would affect everyone in the state and goes beyond the private interest of the plaintiffs. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said in a statement posted on Twitter that they “look forward to making an appeal on this critical constitutional matter.”

Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University, speaks during an interview on October 12.

Early data from the Covid-19 School Response Dashboard shows that schools don’t appear to be the major spreaders of Covid-19 that experts once feared. 

On reopening of K-12 schools, data taken from the last two weeks of September from more than 200,000 students attending school in-person from 47 states found an infection rate of 0.13% among students and 0.24% among staff. The dashboard is operated by Brown University and the School Superintendents Association. 

“I think that one thing is that the rates we’re seeing is fairly low, lower than what we’re seeing generally in the community,” Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University told CNN on Monday. 

Oster said her team is looking into which mitigation factors are working, including wearing masks, social distancing, and home screening temperature checks. 

“Those are the kinds of things I think we can learn from this data which will help other schools reopen more safely,” Oster told King. 

There is currently no federal attempt to systematically map how Covid-19 is spreading across schools in the US, so Oster and her team have had to pioneer their own method of self-reporting from schools. 

“I think our team feels like there should be somebody else doing this,” she said. “I’m sort of hoping as we grow this, maybe there will be more input from the government, but I think so far we haven’t seen that, which is why we’re doing it.” 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott visits Lake Jackson, Texas on September 29.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced today that state resources are being sent to El Paso to help support hospitals in the area as Covid-19 cases rise.

In a news release, Abbott said that 75 medical personnel, including nurses and respiratory therapists, are being sent to El Paso, joining the 169 personnel previously sent there. 

The Department of State Health Services is also working with staffing agencies to “ensure personnel are available to be deployed to regions seeing an increase” in hospitalizations due to Covid-19. 

The El Paso Department of Public Health announced 424 new coronavirus cases on Monday. They have reported a total of 28,934 cases since the pandemic started.

There are 313 people hospitalized in the region with Covid-19 and 89 are in intensive care units. 

One thing to note: These numbers were released by the public health agency in El Paso, and may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.

There are at least 7,772,099 cases of coronavirus in the US, and at least 214,882 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

So far on Monday, Johns Hopkins has recorded 9,553 new cases and 114 reported deaths.

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

The Carnival Liberty — a Carnival Cruise Line ship — leaves Port Canaveral in Florida on March 9.

Carnival Cruise Line is canceling the remaining cruises for its six ships operating from PortMiami and Port Canaveral in Florida for November, the cruise line announced in a statement Monday.  

The US Centers for Disease Control and and Prevention extended its no-sail order for cruise operations until Oct. 31, making a November restart for cruises not “feasible,” the statement said. 

Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean, also headquartered in Miami, Florida, announced said this month they were canceling November sailing as well, the cruise lines announced respectively.   

Carnival cruises that are currently scheduled for December out of Miami and Port Canaveral will remain in place, but guests currently booked on those trips can voluntarily cancel their reservation for a refund or credit, the statement said.  

Carnival also canceled five cruises scheduled to operate from Sydney, Australia from Jan. 16 through Feb. 8, 2021, the statement said.  

Read Carnival’s tweet to its customers:

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks at a briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on October 12.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said exposing people to the virus to achieve herd immunity is “not an option.”

“Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical,” Tedros said, adding that herd immunity is a “concept used for vaccination.”

“For example, herd immunity against measles requires about 95% of the population to be vaccinated. The remaining 5% will be protected by the fact that measles will not spread among those who are vaccinated,” Tedros said. “In other words, herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.”

Allowing the virus to circulate unchecked “means allowing unnecessary infections, suffering and death,” Tedros said.

There were 20% more deaths than expected in the United States from March 1 through August 1, with Covid-19 officially accounting for about two-thirds of them, according to new research published Monday in the medical journal JAMA. 

“Although total US death counts are remarkably consistent from year to year, US deaths increased by 20% during March–July 2020,” said the research, authored by Dr. Steven Woolf and colleagues at the Virginia Commonwealth School of Medicine. “Covid-19 was a documented cause of only 67% of these excess deaths.”

There were at least 1,336,561 deaths in the US between March 1 and August 1, the study said – a 20% increase over what would normally be expected. 

New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Arizona, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island and Michigan were the ten states with the highest per capita rate of excess deaths. The increase in absolute deaths varied from 22% in Rhode Island and Michigan to 65% in New York.

New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts – the three states with the highest death rates – accounted for 30% of US excess deaths, but had the shortest epidemics, according to the researchers.

Of the approximately 225,530 excess deaths, at least 150,541 – or 67% – of them were attributed to Covid-19.

Analysis found that there were increases in deaths related to causes other than Covid-19, including the US mortality rate for heart disease, which increased between the weeks ending March 21 and April 11, “driven by the spring surge in Covid-19 cases;” and mortality rates for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, which increased twice.

The second increase, between the weeks ending June 6 and July 25 – “coinciding with the summer surge in sunbelt states.”

“Some states had greater difficulty than others in containing community spread, causing protracted elevations in excess deaths that extended into the summer,” the authors said.

They also added that excess deaths attributed to something other than Covid-19 could be a reflection of deaths from unrecognized or undocumented cases or deaths among noninfected patients who faced disruptions caused by the pandemic.

The study did have some limitations, including that it relied on provisional data, inaccuracies in death certificates, and assumptions that were applied to the model. 

Bismarck-Burleigh Public Health nurses work at a drive-thru Covid-19 testing center in Bismarck, North Dakota, on September 8.

Covid-19 cases are rising in North Dakota, and the health care system in the state may not be well-equipped to handle this surge, a public health official warns.

“Right now, the hospitals have less than 20 beds available across the state,” said Renae Moch, director of Bismarck-Burleigh Public Health, adding that it’s concerning because some hospitals are struggling to meet the demand for care.

Moch later clarified to CNN that there are fewer than 20 staffed ICU beds available in the state. According to state data, 20 staffed ICU beds were available as of 1 p.m. local time Sunday

Moch says it’s been a challenge to “make a difference in the number of cases” without a state mandate to enforce coronavirus safety measures. 

Public health officials are also having trouble contact tracing in this environment due to a lack of cooperation from the public, Moch says.

“So we’re dealing with people maybe saying they don’t have any close contacts. If they have been to a wedding or large gathering they’re not giving us that information. So that gives us a real hard time to try to do the contact tracing work and contain some of the spread there.”

CORRECTION: This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Moch’s last name.