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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it will pay for any Covid-19 vaccine that is authorized or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to allow for “broad vaccine access and coverage for all Americans.”
The agency also announced it will help cover a larger portion of the cost of new Covid-19 treatments that may be coming down the pipeline for Medicare recipients.
She said that while the federal government is paying for the vaccine, insurers including Medicare, Medicaid and private plans must cover the cost of administering it.
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The number of coronavirus cases across England has doubled in the past three weeks, according to interim findings published by a team of researchers at Imperial College London.
Paul Elliott, the head of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Imperial College, warned more must be done to stop the virus from spreading further.
“Now more than ever we must all work together to curb further spread of the virus and avoid subsequent overwhelming of the health service,” Elliott said.
The data: Researchers tested 85,971 people from across England between October 16-25. They found that prevalence of the virus continues to rise across all age groups and all regions in England, with the biggest increase in those aged 55-64 (from 0.37% to 1.2%). However, the highest rate of positivity was for those aged 18-24 (2.2%).
The geographic distribution of the virus was uneven, with the highest prevalence of the virus found in Yorkshire and The Humber (2.7%) and the North West (2.3%), according to the study.
The number of positive cases was doubling every nine days, the study found.
Gen. David D. Thompson, the US Space Force’s second-highest ranking officer, has tested positive for Covid-19, the US Air Force said in a statement Wednesday.
Thompson, who is the vice chief of space operations, took a test after a close family member tested positive for the virus.
The US Space Force is a newly formed military service branch structured within the Department of the Air Force.
The Space Force “trains, equips and maintains mission-ready space forces that provide missile warning, space domain awareness, positioning, navigation and timing, communications and space electronic warfare,” according to the US Defense Department.
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Days after Eli Lilly and Company said it would stop a trial of its Covid-19 antibody therapy in hospitalized patients because it was not effective, the company on Wednesday published promising interim results from a trial involving patients with mild and moderate Covid-19.
Also on Wednesday, biopharmaceutical company Regeneron reported its monoclonal antibody cocktail treatment helped people with mild and moderate Covid-19.
There are at least 78 monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19 in various stages of development in labs around the world, but those made by Lilly and Regeneron have been among the most closely watched. Both Lilly and Regeneron have already applied to the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorizations that would open up their antibody treatments to more people with Covid-19.
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President Donald Trump has repeatedly mocked former Vice President Joe Biden and others for wearing masks.
At a campaign rally in Arizona on Wednesday – at which there was no social distancing and most attendees did not wear masks – Trump started mocking what he claimed are the mask requirements in California.
“In California, you have a special mask. You cannot, under any circumstances, take it off. You have to eat through the mask,” the President said.
Facts First: Trump’s story was false. Californians are not required to wear “complex” or “special” masks; basic face coverings, even homemade ones, are acceptable there. Though Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed a statewide mask order, Californians are not required to wear masks at all times; they can remove them when at home, when alone in a room outside their home, when outdoors more than 6 feet from others, and when eating or drinking. And while people can transmit the coronavirus or get infected with it while wearing masks, face masks have proven effective in reducing the chances of transmission; they are much better than “nothing.”
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The United States is going to face a “really rough time” over the next couple of months as the daily number of coronavirus cases rises, Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor and dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said Wednesday.
Hotez urged Americans to “get ready.”
“I think we’ll head towards 100,000 new cases per day as we go into December. Deaths will go up and, and we’re going to have to figure out family by family who we’re going to social distance with,” Hotez told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
“We’re headed towards a doubling of the number of Americans who perished in this epidemic by the end of the year, early January,” he predicted.
Hotez said Americans can expect a “pretty awful winter.”
In the wake of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers winning championship titles this year, revelers in the city have been asked to quarantine for the next two weeks.
Los Angeles Health Director Barbara Ferrer said anyone who celebrated with others without wearing a face covering or practicing social distancing should take precautions.
Ferrer attributed an increase in cases partly to gatherings for sports events and celebrations for the Lakers and Dodgers.
Leaving vaccine distribution plans completely up to the states could lead to confusion, a former health and human services secretary said Wednesday.
Sebelius added: “Not having a national strategy on everything from communication to, you know, health protection, has not really been very effective so, I’m hoping when we get the vaccine that we would have a national framework with a clear national identification of priority. … Without that national strategy, I’m very worried it could look like, you know the PPE where every state was fighting with every other state and fighting with the federal government.”
There’s no doubt that wearing masks “makes a difference,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, emphasized on Wednesday.
“We don’t want to shut down completely,” Fauci told Dr. Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of the medical journal JAMA, during a virtual Q&A session.
Fauci added that the politicization of masks should stop.
“It almost becomes a political statement. We’ve got to get away from that,” he said.
France will go into a nationwide lockdown on Friday as Covid-19 cases surge in the country, French President Emmanuel Macron announced today.
Macron announced the measures in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday evening, adding that measures already taken “are not enough.”
What the new measures do:
The United States is “not in a good place” when it comes to a rise in Covid-19 cases nationwide, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“We’re not in a good place,” Fauci told Dr. Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of the medical journal JAMA, during a virtual Q&A session on Wednesday.
Fauci called this “a bad recipe for a tough time ahead.”
With the threat of Covid-19, trick-or-treating is not safe this year and kids should be kept home, professors from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine warned in written statements on Wednesday.
“Being within six feet of somebody who isn’t part of your household, even if outdoors, is risky now. Door-to-door trick-or-treating is very hard to do safely, because there has to be good masking and physical distancing of at least six feet or more,” Khan said, adding that her children plan to dress up in costumes and she’ll hide candy around the house for them to find.
Dr. Craig Garfield, professor of pediatrics at the university and director of the Family and Child Health Innovation Program, said that hiding candy around the house — which he called “trick-or-treat meets hide-and-go-seek” — can be a safe alternative to traditional trick-or-treating.
“Much as I love the costumes and candy of Halloween, this year we will not go out and will not be turning on lights or giving out candy. I suggest other families do the same,” Garfield said in his statement. “Now is a time to just stay together as a family.”
Overall, the lowest risk way to celebrate Halloween is to stay indoors with your household, said Dr. Taylor Heald-Sargent, pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the university.
“The bottom line is that there is a risk, and it’s simpler to just cancel everything. But everyone is getting tired of skipping fun events and disappointing our children,” Heald-Sargent said in her statement. “It’s essential to follow the three W’s: wear a mask, watch your distance and wash your hands.
Heald-Sargent added that instead of handing out candy this year, she used the money she would have spent on candy to buy individually wrapped face masks to leave outside instead.
After clinching the storied franchise’s seventh World Series championship and first since 1988, the Los Angeles Dodgers on Wednesday announced a delay in plans to celebrate the win.
In a statement addressing fans and the City of Los Angeles, the team said the celebration would “have to wait until it is safe to do so. We can’t wait to celebrate together!”
Dodgers 3rd baseman Justin Turner was pulled from Tuesday night’s deciding Game 6 in the 8th inning, after confirmation that a follow-up to an inconclusive Covid-19 test on him came back positive.
The Dodgers have not announced an update on the team’s departure from Texas back to California.
Following Tuesday’s victory, Dodgers president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, was asked if the team was able to fly home or has to remain in Arlington in quarantine.
He replied, “Not sure yet. We’re going back [to the team hotel] tonight and we’re going to all take tests and figure out what the results are from that and then go from there.”
As Covid-19 cases soar across the US, the country is on a path to “look a lot like Europe,” warned Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. European countries have been reporting record numbers of Covid-19 cases as the continent prepares for the pandemic to intensify through winter.
“We’re on a trajectory to look a lot like Europe as we enter the month of November. So I think things are going to get worse,” Gottlieb said. “What we have is very diffuse spread. We’re sort of at the beginning of this steep part of that epidemic curve right now.”
The Big Ten football game between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Nebraska Cornhuskers scheduled for Saturday has been canceled due to several positive Covid-19 cases within the Wisconsin football program.
As of Wednesday morning, 12 people — six student-athletes and six staff members, including head coach Paul Chryst — have tested positive for the virus. Additional test results are pending.
As a result, Wisconsin will pause all team-related activities for at least seven days.
The statement continued: “I am disappointed for our players and coaching staff who put so much into preparing to play each week. But the safety of everyone in our program has to be our top priority and I support the decision made to pause our team activities.”
Wisconsin Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez said in a statement. “We have said from the beginning that the health and safety of our student-athletes, coaches and staff members comes first. Over the past several days we have seen a rising number of student-athletes and staff contract the virus. The responsible thing for us to do is to pause football-related activities for at least seven days.”
The game will not be rescheduled.
Wisconsin’s next scheduled game is Nov. 7 at home against Purdue. Nebraska’s next scheduled game is on the road against Northwestern on Nov. 7.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah downplayed a press release from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released Tuesday that declared “ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC” as a key administration accomplishment, saying Wednesday that it was “poorly worded.”
“No absolutely not, I think that was poorly worded,” Farah said during an appearance on Fox News Wednesday morning when asked whether the President believes the pandemic has ended.
Farah downplayed and defended it further when pressed by CNN’s Joe Johns during a one-man gaggle.
“We’re certainly not getting ahead of it, we’re still in the midst of the pandemic. We do say we’re turning the corner and what we mean by that is, we’re rushing therapeutics, we’re in the best place to treat the virus that we’ve ever been in. And by end of year we expect that we’ll have the vaccine, at which point we will defeat the virus,” she said.
She continued: “But I think the intention of that press release was to give credit to the career medical professionals and scientists has been working since day one on this pandemic.”
And asked by Joe Johns about reports of thousands of Nebraska supporters stranded in the cold after last night’s Omaha rally, Farah directed questions to the campaign, but said, “The health and safety of those coming out to support the President is our top priority.”
On Fox, she said that rising cases and hospitalizations are “absolutely” a concern but said the administration is “working with every county and state to monitor hospital capacity,” going on to attack Joe Biden’s plans to deal with the pandemic.
“We are ready to deal with cases as they arise. We will not have hospitals overflowing, and if there is a need to surge medical capacity or even military doctors, we’ve done that, we have the muscle memory, and we’ll be prepared to do it, but as I said, we have a vaccine coming soon,” she said.
French President Emmanuel Macron will announce this evening “a new stage in our fight against the virus which was decided this morning,” government spokesperson Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday after a cabinet meeting.
Local media, including France’s Le Monde newspaper, report that a new lockdown will be announced by the president in an address to the nation at 8 p.m. local (3 p.m. ET) on Wednesday. CNN affiliate BFMTV are reporting that the new measures may last four weeks and come into force as early as Thursday evening.
This potential lockdown would be less strict than the first “confinement” in the spring, with the possibility of some schools and more businesses staying open.
The French Hospital Federation, a group representing 4,800 hospitals, said in a press release on Wednesday that a full lockdown was the “only solution” that would permit French hospitals to “successfully treat all French people, whether they have Covid, whether they have any other serious illness or are affected by a serious accident.”
President of the French Hospital Federation Frédéric Valletoux, speaking on French radio station France Inter, stressed that the French “hospital system will not hold without radical measures.” Reiterating the federations call for a complete lockdown Valletoux said hospitals are struggling with lower numbers of medical personnel than during the spring.
What the numbers look like: France may be seeing about 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, Jean-François Delfraissy, who leads the scientific council that advises the French government, warned on Monday. Speaking to France’s RTL radio, Delfraissy said, “There are probably over 50,000 cases per day, we are estimating at the scientific council that we are more around 100,000 cases per day, twice as many, because beyond diagnosed cases there are many not diagnosed and asymptomatic cases.”
Delfraissy added that France is in a “very difficult, even critical, situation.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci said that even though he’s “very certain” we will have a coronavirus vaccine “in the next few months,” we are unlikely to be able to go about our normal lives until at least the end of next year – or perhaps 2022.
However, Fauci noted that political division and the fear of economic loss has affected how the country is currently doing.
“When we were trying to open up the economy again, or open up the country … and I was very much involved with Dr. Deborah Birx and putting together these guidelines, which were a gateway of Phase 1, Phase 2 – to tell you how you can gradually safely and prudently open up the country.” Fauci said. “If everybody had done that uniformly, I don’t think we would be in the position we’re in right now.”
He continued: “Masks in the United States have almost become a political statement, and I know that was carried in the news globally, it was really … very, very difficult. In fact, people were ridiculed for their mask, depending upon which side of a particular political spectrum you were at,” Fauci said, adding that it has been painful to witness this divisiveness centered around a public health issue.
Dr. Paul Offit discusses on Newsroom:
The Covid-19 virus is “pretty much up and down the state” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy Wednesday, adding that all options are on the table in terms of potential restrictions.
“I continue to think it’s more likely scalpel community-focused surging of capacities and enforcement, but we have to leave all options on the table,” said Murphy to CNN affiliate WPIX.
He added that the state entered the surge in a “strong position,” with more knowledge of the virus and the demographic shifting toward a younger population.
Murphy said that New Jersey will rely on state executive orders and the same playbook used a couple weeks ago in hotspots like Lakewood to curtail spread of the virus in new hotspots like the East and North wards in Newark.
“Plusing up — surging testing, tracing, using the bullhorn including in languages other than English, so first is Portuguese in the East Ward of Newark,” said Murphy. “And also cranking up compliance and enforcement.”
Newark is under new restrictions this week following Covid-19 spread in the area. The new restrictions, in part, require non-essential businesses to close at 8 p.m. local time.
US stocks tumbled again at Wednesday’s opening bell. The drivers for the selloff are the same as on Monday: rising Covid-19 infection in Europe are sparking worries about renewed lockdowns to stave off the pandemic’s second wave, and uncertainty about next week’s election and further government stimulus is keeping investors worried about the economy.
Here’s how things opened this morning:
On Monday, the Dow logged its worst day in more than seven weeks, while the S&P had its worst performance since late September.
