May 26 coronavirus news

President Biden is tasking the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” in assessing the origins of Covid-19 and report back within 90 days.

In a statement on Wednesday, Biden said he asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in March to “task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

In Wednesday’s statement, the President also says he’s now calling for the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” and report back within 90 days, and in the meantime, “to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.”

“The United States will also keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence,” Biden writes.

During yesterday’s Covid-19 briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, fielded questions on the origin of Covid-19, telling reporters, “Many of us feel that it is more likely that this is a natural occurrence, as has happened with SARS-CoV-1, where it goes from an animal reservoir to a human. But we don’t know 100 percent the answer to that, and since this is a question that keeps being asked, we feel strongly – all of us – that we should continue with the investigation and go to the next phase of the investigation that the WHO has done.”

Emerging coronavirus variants, people not getting vaccinated against Covid-19 and health disparities all keep Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, awake at night.

Walensky said that during a Wednesday subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Appropriations. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro had asked both Walensky and Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC’s principal deputy director, what keeps them up at night.

Schuchat, who announced last week that she will be retiring after serving 33 years at CDC, said, “I think we have to remember the rest of the world and that while it’s getting better here there are many places at risk– so until we’re all out of this, none of us are out of this.”

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, speaks during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on May 26 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

All seven leaders from the National Institutes of Health who spoke before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday agreed there should be further investigation into any possible connection the Wuhan Institute of Virology might have to the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that causes Covid-19.

Joining Collins was Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Dr. Ned Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute; Dr. Gary Gibbons, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; Dr. Eliseo Perez-Stable, director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities; and Dr. Bruce Tromberg, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

The World Health Organization has completed the first phase of its investigation. The US is encouraging the agency to investigate more.

Covid-19 cases and deaths are plateauing at an alarming high levels in the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) director, Dr. Carissa Etienne, said Wednesday.

Last week, the region reported over 1.2 million new Covid-19 cases and 31,000 deaths, figures that remain unchanged over the last few weeks, Etienne said.

During PAHO’s weekly briefing and assessing the pandemic’s evolution, Etienne highlighted Cuba after it continues to report significant new infections.  

Central American countries such as Costa Rica, Panama and Belize are also seeing spikes as well as Honduras “where ICU beds are over 80% capacity,” Etienne said. 

“We are also concerned about increasing trends and hospitalizations in Haiti,” Etienne told reporters 

In South America, while countries such as Chile, Peru and Paraguay have reported declines in new cases, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil are seeing new cases on the rise. Bolivia has also reported “a drastic increase in cases and deaths,” Etienne explained.

Asked about the presence of the Indian variant across the region, PAHO’s Incident Manager Sylvain Aldighieri said cases have been detected in 10 countries in North, Central and South America and mostly linked with international travelers. 

Regarding the slow vaccination rollout in the Americas, PAHO’s director urged once again the global community to help expand the region’s vaccine coverage.

“In our region of nearly 700 million people, just 37 million have been fully vaccinated against Covid. I hope you agree that this is completely unacceptable,” Etienne stated.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on May 26.

It’s hard to determine when exactly scientists will figure out what started the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asked at what point it would be more likely Covid-19 came from lab if an intermediate host could not be identified.

Fauci gave the example of a disease such as Ebola; the first outbreak was reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976. Scientists believe that fruit bats are natural hosts of the Ebola virus, but it’s still not clear what the intermediate host is. Scientists do not believe Ebola started in a lab, Fauci said.

“I don’t think we can give a time element on that yet, senator, for the simple reason, we still have not yet confirmed what the host is from Ebola,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “It’s been many years now since the original Ebola outbreaks and we haven’t yet nailed that down.”

Graham asked Fauci if there had ever been a pandemic that started in a lab.

“To our knowledge, no,” Fauci said.

Fauci and members of the Biden administration have been calling for the continuation of an investigation into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, Fauci said he is not convinced that the pandemic originated naturally. 

Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Rochelle Walensky speaks during a hearing on May 19 in Washington,DC.

As the coronavirus vaccine rollout continues — and the potential future need for booster shots is considered — the nation could benefit from a robust adult immunization program, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Committee on Appropriations during a subcommittee hearing. 

“We don’t have an adult immunization structure in this country,” Walensky said during Wednesday’s hearing, where she discussed the CDC’s requested budget for fiscal year 2022.

Walensky added that it remains unclear if or when coronavirus vaccine booster doses may be needed in the future for those who are already fully vaccinated — but it is currently being studied.

Nearly three-quarters of patients with moderate-to-severe Covid-19 had at least one long-term symptom, according to a new review of existing research published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.

Researchers from Stanford University conducted a review of 45 existing studies that followed a total of 9,751 patients in the months after Covid-19 infection. 

They found 73% of the patients had at least one symptom 60 days after diagnosis, symptom onset or hospital admission. That finding was consistent even in studies that followed patients up to six months.

The researchers also found across the studies that 40% of study participants experienced fatigue, 36% had shortness of breath and another 25% reported an inability to concentrate, often referred to as brain fog.

With more than 33 million reported Covid-19 cases in the US, long-term symptoms among hospitalized patients represented a “huge public health burden,” she said.

She added that many patients go on to experience long Covid, with lingering fatigue or brain fog, even after a relatively mild case.

One major issue, according to the paper, was that the various studies on post-Covid effects were heterogenous, making it hard to fully compare them on measures such as the length of time for which patients were followed or which symptoms were reported. 

It was “impossible” to figure out whether the symptoms resolved, or how long people stayed sick, Nasserie said.

And the research team would have benefited if more studies had been published on long-term effects in patients who were not hospitalized, she explained.

In a secondary aspect of the paper, Nasserie and co-authors recommended methods that future researchers on long-term Covid-19 complications. Those practices could be meaningful in harmonizing studies on long Covid, she felt, especially with the National Institutes of Health earmarking more than $1 billion to study complications of the novel coronavirus.

“We wanted to step in while this body of evidence is still relatively young,” she said. “We wanted to come up with recommendations that we’re hoping that researchers will follow in the future to try and make it more possible for people like us to quantify the true risk of Covid-19.”

People receive a COVID-19 vaccination shot at the Broadway Junction subway station in Brooklyn on May 12 in New York City.

More than 8 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered in New York City, said Mayor Bill de Blasio at a press conference on Wednesday.

Mobile vaccination sites in the form of buses and vans have been very helpful in the vaccination efforts in the city, added de Blasio.

A security guard walks in front of the Olympic Rings on May 9 in Tokyo.

The approach to preventing Covid-19 at the Tokyo Olympics is a dangerous one, and recommendations for protecting the athletes should be reviewed, according to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The first problem, Osterholm said on CNN’s New Day today, is that the vaccines aren’t available for many of the participants, or they aren’t being used. This is a particular problem for people younger than 18 — vaccines aren’t approved for that age group in many countries, although there are athletes in that age group.

“We’ve got to address the vaccine issue immediately,” he said. 

Second, he said that there has been very little planning for how to address aerosol spread of Covid-19. 

Osterholm — who along with other public health experts wrote a piece on the Tokyo Olympics in the New England Journal of Medicine Tuesday — said that they are calling for an emergency review of all the recommendations that have been made and how to handle the games as safely as possible.

“I’d give them a chance right now. I think that we all want the good news with the Olympics, I think no one at this point wouldn’t want to have that torch lit and to see us come back together,” Osterholm said when asked if he would cancel the games.

“But I think that the approach they’re taking right now is virtually a dangerous one if they don’t change many of the recommendations they have and for how they’re going to protect athletes and their support team members. I think this is a real challenge,” he added.

France will establish a mandatory quarantine for travelers coming from the UK, French government spokesperson Gabriel Attal told journalists after the weekly government meeting Wednesday.

“There is a new situation in the UK because of the so-called Indian variant,” Attal explained.

 Details of the decision will be laid out in the coming hours, Attal said.