April 9 coronavirus news

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Americans have the potential to take summer vacations — if we continue with mitigation strategies to prevent a resurgence.  

Speaking to CBS This Morning, Fauci was asked if he could envision a typical summer, filled with vacations, baseball games, weddings and family reunions.

“It can be in the cards,” he said. 

But he warned:

Getting back to normal is not like a light switch that you turn on and off, Fauci said, adding it’ll be gradual and depend on where in the country you live. 

“The bottom line of it all is, that what we see looking forward, it is very likely that we will progress towards the steps towards normalization as we get to the end of this thirty days. And I think that’s going to be a good time to look and see how quickly can we make that move to try and normalize. But hopefully, and hopefully, by the time we get to the summer we will have taken many steps in that direction," he added.

When asked if Fauci would be taking a summer vacation, he laughed, “I don’t take vacations.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s condition "continues to improve," his official spokesperson said. 

Johnson has spent a third night in intensive care at London’s St Thomas’ hospital. Johnson was hospitalized Sunday because he was still suffering coronavirus symptoms 10 days after testing positive for the virus.

 “(Johnson) had a good night and continues to improve,” his spokesperson said. “He’s in good spirits.”

He said Johnson is continuing to receive “standard oxygen treatment” and thanks health staff for their care.

Here's your roundup of the latest coronavirus developments from around the world.

British lawmakers are being given up to £10,000 ($12,400) each to help them set up work-from-home arrangements during the coronavirus outbreak, the UK’s Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) announced Thursday.

“We will do all we can to enable MPs and their staff to continue their work by making it as straightforward as possible to deal with IPSA and receive funding for parliamentary work,” it said.

“To achieve these aims, we have provided an additional £10,000 to each MP’s office costs budget to support the setting up of working from home arrangements.”

It is also relaxing some of the other rules around expense reimbursement, including the 90-day rule for submitting claims.

Pakistan launched the largest social protection effort in the country’s history Thursday with plans to pay close to $1 billion dollars to the country’s poorest in an effort to counter the economic fallout of the Covid-19 crisis.

The Ehsaas Emergency Cash program is a financial assistance effort to assist parts of the population that have been worst hit by the ongoing lockdown in the country, according to Sania Nishtar, special assistant to Prime Minister Imran Khan on Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety.

The program, which aims to cover 12 million families, is meant to assist them to “buy rations so that they don’t go hungry.”

Authorities have used SMS messages and National Identity Card numbers from the country’s extensive National Database & Registration Authority to identify and contact eligible families.

Pakistan’s existing welfare infrastructure gives the country a “slight edge over other developing countries” to roll out such an ambitious program, according to Umair Javed, an assistant professor of politics and development at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, but issues in data collection and the disbursement of cash at a disorganized district level could cause problems.

Plans to hand out cash at close to 18,000 bank branches across the country could cause a “’large mass of people gathering together defeating the purpose of a lockdown enforced for social distancing," said Javed.

Digital Rights Monitor, a digital rights media watchdog based in Islamabad, has called out the programs’ dependency on “technology or technological support," saying that the measures could disregard “people’s right to privacy in the name of tackling a public health crisis. This could “further decrease people’s trust in state authorities.”

However Khurram Hussain, one of the country’s leading financial journalists, described the program as important and “definitely better than nothing.”

Pakistan’s poorest “live to day to day on their wages, when they don’t work, they don’t eat,” Hussain told CNN.

The lockdown in Pakistan has been in place for a month now and the effect on daily wage earners has “been absolutely catastrophic,” said Hussain.

Millions of people living below the poverty line have been “hit very very hard…the Ehsas Emergency Cash program if targeted properly could bring some much-needed respite to these people,” Hussain added.

As of Thursday, according to the Ministry of Health, the number of confirmed cases in Pakistan is now 4,414, with 63 people dead.

Spain has recorded more than 15,000 deaths during the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to data from the Spanish Health Ministry released Thursday. 

Although there have been 15,238 coronavirus-related deaths, the daily death toll has slowed after smaller increases in the previous two days.

There were 683 deaths in the past 24 hours, 74 fewer than Wednesday’s total death count of 757. 

The rate of increase was 4.7% on the total number of deaths Thursday, also lower than Wednesday’s 5.5% rise on the total.

The number of active cases has gone up from 84,111 to 85,043, an increase of 929, one of the lowest in nearly a month. This represents an increase of 1.1% on Wednesday’s numbers.

The Spanish Health Ministry also reports that 52,165 people have now recovered from the virus – 4,144 more than the number reported Wednesday.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has deployed eight “community protection field teams,” a federal official involved in the day-to-day coronavirus response told CNN.

The teams are part of an initiative to work directly with state and local health departments to keep coronavirus cases contained where transmission rates are low.

The official declined to offer the locations of where the teams were deployed, but CNN was told by a second federal health official briefed on the details that “at least one of the CDC teams was deployed to Wyoming.”

“They have not had a lot of cases. You want to make sure it stays that way,” the senior federal health official told CNN when asked about Wyoming.

“You work closely with them to make sure their public health capacity is working. Find cases, interrupt clusters, and do containment as opposed to mitigation. If containment is achieved, you don’t have to have broader heavy duty mitigation restrictions,” the official said.

The eight teams are part of the CDC’s Health Department Support team -- one of “at least two dozen” task forces established as part of CDC’s coronavirus response, an official said. The teams were deployed separately over the last two weeks to states across the country “that have a low number of coronavirus cases,” according to the two federal health officials.

The goal for the teams is to “develop and employ strategies to try to prevent widespread transmission in those states,” an official said.

“The eight task force teams deployed will work directly with state and local health departments to support epidemiologists and provide lab support to help them track the epidemic in their state. To give them the help they need and the data that they need.”

The CDC community protection field teams will conduct testing and contact tracing “to try and help those states remain at low levels of transmission,” the official said when asked about the scientific metrics. The teams will investigate the state health care systems to see “their abilities to manage patients,” the official added.

The CDC often deploys teams to major public health emergencies both in the United States and abroad.

In 2016 the CDC’s Global Rapid Response Team sent health, communications and logistics experts to 90 public health crises in the US and around the world, including outbreaks of Ebola, polio, yellow fever and cholera.

The teams can deploy on short notice and can remain in the field for months to stop health threats or to prevent health threats from developing.

Within the last “several weeks,” other CDC teams have been sent to states to assist health departments with their prisons and homeless populations, while others are conducting household transmission studies, a federal official told CNN.

Young people who don’t live with their parents should be allowed to return to work first as part of an easing of coronavirus restrictions, British researchers have suggested.

The approach could ease the “severe damage” that is being done to the country’s economy, according to a briefing paper by Andrew J. Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee from Warwick University.

“Unless a vaccine is discovered quickly, it is unlikely that there will be any riskless or painless course of action,” they said.

“Epidemiological and economic trade-offs will instead have to be faced. The choices at that juncture are likely to be difficult ones for politicians and citizens."

The researchers propose that the millions people aged 20-30 who don't live with their parents be released from quarantine to return to work.

“This would help to restart prosperity before an extraordinary recession takes hold; it would lead to other societal benefits; it would also create a reasonably small, but unfortunately not negligible, extra risk to health in the country," said the paper.

The researchers calculate that there are 4.2 million people who would fall within the age category and who don’t live with parents.

Austria has recorded 12,969 confirmed cases of coronavirus since the outbreak began, the country’s health ministry said Thursday.

There have been 295 deaths and 5,240 people have recovered from the virus, said the ministry.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced earlier this week that the country is preparing for a “resurrection” after Easter, which would involve re-opening some shops.

Austria is the first European country to outline loosening of its coronavirus lockdown. However, at the same time, it will also extend the requirement to wear face masks in supermarkets and on public transport.