MANILA - San Miguel Corp said Tuesday it donated sample collection booths and testing kits to all Metro Manila local government units as part of efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The facilities will be deployed to areas in "dire need," San Miguel President and COO Ramon Ang said in a statement. Swab samples will be taken in the booths.
“This is the best way we can help our local governments ramp up or expand their testing capacity--in particular, for poorer barangays and communities, even as national government takes care of building our mega swabbing centers, which for now will be focused on our returning OFWs,” Ang said.
San Miguel's efforts compliment the government's massive testing program and would expand its capacity, he said.
SMC also plans to put up its own testing laboratory for its 70,000 employees and extended workforce, it said.
Ang is also calling for the regulation of test kit prices.
news.abs-cbn.com
HANOI - Authorities at kindergartens and primary schools in Vietnam took children's temperatures at the gates when they re-opened on Monday from a months-long closure over the coronavirus pandemic, following last week's partial re-opening of other schools.
With just 288 infections and no deaths, the Southeast Asian nation has seen no community infections for nearly a month, putting it on course to resume activities sooner than most others in the region.
"The teachers told us to use hand sanitizer and not to touch one another at school," a fifth grade student, Vu Tuan Phong, said outside his primary school in Hanoi.
He and his schoolmates went home at mid-day, as most schools are following a shorter day than before the pandemic.
"Parents, myself included, trust that the government, as well as the school, will take the optimal measures so kids are safe being in school and parents have peace of mind going to work," said one mother in the capital, Ngoc Anh, 29.
The school re-opening is Vietnam's latest step in lifting virus curbs, although international commercial flights and dance clubs and karaoke bars remain banned.
Schools for older children reopened partially last week.
"The risk of COVID-19 (in Vietnam) is low now, and that's a good thing," Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said last week. "But we need to stay vigilant."
(Reporting by Khanh Vu; Additonal reporting by Minh Nguyen; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
-reuters-
TAIPEI — The calls come at night, when Taiwan’s vice president, Chen Chien-jen, is usually at home in his pajamas. Scientists seek his advice on the development of antiviral medications. Health officials ask for guidance as they investigate an outbreak of the coronavirus on a navy ship.
Like many world leaders, Chen is fighting to keep the coronavirus at bay and to predict the course of the pandemic. He is tracking infections, pushing for vaccines and testing kits, and reminding the public to wash their hands.
But unlike most officials, Chen has spent his career preparing for this moment — he is a Johns Hopkins-trained epidemiologist and an expert in viruses.
That experience has thrust Chen from behind the scenes to the forefront of Taiwan’s response to the crisis. He has embraced his rare dual role, using his political authority to criticize China for initially trying to conceal the virus even as the scientist in him hunkers down to analyze trends in transmission.
Chen is straddling the 2 worlds at a time when science has become increasingly political. Chinese and American officials are regularly trading unsubstantiated theories attacking each other about the origins of the virus.
Around the world, public health experts routinely spar with political leaders over how the virus spreads and the costs and benefits of lockdowns. Chen says that as vice president, only facts inform his policies.
“Evidence is more important than playing politics,” he said in a recent interview in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei.
Now in the final weeks of his term, Chen’s legacy as vice president may be shaped by Taiwan’s success.
Chen, 68, with his frizzy gray hair and a toothy smile, is known affectionately in Taiwan as “elder brother,” and many people credit him with helping the island avoid the large-scale infections and deaths from the coronavirus have overwhelmed many countries.
As a top health official during the SARS crisis of 2003, he pushed a series of reforms to prepare the island for the next outbreak, including building isolation wards and virus research laboratories.
Taiwan’s early preparations put it in a strong position when the virus hit, and the island has earned widespread praise for its response. It has so far reported about 400 confirmed cases and 6 deaths, far fewer than many countries.
Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said Chen had a mix of “political clout and technical expertise” that was effective in Taiwan, a society where he said there was strong trust in science and respect for medical professionals.
Now Chen hopes Taiwan can play a leading role in helping the world recover from the virus and restart economic growth. He is overseeing efforts to develop a vaccine and produce tools like rapid coronavirus testing kits.
“Taiwan cannot stand by when other countries are in great danger,” he said.
Chen maintains the bookish manner of a research scientist and is largely unaccustomed to the attention. He has made a career out of staying out of political fights, even refusing to join the governing Democratic Progressive Party that is led by President Tsai Ing-wen.
“He is a scholar; he actually doesn’t care much about the power game,” said Chen Chi-mai, a deputy prime minister who as a public health student in the 1990s took an epidemiology class from Chen and remains a close friend. “He is popular because he is neutral.”
The president has deployed Chen as a leading voice to lobby for greater recognition for Taiwan on the global stage, including pushing for membership in the World Health Organization.
Chen is now at the center of a global battle over the narrative about how the virus spread worldwide.
He says Taiwan tried to warn the WHO in late December about the potential for the virus to spread from person to person but was ignored. The WHO has rejected the accusation, saying Taiwan merely requested information from the health agency but did not issue any warning.
Chen has seized the moment, denouncing China’s efforts to block Taiwan from joining the WHO and calling on countries around the world to study the “Taiwan model” of controlling the outbreak.
Chen’s prominence has made him a frequent target of criticism by mainland Chinese commentators, who have accused the government of using the pandemic to seek independence for Taiwan, which China’s government considers part of its territory.
“He wears the clothing of professionalism but deviates from the rigorous precision of science and blatantly speaks nonsense and fabricates rumors,” said a recent commentary by Xinhua, China’s official news agency. “The nature of it is particularly vicious.”
Chen laughs at the criticism.
“China has to be focused more on COVID-19 control rather than politics,” he said.
From a young age, Chen was surrounded by politics. He is the son of a powerful county leader in southern Taiwan and said he quickly developed an appreciation for the art of compromise.
“From my father, I learned that politics does not mean people have to fight against each other to the death,” he recalled in an interview in 2016 with Taiwan’s official Central News Agency. “Once people get stranded in such a confrontation, they will constantly find fault with each other.”
For much of his career, he made a point of avoiding politics, instead focusing on his first love, the natural sciences. He earned a doctorate in epidemiology and human genetics from Johns Hopkins University in 1982, and became an authority in hepatitis B as well as diseases associated with arsenic exposure.
At the height of the SARS outbreak, which infected 671 people and killed 84 people in Taiwan, Chen was tapped to be health minister.
At the time, the government faced a crisis of confidence after authorities sealed a contaminated hospital with more than 1,000 people inside. The move triggered panic and some people inside the facility, convinced that they or their loves ones had the virus, tried to kill themselves.
“We saw people jumping out of windows,” Chen recalled. “It was really chaotic.”
After working to contain SARS, Chen led Taiwan in its efforts to prepare for the next outbreak. The government established a disaster management center, increased production of protective gear and revised the infectious disease law, among other measures.
Chen returned to academic life until 2015, when Tsai, then a presidential candidate, tapped him to be her running mate.
As vice president, Chen has faced other challenges. He tackled pension reform, prompting protests from civil servants over cuts. A Catholic, he visited the Vatican three times as vice president, angering Beijing, which has urged the Vatican to cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
He has supported same-sex marriage, which became legal in Taiwan last year, despite criticism from other Christians.
Mostly, he kept a low profile. But in late December, amid the first reports of a mysterious pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan, about 600 miles northwest of Taipei, he jumped into action, worried about the possibility of an epidemic.
Chen quickly ordered the authorities to screen travelers from mainland China and to isolate people showing symptoms of the virus. By Jan. 21, the first case had arrived in Taiwan, and the government soon began rationing masks.
After an outbreak on a navy ship, he urged officials to test more than 700 crew members with the hope of collecting data for a study on asymptomatic patients.
On May 20, Chen will step down as vice president. He plans to return to academia and says the coronavirus will be a focus of his research.
Every day around 7 a.m., Chen goes to church, where mass has been canceled because of the virus.
“I pray to have the courage to change what we can change,” he said, noting the effort to produce better tests, drugs and vaccines. “We have to accept what we cannot change."
The New York Times
RIYADH- Saudi Arabia's finance minister on Monday said the kingdom would triple its Value Added Tax (VAT) and halt monthly handout payments to citizens in new austerity measures spawned by the coronavirus.
"It has been decided the cost of living allowance will be halted from June 2020 and VAT will be raised from 5 percent to 15 percent from July 1," minister Mohammed al-Jadaan said, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.
The measures come after Jadaan last week warned of "painful" and "drastic" steps as the government steps up emergency plans to slash spending amid the double shock of the novel coronavirus and record low oil prices.
Saudi Arabia, along with other Gulf states, imposed a 5 percent tax on goods and services in 2018 in a bid to generate additional revenue.
The petro-state had also introduced handouts worth billions of dollars to citizens, known as the cost of living allowance, to cushion the impact of rising costs.
Jadaan has said he expected Riyadh could lose half of its oil income, which contributes about 70 percent of public revenues, as oil prices have fallen two-thirds since the start of the year.
He said the world's leading crude exporter would borrow close to $60 billion this year to plug a huge budget deficit.
The International Monetary Fund in April projected that the Saudi economy would contract by 2.3 percent this year.
Agence France-Presse
“Everybody hopes for seasonality” when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, Peter Juni of the University of Toronto acknowledged. Maybe, just maybe, the summer will diminish the spread of COVID-19.
But a new study, by Juni, an epidemiologist, and his colleagues in Canada and Switzerland, offers very little encouragement for warm-weather worshippers. In countries around the world, his research found, variations in heat and humidity had little to no effect on the spread of the pandemic. Differences in how the disease spread were instead strongly associated with public health measures like social distancing and school closures.
Several other studies have found or projected modest effects of warmer climates or the increase of sunlight in diminishing the spread of the coronavirus, but all have emphasized the need for public health interventions.
One reason is that most of the world’s population has no immunity to the virus. “This means the virus doesn’t need favorable conditions” to spread, Juni said.
He and his colleagues did a forward-looking study in which they picked 144 countries or “geopolitical areas” around the world and established the conditions that prevailed from March 7-13 in terms of temperature, humidity and public health measures.
Then they followed those countries and how cases of COVID-19 grew during the subsequent period of March 21-27, after a 14-day incubation period for infections during the earlier period to cause disease.
The regions varied from Canada to the tropics, but no effect for temperature was found. Humidity had a very weak connection to diminished spread, they found. But by far the most important in associations with a diminished spread of the disease were school closings, social distancing and restrictions on large gatherings.
“In our study,” the researchers wrote, “only public health interventions were consistently associated with reduced epidemic growth, and the greater the number of co-occurring public health interventions, the larger the reduction in growth.” The study was published Thursday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Other studies have reported mixed results on the effect of the weather and sunlight. One from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that humidity seemed to slow the spread of the virus. Qasim Bukhari, one of the authors of that study, said the new report was interesting although limited by the short time span it covered. He said he and his colleagues “also stressed in our work that public health interventions are very important.”
Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, found summer weather, including ultraviolet light, had some effect on the virus and its spread but said “social interventions have by far the most important effect.”
And a short report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that summer was not likely to slow the virus significantly.
All of the studies acknowledge uncertainty and limitations in their findings. And none diminish the primacy of public health measures. Juni said that given the effectiveness of social restrictions, school-opening strategies should be very carefully planned and tested.
“We can’t have schools closed for more than a year and a half,” he said, but it is not yet known how best to reopen schools and what policies should be followed. Mistakes could mean that openings backfire, with devastating consequence for spread of the disease.
-James Gorman, The New York Times-
Four seconds of high-intensity exertion repeated periodically throughout the day may counteract some of the unhealthy metabolic consequences of sitting for hours, according to a surprising and timely new study of the potentially large benefits of diminutive workouts.
The study relied on a specialized type of stationary bicycle that few of us will have available at home, but its implications remain broadly applicable and suggest that even a few minutes — or seconds — of exercise each day could help substantially to bolster our health.
For most of us, sitting is our default posture and was, even before the shelter-at-home edicts took effect across the globe. Epidemiological studies indicate that most American adults sit for a least 10 hours a day, a total that is likely to have risen now that many of us are home all day.
The health effects of this inactivity can be considerable, with studies linking prolonged sitting to increased risks for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disruptions. In particular, multiple hours of sitting can contribute to a later rise in the bloodstream of fatty acids, known as triglycerides, probably in part because muscles at rest produce less than contracting muscles do of a substance that breaks up triglycerides. High levels of triglycerides, in turn, are linked to an increased risk of heart disease and other metabolic problems.
In theory, exercise should help fight this problem, since it entails muscular contractions. But some experiments hint that one workout may not be enough. In studies conducted at the University of Texas at Austin in recent years, healthy young people who sat all day for the sake of science showed higher-than-normal levels of triglycerides in their blood the next day after a fatty meal. The sitting had left their metabolisms less able to break up and clear away the fat.
Even when the young people interrupted another full day of sitting with a 1-hour run, they continued to experience difficulties with fat metabolism the next day. The researchers speculated that the long hours of sitting may have changed the volunteers’ physiologies in ways that rendered them “resistant” to the expected, beneficial metabolic effects of physical activity.
Those studies had deployed a single moderately paced workout, however. Recently, the researchers began to wonder whether more-frequent, brief spurts of exercise throughout the day, especially if they were intense, may better stave off the undesirable effects of sitting.
So, for the new study, published in April in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the Texas scientists recruited eight healthy young people and asked them to spend a full day at the lab, rising only to eat or visit the bathroom. The next morning, the volunteers returned or a high-fat breakfast of melted ice cream and half and half, while the scientists monitored their bodies’ metabolic response during the next 6 hours.
Then, on a separate day, the volunteers sat again, except for a few seconds each hour, when they sprinted.
These sprints took place on an unusual type of stationary bicycle with a heavy flywheel and no resistance that has been used at the physiology lab to test the leg and lung power of professional athletes. In those tests, athletes generated a tsunami of power and achieved all-out exertion within about two seconds of pedaling.
The scientists reasoned that if athletes needed two seconds of pedaling to reach maximum exertion, the rest of us probably would require, say, twice as much. So, they asked their volunteers to clamber on the bikes and sprint as hard as possible for four seconds, then stop pedaling, rest for 45 seconds, and sprint again, repeating that sequence 5 times.
The volunteers completed these brief interval sessions once every hour for 8 hours, for a total of 160 seconds of actual exercise that day. Otherwise they sat, then returned the next day to down the unctuous breakfast shake.
Their metabolic responses differed this time, though, the researchers found. The volunteers arrived at the lab with lower blood levels of triglycerides to start with and burned more fat during the next 6 hours, so their triglycerides remained about 30 percent lower throughout the 6 hours of monitoring than on the morning after nonstop sitting.
The results suggest that frequent, intense and extremely abbreviated exercise “can undo” some effects of being sedentary, said Ed Coyle, a professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas, who conducted the study with his graduate student Anthony Wolfe and others. (Coyle has equity in the company that manufactures the bicycles at his lab but said his stake did not influence the design of the study or reporting of results.)
This was a small, short-term study, and its results are limited. They do not tell us if the desirable metabolic outcomes after sprinting linger past the next day or whether 4-second intervals represent the right dose of exercise or merely the teensiest. The study also relied on an uncommon type of bicycle. Standard stationary bicycles or spin-class versions would likely require us to sprint for more than four seconds to reach an all-out exertion level, Coyle said. So would racing up and down stairs or jogging in place.
But the underlying theory of the study remains achievable, he adds. When you find yourself sitting for most of the day, try to rise frequently and move, preferably intensely, as often as possible and for as many seconds as you can manage.
2020 The New York Times Company
The coronavirus has killed so many people in Iran that the country has resorted to mass burials, but in neighboring Iraq, the body count is fewer than 100.
The Dominican Republic has reported nearly 7,600 cases of the virus. Just across the border, Haiti has recorded about 85.
In Indonesia, thousands are believed to have died of the coronavirus. In nearby Malaysia, a strict lockdown has kept fatalities to about 100.
The coronavirus has touched almost every country on earth, but its impact has seemed capricious. Global metropolises like New York, Paris and London have been devastated, while teeming cities like Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi and Lagos have, so far, largely been spared.
The question of why the virus has overwhelmed some places and left others relatively untouched is a puzzle that has spawned numerous theories and speculations but no definitive answers. That knowledge could have profound implications for how countries respond to the virus, for determining who is at risk and for knowing when it’s safe to go out again.
There are already hundreds of studies underway around the world looking into how demographics, preexisting conditions and genetics might affect the wide variation in impact.
Many developing nations with hot climates and young populations have escaped the worst, suggesting that temperature and demographics could be factors. But countries like Peru, Indonesia and Brazil, tropical countries in the throes of growing epidemics, throw cold water on that idea.
Draconian social distancing and early lockdown measures have clearly been effective, but Myanmar and Cambodia did neither and have reported few cases.
One theory that is unproven but impossible to refute: Maybe the virus just hasn’t gotten to those countries yet. Russia and Turkey appeared to be fine until, suddenly, they were not.
“We are really early in this disease,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Research Institute. “If this were a baseball game, it would be the second inning, and there’s no reason to think that by the ninth inning the rest of the world that looks now like it hasn’t been affected won’t become like other places.”
Interviews with more than two dozen infectious disease experts, health officials, epidemiologists and academics around the globe suggest four main factors that could help explain where the virus thrives and where it doesn’t: demographics, culture, environment and the speed of government responses.
Each possible explanation comes with considerable caveats and confounding counter-evidence. If an aging population is the most vulnerable, for instance, Japan should be at the top of the list. It is far from it. Nonetheless, these are the factors that experts find the most persuasive.
THE POWER OF YOUTH
Many countries that have escaped mass epidemics have relatively younger populations.
Young people are more likely to contract mild or asymptomatic cases that are less transmissible to others, said Robert Bollinger, a professor of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. And they are less likely to have certain health problems that can make COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, particularly deadly, according to the World Health Organization.
Africa — with about 45,000 reported cases, a tiny fraction of its 1.3 billion people — is the world’s youngest continent, with more than 60 percent of its population under age 25. In Thailand and Najaf, Iraq, local health officials found that the 20-to-29 age group had the highest rate of infection but often showed few symptoms.
By contrast, the national median age in Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries, is more than 45. The average age of those who died of COVID-19 there was around 80.
Younger people tend to have stronger immune systems, which can result in milder symptoms, said Josip Car, an expert in population and global health at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
CULTURAL DISTANCE
Cultural factors, like the social distancing that is built into certain societies, may give some countries more protection, epidemiologists said.
In Thailand and India, where virus numbers are relatively low, people greet each other at a distance, with palms joined together as in prayer. In Japan and South Korea, people bow, and long before the coronavirus arrived, they tended to wear face masks when feeling unwell.
In much of the developing world, the custom of caring for the elderly at home leads to fewer nursing homes, which have been tinder for tragic outbreaks in the West.
However, there are notable exceptions to the cultural-distancing theory. In many parts of the Middle East, such as Iraq and the Persian Gulf countries, men often embrace or shake hands on meeting, yet most are not getting sick.
HEAT AND LIGHT
The geography of the outbreak — which spread rapidly during the winter in temperate-zone countries like Italy and the United States and was virtually unseen in warmer countries such as Chad or Guyana — seemed to suggest that the virus did not take well to heat. Other coronaviruses, such as ones that cause the common cold, are less contagious in warmer, moist climates.
But researchers say the idea that hot weather alone can repel the virus is wishful thinking.
Some of the worst outbreaks in the developing world have been in places like the Amazonas region of Brazil, as tropical a place as any.
“The best guess is that summer conditions will help but are unlikely by themselves to lead to significant slowing of growth or to a decline in cases,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University.
The virus that causes COVID-19 appears to be so contagious as to mitigate any beneficial effect of heat and humidity, said Dr. Raul Rabadan, a computational biologist at Columbia University.
But other aspects of warm climates, like people spending more time outside, could help.
“People living indoors within enclosed environments may promote virus recirculation, increasing the chance of contracting the disease,” said Car of Nanyang Technological University.
The ultraviolet rays of direct sunlight inhibit this coronavirus, according to a study by ecological modelers at the University of Connecticut. So surfaces in sunny places may be less likely to remain contaminated, but transmission usually occurs through contact with an infected person, not by touching a surface.
EARLY AND STRICT LOCKDOWNS
Countries that locked down early, like Vietnam and Greece, have been able to avoid out-of-control contagions, evidence of the power of strict social distancing and quarantines to contain the virus.
In Africa, countries with bitter experience with killers like HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis and Ebola knew the drill and reacted quickly.
Airport staff from Sierra Leone to Uganda were taking temperatures (since found to be a less effective measure) and contact details and wearing masks long before their counterparts in the United States and Europe took such precautions.
Senegal and Rwanda closed their borders and announced curfews when they still had very few cases. Health ministries began contact tracing early.
Counterintuitively, some countries where authorities reacted late and with spotty enforcement of lockdowns appear to have been spared. Cambodia and Laos both had brief spates of infections when few social distancing measures were in place, but neither has recorded a new case in about three weeks.
ROLL OF THE DICE
Finally, most experts agree that there may be no single reason for some countries to be hit and others missed. The answer is likely to be some combination of the above factors as well as one other mentioned by researchers: sheer luck.
Countries with the same culture and climate could have vastly different outcomes if one infected person attends a crowded social occasion, turning it into what researchers call a superspreader event.
And when countries do all the wrong things and still end up seemingly not as battered by the virus as one would expect, go figure.
“In Indonesia, we have a health minister who believes you can pray away COVID, and we have too little testing,” said Dr. Pandu Riono, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Indonesia. “But we are lucky we have so many islands in our country that limit travel and maybe infection.
“There’s nothing else we’re doing right,” he added.
2020 The New York Times Company
AGARTALA, India - An Indian school drop-out has built a motorbike with a 1-meter gap between the rider and the passenger to drive home the importance of social distancing in the coronavirus pandemic.
Partha Saha, 39, bought an old bike from a scrap dealer, removed the engine and cut the machine in two before affixing a rod slightly longer than a meter (3.2 feet) to connect the wheels.
"Now I can ride with my eight-year-old daughter while maintaining a safe distance," he told AFP from Agartala in the northeastern state of Tripura.
Like other countries, the Indian government has imposed a nationwide lockdown and urged citizens to practice social distancing to curb the spread of the virus.
As of Thursday, India had reported 33,050 cases of COVID-19, with 1,074 deaths.
When the nation extended its lockdown this month until at least May 3, Saha realized the battle against the virus might not be over any time soon.
He used up his meager savings to make the vehicle, which he plans to use to ferry his daughter to and from school once the restrictions are lifted.
"I didn't want her to take the school bus as it would be crowded," said Saha, who works in a TV repair shop.
His new bike runs on battery power and has a top speed of 40 kilometers per hour.
It takes three hours to charge the battery, which allows the bike to travel 80 kilometers, Saha said.
"The cost of charging it once comes to about 10 rupees (about Php 6.7)," he added.
The mechanic has already tried out his invention on the streets, leaving onlookers stunned at the design and drawing praise from Biplab Kumar Deb, Tripura's chief minister.
"Necessity is the mother of invention! I congratulate Partha Saha... for making a unique motorcycle to create awareness during COVID-19 pandemic," Deb tweeted.
Agence France-Presse
A new test for the coronavirus is so simple and straightforward, almost anyone could do it: Spit a glob of saliva into a cup, close the lid and hand it over.
While not as fast to process as the speediest swab tests, saliva tests could transform the diagnosis of COVID-19. If manufactured in enough numbers and processed by enough labs across the country, they could alleviate the diagnostic shortages that have hampered containment of the pandemic and offer a less onerous way for companies to see if workers are infected.
The first saliva-based test, already being offered in parts of New Jersey, detects genetic material from the virus, just as the existing tests do, but it avoids a long swab that reaches disturbingly far up a person’s nose. For the saliva-based test, health care workers do not need to wear and discard precious gowns and masks. And early evidence suggests it is just as sensitive, if not more so, than the swabs.
Because the saliva test relies on equipment that is widely available, it also offers the hope of a nationwide rollout without encountering the supply problems that have plagued the swabs.
Starting about 2 weeks ago, New Jersey has offered the saliva test at a walk-up site in New Brunswick; drive-thru sites in Somerset and Edison; the state’s Department of Corrections; 30 long-term care facilities; and even the American Dream mall.
Experts not involved with the test praised it as a welcome solution to diagnostic shortages across the country.
“If people are going back to work, and they’re going to be tested presumably on a regular basis, we really do need to have less invasive sampling methods than the swabs,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. “To have to do nasopharyngeal swabs twice a week? No, thanks.”
The next step would be an at-home saliva test kit that skirts even the need to go to a walk-in center, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.
Adalja noted that LabCorp, one of the nation’s largest commercial laboratories, now offers an at-home test that people can use to swab their own nose. “If we can do nasal swabs unsupervised, there’s no reason why we can’t do these tests unsupervised as well,” he said.
On April 13, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency-use authorization, waiving some usual requirements, to a saliva test made by a Rutgers University lab, RUCDR Infinite Biologics.
The Rutgers lab has already processed close to 90,000 tests, according to its chief executive, Andrew Brooks, and expects to ramp up eventually to 30,000 tests per day. Results are available within 72 hours, although they could be sped up to just a few hours with enough infrastructure in place. By contrast, some rapid tests that rely on swabs deliver results in minutes.
Other states are expressing interest. Working with Rutgers, Oklahoma has begun validating a version of the test, and the Rutgers researchers have fielded questions from the White House’s coronavirus task force, Indiana, Illinois, California and several large companies. In New Jersey, the test is available for between $65 and $100.
After a disastrously slow start, the United States is starting to see an increase in testing types and capacity. The National Institutes of Health on Wednesday announced a new $1.5 billion “shark tank” style program aimed at encouraging swift innovation in coronavirus testing, with a goal of new tests by the end of summer. Also Wednesday, testing manufacturer Hologic said that it had a new test that could allow labs to begin running up to 1 million additional tests per week.
The nasopharyngeal swabs that have mostly been used to test for the coronavirus are invasive and uncomfortable and may be difficult for severely ill people to tolerate. They also put health care workers at high risk of infection and require them to wear gloves, gowns and masks.
The saliva test, by contrast, doesn’t require any interaction with a health care worker. And it’s easy enough that New Jersey has also started using it at developmental centers with residents who have intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The saliva is immersed in a liquid that preserves it until it can be analyzed. This will be particularly important for developing tests that people can use at home and mail or drop off at a lab, or when dealing with large numbers of samples.
The Rutgers test was validated in people who were severely ill, but the saliva test often yielded a stronger signal than the swab, suggesting that it is more sensitive — yielding fewer false negatives — than the swab. It also generated no false positives in all of the samples tested.
False negatives in particular have been a problem with the nasopharyngeal swabs. (A different type of test for antibodies, which can say whether a person was exposed to the virus and has recovered, is riddled with false positives.)
In separate research, a Yale University team reported that saliva may be able to detect the virus in people who are only mildly ill, while a nasopharyngeal swab cannot.
In their study, the team compared swabs and saliva samples from patients. They needed only a few drops of saliva for their test, an advantage for people who may have trouble producing more. Thinking about a favorite meal can often do the trick, said Anne Wyllie, the Yale team’s leader.
The swabs are known to produce false negatives — perhaps in part because of errors by health care workers under stress. The saliva test appeared to be more consistent and accurate over a longer period of time, detecting infections even after the amounts of the virus have waned, than the swab.
“The nasopharyngeal swab is subject to so much more variability in how well it’s obtained,” Wyllie said. A saliva test is “definitely more reliable.”
In one case, the team found a health care worker who twice tested negative using a nasopharyngeal swab before finally testing positive on a third day. But the worker’s saliva tested positive all three days, Wyllie said. She underlined the risks of asymptomatic health care workers getting a false negative and continuing to care for patients. “You can imagine the implications,” she said.
While the Yale team did not compare saliva tests with the shorter swabs used in some tests, Wyllie said she expected that saliva tests would prove superior there as well. Most people with COVID-19 do not have runny noses, which might influence how much virus a short swab can collect, she said.
Saliva tests would also be a preferred choice for at-home tests, Adalja added. A saliva test for HIV is the only at-home test approved for an infectious disease, he said, but before the pandemic, the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority had funded two companies to develop at-home nasal swab tests for influenza.
“It’s not a high bar to repurpose home testing for the coronavirus,” he said. “It’s not something that’s out of reach.”
The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — As people turned in droves to video chatting app Zoom in recent weeks, the buzz caught Facebook’s attention. Inside the social network, that immediately set off a scramble.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, ordered employees to ramp up and focus on the company’s own video chat projects, especially as use of its products also increased, said three people with knowledge of the plans, who declined to be identified because the details are confidential. On Facebook’s internal message boards, employees openly gawked at public data showing Zoom’s growing popularity, they said.
On Friday, Facebook unveiled one of its biggest expansions into videoconferencing with several new video chat features and services. They included video group chats for as many as 50 people on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp video calls for up to eight people, and video calls in Facebook Dating.
Zuckerberg is not the only tech titan with Zoom on his mind. Google this month made its video chat app, Meet, more accessible through Gmail. Cisco recently promoted its Webex teleconferencing service as highly secure compared with Zoom. And Verizon announced last week that it was acquiring BlueJeans Network, a videoconferencing service.
Tech and telecommunications giants are mobilizing against Zoom as the Silicon Valley company has become one of the biggest tech beneficiaries of the coronavirus outbreak. Over the past month, downloads of Zoom have increased 740 percent, according to App Annie, an analytics firm. Zoom has said it now has more than 300 million daily participants, up from 10 million before the pandemic.
Facebook, Google and others want a piece of that success. Behind the scenes, people with knowledge of the companies said, employees are sore that they have not grabbed more of the same buzz as Zoom, especially because many of the giants have offered their own video chat software — like Google Meet — for years.
In targeting Zoom, the tech behemoths are following a playbook of deploying their vast resources to outmuscle a smaller, fast-rising competitor. Last year, Facebook and Google trained their sights on TikTok, the Chinese-made video app, which had become a hit with young audiences. Often, the largest companies have opened up their wallets and snapped up tiny rivals to eliminate them as competition.
In an interview, Zuckerberg chafed at comparisons to Zoom and said video chat was just beginning to be a larger phenomenon as people aimed to digitally connect in more intimate ways.
“The world was already trending in this direction before COVID-19,” Zuckerberg said while using the new Facebook Messenger video product. “This is the trend in general — the ability to feel more present, even when you’re not physically together.”
Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, said in an interview this month that his company was not thinking about competition and was focused on users and their experience during a “once in a probably 100 years crisis.”
Zoom, founded in 2011 by Yuan, a former Cisco executive, was designed to be easy to use and install. Unlike other video chat products, the app also has a popular grid view that lets people see everyone on a call at once, creating a more social atmosphere. The company, based in San Jose, California, went public last year.
When the spread of COVID-19 turbocharged the video chat phenomenon, Zoom emerged as a clear front-runner, owing largely to word-of-mouth about its ease and simplicity. It has been the most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store for more than a month. The company is valued at around $47 billion, more than Slack and Pinterest.
But its success has been bumpy, with scrutiny falling on Zoom’s lack of security and privacy practices. Zoombombing — intentionally disrupting other people’s Zoom sessions with pornography or other forms of digital harassment — has grown so pervasive that the term has become a part of mainstream discourse.
Bigger tech and telecom companies are racing to catch up, even though they were earlier to roll out videoconferencing services. Cisco acquired Webex in 2007 for $3.2 billion. Facebook has long hyped its own video chat offerings. Microsoft bought internet calling service Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion.
This month, Google said it would plug Meet directly into Gmail so users could take video calls inside their email browser window. Google is also mimicking Zoom, releasing a grid-style view for Meet and adding features to improve video quality in low-light conditions. On Wednesday, Google added a noise-cancellation option for video calls and expanded the advanced features to all of its customers for free.
Google said Meet use was up more than 25 times what it was in January, with more than 2 million new user sign-ups every day.
After questions arose about Zoom’s privacy and security, competitors also rushed to assure customers that their offerings were safer. Javed Khan, a Cisco vice president, said that not only had use of Webex skyrocketed — at one point, the company added 240,000 new users in 24 hours — but so had its security business.
“As the largest enterprise security company in the world, we’re helping our customers connect and collaborate, securely,” he said.
When Verizon announced its purchase of BlueJeans on April 16, BlueJeans also emphasized security. “As this current work-from-home era has shown us, having secure, reliable and high-quality collaboration tools like BlueJeans is essential,” the company said in a blog post.
Houseparty, a video chat app that Epic Games acquired last year, has been popular with younger audiences. In recent weeks, more than 50 million people have signed up for it, widening its audience to those who also use Zoom. To differentiate itself, Houseparty said it was emphasizing features like the ability to play games with other participants in the app.
Few companies have been as attuned to Zoom’s rise as Facebook.
Zuckerberg recently galvanized several Facebook teams to accelerate their video chat product releases, including a desktop app for Facebook Messenger — which has a video chat feature front and center — this month. More than 700 million people now make calls across Messenger and WhatsApp each day, Zuckerberg said, making it clear that other features needed to be built in as soon as possible.
Those include Messenger Rooms, a way to quickly create video chat rooms using Facebook Messenger that can support dozens of people simultaneously. Facebook also integrated video chat into its Dating product and plans to bring the ability to create Rooms to WhatsApp, Instagram Direct and other services.
Zuckerberg said Zoom felt more scheduled and a little less casual than Messenger Rooms. He said he wanted to make the video chat experience more serendipitous.
“I don’t really think there’s anything today that you can display on an ad hoc basis that you’re hanging out and have whoever wants to join you over video,” he said. “Sometimes people compare what we do to other companies, like you did earlier with Zoom. I think the main thrust of how people are going to experience Rooms will be very different.”
Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality division, which offers a video communications device called Portal, has also been working with Zoom since January on a partnership so people could make Zoom video calls on the gadget, according to three people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
The companies had planned to release the product in May, these people said, but that was put on hold when Zoom recently decided to freeze all new feature development for 90 days to spend time beefing up its security practices.
Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality division is also in discussions with other companies to expand video chat partnerships, two of the people said. Press officers for Facebook and Zoom declined to comment.
Yet Zoom may already be too ingrained for Silicon Valley’s giants to dislodge.
Late last month, Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, held a videoconference with thousands of the search giant’s employees using Google Meet, three people who attended the call said. During the session, one employee asked why Zoom was reaping the biggest benefits even though Google had long offered Meet.
Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom. Schindler tried correcting him, but the boy went on to say how much he and his friends loved using Zoom.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on the episode.
2020 The New York Times Company
Adding to growing evidence that the novel coronavirus can spread through air, scientists have identified genetic markers of the virus in airborne droplets, many with diameters smaller than one-ten-thousandth of an inch.
That had been previously demonstrated in laboratory experiments, but now Chinese scientists studying real-world conditions report that they captured tiny droplets containing the genetic markers of the virus from the air in 2 hospitals in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak started.
Their findings were published Monday in the journal Nature.
It remains unknown if the virus in the samples they collected was infectious, but droplets that small, which are expelled by breathing and talking, can remain aloft and be inhaled by others.
“Those are going to stay in the air floating around for at least 2 hours,” said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who was not involved with the Nature paper. “It strongly suggests that there is potential for airborne transmission.”
Marr and many other scientists say evidence is mounting that the coronavirus is being spread by tiny droplets known as aerosols. The World Health Organization has so far downplayed the possibility, saying that the disease is mostly transmitted through larger droplets that do not remain airborne for long, or through the touching of contaminated surfaces.
Even with the new findings, the issue is not settled. Although the coronavirus RNA — the genetic blueprint of the virus — was present in the aerosols, scientists do not know yet is whether the viruses remain infectious or whether the tests just detected harmless virus fragments.
“The missing piece is viable viral replication,” said Harvey V. Fineberg, who leads the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. “Could you culture this virus from the air?”
In the Wuhan research, no viruses were detected in most of the public places they studied, including the residential building and the supermarket, although some levels were detected in crowded areas outside one of the hospitals and in the department stores.
“It was interesting to see there were measurable amounts,” Marr said. “I think it adds good evidence to avoid crowding.”
Kenneth Chang, The New York Times
Singapore registered 897 new coronavirus infections on Friday, taking its total number of cases to 12,075.
The health ministry said the vast majority of the new cases were migrant workers residing in dormitories, many of which are under government-ordered quarantine due to mass outbreaks.
The island of 5.7 million people now has one of the highest infection rates in Asia, according to official figures, behind only China, India and Japan.
-reuters-
With the coronavirus continuing to upend familiar rhythms of life, leaving schools shuttered, millions out of work and billions stuck at home, those looking for ways to pass the time have gotten creative.
In the absence of jam-packed calendars, people are turning to social media challenges in droves. Some bring together families for choreographed dance routines while others spark the inner artist or unlock hidden engineering skills. All of them hold the promise of warding off boredom and — maybe — earning users a moment of online celebrity.
Here are some of the biggest challenges sweeping the world during the lockdown.
#FliptheSwitch
Early last month, the lyrics “I just flipped the switch” from the Drake song “Nonstop” inspired a viral challenge on TikTok that eventually made its way to Instagram. All over, people began swapping clothes, poses and sometimes attitudes when the lights are switched off and then back on. A version featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kate McKinnon of “Saturday Night Live” went viral, as did a clip of Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.
#DontRushChallenge
The song “Don’t Rush” by the British hip-hop outfit Young T & Bugsey provided the backdrop for this challenge. In some videos, participants pass around a makeup brush like a wand that magically upgrades their look. One popular take featured New Orleans police officers passing around their hats while another video highlighted disabled women and men.
#PillowChallenge
This challenge attracts creative fashionistas who aim to turn everyday pillows into striking quarantine couture, often using belts to fashionably fasten the pillows around their waists. Actresses Halle Berry, Tracee Ellis Ross and Anne Hathaway all participated in the craze.
#BinIsolationOuting
In Australia, where lockdowns have halted nearly 30 years of economic growth, residents have begun dressing up as superheroes, Disney characters and sometimes dinosaurs to wheel the trash to the curb. A Facebook group called “Bin Isolation Outing,” which has quickly racked up nearly 1 million members, features photos and videos of residents dressing up for the usually mundane task.
“So basically the bin goes out more than us so let’s dress up for the occasion!” reads a description of the group. “Fancy dress, makeup, tutu … be creative. Post photos to cheer us up, after all laughter is the best medicine.” The challenge has since spilled over onto Instagram and Twitter.
#BetweenArtandQuarantine
While the pandemic has shuttered most public institutions, museumgoers have shifted their focus online, where people are cleverly replicating famous artworks. Participants use toilet paper, food, old clothes and more to form a living archive of creativity in isolation. The Instagram account @tussenkunstenquarantaine collects and posts submissions from locked-down artists all over. Thousands of replicas appear under the hashtags #tussenkunstenquarantaine and #betweenartandquarantine. There’s also a Russian Facebook group called “Isolation” that features at-home replicas of sculptures, paintings and movie scenes.
#TrickShot
When boredom sets in, silly tasks are sometimes the most entertaining, as evidenced by the millions of TikTok, Instagram and Twitter videos posted with the hashtag #trickshot. The objective is to land the shot, no matter how many obstacles or how ridiculous the task. Some popular videos show Ping-Pong balls bouncing off pots and pans or going through complicated courses. Although Ping-Pong balls are commonly used, people have recorded their own #trickshot videos using basketballs, soccer balls and golf balls.
Your First Move Is Their Last Move
This challenge turns family living rooms and kitchens into makeshift nightclubs, where everyone gets a turn on the dance floor. The conceit: Repeat the dance move from the person in front of you, then add your own twist for the person behind you to replicate. The “Your First Move Is Their Last Move” challenge is most popular on TikTok, where there are hundreds of thousands of videos.
c.2020 The New York Times Company
SAN FRANCISCO -- Videoconferencing platform Zoom is rolling out a number of measures meant to stem criticism over how it has handled security as users flock to the application during the coronavirus pandemic.
Zoom chief executive Eric Yuan laid out steps Wednesday that the company is taking against problems such as data hacking and harassment by individuals who crash sessions in what is referred to as "Zoombombing."
By week's end, paid account holders will be able to select which regions their data is routed through during their sessions in a move apparently aimed at concerns over information passing through China where it might be subject to snooping.
"As a reminder, meeting servers in China have always been geofenced with the goal of ensuring that meeting data of users outside of China stays outside of China," Zoom said in an online post.
The Silicon Valley startup also said that it was working with cyber-security firm Luta Security to overhaul processes and its "bug bounty" program that pays rewards to researchers who find security flaws in its operations.
Zoom also addressed a recent report that users' log-in information was being sold by criminals on the "dark web."
The credentials were likely stolen elsewhere on the internet, or by malicious code slipped into people's computers, according to Zoom advisor Alex Stamos, former chief of security at Facebook.
It is not uncommon for hackers to take passwords and account names pilfered in data breaches and then check whether people use them for other online services.
Zoom said it was building systems to "detect whether people are trying out username and password pairings and block them from trying again."
Improvements to Zoom security also include a toolbar to easily access features such as locking chats from strangers and making meeting password requirements a default setting.
"To successfully scale a video-heavy platform to such a size with no appreciable downtime and in the space of weeks is literally unprecedented in the history of the internet," Stamos said in a post.
"The related security challenges are fascinating."
India this week banned the use of Zoom for government remote meetings, saying it "is not a safe platform."
The New York school system has also banned the videoconferencing platform based on security concerns.
Prosecutors from several US states are meanwhile investigating the company's privacy and security practices, and the FBI has warned of Zoom sessions being hijacked.
According to Yuan, the number of people taking part in Zoom meetings daily eclipsed 200 million in March, up from just 10 million at the end of last year.
Agence France-Presse
MANILA, Philippines — Even before the coronavirus arrived in Metro Manila, a saying in the capital’s sprawling San Roque slum — “No one dies from a fever” — crystallized the many threats that its residents faced in their daily lives.
Drug-fueled petty crime. Food shortages. Overcrowding and poor sanitation. Fever, body aches and coughs were commonplace long before the virus came.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s lockdown of Luzon, the Philippines’ largest island and home to Manila, is moving into its second month, plunging San Roque’s people even deeper into poverty as the virus continues to rage. Yet the restrictions have not stopped runny-nosed children from playing tag in the slum’s labyrinth of alleyways as parents shout halfhearted admonitions to stay away from one another.
Home to roughly 6,000 families — conservatively, about 35,000 people — San Roque, in Manila’s northern suburb of Quezon, has for years been home to some of the poorest people on the fringes of Philippine society.
Many of the men are day laborers who work at construction sites in the ever-expanding metropolis. Others are provincial migrants whose journeys took them to the slum’s squalid shanties, made from dilapidated cardboard and rusting iron sheet roofing.
“Now it is a nightmare for people like us,” said Susana Baldoza, a grandmother of four who has lived nearly half her 59 years in San Roque, subsisting on odd jobs. “Now that there is a lockdown, we can’t go outside to look for jobs, to survive.”
She said she does not doubt that the virus is a killer but believes that many are likelier to die of hunger because government aid has been slow to trickle in. Now neighbors are helping neighbors as the community turns inward to feed its poorest residents.
Frustration over the lockdown recently exploded into violence. An April 1 gathering in San Roque became an impromptu rally, with dozens taking to the streets demanding answers from the government about when they would receive promised relief.
Police officers in riot gear and fatigues responded with force, scuffling with protesters and sending 21 people to jail. Duterte accused Kadamay, a group that advocates for the poor, of inciting the violence and warned that his government would not be lenient toward those who challenged it.
“Now is the time to set an example to everybody,” Duterte said, telling police to “shoot them dead” if they believed protesters were endangering their lives. “I am not used to being challenged. Not me. Let this be a warning to all.”
So far, there have been no confirmed cases of the coronavirus in San Roque, although Baldoza is almost sure that residents have been infected.
“I pray to God that there won’t be any, but how could there be none?” she said.
As of Wednesday, 349 people had died in the Philippines from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and 5,453 infections had been confirmed. But that figure is likely to rise sharply, with the Philippine government having just begun mass testing this week.
Community leaders in San Roque have been tacking up cardboard signs reminding people not to spit. Some people have started wearing face masks, but most don’t. Wearing them in the city’s stifling heat can be suffocating, some said; others said they would rather spend what little money they had on food.
Yumi Castillo, a volunteer social worker with Kadamay, said it was hard to explain the concept of social distancing to people who spend their lives crammed into small, makeshift spaces.
Her group had printed out information about the virus for volunteers to distribute. But judging from the many children playing in congested alleyways and streets, the message didn’t seem to be getting through.
“There are practically no health services here. No one teaches them,” Castillo said at a community center where rice, food, drinking water and rubbing alcohol were sorted and stored.
Baldoza, the grandmother of four, was volunteering as a cook for a community kitchen in San Roque, serving fried herring over rice, courtesy of the Catholic Church and a civic group that has been helping residents weather the crisis.
“People here are very poor, as you can see,” said Baldoza, frying fish outdoors in a wok. “We don’t have money and the luxury of going to the supermarkets. We haven’t received help from the government, no help from the outside, except the donations that they give us. And people can’t work.”
Her neighbor Analyn Mikunog was waiting for the food to be served. Mikunog’s partner has no permanent job, although sometimes he is lucky enough to find work on construction sites. He had just been hired as a day laborer when Duterte imposed the lockdown.
Now the family’s future is bleak. With four young children to feed, the gaunt-looking Mikunog, 28, said she was at her wits’ end trying to figure out how they would survive.
“Sometimes we talk and wonder how long this lockdown will last,” she said. “Will we die hungry?”
Priests in clerical collars and rugged jeans were busily making lunches, but their camaraderie belied the seriousness of the situation. As the meals were being prepared, riot police officers moved in to break up the feeding program. They accused leftist organizations of using it to recruit people to campaign against the government.
The officers, some in black uniforms and others in combat fatigues, carried batons and long firearms. They confiscated signs that read, “Help, Not Jail.” After tense negotiations, a commander, who refused to identify himself, finally relented. But he warned the group to break up after the food was distributed and to practice social distancing.
“We are just serving the people,” said King Garcia, a 39-year-old priest.
“The government has left them in the fringes at a time when they needed help the most,” he said. “If the virus does not kill them, hunger will.”
The New York Times (Jason Gutierrez)
