What you need to know about the coronavirus right now
US President Donald Trump, still being treated for COVID-19, abruptly ended talks with Democrats on a coronavirus economic aid package on Tuesday until after the election. Trump, who left the hospital on Monday, is working from makeshift office space in the White House residence rather than the Oval Office, with only a few senior staff gaining face-to-face access while he receives treatment for COVID-19, officials said on Tuesday.
Facebook and Twitter took action on posts from Trump on Tuesday for violating their rules against coronavirus misinformation by suggesting COVID-19 was just like the flu. Twitter disabled retweets on a tweet from Trump and added a warning label that said the tweet broke its rules on "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID19" but that it might be in the public interest for it to remain accessible.
Top U.S. infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose advocacy of public health guidelines to fight the virus has conflicted with Trump's downplaying of the pandemic, said on Tuesday the recent rash of infections at the White House among senior Republican politicians and several aides close to Trump could have been prevented.
Asked if the spread of the virus among staff was harming the federal government's ability to function, spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, speaking from isolation after testing positive herself, told Fox Business Network: "Not in the slightest." The U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff have almost entirely gone into self-quarantine after the Coast Guard's No. 2 tested positive for the virus following top-level meetings at the Pentagon last week, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
U.S. defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, stressed that the military's top brass had all tested negative so far and were still carrying out their duties.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration told coronavirus vaccine developers on
Tuesday it wants at least two months of safety data before authorizing emergency use, a requirement that would likely push any U.S. vaccine availability past the Nov. 3 presidential election.
A vaccine against COVID-19 may be ready by year-end, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday. "We will need vaccines and there is hope that by the end of this year we may have a vaccine. There is hope," Tedros said in final remarks to the WHO's Executive Board, without elaborating. Nine experimental vaccines are in the pipeline of the WHO's COVAX global vaccine facility that aims to distribute 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. Rich world could be close to normal by late 2021 if vaccine works, Bill Gates says
Rich countries could be back to close to normal by late 2021 if a COVID-19 vaccine works, is ready soon and distributed properly at scale, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on Tuesday. "We still don't know whether these vaccines will succeed," Gates, 64, told The Wall Street Journal CEO Council.
"Now the capacity will take time to ramp up. And so the allocation within the U.S., and between the U.S. and other countries will be a very top point of contention." COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca/Oxford University are two of the leading candidates in the race to be first to get regulatory approval in the West.