Lowered flags honor virus victims in US
Trump order for half-staff tribute in force for 3 days as toll nears 100,000
US President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered US flags to be lowered to half-staff for three days in honor of those who have died from the coronavirus in the United States.
The announcement came as the country’s COVID-19 death toll approaches the 100,000 mark, and followed calls by Democrats to lower the flag when it reaches that grim milestone.
“I will be lowering the flags on all Federal Buildings and National Monuments to half-staff over the next three days in memory of the Americans we have lost to the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted.
The Republican president added that flags would remain at halfstaff on Monday for the country’s Memorial Day, honoring those who died while serving in the US military.
The US recorded 1,255 coronavirus deaths in the 24 hours to 8 pm local time on Thursday, bringing the total to 94,661, according to the latest real-time tally reported by Johns Hopkins University.
The country hit hardest hit by the pandemic has now confirmed 1,576,542 cases, the Baltimorebased university reported.
Globally, as of Friday afternoon, there have been 4,962,707 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 326,459 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
During a tour of a Ford manufacturing plant in the state of Michigan on Thursday, Trump said the US would not close in the event of a second wave of the virus.
“People say that’s a very distinct possibility. It’s standard. And we’re going to put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country. We’re going to put out the fires,” Trump told reporters when asked if he was concerned about a second wave.
The number of US citizens applying for unemployment benefits in the two months since the coronavirus took hold in the US has swelled to nearly 39 million, the government reported on Thursday, even as states from coast to coast gradually reopen their economies and let people go back to work.
Nearly 2.4 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week in the latest wave of layoffs from the business shutdowns that have brought the economy to its knees, the Labor Department said.
Also on Thursday, the US Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, revised airport screening procedures to limit the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus among its employees and air travelers.
Effective immediately, passengers will be asked to observe social distancing and place their boarding passes on computer scanners themselves rather than handing them to TSA agents.
The agency said it now will require travelers to remove wallets, keys, belts and phones and place them in a carry-on bag rather than in a bin “to reduce touch-points during the screening process”.
In Brazil, the death toll surpassed 20,000 on Thursday, after a record number of fatalities in a 24-hour period, the Health Ministry said.
The country is the epicenter of the outbreak in Latin America, and its highest one-day toll of 1,188 pushed the overall death tally to 20,047. Brazil has now recorded more than 310,000 cases, with experts saying a lack of testing means the real figures are probably much higher.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday said he would sign off on a federal assistance program “as soon as possible”, which will distribute 60 billion reais ($10.7 billion) in federal money to states and municipalities hit by the coronavirus outbreak, but he asked governors for support freezing public-sector pay increases.
However, the amount of virus genome detected in the noses of the vaccinated and unvaccinated monkeys was the same and this is concerning.” Jonathan Ball, professor of virology at the University of Nottingham
On Sunday, the UK government confirmed it had invested 65.5 million pounds ($80 million) in the vaccine project as part of an agreement to make 30 million doses available by September.
But some virologists have concerns about the vaccine, particularly stemming from earlier trials in rhesus monkeys, for which results were released on May 13.
William Haseltine, a former professor at Harvard Medical School and renowned HIV specialist, wrote in a Forbes blog post on Saturday that the study provides evidence to the effect that, while the vaccine was found to moderate COVID-19 in monkeys, it did not protect the animals from infection.
Jonathan Ball, a professor of virology at the University of Nottingham, told China Daily that, if the same results displayed in the monkey trials are seen in humans, then there is a chance that people who are vaccinated could still become infected and spread the virus.
“The fact that the vaccine prevented pneumonia in all, and symptoms in some, of the vaccinated animals is encouraging — we know that many vaccines work because they prevent serious disease rather than preventing virus infection,” Ball said.
“However, the amount of virus genome detected in the noses of the vaccinated and unvaccinated monkeys was the same and this is concerning.
“If this represents infectious virus and a similar thing occurs in humans, then vaccinated people can still be infected, shed large amounts of virus which could potentially spread to others in the community,” he said.
Ball, who is involved in the development of a separate COVID-19 vaccine led by immunotherapy specialists Scancell Holdings and the University of Nottingham, said that the viral load detected in vaccinated monkeys warrants an “urgent reappraisal” of the ongoing human trials of the Oxford vaccine.
“If the most vulnerable people aren’t protected by the vaccine to the same degree, then this will put them at risk,” Ball said.