Tulane Outbreak Daily | April 27, 2020

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Featured Headlines

CDC Adds 6 New Coronavirus Symptoms – Forbes
CDC officially added these six symptoms to its list: chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, new loss of taste or smell, in addition to previously known symptoms of fever, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.

New York clinical trial quietly tests heartburn remedy against coronavirus – Science
As of Saturday, 187 COVID-19 patients in critical status, including many on ventilators, have been enrolled in the trial, which aims for a total of 1174 people. Reports from China and molecular modeling results suggest that the drug, which seems to bind to a key enzyme in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), could make a difference. But the hype surrounding hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine—the unproven antimalarial drugs touted by President Donald Trump and some physicians and scientists—has made Tracey wary of sparking premature enthusiasm. He is tight-lipped about famotidine’s prospects, at least until interim results from the first 391 patients are in. “If it does work, we’ll know in a few weeks,” he says.

Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs) and COVID-19 – FLARE

The FLARE team investigates the use of MSCs as immunomodulatory therapy for COVID-19.

‘No evidence’ that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected, says WHO

As part of its guidance on adjusting public health and social measures for the next phase of the COVID-19 response, WHO stressed that it continues to review the evidence on antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection.Coronavirus can apparently live for days in your eye – BGRThe virus was apparently able to be detected in the patient’s eye for up to 20 days. At that point, it seemed to go away, but then it made a reappearance a week later. [Related Study]

Antimalarials widely used against COVID-19 heighten risk of cardiac arrest. How can doctors minimize the danger? – Science

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, he knows, have a potentially fatal side effect: They can cause a type of irregular heart rhythm that sometimes leads to cardiac arrest.[Related Pre-Pub Study] [Related Pre-Pub Study]

How the new coronavirus gets into respiratory tissue — and may exploit one of our defenses – Boston Children’s Hospital
What makes SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, such a threat? A new study, led by Jose Ordovas-Montanes, PhD, at Boston Children’s Hospital and Alex K. Shalek, PhD, at MIT, pinpoints the likely cell types the virus infects. Unexpectedly, it also shows that one of the body’s main defenses against viral infections may actually help the virus infect those very cells. Findings were published this week by the journal Cell. – [Related Study]

‘The food supply chain is breaking’: Tyson Foods raises coronavirus alarm in full-page ads, defends safety efforts

The company warned that shuttering processing plants would cause “millions of pounds of meat” to disappear from the markets, reducing what’s available on grocery store shelves and raising prices. Farmers may have to kill and dispose of cows, pigs and chickens that were bred for the closed slaughterhouses, the company claimed, and those animals’ meat would go to waste.

As they rushed to maintain U.S. meat supply, big processors saw plants become covid-19 hot spots, worker illnesses spike – Washington Post

Three of the nation’s largest meat processors failed to provide protective gear to all workers, and some employees say they were told to continue working in crowded plants even while sick as the coronavirus spread around the country and turned the facilities into infection hot spots, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Meatpacking workers in Texas Panhandle have little power to avoid the coronavirus – Texas Tribune

A workforce of immigrants has long powered the massive JBS meatpacking plant in Cactus, where a cluster of coronavirus cases is under investigation. They’re risking their lives each shift in the county with the state’s highest known infection rate.

How Are Supply Chains Adapting to the New Reality? – Industry Week

While supply chains are generally quite flexible, no one was prepared for this pandemic.

Whose coronavirus strategy worked best? Scientists hunt most effective policies – Nature

Researchers sift through data to compare nations’ vastly different containment measures.

Surveillance

Official Reporting for April 27, 2020