EIGHT-FIVE INFANTS INFECECTED WITH COVID-19 IN TEXAS

Eighty-five infants infected with COVID-19 in Corpus Christi, Texas

20 July 2020

Eight-five infants under the age of one have tested positive for the coronavirus in Nueces County, Texas. The county, which includes Corpus Christi, has seen the number of new cases skyrocket in July after seeing a slight flattening trend. The virus has infected dozens of babies, including the death on July 6 of a baby of less than six months old.

The director of public health for Nueces County, Annette Rodriguez, told CNN on Saturday, “We currently have 85 babies under the age of one year in Nueces County that all have tested positive for COVID-19” and “these babies have not even had their first birthday yet.” She urged, “Please help us stop the spread of this disease.”

Nueces County, on the Gulf of Mexico, has seen a rise in cases and deaths in July in the wake of the reopening, with 2,416 cases and 9 deaths at the beginning of the month, compared to 8,407 cases and 90 deaths as of Saturday, an increase in cases of over 300 percent and deaths by 1,000 percent. This is in a county with a total population of approximately 326,000, meaning that about 2.6 percent of the total population has been infected, twice the infection rate of the United States, which stands at 1.2 percent.

In Corpus Christi, as of Saturday a total of 90 people had died from COVID-19, although this is most likely an undercount due to shortages in testing. According to city numbers, the 7-day averaged daily case was 26 a month ago. As of Saturday, it stood at 236, for a 14-fold increase in daily cases.

The total number of people who have died in Texas stood at 3,865 as of Saturday, far surpassing the 2,977 deaths from 9/11 terrorist attacks, with a new grim record of 174 deaths on Friday alone. Out of the 254 counties in the state, only 5 have reported no COVID-19 cases.

Stretches of South Texas have seen coronavirus infections spread so quickly in recent weeks that local hospitals are being pushed to their limit. The four-county region in the Rio Grande Valley and the Coastal Bend has just 21 ICU beds still available for a population of about 1.4 million people, according to the latest state data. Ambulance operators describe wait times of up to 10 hours to deliver patients to overflowing emergency rooms.

In the Coastal Bend region, which includes Corpus Christi, a trauma service division managed by the Regional Advisory Council reports hospital bed usage is upwards of 80 percent and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds are completely full. Health professionals and scientists have warned that this causes an increase in deaths from other ailments and diseases that otherwise would be treated, as patients are turned away as ICU and ER beds are overwhelmed.

The governor of Texas, Republican Greg Abbott, as recently as July 16 signaled his commitment not to impose a new lockdown. Abbott told KPRC-TV in Houston on Wednesday that it seems like people ask him about a shutdown “like a thousand times a day.”Nueces County Medical Examiner Adel Shaker has requested an additional refrigerated truck to store bodies, as the county’s existing morgue is full. The mobile morgue was scheduled to arrive on Saturday. The county has also written to the Texas Division of Emergency Management asking for additional staffing, personal protective equipment and the construction of field hospitals.

“People are panicking, thinking I’m about to shut down Texas again,” he said. “The answer is no. That is not the goal. I’ve been abundantly clear.” Abbott is touting measures he’s taken in recent weeks, including a statewide mask mandate and an order shutting down bars. He said it will take a few weeks to see a reversal to the surge in coronavirus cases.

On Thursday, Abbott defended his response to the coronavirus at a virtual Texas Republican convention after acknowledging widespread discontent among party members who have criticized even the governor’s mask mandate. “The last thing that any of us want is to lock Texas back down again,” he said during the convention.

Abbott is trying to shift the blame for the rise in cases on young people, whom he blames for not wearing masks. This claim is obviously false given the fact that people have been infected at places, such as bars and restaurants, that should have been closed under a lockdown.

The news of the infections of infants in Corpus Christi is particularly concerning. The specific literature from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on COVID-19 in infants states that transmission is thought to “occur primarily through respiratory droplets during the postnatal period,” though there are concerns that it may spread during birth or late pregnancy. It also states that “data suggest that infants (<12 months of age) may be at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19 compared with older children,” though the information is not conclusive.

The CDC states that there are complications reported with COVID-19 in infants, and that in a minority of infants “severe disease requiring mechanical ventilation has been reported in COVID-19 positive neonates [infants who were just born].”

The infection of infants exposes the criminality of the Texas government’s efforts to reopen, and the reopening efforts throughout the US and globally, where workers are told that their children will be safe being sent back to school and daycare. This is combined with the failure to heed the warnings of scientists and health professionals, who have warned against premature re-openings, and emphasized the need for massive testing, treatment and the closing of all nonessential businesses.

Given recent revelations on the many complications and additional symptoms from the virus, such as widespread blood clotting, liver failure and, in children, Kawasaki-like disease, it is a fair to conclude that sending children back to schools and daycare, where the virus would spread like wildfire, will not be safe for children or infants. The longevity of the effects of the disease are unknown, and may prove to be long term or permanent, much in the same way as polio left people crippled long after being treated.

On July 14, the White House Coronavirus Task Force designated almost half of the counties in Texas as “red zones,” or counties that have at least 10 percent of tests coming back positive. Roughly 4 in 5 people in Texas live in these zones. The task force document suggests “red zones” should close nonessential businesses and limit gatherings to less than 10. These modest demands will most certainly fall on deaf ears as the state government, following the Trump administration’s lead, has repeatedly asserted that it will take no serious measures to fight the virus.

Trump administration expands assault on coronavirus testing

20 July 2020

In an interview with Chris Wallace that aired Sunday on “Fox News Sunday,” US President Donald Trump continued his attacks on mass coronavirus testing in the United States. While claiming that countries in Europe “don’t test,” supposedly explaining the continent’s lower case count, Trump decried testing in the US for “really skew[ing] the numbers.” He asserted, “In a way we’re creating trouble.”

The president also said that “many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases,” because “many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day.” Trump then added, “They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test.” Wallace was forced to correct Trump, stating that “Testing is up 37 percent. Cases are up 194 percent. It isn’t just that the testing has gone, the virus has spread. The positivity rate has increased.”

Trump’s interview was broadcast as the number of cases in the US has already exceeded 3.8 million, more than any other country in the world, and as the number of deaths has soared to 143,000. Worldwide, there are now 14.6 million cases and 608,000 deaths. The majority of reported daily new cases and deaths are from the United States, Brazil, India, South Africa and Mexico.

President Donald Trump Interviews with Chris Wallace on Fox News (Screen Capture from Fox News)

Florida continues to be the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, having recorded more than 12,000 new cases yesterday and at least 87 deaths. California had the second highest number of new cases, 8,115, and 11 deaths. Ohio, which Governor Mike DeWine has touted as doing “very well,” had the second highest death toll yesterday, 40 people, along with more than 1,000 new cases. Texas ranked third in both metrics, with 7,389 new cases and 39 reported deaths.

Even New York, which has been hailed as a success story in controlling the coronavirus after being the world epicenter in April, recorded 850 cases and 18 deaths. The state of Montana, which had two multi-day stretches of no new cases in May, now has one of the fastest-growing outbreaks in the country.

Other states with large case counts or deaths rates—or both—include Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina. According to the coronavirus tracking website covidexitstrategy.org, 17 states in the American South and West have “uncontrolled spread” of the disease while only four across the country are “trending better” in regard to their outbreak.

In the interview with Fox News, Trump also reiterated his demand that children attend school in the fall, regardless of their safety. “Young people have to go to school. There are problems when you don’t go to school, too.” He then again threatened to withhold federal money from states and school districts that don’t reopen. “There is going to be a funding problem. When they don’t open their schools, we’re not going to fund them.”

The danger of a quick and massive spread among children was made clear in data from Florida’s Department of Health, which currently shows that 31 percent of all children that have been tested for COVID-19 have tested positive, compared to an 11 percent positivity rate for the state as a whole. While questions have been raised as to whether the children tested were at a higher risk of infection, the fact that such a high proportion of those tested have been infected has raised concerns among local health officials even as Governor Ron DeSantis moves ahead with reopening all Florida schools in August and September.There is a connection between Trump’s two main talking points. He and his administration are aware of the enormous risks involved in sending the nation’s children back to school amid a contagious and deadly pandemic. It is not out of the realm of possibility that most of the 50-60 million school-age children in this country, packed into increasingly crowded classrooms, contract the disease, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and perhaps hundreds of thousands of debilitating lifelong conditions.

But, at least according to Trump’s logic, it will be much harder to conclusively prove that the virus caused such a catastrophe if the students, teachers and parents no longer have access to testing. The same can be said for workplaces across the US: the virus will in fact “disappear,” as the president has continued to claim, fabricating an excuse to force even more people back to work. The ongoing deaths in factories, plants and workplaces will become a nonissue for Trump and the financial and political interests for which he speaks.

Further details about the state of testing in the US came out during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” between host Chuck Todd and the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins. Todd noted that, “There’s a report this morning that the White House is actually pushing back on a congressional proposal that would add more money to your budget, by the way, more money to states for testing and contact tracing.”

Todd then asked specifically about how tests are conducted. “What can the federal government do right now to improve the testing lag issue, okay? … I've had my own family members have to wait five to seven days to get, to get a, to get the result. That becomes useless at some point if you’re asymptomatic. What do we do to fix that?”

Dr. Collins responded that it can take “as long as a week” to get testing results back, which “really undercuts the value of the testing.” Collins then explained that since “you do the testing to find out who’s carrying the virus and then quickly get them isolated so they don't spread it around.”

Moreover, both Collins and Todd are assuming that one can even get tested. While testing has been ramped up across the country, there are an increasing number of reports that have emerged of miles-long lines of cars at testing centers in Arizona and Florida, as well as testing centers closing down completely in Houston, Texas.

The risk of unknowingly spreading the disease was highlighted in a weekend Washington Post article on “Coronavirus superspreaders,” where one or two cases can cause a cluster of dozens or even thousands of new cases. There are at least a thousand suspected cases worldwide, dozens in the United States alone. One instance reported by the Post occurred in Ingham County, Michigan, where two infections at a college bar on June 18 led to 187 cases by July 17. Health officials have also linked Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma last month to a surge of cases in that state.

Todd also took the opportunity to ask Dr. Collins about the supposed “hacking issue that apparently the Russians were behind.” He then provocatively asked, “Did you guys lose any key information?”

Collins responded somewhat indifferently. “It’s not entirely clear to me what this was all about. Now, we certainly are deeply engaged in this vaccine effort. The vaccine that’s about to have its phase three trials started in just the next ten days or so was initially designed a few hundred yards from where I’m sitting right now at NIH. And certainly, we are always under cyberattacks of various sorts. But I would say most of what we do in science, we publish it. We put it out there. People don’t have to go hacking to find it. We're all about transparency. So, I’m not exactly sure what serious risk is involved here.”