Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Massachusetts General Hospital researchers show children are silent spreaders of virus that causes COVID-19

In the most comprehensive study of COVID-19 pediatric patients to date, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Mass General Hospital for Children (MGHfC) researchers provide critical data showing that children play a larger role in the community spread of COVID-19 than previously thought. In a study of 192 children ages 0-22, 49 children tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and an additional 18 children had late-onset, COVID-19-related illness. The infected children were shown to have a significantly higher level of virus in their airways than hospitalized adults in ICUs for COVID-19 treatment.

Source: Massachusetts General Hospital researchers show children are silent spreaders of virus that causes COVID-19

Teachers could stay in classroom if exposed to COVID-19 – ABC News – (Guide for destruction of schools and communities?)

New guidance from President Donald Trump’s administration that declares teachers to be “critical infrastructure workers” could give the green light to exempting teachers from quarantine requirements after being exposed to COVID-19 and instead send them back into the classroom.

Keeping teachers without symptoms in the classroom, as a handful of school districts in Tennessee and Georgia have already said they may do, raises the risk that they will spread the respiratory illness to students and fellow employees. Multiple teachers can be required by public health agencies to quarantine for 14 days during an outbreak, which can stretch a district’s ability to keep providing in-person instruction.

South Carolina health officials also describe teachers as critical infrastructure workers, although it’s unclear if any district there is asking teachers to return before 14 days.

Among the first districts to name teachers as critical infrastructure workers was eastern Tennessee’s Greene County, where the school board gave the designation to teachers July 13.

“It essentially means if we are exposed and we know we might potentially be positive, we still have to come to school and we might at that point be carriers and spreaders,” said Hillary Buckner, who teaches Spanish at Chuckey-Doak High School in Afton.

 

Source: Teachers could stay in classroom if exposed to COVID-19 – ABC News

An ‘Unprecedented’ Effort to Stop the Coronavirus in Nursing Homes – The New York Times

Eli Lilly’s researchers are watching facilities in which a single case of Covid-19 appears after having no active cases for at least 14 days. Once the case is reported, a sort of medical SWAT team scrambles to the facility as quickly as possible. A nursing supervisor at Heartland called Eli Lilly as soon as the home learned of the employee’s positive test. The team wasted no time getting to the facility. The next day, medical personnel pulled up in two vehicles. One was a moving truck carrying infusion chairs, poles for intravenous infusions, bedside tables, and privacy screens. The other was an R.V. with an interior retrofitted as a mobile lab with infusion materials, a centrifuge, freezers and computers to transmit data. The team quickly turned Heartland’s large dining room — which was not being used, because the pandemic had put a stop to communal dining — into an infusion center. The day after the medical team arrived, the first residents and staff who agreed to participate received infusions.