Coronavirus Morning News Brief – July 8: Safety Training at Wuhan Lab Was ‘Routine,’ Hospitals That Went Over Budget on Nursing Are in Arrears

A panda at the Chengdu Research Base of the Giant Panda Breeding Center

Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,214th day of the pandemic.

SATURDAY OP-ED

On Saturday, 99% of the Earth’s Population Had Sun at the Same Time

If you happened to be up this morning at just after 7 a.m. EDT and looked out to see the sun, you were far from alone.  At that very moment, 99% of the world’s population – almost eight billion people – were able to see some sunlight all at the same moment in time.

It’s notable that this temporal phenomenon does not fall on the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day of the year. Rather, it takes place as the earth tilts ever so slightly from the sun, thus shortening the average day but exposing populations farther south to more hours of daylight.

A few caveats are called for: First, not everyone will experience the same intensity of the sun’s rays.  Some will experience them at sunrise or shortly thereafter, while 16% will see some form of twilight, with some experiencing dark twilight, which is more or less indistinguishable from darkness.

Only 83% of the world’s population will experience what we would consider true daylight, however.

Another caveat: Many people think of the world as balanced in terms of population between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but, truth be told, 90% of the world’s population lives north of the equator.

If this doesn’t excite you terribly much, cheer up: You can start to count down to December 5, 2023, a day when 85% of the world’s population will collectively experience night.

In other news we cover today, a newly released intelligence report indicates that safety training at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was in fact routine in 2019, China’s economic recovery appears to be stalling, and more HIV cases have been linked to a long-shuttered spa in Albuquerque that offered “vampire facials.”

UNITED STATES

A newly-declassified intelligence report on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in China found that safety training at the Wuhan Institute of Virology appears to have been merely routine, taking the opposite view of a 2022 report by the oversight staff of a Senate committee that saw the training as a response to a biosafety problem.

Meanwhile, some hospitals that were forced to make larger than expected outlays on nurses in the first two years of the pandemic are now short on cash.  Some distressed institutions are shuttering unprofitable services and selling assets to avoid default on debts.

GLOBAL

China’s factory activity shrunk for the third month in a row as the country’s recovery from the earliest days of the pandemic stalled.  June manufacturing purchasing managers’ index came in line with market expectations for 49.0, while non-manufacturing PMI was its weakest this year.

OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS

A shuttered New Mexico salon that once offered “vampire facials” has been linked to new cases of HIV.  The Albuquerque spa was forced to close in 2018 after two patrons seroconverted after receiving treatments there.  Now three more cases have been genetically linked to the facility.

A vampire facial (we had to look this up, too!) is a way of extracting platelets from the patient’s own blood and using them as a dermal filter to fill out wrinkles.

Meanwhile, some patients at Johns Hopkins Medicine may find they get billed when they message their doctors via the hospital’s portal.  “Insurance companies now recognize some MyChart medical advice messages as a billable service,” the hospital told the newspaper the Baltimore Banner.

Finally, if you think it’s hot outside, it may still not be hot enough to stop our bodies from working optimally.  A new study suggests that our bodies work optimally until the ambient temperature climbs above 104° F (40° C).

TODAY’S STATISTICS

Now here are the daily statistics for Saturday, July 8.

As of Saturday morning, the world has recorded 691.23 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.03 million from the previous day, and 6.89 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 663.8 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.04 million from the previous day.

The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls.

Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Saturday at press time is 20,527,215, a decrease of 26,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 20,489,946, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 37,269, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past eight months.

The United States reported 72,136 new cases in the period May 4 through May 10, a figure that is down 26% over the same period one week earlier, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The test positivity rate for Covid for the week ending July 1 was 8.22%, up from 8.2% the prior week, according to data from the CDC Respiratory Virus Laboratory Emergency Department Network Surveillance, or RESP-LENS. By comparison, the test positive rate for influenza was 1.77% and, for RSV, that figure was 0.51%.

The death toll from Covid was 1% in the week ending July 1, 2023, a figure that is down 9.1% over the past week.

Finally, the number of hospital admissions from Covid for seven days ending June 24 was 6,198, a figure that is down 5.9% over the preceding 7-day period.

As of March 25, 2023, the Morning News Brief began to update case data as well as death tolls on a weekly basis.  In addition, as of May 15, 2023, the Morning News Brief has pressed pause on certain data sets as we assess the update of changes in reporting by U.S. health authorities at the CDC.  Where appropriate, the Morning News Brief has reintroduced data sets are they have become available.

Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Saturday, recorded 107.35 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.17 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45 million, and a reported death toll of 531,912.

The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States.  Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.

Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.1 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.4 million total cases.

Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 704,159, has recorded 37.7 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.

The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are Japan, with 33.8 million cases, South Korea, with 32.3 million cases, placing it in the number seven slot, and Italy, with 25.9 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.6 million, and Russia, with 22.9 million.

VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, as of June 15, the total number of updated bivalent doses given in the United States was 139.9 million.

Older – and no longer updated – data from the CDC shows that over 270.2 million people in the United States – or 81.4% – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine as of May 11, 2023. Of that population, 69.5%, or 230.6 million people, have received two doses of vaccine, and the total number of doses that have been dispensed in the United States is now over 676.7 million. Breaking this down further, 92.23% of the population over the age of 18 – or 238.2 million people – has received at least a first inoculation and 79.1% of the same group – or 204.3 million people – is fully vaccinated.

Some 70.3% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Saturday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.47 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 34,375 doses are now administered each day.

Meanwhile, only 32.2% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.

Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.

In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines.

Paul Riegler contributed reporting to this story.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)