Australian military deployed amid worsening epidemic in state of Victoria

All Americans must have the option to vote by mail in the general election in November to protect against the coronavirus in crowded polling stations, a group of doctors, nurses and public health officials warned in a letter sent to Congressional leaders Thursday.

Every US state has a vote-by-mail or absentee ballot option, but about a third of states only allow it in certain circumstances.

That is unacceptable during a pandemic when people’s health, and possibly lives, are at risk from a potentially deadly virus, the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health said in the letter.

It was addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and minority leader Chuck Schumer.

 Polling stations are often crowded with long lines that make social distancing difficult.

“We write to urge you to move rapidly and aggressively to ensure that every person in the US who is eligible to vote is able to do so without risking their health,” the group said in the letter.

Ninety-six employees at a seafood processing plant in Seward, Alaska have tested positive for Covid-19, according to the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

The company, OBI Seafoods, said most of the employees have not experienced any Covid-19 symptoms and none have been hospitalized, the press release said.

The infected employees were taken to Anchorage to isolate where they will be provided medical care, monitoring, security and housing.

Employees who tested negative will be placed under quarantine in Seward and will be monitored and tested every three days until no additional positive cases are identified.

The first case was discovered after a plant employee, who had sought medical care for a non-Covid 19 related issue, tested positive for the virus. The company then tested all 262 plant employees, implemented isolation protocols and began contact tracing. 

CNN has reached out to OBI Seafoods for comment.

A total of 300 new novel coronavirus cases have been detected in the southeastern Australian state of Victoria, the state's premier announced Friday.

Of the 300 cases, only 51 are from a known source with connections to previous cases. 

Premier Daniel Andrews told reporters that health authorities had struggled to conduct contact tracing interviews with around 25% of people who had tested positive, as they were unable to contact them. 

To ensure that contact tracing interviews are conducted on the same day, twenty-eight teams from the Australian Defense Force will be dispatched to go from door-to-door with health officials, Andrews said.

Before the military support teams are sent to individual homes, Andrews said that authorities would attempt to telephone first. If the call goes unanswered then they will visit the home. 

Andrews warned that if the person was not at home when teams arrived, they could be subject to fines for breaching lockdown orders.

The military personnel who have been sent to Victoria State has been bolstered to 1400.

Counties that are predominantly Latino account for a disproportionate number of Covid-19 cases in most regions of the United States, with the exception of the South, and structural racism is in part to blame, according to a new study.

In general, the Latino/Hispanic community has been disproportionately impacted by Covid-19. While Latinos account for 18% of the US population, in June the community accounted for one in three of all confirmed Covid-19 cases in the US.

Latinos also had among the highest age-adjusted rates of Covid-19 related hospitalizations and in June made up one in five of all confirmed Covid-19 deaths. 

For the study published Thursday in the Annals of Epidemiology, researchers looked at data on Covid-19 cases in deaths at the county level. In the Northeast, majority Latino counties have more than 63% of coronavirus cases and more than 66% of the deaths. In the Midwest, these counties have more than 31% of the cases and more than 22% of the deaths. In the West it’s more than 75% of the cases and more than 73% of the deaths.  

These numbers are likely an undercount, the researchers said, because Latino communities, particularly in low-income areas, are less likely to have access to Covid-19 testing. 

Rodriguez-Diaz hopes that public health leaders can use this work to inform decisions about which areas need to increase access to testing and access to language-appropriate education materials about Covid-19. The study also argues that all states need to expand Medicaid.

Mexico’s health ministry reported a new daily record in coronavirus cases Thursday, logging 8,438 new confirmed infections in 24 hours.

The ministry also said there had been 718 new deaths from the virus.

The country’s total number of confirmed coronavirus infections is now 370,712, while the death tolls stands at 41,908, according to the ministry.

Mexico has the world’s fourth highest Covid-19 death toll, trailing the United States, Brazil and the United Kingdom, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Americans should have clamped down on public gatherings instead of opening up, global philanthropist and coronavirus vaccine funder Bill Gates said Thursday on CNN’s Global Town Hall Coronavirus: Facts and Fears.

Going to bars is one of those activities, he said.

Coronavirus cases are surging across parts of the United States and hundreds of people are now dying again every day from the deadly virus.

When asked what he learned from the Covid-19 outbreak, philanthropist Bill Gates said that testing needs to be "10 times faster."

Gates said he plans to invest in testing for future pandemics.

"We will invest — and I know the US government and other governments will — in having vaccine platforms that get us very rapid results. Likewise, next time we'll be able to scale up diagnostics 10 times faster than this time. And antivirals and antibodies, we'll be able to do those more quickly," he said.

Gates continued: "It's sad that it took this, you know, these deaths, the economic pain, the divisiveness that we still aren't sure how quickly it will end, but they are indeed a priority and the potential to solve these things is absolutely there. That's why I was excited in 2015 that even if tens of billions had gone into these things, this is exactly the kind of thing that could have been stopped before it did significant damage."

Early data on a coronavirus vaccine shows that it will take more than one dose to protect people from the virus, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates told CNN tonight.

Gates, who along with his wife Melinda, runs the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which pledged up to $100 million in February to help contain the coronavirus outbreak around the world.

These funds have also been used to help find a vaccine for the virus, limit its spread and improve the detection and treatment of patients.

Gates said that his foundation is funding not only the first generation of vaccines and the capacity for those, "but also a second generation that will be ready four to six months later that may get us closer to 100% protection or 100% transmission reduction."

"So there's a lot of uncertainty in the vaccine enterprise, which is hard to explain, you know, when people want to summarize is the vaccine miracle on its way," Gates added.