Dutch Woman Dies After Being Reinfected With COVID-19, Global Cases See Biggest Weekly Jump Yet: Live Updates

Summary:

• Dutch woman dies after being reinfected
• First American confirmed reinfected with COVID-19
• Russia, Hungary report record deaths
• China launches another massive testing campaign
• India new cases lowest in 2 months
• WHO says world saw record jump in COVID-19 cases last week
• 14% of those infected with COVID are health-care workers
• Italy imposes new restrictions

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Speaking to a massive crowd in Florida last night, President Trump declared that he felt “powerful” and that he would “kiss” every person in the crowd if he could. Shortly before the start of Trump’s performance, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany posted a memo from President Trump’s doctor, Dr. Sean Conley, telling the public that Trump had tested negative repeatedly over the course of several days.

Trump went ahead with his rally even as Dr. Anthony Fauci slammed the president for holding the rallies despite the chance of spreading COVID-19 (even after he repeatedly refused to weigh in on the potential impact of all those protests) and even accused the president and his campaign of “harassing me” by using clips that Dr. Fauci said were taken out of context.

But perhaps the biggest news on the COVID-19 front from overnight was Johnson & Johnson’s decision to “pause” its 60,000 patient COVID-19 vaccine trial. JNJ’s halt comes a little over a month after the AstraZeneca-Oxford trial was stopped by regulators after a patient was afflicted with a rare spinal condition. Although AZ’s trials have resumed in India, the UK and elsewhere, regulators in the US are still enforcing a hold, and their reasoning isn’t clear. Though JNJ insisted that it voluntarily halted the trial, we await more information from US regulators, who have been convened to investigate what went wrong. According to the STAT News report that broke the story, the trial was halted due to an “unspecified” illness.

Moving on to Tuesday morning, there has been some big news out of Europe. The FT reported, citing a scientific paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease, that an 89-year-old Dutch woman has become the first person reinfected with COVID-19 to succumb to the virus. According to the paper, the patient first arrived at a hospital in the Netherlands complaining of fatigue. She tested positive, and was later discharged. But 59 days later, she returned to the hospital with even more serious conditions, and tested positive for COVID-19 again. She died shortly after.

The news follows last night’s exclusive WSJ report documenting the first case of a patient who was reinfected with COVID-19 in the US. We’ll have more on that later. The report in the Lancet cited by WSJ also shows that the second bout of COVID-19 is often more severe in reinfected patients.

Finally, after announcing a slate of new restrictions last week, the Italian government has on Tuesday set out the tighter restrictions on social gatherings, restaurants and school activities to stop the spread of the virus after the average number of daily cases doubled over the course of a week.

PM Giuseppe Conte signed off on a decree outlining the measures that are expected to come into force from Tuesday and to be in force for the next 30 days. The measures include restaurants and bars needing to close by midnight, or before 2100 local time if they don’t have table service.

Finally, the WHO confirmed yesterday that global COVID-19 cases set a new record last week.

Though it has slowed somewhat since September, India’s outbreak was one of the biggest contributors to this trend, along with Europe, the US and Brazil.

Here’s a rundown of the key COVID-19 news from overnight and Tuesday morning:

Globally, Global cases have reached 37,722,044, according to Johns Hopkins data. The global death toll has hit 1,078,411 (Source: JHU).

India reports fewest new cases in two months, reporting just 55,342 new cases for the past 24 hours, bringing the country total to 7.18 million. That’s well below the numbers from last month, when India was reporting 90k+ new cases on average. The health ministry also reported 706 deaths in the past 24 hours, raising the toll to 109,856. (Source: Nikkei).

South Korea reports 102 cases, marking the first triple-digit increase in six days. Daily infections had mostly fallen into the double digits over the past two weeks, prompting the government to relax social distancing rules this week (Source: Nikkei).

After reporting China’s first domestic outbreak in more than 2 months, the Chinese city of Qingdao said on Monday it will test its entire population of more than 9 million people for coronavirus, after discovering 12 new infections that appeared to be linked to a hospital treating imported infections (Source: Nikkei).

The World Health Organization chief has warned against suggestions by some to just allow COVID-19 to spread in the hope of achieving so-called herd immunity, saying this was “unethical” (Source: Al Jazeera).

In a study of 83 countries, mostly in Europe and the Americas, about 14% of the cases reported to the WHO affected health-care workers, who make up less than 3% of the global population (Source: Bloomberg).

Russia reported its highest number of deaths over 24 hours from Covid-19. The total of 244 exceeds the previous high of 232 on May 29, according to data from the country’s anti-coronavirus task force. Overall, 22,966 people have died from the disease, it said. Hungary also registered record coronavirus deaths on Monday, as well as 1,025 new cases, official data show (Source: Bloomberg).

A key member of Hong Kong’s top orchestra has been infected with Covid-19, sending some 100 musicians into quarantine and raising concerns about the risk of exposure to a concert audience that included the city’s leader and home affairs chief (Source: SCMP).

Hong Kong will extend all social distancing rules for another week to Oct. 22, according to a government statement. Rules include a public-gathering limit of four people, compulsory mask-wearing and no dining in restaurants after midnight (Source: Bloomberg).