Dressed in a hazmat suit, two masks and a face shield, Du Mingjun knocked on the mahogany door of a flat in a suburban district of Wuhan on a recent morning.
A man wearing a single mask opened the door a crack and, after Du introduced herself as a psychological counsellor, burst into tears.
“I really can’t take it anymore,” he said. Diagnosed with the novel coronavirus in early February, the man, who appeared to be in his 50s, had been treated at two hospitals before being transferred to a quarantine centre set up in a cluster of apartment blocks in an industrial part of Wuhan.
Why, he asked, did tests say he still had the virus more than two months after he first contracted it?
The answer to that question is a mystery baffling doctors on the frontline of China’s battle against COVID-19, even as it has successfully slowed the spread of the coronavirus across the country.
Chinese doctors in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in December, say a growing number of cases in which people recover from the virus, but continue to test positive without showing symptoms, is one of their biggest challenges as the country moves into a new phase of its containment battle.
Those patients all tested negative for the virus at some point after recovering, but then tested positive again, some up to 70 days later, the doctors said. Many have done so over 50-60 days.
The prospect of people remaining positive for the virus, and therefore potentially infectious, is of international concern, as many countries seek to end lockdowns and resume economic activity as the spread of the virus slows. Currently, the globally recommended isolation period after exposure is 14 days.
As the novel coronavirus spread through New York City in late March, doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital noticed something strange happening to patients’ blood.
Signs of blood thickening and clotting were being detected in different organs by doctors from different specialties. This would turn out to be one of the alarming ways the virus ravages the body, as doctors there and elsewhere were starting to realize.
At Mount Sinai, nephrologists noticed kidney dialysis catheters getting plugged with clots. Pulmonologists monitoring COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilators could see portions of lungs were oddly bloodless. Neurosurgeons confronted a surge in their usual caseload of strokes due to blood clots, the age of victims skewing younger, with at least half testing positive for the virus.
“It’s very striking how much this disease causes clots to form,” Dr. J Mocco, a Mount Sinai neurosurgeon, said in an interview, describing how some doctors think COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, is more than a lung disease. In some cases, Mocco said, a stroke was a young patient’s first symptom of COVID-19.
As colleagues from various specialties pooled their observations, they developed a new treatment protocol. Patients now receive high doses of a blood-thinning drug even before any evidence of clotting appears.
“Maybe, just maybe, if you prevent the clotting, you can make the disease less severe,” said Dr. David Reich, the hospital president. The new protocol will not be used on certain high-risk patients because blood thinners can lead to bleeding in the brain and other organs.
Singapore has moved to extend restrictions to combat coronavirus until early June, as the number of cases in the city state exceeded 9,000 due to a growing number of infections in its crowded migrant worker dormitories.
While Singapore had drawn worldwide attention for what was seen as its success in containing the early stages of the outbreak, a new and quickly expanding second peak of infections has underlined how easily the virus is able to return.
The tiny city-state has the highest number of cases in south-east Asia, a huge increase from 200 infections on 15 March, when its outbreak appeared to be nearly under control. About 3,000 cases have been reported in the past three days.
The decision by Gov. Brian Kemp to begin restarting Georgia’s economy drew swift rebukes on Tuesday from mayors, public health experts and some business owners, with skeptics arguing that the plan might amplify another wave of coronavirus outbreaks.
“That could be setting us back,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview on Tuesday, referring to Georgia and other states planning to reopen in coming days. “It certainly isn’t going to be helpful.”
Mr. Kemp’s decision allows for what he described as a measured return, starting on Friday with the reopening of gyms, hair and nail salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors. On Monday, restaurants can resume dine-in service, and movie theaters and other entertainment venues can reopen. He also lifted limitations on houses of worship.
Two cats in New York have been infected with the novel coronavirus, federal officials announced Wednesday. Both had mild respiratory symptoms and are expected to make a full recovery.
"These are the first pets in the United States to test positive," the US Department of Agriculture said Wednesday in a joint statement with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The agencies emphasized that there is no evidence pets play a role in spreading coronavirus in the United States. "There is no justification in taking measures against companion animals that may compromise their welfare," they said.
The two cats were tested after they showed respiratory symptoms, according to the agencies, and they join the ranks of a lion and a tiger in New York who were previously confirmed to be infected.
A veterinarian tested the first house cat after it showed mild respiratory signs, but none of the humans in its household were confirmed to have the virus.
It's possible, officials said, that the cat was infected by somebody outside the home. Someone inside the house, with mild or no symptoms, could have also transmitted the virus.
The second cat, in a separate area of New York, was also tested after it showed signs of respiratory illness. The owner of that cat tested positive for Covid-19 before the cat became ill, but another cat in the household has shown no signs of illness.
Standing in front of an empty storefront along Main Street, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman was beaming with optimism, believing that businesses would make it through the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re all together in this and we are going to come out with a bang,” she said earlier this month.
On Tuesday, it became apparent what the independent mayor may have had in mind. She said she wants to reopen casinos, assuming that 100 percent of the population are carriers of the novel coronavirus.
Let them, and visitors, gather and gamble, smoke in confined spaces, touch slot machines all day — and let the chips, and apparently the infections, fall where they may.
“Assume everybody is a carrier," the mayor said Tuesday on MSNBC. "And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”
The perspective left MSNBC host Katy Tur visibly dumbfounded. The next day, Goodman went on to shock another host, Anderson Cooper of CNN, telling him that she’s previously asked the city statistician if they could be a control group for the virus but the statistician told her people commute into the city and it wouldn’t work.
“We offered to be a control group,” she said. “It was offered, it was turned down.”
Cooper displayed a graphic depicting how the virus could spread in a restaurant in China to ask Goodman about the risk of the virus among diners, but Goodman interjected.
“This isn’t China,” she said, “this is Las Vegas, Nevada.”
A doctor who was removed as head of the federal agency that is helping develop a vaccine for the coronavirus said he was ousted after resisting widespread adoption of a drug promoted by President Donald Trump as a treatment for Covid-19.
Dr. Rick Bright also said that he believed he was removed from his post because he insisted that “the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic” be invested “into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”
“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Bright said in a statement, which was first reported by The New York Times.
“Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.”
The White House declined to comment. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bright was removed Tuesday as director the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a division of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department that is known by the acronym BARDA.
He was given a job with less responsibilities at the National Institutes of Health.
“Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis,” Bright wrote in his statement.
He said that he will ask HHS’s inspector general, an internal ethics watchdog, to “investigate the manner in which this administration has politicized the work of BARDA and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections and efforts that lack scientific merit.”
