Perhaps the most improbable—and useful—app available to students, faculty and staffers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) is the one that allows them to monitor the makeup of the sewage in campus buildings. Typically, waste left behind by your friends and colleagues is not of much interest. But as my colleague Alice Park reports, this particular app reveals the presence of the COVID-19 virus in all that wastewater. If the virus shows up in a building you frequent, it might be time to get yourself tested.
As Alice reports, the UCSD system can serve as an early warning system to help officials know when it might be time to order more testing or close a building. The sampling "really gives us an unprecedented ability to track the pandemic day by day as the waves of cases go up and down on campus," Rob Knight, professor of pediatrics, computer and engineering and director of the center for microbiome innovation at UCSD, told Alice.
Wastewater analysis is an especially useful pandemic-fighting tool for two reasons. First, wastewater can reveal the presence of the COVID-19 virus days or weeks before outbreaks show up in individual testing data. Researchers can also genetically sequence viral material that shows up in wastewater, helping epidemiologists track new mutations. In turn, that could signal the need to ramp up prevention measures or consider changes in treatments or vaccines.
UCSD is far from the only organization using wastewater analysis to track the spread of COVID-19. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a nationwide wastewater surveillance program for public health departments last September. Currently, 33 states, four cities, one county and three U.S. territories can upload their wastewater surveillance data and get support from data analytics teams at the CDC to interpret them.
For the CDC, the next step is ensuring the current national network survives beyond this pandemic so public health experts can use it to keep tabs on future pathogens. One challenge on that front: the sequencing of the wastewater samples is primarily being churned out by academic and commercial labs that the CDC has partnered with—but there's no guarantee that the government will be able to retain these partnerships. "That's not a sustainable model for the long term," says Amy Kirby, the CDC's wastewater surveillance program lead. "We want to bring this wastewater testing capacity into public health labs which are built for surveillance testing."
About 380.2 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to U.S. states as of this morning, of which some 321.1 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 45.7% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
Nearly 180 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 3.9 million people have died. On June 24, there were 403,837 new cases and 8,612 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 3 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 33.5 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 603,000 people have died. On June 24, there were 12,830 new cases and 341 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of June 25, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Almost all recent U.S. COVID-19 deaths have occurred among unvaccinated people,according to a new Associated Press analysis. Working with U.S. government data, the AP found that only 150 of more than 18,000 coronavirus deaths in May were among fully vaccinated people—or 0.8%. Vaccinated people also account for only 0.1% of recent COVID-19 hospitalizations. The findings echo the assessment of CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who said at a White House briefing Tuesday that "nearly every death due to COVID-19 is particularly tragic, because nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19 is at this point entirely preventable."
"Delta Plus," a new coronavirus variant first identified in India, is dangerous but unlikely to be a game-changer, my colleague Alice Park reports. The variant, which contains an additional mutation in the virus' spike protein, is unlikely to become dominant. However, its existence is another motivating factor to "get people vaccinated as fast as possible," as one expert told Alice.
Many U.S. health care workers have struggled with mental health disorders during the pandemic, according to findings published today in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Investigators surveyed 26,174 state, local, tribal and territorial front line workers in March and April, and found that 53% reported symptoms of at least one mental health problem in the preceding two weeks. The conditions included depression (32.0% among those surveyed), anxiety (30.3%), PTSD (36.8%), and suicidal ideation (8.4%) and were most common in respondents 29 years old and younger. The severity of the symptoms was found to increase in lockstep with the number of hours worked weekly and the percentage of working hours dedicated to activities related to COVID-19.
A third wave of COVID-19 is sweeping across Africa, principally driven by the Delta variant, reports The New York Times. The variant has so far been detected in 13 African nations, and is the most prevalent strain of the virus in some of them. In Uganda and Zambia, for example, 97% and 77% of recent cases were attributed to the Delta variant, respectively. The World Health Organization (WHO) is sending teams to monitor the outbreak and analyze the strain of the virus involved. The crisis is made all the worse given the continent's low vaccination rate: So far, fewer than 1% of Africa's 1.3 billion people have been fully immunized.
The estimated date of the initial emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, keeps getting pushed back. According to a new study in PLOS Pathogens, the first case of COVID-19 may have appeared in China as early as October 2019. The investigators did not use traditional epidemiological tools to reach their conclusions, but rather relied on a computer model typically used to calculate the timing of species extinctions, based on when the final sightings of a species took place in various locations. Reversing the model and instead plugging in data about the first cases of COVID-19 reported in 203 places around the world yielded the new estimate.
Russia continues to lag badly in vaccination rates, with only 20.7 million people—14% of the population—having received at least one shot. Local governments across the nation of 146 million people are now trying a new approach: mandating vaccines, according to the Associated Press. At least 14 Russian cities and regions—including Moscow and St. Petersburg—are now requiring vaccines for people working in certain sectors, including government offices, retail, health care, education, restaurants, fitness centers and more. Moscow recommends that local governments punish workers who don't comply by suspending them without pay. The central government is also threatening to shutter businesses that fail to have 60% of their employees at least partially vaccinated by July 15.
Lower income nations are set to receive a boost in vaccine supplies from COVAX. GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance—which runs the COVAX program jointly with the WHO—has approved an additional $775 million to deliver vaccine doses to underserved areas over the next two years. Since February, COVAX has delivered just 90 million doses to 132 countries, according to Reuters. The new funds are intended to help the organization achieve its much more ambitious longer-term goal of delivering 1.8 billion doses to countries in need by the first quarter of 2022.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given Emergency Use Authorization to the arthritis drug Acemtra for use in adults hospitalized for COVID-19 as well as pediatric patients over age two being treated for the disease. Acemtra, an anti-inflammatory, will be used in patients currently receiving corticosteroids to reduce inflammation. FDA trials have shown that the drug reduces the risk of death, as well as the need for continued hospitalization and ventilator use; the results were obtained in a randomized trial of 5,500 hospitalized patients.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jeffrey Kluger and edited by Alex Fitzpatrick.
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