The latest on the coronavirus pandemic.

WASHINGTON — As businesses reopened Friday in more of the U.S., an overwhelming majority of states still were falling short of the COVID-19 testing levels that public health experts say are necessary to safely ease lockdowns and avoid another deadly wave of outbreaks, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Rapid, widespread testing is considered essential to tracking and containing the coronavirus. But 41 of the nation’s 50 states fail to test widely enough to drive their infections below a key benchmark, according to an AP analysis of metrics developed by Harvard’s Global Health Institute.

Among the states falling short are Texas and Georgia, which recently moved aggressively to reopen stores, malls, barbershops and other businesses.

As health authorities expand testing to more people, the number of positive results should shrink relative to the total number of people tested. The World Health Organization and other health researchers have said a percentage above 10 percent indicates inadequate testing. South Korea, a country praised for its rapid response, quickly pushed its positive cases to below 3 percent.

Most governors are moving ahead with unlocking their states, even in cases where they are not meeting broad guidelines recommended by the White House.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has set a goal of 30,000 tests per day as his state launched one of the nation’s most aggressive reopenings on May 1. He never set a firm date on when the state would hit the 30,000 mark, but for most of May, the daily testing numbers have fallen well short of that.

Read the full story on the Associated Press analysis here.

Sailors on sidelined U.S. aircraft carrier get virus twice

WASHINGTON — Five sailors on the aircraft carrier sidelined in Guam due to a COVID-19 outbreak have tested positive for the virus for the second time and have been taken off the ship, according to the Navy.

The resurgence of the virus in the five sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt underscores the befuddling behavior of the highly contagious virus and raises questions about how troops that test positive can be reintegrated into the military, particularly on ships.

All five sailors had previously tested positive and had gone through at least two weeks of isolation. As part of the process, they all had to test negative twice in a row, with the tests separated by at least a day or two before they were allowed to go back to the ship.

The Roosevelt has been at port in Guam since late March after the outbreak of the virus was discovered. More than 4,000 of the 4,800 crew members have gone ashore since then for quarantine or isolation. Earlier this month hundreds of sailors began returning to the ship, in coordinated waves, to get ready to set sail again.

Read the full story here.

White House confident in virus test made by company in Scarborough

WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Friday the White House still has confidence in a rapid COVID-19 test it has been using despite new data suggesting the test may return false negatives.

The head of the Food and Drug Administration said Friday his agency has provided new guidance to the White House after data suggested that the test used by President Trump and others every day may be inaccurate and provide false negatives.

The test by Abbott Laboratories is used daily at the White House to test Trump, key members of his staff as well as any visitor to the White House complex who comes in close proximity to the president or Vice President Mike Pence. Azar commented after the FDA said late Thursday it was investigating preliminary data suggesting the 15-minute test can miss COVID-19 cases, falsely clearing infected patients.

“We’ve got to get to the bottom of it, but we still have confidence in the test or we wouldn’t have it on the market,” Azar told Fox Business Network.

White House officials on Friday continued using the Abbot ID Now test. Reporters at the White House underwent the test late Friday morning shortly before Trump held a Rose Garden event to address administration efforts to develop a vaccine for the virus.

Azar described the FDA warning as a routine announcement that comes after medical manufacturers submit any type of negative information about their product.

Read the full story about the virus test here.

New York to open beaches for Memorial Day

NEW YORK — After two months of strict limits on business and social distancing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo welcomed the first loosening of restrictions in many parts of the state Friday and announced that beaches would be allowed to open in time for the Memorial Day weekend.

State and municipal beaches throughout the state will be allowed to open the Friday before the holiday, but with limits, the Democrat said.

Capacity will be limited to no more than 50 percent of normal, with parking limited to trim crowds. Group activities will not be allowed. Picnic areas and playgrounds will stay closed. Employees need to wear masks.

It will be up to local governments, Cuomo said, to decide whether to allow municipal beaches to reopen. If they do, they must follow the state’s rules.

“If there is a problem, and the locals do not enforce those regulations, we will close those beaches,” Cuomo said.

Beaches in New Jersey and Connecticut will also be open for the holiday weekend, and Cuomo said part of the rationale for reopening was to prevent New Yorkers from flocking to those states as the weather warms.

Places without social distancing have 35 times more potential coronavirus spread, study finds

Areas in the United States that do not adhere to any social distancing policies face 35 times more cases of the novel coronavirus, according to a study published Thursday in a peer-reviewed health-care journal.

The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, looked at the policies mandating social distancing, and found that the longer a measure was in effect the slower the daily growth rate of COVID-19, the virus’s disease. Researchers from the University of Kentucky, University of Louisville and Georgia State University looked at confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States between March 1 and April 27, totaling about 1 million reported instances at the time, illustrating “the potential danger of exponential spread in the absence of interventions.”

For social distancing policies that lasted at least 16 to 20 days, the daily rate of infection dropped by more than 9 percentage points, according to the study. Policies lasting 15 days and less also saw declines in the daily infection rate, researchers found. Such social distancing measures, mandated by 95 percent of the country, include shelter-in-place orders, school closures, bans on large events and the closure of gyms, bars and restaurants.

Places with no social distancing orders were at substantially higher risk for infection.

Read the full story.

What do bikes and toilet paper have in common? Both are flying out of stores

The coronavirus could have been the last straw for City Bikes, an independent bike shop in Washington that was on fragile financial ground before the pandemic struck. But last weekend, Charles McCormick found himself in his shop after midnight, assembling bike after bike. Sales had more than quadrupled.

“We have really gotten into the toilet-paper-flying-off-the-shelves phase over here,” said McCormick, who launched City Bikes 32 years ago. “I finally feel like the bike is getting recognized for the awesome tool that it is.”

The bicycle industry has emerged as one of the few beneficiaries of the coronavirus pandemic as people search for ways to stay active, entertain children and commute to work. The unprecedented demand has sent shock waves through the supply chain and left customers in a race to get their hands on a bicycle before they sell out.

Andrea Hewitt, a 38-year-old living in Arlington, Virginia has purchased two bikes since the pandemic struck. She needed a break, she said, from the daily grind of full-time work and part-time home schooling that grew more tedious, isolating and tiresome by the day.

“It felt like there was nothing we could do but walk outside, but then we got the bikes and I felt free,” she said of her early days in quarantine. “It was like some sense of normalcy had returned to our lives.”

Hewitt and her two children, ages 7 and 10, have quickly grown addicted to the new bicycles the family purchased from a local store in late March. Four times a week, the three of them strap on their helmets, mount their bicycles and meet with cousins down the block. The “bike gang of six,” as they now call themselves, then rides a mile to wave to their grandparents.

“My parents get a kick out of it when all of us pull up in our bikes,” Hewitt said. “It has allowed us to make extended family time a part of our weekly routine.”

Hewitt snagged the bicycles early in the pandemic, but many are now struggling to find an affordable bicycle available for purchase.

Bicycle sales nationwide surged by 50% in March, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. It reported a 121% increase in adult leisure-bike sales and a 59% uptick in children’s bike sales compared with the same time last year.

What’s opening in the United States this weekend

The scattershot reopening of America continues Friday and into the weekend, with more areas relaxing restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) said that starting Friday, his stay-at-home order will be lifted and more businesses will be able to reopen — with limitations. Restaurants, bars, malls, gyms, movie theaters and museums can all reopen with occupancy caps and distancing limitations in place. (In New Orleans, restrictions will stay through Saturday.)

Beginning Friday, Iowa restaurants can reopen with half their normal capacities and groups capped at six people. Gyms can reopen, but with reduced capacities. Malls can welcome back shoppers, but food courts and play areas have to stay shuttered.

Wyoming will let restaurants reopen with limitations, allow gatherings of up to 25 people and let movie theaters reopen — albeit with limits on the number of viewers. Arizona’s stay at home order is ending Friday, two days after pools, gyms and spas were able to reopen.

In Oregon, most of the state’s counties are cleared Friday to reopen restaurants, bars, gyms and hair salons — with some restrictions, including fewer customers, requirements for face coverings and mandated distancing. Gatherings of up to 25 people will be allowed in these locations as well.

In other states, specific restrictions are being lifted. Some businesses and beaches in Hawaii can reopen Friday, as can ice cream stores and trucks in Delaware, a state that is keeping its beaches closed for another week. Idaho gave the green light for more of the state’s businesses to resume activity on Saturday, when restaurants, gyms and salons can reopen. (Movie theaters and concert venues will still remain shuttered.)

In the Washington region, much of Virginia and Maryland can lift restrictions Friday, although they will remain in place in both the District and the populous suburbs surrounding it.

Russian doctors say woman contracted virus twice

MOSCOW — Russian doctors say they are treating a woman who may have contracted coronavirus for the second time after recovering from it.

The woman was discharged from a hospital in the Siberian city of Ulan-Ude after receiving treatment for coronavirus and testing negative for it in early April. But two weeks later she started having respiratory symptoms again and tested positive for the virus for the second time.

She was readmitted to the hospital and is currently being treated, says its chief doctor Tatyana Symbelova.

“The question is whether it’s a re-infection, because 15-16 days passed between discharged and respiratory symptoms appearing, or the disease she had earlier coming back. It is not entirely clear for us at this point,” Symbelova says.

According to the World Health Organization, no studies have shown people who have recovered from the coronavirus are immune to becoming infected again.

Russia reported over 262,000 coronavirus cases on Friday and 2,418 deaths.

U.S. retail sales plunged a record 16% in April as virus hit

BALTIMORE — U.S. retail sales tumbled by a record 16.4% from March to April as business shutdowns caused by the coronavirus kept shoppers away, threatened stores across the country and weighed down a sinking economy.

The Commerce Department’s report Friday on retail purchases showed a sector that has collapsed so quickly that sales over the past 12 months are down a crippling 21.6%.

The sharpest drops from March to April were at clothiers, electronics stores, furniture stores and restaurants. A long-standing migration of consumers toward online purchases is accelerating, with that segment posting a 8.4% monthly gain. Measured year over year, online sales surged 21.6%.

For a retail sector already reeling from the migration of consumers to online shopping and to app-based delivery services, a back-to-back free-fall in spending poses a grave risk. Department stores like Neiman Marcus and J.Crew have filed for bankruptcy protection. Hotels, restaurants and auto dealerships are in danger.

An April analysis by a group of academic economists found that a one-month closure could wipe out 31% of non-grocer retailers. A four-month closure could force 65% to close.

The plunge in retail spending is a key reason why the U.S. economy is contracting. Purchases at retailers are a major component of overall consumer spending, which fuels about 70% of economic growth.

With few Americans shopping, traveling, eating out or otherwise spending normally, economists are projecting that the gross domestic product — the broadest gauge of economic activity — is shrinking in the April-June quarter at a roughly 40% annual rate. That would be the deepest quarterly drop on record.

Spending tracked by Opportunity Insights suggests that consumer spending might have bottomed out around mid-April before beginning to tick up slightly, at least in the clothing and general merchandise categories. But spending on transportation, restaurants, hotels and arts and entertainment remains severely depressed.

Credit card purchases tracked by JPMorgan Chase found that spending on such necessities as groceries, fuel, phone service and auto repair declined 20% on a year-over-year basis. By contrast, spending on “non-essentials,” such as meals out, airfare and personal services like salons or yoga classes, plummeted by a much worse 50%.

A fever is 100.4 in Ohio; it’s 99.5 in Minnesota: States, companies write their own rules for temperature screening

COVID-19 screening guidelines in Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania suggest that workers with temperatures of at least 100.4 degrees should be sent home because they could be infected with the novel coronavirus.

But the cutoff is 100 degrees in Texas. And even lower in Minnesota and Delaware: 99.5 degrees.

Some states don’t suggest temperature screenings at all.

As states slowly start to reopen after weeks of coronavirus shutdowns, companies and workers face a patchwork of safety guidelines about what temperature should be a COVID-19 warning sign.

Without a national screening strategy, states and businesses are creating their own guidelines and establishing informal disease-surveillance systems with different detection levels, potentially creating confusion about what is a safe temperature.

At Walmart, a temperature above 100 degrees is enough for a worker to be sent home. At Amazon, it’s 100.4.

“Where do you set the bar? Well, what is your threshold for risk?” said Steven Lawrence, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “I think it would make it easier if there was one standard temperature we were using.”

Fever is one of several symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, along with a list that includes shortness of breath, coughing, loss of taste and smell, sore throat and headache.

But fever is the one symptom that can be measured and checked externally – an especially important distinction given the scarcity of rapid diagnostic testing.

Read the full story.

Colorado’s new tourism campaign asks visitors to stay home

Colorado’s tourism bureau has launched a new campaign encouraging people to explore the state’s natural wonders — later.

The “Waiting to CO” campaign aims to keep the state “top of mind as a beloved vacation destination” while also encouraging would-be visitors to stay home, Cathy Ritter, the head of the Colorado Tourism Office, said in a news release. While Colorado has begun easing coronavirus-related restrictions and has permitted some state park campgrounds to reopen, the state has yet to say when tourism can resume.

In the meantime, tourism officials are encouraging people to listen to a Colorado-themed playlist, plan a future vacation, and post pictures of themselves trying out their favorite Colorado activities (like kayaking or roasting marshmallows) at home. The “Waiting to CO” campaign is intended to be a “grass roots promotion” and will not involve any paid advertisement, the news release said.

Tourism has typically been a major economic driver for Colorado, contributing roughly $1.3 billion in tax revenue in 2018. But fears that out-of-state visitors could spread the coronavirus prompted Gov. Jared Polis to shut down the state’s ski resorts in March. Some mountain communities went even further by banning non-locals from driving on their roads or ordering people who had fled to their ski houses to leave.

Many of those orders were later softened amid legal pressure, but restrictions on travel and nonessential businesses remain in place.

Baltic nations reopen borders to each other

VILNIUS, Lithuania — The prime ministers of the three Baltic nations said the first coronavirus wave is under control in their region. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania formally removed travel restrictions between them Friday.

“We are the first in the European Union to open our borders to each other’s’ citizens,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis said. “But we remain cautious and responsible and are protecting the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian space.”

In a joint video, Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins called it “a very important day” while his Estonian counterpart Juri Ratas said it was “another step toward our normal life.”

They spoke hours before the three former Soviet republics’ foreign minister gathered in the Latvian capital of Riga to sign a document, formally reopening the borders between the three EU members which are home to around six million inhabitants.

Baltic citizens and residents have been able to move freely between the three EU nations since Thursday midnight. People returning from countries outside the region will still be required to self-isolate for two weeks.

Britain’s nursing home toll

LONDON — Official British statistics show that more than 12,000 residents of nursing homes have died with confirmed or suspected COVID-19.

The Office for National Statistics says 12,526 care home residents in England and Wales died with confirmed or suspected coronavirus infections between the start of the outbreak and May 1. That’s 27% of the 45,899 total deaths of care-home residents during the period.

Britain has struggled to get a full picture of the scale of the epidemic in nursing homes. At first, the government recorded only COVID-19 deaths that occurred in hospitals, though that has now changed.

The country’s official death toll stands at 33,614, the highest number of coronavirus deaths in Europe.

Rohingya refugee camps have first coronavirus case

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Authorities have reported the first coronavirus case in the crowded camps for Rohingya refugees in southern Bangladesh, where more than 1 million people are sheltered.

The person from the Rohingya community and a local person who lives in the Cox’s Bazar district who also tested positive have been isolated, Mahbub Alam Talukder, the country’s refugee commissioner, said Thursday.

Teams have been activated for treatment of the patients as well as tracing people they might have encountered and quarantining and testing of those contacts, Louise Donovan, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, told The Associated Press.

Aid workers have been warning of the potential for a serious outbreak if the virus reached the camps. The dense crowding with plastic shacks standing side by side housing up to 12 residents each mean the refugees would be dangerously exposed to the virus.

WHO’s Europe office says ‘there is no return to normal’

PARIS — The head of WHO’s Europe office, Dr. Hans Kluge, says the future of the pandemic will depend on everyone’s actions.

“It’s very important to remind everyone that as long as there is no vaccine and effective treatment, there is no return to normal,” he said on French radio Europe-1 on Friday. “This virus won’t simply disappear, so the personal behavior of each of us will determine the behavior of the virus.”

“Governments have done a lot (to limit the virus), and now the responsibility is on the people,” he added. “Before we said that public health is important for the economy. Now we have seen that without health there is no economy, there is no national security.”

American pilot arrested for breaking quarantine

SINGAPORE — An American cargo pilot who admitted to “poor judgment” in breaking a quarantine order to buy medical supplies became the first foreigner imprisoned in Singapore for breaching its restrictions meant to curb the coronavirus.

Lawyer Ronnie Tan said FedEx pilot Brian Dugan Yeargan was sentenced to four weeks after he pleaded guilty to leaving his hotel room for three hours to buy masks and a thermometer.

Singapore has the largest outbreak in Southeast Asia with 26,000 cases. More than 90% of those infected are foreign workers living in crowded dormitories, while the government recently began easing restrictions for the local population.

The tiny city-state has strict penalties for those who breach quarantine rules. The lawyer said Friday he would apply for the sentence to be shortened for good behavior.

 

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