The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus illness COVID-19 world-wide climbed above 38.9 million on Friday, as a clinical trial found one therapy believed to be promising as a treatment to have no effect on mortality in hospitalized patients.
The trial, conducted by the World Health Organization, found that Gilead Sciences Inc.’s GILD,
Results were presented in a preprint, which is medical research that has not been peer-reviewed. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized remdesivir as a COVID-19 treatment, based on a clinical study conducted in the U.S. that found the drug could reduce recovery times.
It had also granted an emergency use authorization to hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment although it was rescinded this summer. The WHO study was first reported by the Financial Times on Thursday.
In a statement shared after the FT story published, Gilead questioned the validity of the trial data, saying it was “concerned that the data from this open-label global trial have not undergone the rigorous review required to allow for constructive scientific discussion, particularly given the limitations of the trial design.”
However, Raymond James analyst say that Gilead’s response is off-base.
“We would hope that Gilead reconsiders its knee-jerk dismissal of the SOLIDARITY study and reassesses the clinical value of remdesivir in the context of these new data,” they told investors in a note.
The news comes as the U.S. counted more than 63,000 infections on Thursday, breaching 60,000 for the first time since early August, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.
New cases are rising at the fastest clip in the Midwest, with more than a half dozen states, including Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, reporting record one-day totals.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers asked residents on Twitter to “put science and public health before politics,” urging them to wear face masks and limit outings.
He also cited a White House report on Wisconsin from Oct. 11, that says: “Lack of compliance with these measures will lead to preventable deaths.”
Wisconsin Department of Health Services secretary-designee Andrea Palm said at a briefing that hospitals in some parts of the state are already at 90% capacity.
Forty-four states and the District of Columbia currently have higher caseloads than in mid-September, the Washington Post reported, as the virus moves across rural areas.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated advice for the coming holidays and said Americans should consider the number and rate of COVID-19 cases in their community, should consider whether others are socially distancing and wearing face masks and consider the location people are coming from when making plans for gatherings.
See also: When will the COVD-19 pandemic end? History offers a sobering message
In other news:
• A Berlin court suspended a planned curfew on bars and restaurants in the German capital, that aimed to stem a surge in COVID-19 cases, Reuters reported. Berlin’s local government announced last week that it would impose a nighttime curfew from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. “The curfew has been suspended for the time being as the court considers it disproportionate in view of other measures taken to fight the pandemic,” a spokesman for the administrative court in Berlin said. The court found no evidence that a curfew would have much impact on bars and restaurants that are complying with mask-wearing and social-distancing rules. Paris and other French cities will be subject to an even more stringent curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. for the next four weeks.
• Switzerland set a record of 3,105 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, hitting record levels for a second straight day, the Guardian reported. The alpine nation and neighboring Liechtenstein now have 74,422 confirmed cases and 1,823 people have died.
• Officials in the Chinese city of Qingdao have tested more than 10 million residents, according to a government notice, the Wall Street Journal reported. The city has counted just 13 local cases since last weekend, which were linked to a local hospital’s CT scanning room, that was used by two port workers who had earlier tested positive. A senior provincial health official said the room wasn’t disinfected properly.
Read now:Northern Italy sees resurgence of COVID-19 infections, with hospitalizations rising
• The coronavirus pandemic was a key theme at dueling town halls on live TV Thursday night featuring President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. Biden, appearing on ABC, kept up his attacks on Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic and his disdain for safety measures such as face masks. “The words of a president matter,” Biden said during the event in Philadelphia that was hosted by ABC News. “When a president doesn’t wear a mask and makes fun of folks like me when I’m wearing a mask for a long time, people say, ‘Well, it must not be that important’.” Trump, appearing on NBC, addressed his experience with COVID, saying his lungs were “a little bit, perhaps, infected,” and that he had “a little bit of a temperature.” But he could not answer for certain whether he took a COVID test on the day of the first debate with Biden, and did not definitively answer whether he would support “herd immunity” as a strategy to fight the disease.
• A growing chorus of critics are taking aim at herd immunity, after the Trump administration promoted a theory based on it on a call with reporters earlier this week, MarketWatch’s Jaimy Lee reported. The White House denies it has considered a herd-immunity strategy. Herd immunity occurs when 50% to 90% of a population becomes immune to a virus. The idea is that once people have been infected, they would then develop protective antibodies as part of their recoveries. The virus would then, in theory, lose mobility, with fewer and fewer hosts available. But with a highly contagious and sometimes fatal virus like SARS-CoV-2, this also means the loss of potentially hundreds of thousands of lives. “Without a vaccine, many people would have to die from COVID-19 before population immunity is achieved,” two professors wrote in an editorial in The Lancet last month.
Latest tallies
The coronavirus has caused the deaths of 1.09 million people world-wide, the Johns Hopkins data show, while that 26.9 million people have recovered since the start of the outbreak.
The U.S. with 4% of the world’s population accounts for 7.9 million confirmed cases out of a global total of 39 million, or about a fifth. The U.S. also leads by deaths with 217,747 Americans lost to the virus.
Brazil has the second highest death toll at 152,460 and is third by cases at 5.2 million. India is second in cases with 7.4 million, and third in deaths at 112,161.
Mexico has the fourth highest death toll at 85,285 and ninth highest case tally at 834,910. The U.K has 43,383 deaths, the highest in Europe and fifth highest in the world, and 676,455 cases.
Read: Second coronavirus wave could delay Europe’s recovery: ECB President Lagarde
China, where the illness was first reported late last year, has had 90,912 cases and 4,739 fatalities, according to its official numbers.
What’s the latest medical news?
The National Institutes of Health is launching a late-stage clinical trial to determine whether three drugs used for controlling immune systems could be used to treat respiratory distress and organ failure in severely ill Covid-19 patients, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The NIH study will evaluate two drugs already on the market, Johnson & Johnson’s JNJ,
The study will evaluate whether any of the medicines, known as immune modulators, can control an overreaction of the patient’s systemic Covid-19 inflammatory response.
Pfizer Inc. PFE,
Pfizer, which is developing its vaccine candidate with Germany-based biotechnology company BioNTech S.E. BNTX,
To do so, the Food and Drug Administration requires two months of safety data on half of the trial participants following the final dose of the vaccine.
“Based on current trail enrollment and dosing pace, we estimate we will reach this milestone in the third week of November,” Bourla wrote in an open letter posted on its website Thursday. He said he wrote the letter to clear up any confusion regarding the development and approval of the vaccine candidate.
What’s the economy saying?
Sales at U.S. retail stores surged in September and rose for the fifth month in a row as Americans bought more clothes, went out to eat and splurged on new cars and trucks, suggesting an economic recovery was still well under way at the start of fall, MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash reported.
Retail sales climbed 1.9% last month, the government said Friday. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 1.2% increase.
Setting aside the large auto segment, retail sales were still quite strong, up 1.5%.
Although retail sales have snapped back quickly to precrisis levels and done so far faster than expected, many economists worry a letdown is coming. People are returning to work at a slower pace, the coronavirus is spreading rapidly again, and Washington has failed to pass a second coronavirus-relief bill, triggering fresh worries about the health of the economy.
“The unexpectedly strong 1.9% rise in retail sales last month suggests the economy was carrying more momentum into the fourth quarter than anticipated,” said U.S. economist Michael Pearce of Capital Economics. “But we are wary of getting too carried away when events in Europe serve as a reminder of how quickly a renewed resurgence in virus cases could take hold, which could yet dampen the recovery in the U.S.”
Separately, industrial production fell for the first time in five months in September, surprising economists who had expected more steady growth from the factory sector, MarketWatch’s Greg Robb reported. Industrial output fell 0.6% in September, the first decline after four straight months of gains, the Federal Reserve reported Friday.
The decline was well below Wall Street expectations of a 0.4% gain, according to a survey by MarketWatch. Output remains 7.1% below its pre-pandemic level.
Finally, Americans grew more worried in early October about a resurgence in the coronavirus and slower hiring, but optimism that the economy will get better next year pushed consumer sentiment to a pandemic high.
The preliminary reading of consumer sentiment index edged up to 81.2 this month from a revised 80.4 in September, the University of Michigan said Friday. That’s the highest level since March, just when the pandemic slammed the U.S.
What are companies saying?
• Amazon.com Inc. AMZN,
• Del Taco Restaurants Inc. TACO,
• Hertz Global Holdings Inc. HTZ,
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. HPE,
• VF Corp. VFC,