As lockdowns and business closures across the world now span at least a month, nations are working hard to make sure their coronavirus data is accurate and they have the ability to control the spread as they begin to lift public restrictions. The United Kingdom started expanding their testing program to include the police, fire service, judiciary and others in effort to have a more accurate look at the rate of infections. Health experts around the world continue to encourage nations to expand their testing capabilities before beginning to reopen.
In an effort to maintain an accurate case number, China has revised its official death toll on Friday. The new figures for China totaled 82,692 confirmed cases and 4,632 deaths.
The World Health Organization stated that China has revised its infection total in order to record the most accurate reading possible. "This was done in an attempt to leave no case undocumented," Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, W.H.O.'s lead for COVID-19, stated during the agency's Friday press conference. "They looked at the funeral service systems. They looked at hospitals systems. They looked at laboratories to see if there were any duplications or if there were any cases missing."
W.H.O. stated that other countries will likely need to amend their own coronavirus data in the future in an effort. Without accurate totals for case and death count, scientists will be unable to study the true outbreak and death rate of COVID-19.
Total Global Cases: Over 2.3 Million
Total Deaths: At Least 158,000
Total Recovered: At Least 600,000
Reopen America
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has begun to work with Silicon Vally to develop technology for contact tracing, which is part of the governor's plan to reopen the state. "We're so pleased with the work Mark Zuckerberg [of Facebook (NASDAQ: FB)] is doing to support the open access of appropriate data in an anonymized way, in a individual or personalized way, including Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and others," Newsom stated in an interview with CNBC. "This is really going to help us with the technology platform to help us supplement or support the efforts of individual tracers, an army that we're all starting to build and train..."
As states across the United States begin to draft their own plans for reopening, President Donald Trump echoed some calls for more immediate action. Protests that have already begun in Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota have been encouraged by Trump on Friday, despite participants disobeying the guidelines his administration drafted for the county.
Trump tweeted: "LIBERATE MINNESOTA!"; LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"; and "LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!," in succession on Friday, with many fearing that this could increase COVID-19 cases in these states where infection rates have yet to fall. The call to action can also cause a wave of other demonstrations throughout the country, which could also lead to more infections. The tweets were also in contrast with the White House's plan to reopen America, where the Trump administration called on state governors to make their own individual plans on restarting their economies.
Drug Test
Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) received $483 million in federal funding for its potential coronavirus vaccine currently in development on Friday. The company earned the grant from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, who works under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in hope that they will be able to fast track testing and production for the COVID-19 candidate.
"Time is of the essence to provide a vaccine against this pandemic virus," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel stated in a press release. "By investing now in our manufacturing process scale-up to enable large production for pandemic response, we believe that we would be able to supply millions of doses per month in 2020 and with further investment, tens of millions per month in 2021, if the vaccine candidate is successful in the clinic."
Moderna plans to hire up to 150 new team members in the United States in 2020 in order to scale up its testing and production of a potential COVID-19 cure.
In France, drugmaker Sanofi (NASDAQ: SNY) expects to produce up to 600 million doses of its vaccine candidate in 2021, if its clinical trials go as planned. Sanofi and the pharmaceutical GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK) have entered into an agreement on Tuesday to manufacture a potential COIVD-19 vaccine together. If all goes as planned, the companies predict that they will be able to have a vaccine available to the public by the second half of 2021.