Coronavirus Watch: 'No evidence' of immunity
There is still "no evidence" that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection, the World Health Organization said in a statement.
States are beginning to ramp up antibody testing in an effort to determine how many Americans have really had the virus and whether some can go back to work. But the WHO says the tests "need further validation to determine their accuracy and reliability."
It's Saturday, and this is Coronavirus Watch from the Paste BN Network.
Here's the latest news, as of 12:15 p.m. ET:
- More than 907,000 people have tested positive for the virus in the U.S., and more than 52,000 have died. See a map of confirmed cases here.
- Political protests have continued across the nation – and more are set to take place Saturday – as states begin to announce plans for phased reopenings.
- A number of sailors aboard the USS Kidd, a Navy destroyer off the Pacific coast of Central America, have tested positive for the coronavirus, and the ship was preparing to return to port, the Pentagon said Friday. The outbreak is the second aboard a Navy ship, following the outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
- At least 40 coronavirus cases in Milwaukee appear to be linked to Wisconsin's controversial April 7 election, the city's health commissioner said Friday.
- In rural communities across America, the coronavirus pandemic could trigger a financial cascade that sinks up to a hundred hospitals within the next year.
- The federal Bureau of Prisons, the largest detention system in the country, is expanding testing for asymptomatic prisoners in an attempt to control the spread of the virus that has so far infected nearly 1,000 inmates and staffers and claimed the lives of 24 inmates.
Need a smile today? Watch these coronavirus patients reunite with their families.
Please keep sending us your coronavirus questions through this form! (Trust me, I read them all.) William from St. Petersburg, Florida, asks: Is a virus "alive" in some technical sense?
It's complicated. The National Human Genome Research Institute describes viruses as existing "near the boundary between the living and the nonliving." That's because viruses can't function without interacting with a living cell. On their own, they're also essentially unable to move.
Definitively answering whether a virus is alive may be more of a philosophy question than one strictly for science, virologist Paulo Verardi told Paste BN.
Technically, SARS-CoV-2 particles are spherical bundles of genetic material surrounded by a fatty outer layer with proteins called spikes protruding from the surface. These spikes latch onto human cells in the lungs and other tissues and change the structure of those human cells, allowing the viral genes to enter the host cell to be copied, producing more viruses.
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— Grace Hauck, Breaking News Reporter, @grace_hauck