Glenn gives the latest coronavirus numbers, updating YOU on everything needed to know as Americans and officials monitor China's new COVID-19 virus:
Daily Stats as of 5:30 AM CT (from John's Hopkins)
- Total Confirmed Cases Worldwide: 2,498,474 (up from 2,418,980 Yesterday)
- Total Confirmed Deaths Worldwide: 171,332 (up from 2,197,161 Yesterday)
- Total Confirmed Recovered Worldwide: 657,808 (up from 633,376 Yesterday)
- The US has 792,938 Confirmed Cases and 42,518 Deaths, up from 746,265 cases and 40,766 deaths yesterday
- The US currently has 13,951 people in Serious or Critical Condition, up from 13,336 yesterday
- The US has now tested 4,027,367 people but still lags behind 36 other countries in terms of testing per capita. US has done less testing per capita than Estonia, Slovenia, Ireland, Aruba and Venezuela...
- The National Guard has been deployed to two meat processing plants in Iowa.
- After the Smithfield Meats plant was closed in North Dakota last week, workers from Smithfield were apparently hired by JBS National Beef Packing Inc.
- Tyson Foods also had an outbreak and is closing one of its Iowa-based meat processing plants.
- The National Guard is expected to help with testing and medical care of workers in an attempt to try to get the food processing plants back online more quickly.
- Iowa meatpackers produce about 1/3 of the nation's Pork and 15% of all Beef.
- With the processing plants offline, many Hog farmers may be forced to euthanize hogs. https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/pork-producers-could-kill-hogs-to-offset-losses-from-coronavirus/
- Even if the FDA buys hogs from farmers, without production plants to slaughter and process the meat, animals would have to be euthanized.
- In February, Russia broke with OPEC+ and increased oil production by over 20%, just as demand for oil/gas dropped of a cliff due to COVID-19.
- Saudi Arabia followed suit and also increased production in an effort to prevent Russia from capturing market share.
- The Price War resulted in a massive oversupply of oil, even as demand for oil and fuel dropped by over 35% globally.
- President Trump had negotiated a production decrease of 9 Million Barrels per day between Russia and OPEC+, but that production cut doesn't go into effect until May.
- In the interim, there is no place to store the excess oil already in the system, so the May futures contracts, for 1000 barrels of oil each, dropped to negative $41/barrel yesterday in intraday trading. Those contracts 'expire' today, meaning the holder of the contract is forced to either take delivery or pay someone else to take/store the oil.
- The May futures contract had been trading at $64/barrel as recently as late January.
- June WTI futures are still trading near $20/barrel, down from $68 in January.
- US President Donald Trump said he will temporarily suspend all immigration to the United States because of the coronavirus outbreak
- Trump referred to the "Invisible Enemy" in a late-night tweet on Monday, a phrase he has used to describe the virus that has killed more than 42,000 people out of more than 787,370 confirmed infections in the US
- He said the move would protect Americans' jobs after almost 22 million people in the US were put out of work.
- "In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!" Trump tweeted, without providing details.
- Details are said to be forthcoming, but no word yet on whether H2-A Agricultural Worker visas would be exempt from the immigration ban. About 55% of ag and food production workers in the US come from Mexico on H2-A visas.
- Industry analysts have warned of potential production disruptions if the more than 2 Million H2-A visas aren't exempted.
- A new study by one of China's top scientists has found the ability of the new coronavirus to mutate has been vastly underestimated and different strains may account for different impacts of the disease in various parts of the world.
- Professor Li Lanjuan and her colleagues from Zhejiang University found within a small pool of patients many mutations not previously reported. These mutations included changes so rare that scientists had never considered they might occur.
- They also confirmed for the first time with laboratory evidence that certain mutations could create strains deadlier than others.
- "Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity," Li and her collaborators wrote in a non-peer reviewed paper released on preprint service medRxiv.org on Sunday.
- The study provided the first hard evidence that mutation could affect how severely the virus caused disease or damage in its host.
- The most aggressive strains of Sars-COV-2 could generate 270 times as much viral load as the least potent type, the study indicated.
- New York may have a deadlier strain imported from Europe, compared to less deadly viruses elsewhere in the United States.
- The various strains may help explain why some outbreak regions are so much worse than others, and may also make vaccine production much more complex, the research study concluded.
- A 96-year-old Texas woman died from coronavirus last week, more than a century after her older sister died from the Spanish Flu, according to an obituary and media reports.
- Selma Esther Ryan has lived at an Austin assisted living center for the past three years after previously living in San Antonio.
- Her daughter, Vicki Spencer, said she got a call April 3 that her mother was sick along with four other residents at the center.
- "Over the next five days I watched through the window as she got sicker and sicker," Spencer said. "It was so hard to not be with her. Her 96th birthday was April 11. Our family gathered outside her window, but it was obvious that something terrible had happened to her."
- Her death April 14 came 102 years after her older sister, 5-year-old Esther, died from the Spanish Flu, Selma's obituary states. Esther is one of at least 50 million people who died during the 1918 pandemic.
- Businesses including Salons, Gyms, Spas, Movie Theaters, Restaurants - including limited dine-in services, and tattoo parlors are among those businesses that will be allowed to reopen.
- Customers and business owners will still be expected to follow social distancing and hygiene guidelines, including maintaining 6 feet of separation.
- Businesses will also be required to provide hand sanitizer or hand-washing stations for customers, as well as to frequency disinfect surfaces that may be touched by customers.
- It is unclear how hygiene and disinfection guidelines will be observed and enforced, if at all.
- Tennessee also expected to relax business closures by next week.
- COVID-19 attacks the body at all locations that have high ACE-2 cell protein types.
- ACE-2 cells are found in the lungs and respiratory tract but also found in the Kidneys, Liver, Heart, Gut, Testicles and Brain.
- COVID-19 appears to prevent blood flow to vital organs by damaging the mico-blood-vessels that feed oxygenated blood to these organs.
- The study, from the Journal Lancet, looked at cell samples from 119 COVID-19 victims who had succumbed to the virus, as part of an expanded autopsy study.
- This virus does not only attack the lungs, it attacks the vessels everywhere," said Dr Frank Ruschitzka, an author of the paper from University Hospital Zurich.
- He said the researchers had found that the deadly virus caused more than pneumonia.
- "It enters the endothelium [layer of cells], which is the defense line for blood vessels. So it causes severe problems in microcirculation," said Dr Ruschitzka, referring to circulation in the smallest of blood vessels.
- It then reduces the blood flow to different parts of the body and eventually stops blood circulation, according to Dr Ruschitzka, chairman of the heart center and cardiology department at the university hospital in Switzerland.
- "From what we do see clinically, patients have problems in all organs — in the heart, kidney, intestine, everywhere," he said.