After six months of complete disaster in the United States, President Donald Trump announced that he was finally beginning to develop a strategy.
“We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful," Trump announced at his first coronavirus task force briefing that didn't have any members of the coronavirus task force in attendance.
He went on to confess that things are going to get worse before they get better, the first time he has made such a comment.
There are questions as to why Trump's White House has waited so long to develop a strategy responding to the pandemic, but until recently, the president claimed that the virus was going to disappear.
A member of the military is calling those complaining about wearing a mask a "beta b*tch," noting that as a soldier he's required to wear far worse.
The cloth balaclavas, he explains, are terrible and a soldier must pull them away from their face to be understood when speaking.
"Don't even get me started on this ball of fun," he says sarcastically, pointing to a photo wearing a plastic gas mask.
"You're gonna be fine," he goes on. "Stop being a little beta b*tch. And to you other geniuses who are like, 'This is America! I have the freedom not to wear a mask!' Call it dress code, Kevin!"
President Donald Trump bragged about taking a cognitive test that he said the doctors were "surprised" that he passed. The reality, however, is that the "test" was hardly a representation of what people with suspected dementia or Alzheimer's disease take. Trump's father had Alzheimer's, though studies have shown that if your mother has the disease you are more likely to develop it than if your father suffered from it.
Fox News host Chris Wallace questioned Trump on the test, saying that one question even asked him to identify an elephant, which Trump didn't contradict. That's not a dementia test.
"It is a 10-minute screening exam meant to highlight possible problems with thinking and memory," said the Times.
“The way our president is having a conversation about mental health is not helpful,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, who serves as a dementia researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
This reporter endured the early stages of Alzheimer's disease with her grandfather, including the testing stage, which required a full day of cognitive tests that went far beyond looking at a picture of an elephant. The test lists a number of things for the patient to remember and then asks other questions before returning to the things they were supposed to remember. It aims to test the short-term memory, which often fails first in dementia.
“You would think [Trump] would understand clearly what the test result was and why the test was done,” Dr. Karlawish said, “and not turn it into a competition about mental health.”
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MOCA, has about 30 questions that the Times says is "meant to briefly assess memory."
"To test memory, for example, the examiner reads five words at a rate of one per second and asks the subject to repeat them immediately and then again after some time has passed," the report described. "To assess attention and concentration, subjects are read a list of five digits and asked to repeat them in the order they were provided and then in reverse order. The subjects also are asked to count backward from 100 in increments of 7."
People are then asked to draw a clock showing 11:10. The top score is 30 and normal is considered 26 to 30. Trump didn't reveal what his score was.
Most doctors don't like such tests, said the Times, because they're nothing like a cancer screening or an X-Ray. They're only part of the equation in mental functioning, where more extensive examinations are necessary as well as interviews with loved ones who can relay what they have observed over time. In the case of this reporter's grandfather, our family was asked about observations of forgetfulness, inability to follow conversations, driving problems, diet, as well as family history. There was also an MRI done to observe the status of the brain. In cases of Alzheimer's and forms of dementia, gaps form between the folds in the brain as it is almost eaten away. A PET scan can also measure brain cell activity using glucose rates.
Trump getting a "perfect score" on the test isn't exactly reassuring as the test is so easy that only an advanced case of dementia would be discovered. The questions about Trump are about the early stages of dementia, which may not be caught by that test until it's too late for America. "Usually it’s the trend over time that suggests a problem," the report also said.
"It’s also important for the physician to talk to someone who knows the patient well, because people who are slipping cognitively do not always recognize it," the Times explained.
“Lack of awareness or insight can be part of the package” of dementia, the Times quoted Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic.
Trump has challenged Biden to a test, which he seems to think was enough of a challenge that Biden wouldn't pass. It's clear that Biden's cognitive ability is far beyond Trump's, simply by remembering things Trump struggles to. While people have questioned Trump's ability to walk down a ramp or stairs and drink water with one hand, there's much more to it.
An experimental vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University against the new coronavirus produced an immune response in early-stage clinical trials, data showed on Monday, preserving hopes it could be in use by the end of the year.
The vaccine, called AZD1222, has been described by the World Health Organization's chief scientist as the leading candidate in a global race to halt a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 people.
More than 150 possible vaccines are in various stages of development, and U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and China's CanSino Biologics also reported positive responses for their candidates on Monday.
The vaccine from AstraZeneca and Britain's University of Oxford prompted no serious side effects and elicited antibody and T-cell immune responses, according to trial results published in The Lancet medical journal, with the strongest response seen in people who received two doses.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government has helped fund the project, hailed the results as "very positive news" though the researchers cautioned the project was still at an early stage.
"There is still much work to be done before we can confirm if our vaccine will help manage the COVID-19 pandemic," vaccine developer Sarah Gilbert said. "We still do not know how strong an immune response we need to provoke to effectively protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection."
AstraZeneca shares surged 10%, but then gave up most of those gains, to close up 1.45% on the day.
AstraZeneca has signed agreements with governments around the world to supply the vaccine should it prove effective and gain regulatory approval. It has said it will not seek to profit from the vaccine during the pandemic.
AZD1222 was developed by Oxford and licensed to AstraZeneca, which has put it into large-scale, late-stage trials to test its efficacy. It has signed deals to produce and supply over 2 billion doses of the shot, with 300 million doses earmarked for the United States.
Pascal Soriot, Chief Executive of AstraZeneca, said the company was on track to be producing doses by September, but that hopes that it will be available this year hinged on how quickly late-stage trials could be completed, given the dwindling prevalence of the virus in Britain.
Late-stage trials are under way in Brazil and South Africa and are due to start in the United States, where prevalence is higher.
Targeting two doses
The trial results showed a stronger immune response in 10 people given an extra dose of the vaccine after 28 days, echoing a trial in pigs.
Oxford's Gilbert said the early-stage trial could not determine whether one or two doses would be needed to provide immunity.
"It may be that we don't need two doses, but we want to know what we can achieve," she told reporters.
AstraZeneca's biopharma chief, Mene Pangalos, said the firm was leaning towards a two-dose strategy for later-stage trials, and did not want to risk a single or lower dose that might not work.
The antibody levels generated were "in the region" of those seen in convalescent patients, he said.
The trial included 1,077 healthy adults aged 18-55 years with no history of COVID-19. Researchers said the vaccine caused minor side effects more frequently than a control group, but some of these could be reduced by taking the painkiller paracetamol, which is also known as acetaminophen.
Astrophysicists on Monday published the largest-ever 3D map of the Universe, the result of an analysis of more than four million galaxies and ultra-bright, energy-packed quasars.
The efforts of hundreds of scientists from around 30 institutions worldwide have yielded a "complete story of the expansion of the universe", said Will Percival of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
In the project launched more than two decades ago, the researchers made "the most accurate expansion history measurements over the widest-ever range of cosmic time", he said in a statement.
The map relies on the latest observations of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), titled the "extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey" (eBOSS), with data collected from an optical telescope in New Mexico over six years.
The infant Universe following the Big Bang is relatively well known through extensive theoretical models and observation of cosmic microwave background -- the electromagnetic radiation of the nascent cosmos.
Studies of galaxies and distance measurements also contributed to a better understanding of the Universe's expansion over billions of years.
'Troublesome gap'
But Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, who unveiled the map on Monday, said the researchers tackled a "troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years".
Through "five years of continuous observations, we have worked to fill in that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most substantial advances in cosmology in the last decade," he said.
Astrophysicist Jean-Paul Kneib of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, who initiated eBOSS in 2012, said the goal was to produce "the most complete 3D map of the Universe throughout the lifetime of the Universe".
For the first time, the researchers drew on "celestial objects that indicate the distribution of matter in the distant Universe, galaxies that actively form stars and quasars".
The map shows filaments of matter and voids that more precisely define the structure of the Universe since its beginnings, when it was only 380,000 years old.
For the part of the map relating to the Universe six billion years ago, researchers observed the oldest and reddest galaxies.
For more distant eras, they concentrated on the youngest galaxies -- the blue ones. To go back even further, they used quasars, galaxies whose supermassive black hole is extremely luminous.
The map reveals that the expansion of the Universe began to accelerate at some point and has since continued to do so.
The researchers said this seems to be due to the presence of dark energy, an invisible element that fits into Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity but whose origin is not yet understood.
Astrophysicists have known for years that the Universe is expanding, but have been unable to measure the rate of expansion with precision.
Comparisons of the eBOSS observations with previous studies of the early universe have revealed discrepancies in estimates of the rate of expansion.
The currently accepted rate, called the "Hubble constant", is 10 percent slower than the value calculated from the distances between the galaxies closest to us.
HBO host John Oliver went after stupid Republicans who have decided that children should go back to school even if they, their families, or their teachers and other faculty will die.
In a press conference last week, Vice President Mike Pence encouraged schools to ignore the Center for Disease Control rules about safety to reopen schools anyway.
"Mike Pence doesn't think CDC guidelines should impede schools opening?" asked Oliver. "Then what exactly are they for? These are public health guidelines they shouldn't be skimmed through and deemed ultimately inconsequential to our current situation. They aren't Mary Trump's book."
Meanwhile, economic adviser Larry Kudlow doesn't care and said people should just go back to school anyway.
"Just go back to school," he told the press last week. "You know, you can social distance, you can get your temperature taken, you can be tested, you can have distancing. Come on. It's not that hard."
It's unclear how many 6-year-olds Kudlow has tried to get to wear masks for more than an hour, but he clearly thinks he's an expert in education and the coronavirus.
"OK, real quick," Oliver began his rebuttal. "F*ck you, Larry Kudlow. You human-cufflink. You can't tell people to 'just go back to school' without answering questions about how that can happen safely. In fact, the only question that Kudlow is answering effectively there is what it would look like if someone made Rudy Giuliani 0.0001 percent hotter."
Safely reopening isn't going to be easy, Oliver explained because schools aren't set up to be socially distant, and children arguably aren't able to wear masks for eight hours a day. Right now, we can't even get adults to wear masks for a quick trip to Walmart without them throwing a tantrum in the store.
Oliver pointed out that at least one-third of K-12 teachers are over the age of 50, meaning they're at greater risk for dying of COVID-19 when they likely will get it. As a result, some teachers are preparing their Will and other estate planning documents assuming that they'll get the virus at work and die.
Then there is Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who said all of the European countries are able to reopen; therefore, the U.S. should too. The difference obviously from the U.S. and European countries is that we haven't gotten our virus under control. He does make a good point, Oliver said, an internet school is a poor option, particularly for children who don't have internet access or who don't have a computer. There are also children who need schools to get a healthy meal each day.
Finally, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) earned Oliver's greatest attack after saying that schools should open because grocery stores were deemed essential.
"He's actually right there," Oliver said. "We have prioritized things like reopening bars and restaurants ahead of our children, and many advised that we go a lot slower. While, fortunately, the Ron DeSanti of the world ignored that advice and was like, 'Go enjoy. Have a drink. It's fine.' And it's almost impressive to watch a sitting governor make the argument, 'we were really dumb there. But the only fair thing is to also be really dumb now.'"
President Donald Trump made a series of inaccurate claims during his Fox News interview with Chris Wallace on Sunday. At one point, Trump demanded his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany hand him proof that he is right about the U.S. having the lowest mortality rate in the world, which isn't accurate. It begs the question of whether Trump is being lied to by his advisers or if he's lying to the American people.
Either way, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief division of infectious diseases, Massachusetts General Hospital, explained that there are several different measures of "mortality" in the coronavirus, but by no measure is the United States the best in the list.
"You can measure given a patient had the disease, what's the chance they would have passed?" Dr. Walensky said. "The United States ranks about seventh there, 3 percent of people with the disease in the United States have passed away from COVID-19. Another way to look at it, what is the number of people per 100,000 [who] passed in the United States compared to other countries. Unfortunately, on that metric we rank third behind the U.K. and Mexico, 65 per 100,000 in the U.K., 45 in Mexico and 42 in the United States. The tragic thing is our numbers are rising because our cases are going up exponentially, in comparison to the U.K., where the cases are low and flat. Unfortunately, I think we're going to surpass the U.K. in the number of deaths per 100,000 in the United States."
CNN host Wolf Blitzer compared the U.S. to South Korea, which has millions of people but still has under 300 deaths from COVID-19.
"We know there's a lag between tests going up and mortality rate following," Blitzer continued. "Is it fair to grade the U.S. handling of the coronavirus on the mortality rate when we've also heard so many reports of lasting and debilitating symptoms from the virus. Even a lot of people who don't die are ill for months and months and may have long-term ramifications down the road?"
Dr. Jeremy Faust, a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, agreed with Blitzer.
"That is absolutely right, Wolf, and I don't think our report card is good on any particular metric," said Dr. Faust. "The mortality rate, we ought to be first, we are the country that led the way on some vaccines, has done better than anyone else on cancer. We ought to be first, but in this particular crisis, we're not first on anything, mortality rate, testing, capacity. We ought to be disturbed by that fact and start to own up to it. The world is not looking to us right now for leadership, and usually, they do on issues when it comes to medical science. There are a lot of ways to look at this and a lot of ways we have room for improvement."
Trump also said that doctors were wrong when they predicted that the virus would dissipate in the summer.
Dr. Walensky said that this was a nuanced two-fold explanation. First, most respiratory diseases do disappear in the summer, but COVID-19 isn't just any respiratory disease. Secondly, she said that many scientists assumed that people would follow medical recommendations, shelter in place, wear masks, and stay socially distant. That didn't happen, and the results have been an increase in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Hong Kong's leader said Sunday that coronavirus was spreading out of control in the city as she announced a record daily high of more than 100 cases and ordered new social distancing measures.
The finance hub was one of the first places to be struck by the virus when it emerged from central China.
But the city had impressive success in tackling the disease, all but ending local transmissions by late June.
However, in the last two weeks, cases have begun to spike once more and doctors fear it is spreading undetected in the densely packed territory of 7.5 million people.
On Sunday, chief executive Carrie Lam said more than 500 infections had been confirmed in the last fortnight, bringing the city's total tally to 1,788 cases with 12 fatalities.
More than 100 were confirmed on Sunday alone, a record daily high for the finance hub.
"I think the situation is really critical and there is no sign the situation is being brought under control," chief executive Carrie Lam told reporters.
Lam announced new social distancing measures last week, shuttering many businesses including bars, gyms and nightclubs, and ordering everyone to wear masks on public transport.
Restaurants were ordered to only offer takeout services in the evenings.
On Sunday, Lam announced new measures including plans to make it compulsory to wear masks inside any public indoor venue -- and a new order for non-essential civil servants to work for home.
As hospital wards fill up, officials are also scrambling to build a further 2,000 isolation rooms on barren land near the city's Disneyland resort to monitor and treat those who test positive, she added.
Hong Kong was already mired in recession when the pandemic hit thanks to the US-China trade war and months of political unrest last year.
The new partial lockdown has compounded the economic misery.
On Sunday, Lam called for landlords to look at lowering rents.
She said further social distancing measures would be rolled out if the daily infection rate did not ease in coming days.
The two US astronauts who reached the International Space Station (ISS) on board the first crewed US spacecraft in nearly a decade will leave for Earth on August 1, NASA's chief said Friday.
"Splashdown is targeted for Aug. 2. Weather will drive the actual date. Stay tuned," tweeted the US space agency's administrator Jim Bridenstine.
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took off from Florida aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule on May 30, becoming the first astronauts to hitch a ride to the ISS on board a commercial spaceship, which is under contract with NASA.
It was the first time a crewed spaceship was launched from the United States since 2011 when the space shuttle program was ended.
Between then and this mission, American astronauts traveled exclusively on Russian rockets.
Eventually, Dragon will regularly bring four astronauts to the ISS at a time, from NASA and partner space agencies in Canada, Japan, Europe and potentially Russia.
This will be the first time the SpaceX capsule will make the journey to Earth with astronauts, having successfully completed an uncrewed test run last year.
It will splash down in the Atlantic, like the Apollo capsules did in the 1960s and 1970s.
Clots obstruct blood vessels and can be deadly. They cause heart attack, stroke and are also a major problem in severe cases of COVID-19 patients. Treating clots with available drugs, however, can cause blood vessel leaking and bleeding, which can also be deadly in some circumstances.
As a scientist studying the biology of blood cells and vessels, I am particularly interested in understanding how platelets – a kind of blood cell important in clotting – participate in the formation of clots to stop bleeding or obstructing blood vessels. Our results are published in Science Translational Medicine and show how this drug can effectively treats heart attack in mice.
Heart attack can cause heart failure and death in two different ways. First, the clots block the blood flow to the heart and cause a lack of oxygen, resulting in damage to the heart muscles. This is called ischemic injury.
This is typically treated by a procedure called angioplasty, which reopens the clogged blood vessel; and a stent, which prevents the reopened artery from collapsing. The patient is also given anti-platelet drugs to prevent the artery from clotting again.
However, fresh blood flowing into the damaged heart tissue following successful treatment can trigger inflammation, which happens when white blood cells attack the damaged heart tissues, and cause leaks and clots in small blood vessels in the heart, resulting in further damage. This is so-called reperfusion injury, which can increase the chance of heart failure and can be deadly.
A new anti-platelet drug
Current anti-platelet medications, such as Plavix, prevent blood clotting that cause heart attack and stroke but also disrupt platelets’ ability to stop bleeding if a blood vessel becomes leaky. The current drugs have only mild effects in preventing inflammation.
Anti-platelet drugs have been successfully used to prevent thrombosis, or ‘clotting,’ but they cause blood vessels to leak and bleed, which can make inflammation worse. A new anti-platelet drug address all three conditions.
This new drug prevents clots but allows platelets to patch the wound, which all other available anti-platelet drugs have failed to do. This is potentially ideal for patients who need to be treated for clotting, but also need surgery or have leaky blood vessels.
The invention of this new drug is based on our previous discovery that a protein responsible for platelets to stick to the blood vessel wall to patch the wound can also bind to another protein inside a platelet to send a signal that triggers the formation of a much larger, tougher and more dangerous clot. When our team interferes with the binding of these two proteins, the formation of vessel-obstructing clots is prevented, but the ability of platelets to stick to the vessel wall to stop bleeding is preserved.
We designed a peptide, which is a small fragment of a protein, and packed it into tiny nano-particles that enter the platelets and block the signal. This new drug candidate can prevent the formation of blood vessel-obstructing clots without causing blood vessel leaking and bleeding.
Testing impact of new drug on a heart attack
Because the new anti-platelet drug we are developing does not cause blood vessel leaks, I and my colleagues were hopeful that this new drug would help limit reperfusion injury and reduce the chance of heart failure and deaths.
We tested our hypothesis in mice. After obstructing the mouse coronary artery to cause a heart attack, a researcher injected our new drug before reopening the artery to mimic treatment in humans.
Mice that did not receive the drug had clots in the small vessels and inflammation in the heart. These mice had severe damage to their heart muscles which reduced the ability of the heart to pump blood. Also, most of these mice died in a week. The new drug treatment inhibited clotting, reduced inflammation, reduced damage to the heart and improved the ability of their hearts to pump blood. And, most of the mice survived.
At this time, the new drug has not been tested in humans and is formulated to be injected into veins for it to work, which limits its use outside hospitals. Hopefully, pills for daily use can be developed in the future if trials in humans are successful.
It is very exciting for me to see such promising results in the lab, and we are now performing further preclinical work in order to bring this new drug to the clinical trials for treating heart attack in humans.
This new drug should have therapeutic potential not only for treating heart attack. But I hope that it is also effective for other clotting-induced disease conditions such as stroke. In the brain, both clotting and bleeding can cause stroke, and both are life-threatening. Thus, an anti-platelet drug that does not cause bleeding is a lot safer.
In addition, this type of drug may theoretically also have potential for treating severe cases of COVID-19, in which patients suffer from severe oxygen deprivation, inflammation, blood vessel leak and clotting.
When health experts warn about the possibility of the United States suffering a “double whammy” with coronavirus, they are likely referring to two COVID-19 waves: the first wave (which has recently taken a turn for the worse in many Sun Belt states) followed by a possible second wave later this year in the fall and the winter. That’s how the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919 behaved: it was brutal during the spring but even more brutal when a second wave killed millions in the fall and the winter. But in a July 15 article for The Atlantic, journalist Ed Yong describes a different type of double whammy scenario: one in which the U.S. continues to be battered by COVID-19 while a separate coronavirus emerges and inflicts widespread misery.
“I first worried about the possibility of a double pandemic in March,” Yong writes. “Four months ago, it felt needlessly alarmist to fret about two rare events happening simultaneously. But since then, federal fecklessness and rushed reopenings have wasted the benefits of months of social distancing. About 60,000 new cases of COVID-19 are being confirmed every day, and death rates are rising. My worry from March feels less far-fetched. If America could underperform so badly against one rapidly spreading virus, how would it fare against two?”
When reporters speak of “the coronavirus pandemic,” they are specifically referring to the COVID-19 pandemic — which, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had killed more than 579,500 people worldwide (including over 136,400 in the U.S.) as of early Wednesday morning, July 15. But as Yong explains in his article, COVID-19 is only one of the many coronavirus diseases that has existed. SARS and MERS were among the coronaviruses that killed people well before COVID-19.
“Many countries are on high alert for such viruses, primed by their COVID-19 ordeal in the same way that East Asian countries were primed at the start of this pandemic by their previous run-ins with SARS and MERS,” Yong observes. “But waning global solidarity is a problem…. Having failed to lead the best-prepared nation in the world against one pandemic, Donald Trump has made it more vulnerable to another. He has, for example, frayed international bonds further by trying to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization.”
Yong asserts that if a new coronavirus separate from COVID-19 “begins to spread,” there is “an optimistic scenario” in which “the new pathogen finds it harder to move around an alert world, is rapidly detected wherever it arrives, and fizzles out because cautious citizens have their guard up.” But such an “optimistic scenario,” Yong stresses, would require strong international cooperation. And Yong notes that a “second” coronavirus pandemic — one involving a disease other than COVID-19 — “would further tax the same resources that the U.S. has already failed to adequately marshal for COVID-19. Hospitals would also struggle. In many states, emergency rooms and intensive-care units are filling up. A second virus wouldn’t need to be that severe to push them beyond their capacity, deplete the shrinking supply of protective equipment, or create a logistical nightmare.”
Long before COVID-19 emerged in China in late 2019, Dr. Anthony Fauci (who is part of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force) warned that a deadly pandemic could inflict misery around the world. And some politicians encouraged pandemic preparedness, including former Vice President Joe Biden — who, on October 25, 2019, warned, “We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security.”
Lauren Sauer, who specializes in disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins, told The Atlantic, “All the resources we would normally use to detect potential viruses of concern have been redirected for COVID-19….. Say we had pandemic flu and COVID at the same time. You have two groups of people who need to be sorted and separated.”
According to Sauer, “All the people with preparedness jobs have turned into COVID responders. Things are getting dropped.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) this week defended the federal government's top infectious disease expert after President Donald Trump and the White House put out statements defaming him.
The Republican senator praised Fauci as "one of the smartest people I know."
"Has he been right all the time? No," Graham said. "We don't have a Dr. Fauci problem. We need to be focusing on doing things to get us where we need to go. So, I have all the respect in the world for Dr. Fauci."
Graham added: "I think any effort to undermine him is not going to be productive, quite frankly."
In the millions of tiny air sacs tasked with absorbing oxygen in Brett Breslow’s lungs, the scene was chaos.Some of the sacs were swollen with fluid that had leaked from surrounding blood vessels. Others had simply collapsed. The grim result: the Cherry Hill man was starved of oxygen, leading doctors at Cooper University Hospital to put him on a ventilator for 19 days.Breslow was suffering from a massive bout of inflammation — a catch-all description for the damage in many of the sickest patients with COVID-19. In addition to the assault on his lungs, the disease was harming his liver and kidn...
