August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Ovidiu Dugulan/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed more than 737,000 people worldwide.

Over 20 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some national governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their outbreaks.

Since the first cases were detected in China in December, the United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 5 million diagnosed cases and at least 163,681 deaths.

Here’s how the news is developing today. All times Eastern.

1:10 p.m.: Over 800 students quarantined in Georgia school district

Georgia’s Cherokee County school district has ordered 826 students and 42 teachers to quarantine due to possible exposure in the six days that school has been open, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

Of the more than 42,000 students in the district, about 25% of them chose to do virtual learning, according to the newspaper.

Cherokee district staff must wear masks but students do not, the Journal Constitution said.

Cherokee County is about 40 miles north of Atlanta.

11:45 a.m.: Florida sees new record daily death toll

Hard-hit Florida reached a new record daily death toll with 276 additional fatalities reported on Monday, according to the state’s Department of Health.

The previous high record was 257 deaths reported on July 31.

Florida, with more than 542,000 diagnosed coronavirus cases, has the second highest number of cases in the U.S. behind California.

At least 8,684 people in Florida have died, according to the state’s Department of Health.

Hawaii, South Dakota and the Virgin Islands have been added to New York state’s travel advisory list, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Alaska, New Mexico, Ohio and Rhode Island have been removed from the list.

Those traveling to New York from states on the list must quarantine for two weeks when arriving.

A state or territory is added to the list if it has a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a one-week average or a 10% or higher positivity rate over a one-week average.

Here are the states and territories currently on New York’s travel advisory list: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Virgin Islands and Wisconsin.

In New York state, once the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, .86% of those tested on Monday were positive, Cuomo said.

10:40 a.m.: UMass cancels football season

The University of Massachusetts is canceling its football season, athletic director Ryan Bamford announced Tuesday.

“The continuing challenges surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic posed too great of a risk,” he said in a statement.

Football players started returning to campus in June. In the last seven weeks, there has been one positive coronavirus test among the more than 600 tests administered to the team, the school said.

7:29 a.m.: ‘The point is not to be first with a vaccine,’ Azar says

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said “transparent data” from phase three clinical trials is necessary to determine whether a vaccine is actually safe and effective.

Azar made the comments during an interview Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America, following news that Russia had become the first country in the world to officially register a COVID-19 vaccine and declare it ready for use. Moscow approved the vaccine before completing its final Phase III trial, and no scientific data has been released from the early trials so far.

“The point is not to be first with a vaccine; the point is to have a vaccine that is safe and effective for the American people and the people of the world,” Azar said on GMA.

The U.S.-led Operation Warp Speed initiative, which the Trump administration introduced in early April, currently has six vaccines in development, including two that are in Phase III trials — the final stage before a vaccine candidate could potentially be authorized for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Azar said he believes the United States “could have FDA-authorized or approved vaccines by December.”

“We believe that we are on track towards having tens of millions of doses by December of FDA gold-standard vaccine, and hundreds of millions of doses as we go into the new year,” Azar said. “It will really depend on the speed at which the clinical trials enroll and people are vaccinated and then are exposed to the virus.”

6:31 a.m.: New Zealand returns to lockdown after finding local transmission

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Tuesday that the city of Auckland would temporarily return to lockdown, after four new locally-transmitted cases of COVID-19 were identified in a household in the region.

New Zealand had gone 102 days without recording any locally-transmitted cases — until now.

Auckland will be placed under level three restrictions for three days, starting Wednesday afternoon. The rest of the country will go into level two until midnight on Friday.

Residents of Auckland will be asked to stay home where possible, while restaurants, bars and non-essential shops will shutter. Schools across the city will also be closed for those three days and gatherings of over 10 people will be prohibited.

“We’re asking people in Auckland to stay home to stop the spread,” Ardern said at a press conference Tuesday. “Act as if you have COVID, and as though people around you have COVID.”

5:10 a.m.: Russia becomes first country to approve COVID-19 vaccine, Putin says

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday that his country has become the first in the world to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19 vaccine.

Speaking at a meeting with his cabinet ministers on state television, Putin said the vaccine had “passed all the needed checks” and had even been given to one of his daughters. The vaccine will soon be administered to Russian health workers, he said.

The vaccine, developed by the state-run Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, was officially registered and declared ready for use after less than two months of human testing, without completing its final Phase III trial. So far, the drug has been tested on fewer than 100 people and Russia has yet to release any scientific data from those early trials.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Phase III trials must involve a minimum of 3,000 volunteers to be recognized.

Dozens of COVID-19 vaccine candidates are being developed by teams of researchers around the world, and several are in final Phase III human trials, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization.

3:45 a.m.: US records under 50,000 new cases for second straight day

There were 49,544 new cases of COVID-19 identified in the United States on Monday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

It’s the second consecutive day that the nation has recorded under 50,000 new cases. An additional 525 coronavirus-related deaths were also reported.

Sunday’s caseload is well below the record set on July 16, when more than 77,000 new cases were identified in a 24-hour reporting period.

A total of 5,094,565 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 163,465 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C. and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up and crossing 70,000 for the first time in mid-July.

Many states have seen a rise in infections in recent weeks, with some — including Arizona, California and Florida — reporting daily records. However, the nationwide number of new cases and deaths have both decreased in the last week, according to an internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News Monday night.

Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

August 11, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Halfpoint/iStockBy ANTHONY RIVAS, TENZIN SHAKYA and. ASHLEY RIEGLE, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Nancy Shively, a lifelong educator in Oklahoma, says she’s always loved teaching. But with the coronavirus still raging and schools around the country beginning to reopen, she resigned from her job last week to protect herself and her family.

Shively has spent the last few years teaching special education. She said it’s been “rewarding” helping students to develop their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. After starting a job at a new school in the Skiatook Public Schools district last year, she’s disappointed she won’t be back to greet the second graders who are now entering third grade. Her school started in-person classes on Monday.

“I was really looking forward to it, and I have to finally come to the decision that I can’t [go back],” Shively told “Nightline.” “I was heartbroken. My children are grown but my daughters in particular asked me not to go back. And I lost my own mother when I was 30, and that’s about the age they are now and I don’t want them to go through that … the choice became, do I resign to protect myself and my kids or do I keep going because I want to help my students?”

In her 60s and dealing with underlying health conditions, Shively said the potential exposure to COVID-19 at school not only puts her at risk but also her husband at home, who she says is also susceptible to the virus.

Shively’s concern is one shared by many students, parents and teachers as safety issues in some schools begin to emerge. At North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia, where in-person classes started last week, images of its packed hallways between classes went viral on social media. On Saturday, a letter received by one of the parents and provided to ABC News said six students and three staff members at the high school had tested positive for COVID-19.

Tiffany Robbins’ daughter, Elyse, goes to Sequoyah High School, which faced similar criticism after a photo surfaced of students not wearing masks or social distancing on the first day of classes. She said she wasn’t surprised by the North Paulding image. As an English teacher who returned to work last week at Dean Rusk Middle School in Cherokee County, Georgia, she says the excitement of being back at school turned into stress and anxiety by the end of the week.

“We are happy to be face to face. We’re happy to be in the building,” Robbins, who is also the president of the Cherokee County Teachers Association, told “Nightline.” “But we don’t feel like we can guarantee the safety of our students — the safety of our coworkers.”

Robbins said “it took a lot of soul searching,” but she chose to go back to school because she loves to teach. “And if this is the only way I can do it in this county, at this point in my life, then I have to go back into the classroom,” she said.

She also updated her will and looked into life insurance “because I am worried,” she explained.

Georgia saw a record number of COVID-19 deaths over the weekend even as new cases and hospitalizations have started going down. In the Cherokee County School District, more than 250 students and staff have been quarantining after at least 11 students and two staff members tested positive for COVID-19.

In her community, Robbins says one of the challenges she faces is that some parents don’t believe the virus is real.

“There are many students across the county who come in declaring to their teachers that their parents don’t believe in COVID,” Robbins said. “There are parents who’ve reached out to me to express their dislike of my requests for a safe school. Across the board, there are people who believe in science and there are people who don’t believe in science, and having a conversation between the two is almost pointless. We’re not going to change each other’s minds.”

Robbins said she can have between 25 and 35 students in each of her four classes, or about 120 students a day. At the middle school level, many of these students then go on to different classes, “not really moving together as a team,” she noted.

She said that even with several precautions in place, like making hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies and masks available, the risk of exposure to the virus is still there.

“Every day you leave your house and you walk into the building, you’re exposing yourself to hundreds and hundreds of students who are exposing themselves to multiple people when they’re outside of school,” Robbins said.

Dibett Lopez, a language arts teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, says she’s feeling a lot of anxiety about returning to school. Classes in her county are scheduled to begin on Wednesday, first through virtual learning until Aug. 26 and then by phasing in students for in-person learning thereafter.

Lopez said even this plan is risky for her and her family. She lives in a multigenerational home with her grandfather, her parents, her children and her sister’s family, and she’s also a Type 1 diabetic.

“For Type 1 diabetics, fevers can impact our blood sugar,” she said. “It can put us in different ranges with our blood sugar, it can mess with our insulin and the production of our insulin and our hormones. And so, all of that can mess with how medicine comes into us.”

Lopez said that like her, many of her students live in multigenerational homes, and she’s concerned her students may become asymptomatic carriers and inadvertently pass the virus on to someone in their families.

“Gwinnett is the most diverse county in all of Georgia, and so I have students from last semester who live with grandparents or live with aunts and uncles or live with extended families,” she said. “So I know that multigenerational homes are definitely going to be impacted. I know that they were impacted in the spring, so I can only imagine when schools reopen in the fall.”

When students return to school, Lopez said she expects them to face “a lot of confusion and chaos” as they try to adjust to the new protocols. Like Robbins, she said her classes have upwards of 36 students.

“There’s just no way that I’m not going to be within 3 [feet], 2 feet of a student,” she said. “You know, even if I wore a face shield and both of my masks, I’m still going to be in direct contact with those students.”

Lopez also said “there’s nothing else we would rather do” than teach students in-person. But she said teachers shouldn’t be placed in a position where they’re risking their own health or that of their students, some of whom may also have underlying health conditions.

“We are still in a pandemic. We’re still in crisis mode. We’ve just learned how to handle it better,” she said. “And so, I think it’s important to tell parents this is about our community. This is about making sure that we are all OK, because I can’t deliver a lesson if I’m constantly thinking about, ‘Oh my God, are they getting too close?’”

Shively said she’s concerned for younger teachers, who aren’t at the end of their career and don’t have the option to resign. In an op-ed she wrote for USA Today, she called out President Donald Trump and the federal government as well as local governments for what she says is failed leadership.

“It’s like a cascade of failure of leadership, starting with our president who abdicated his responsibility to handle the pandemic,” she told “Nightline.”

“I’m not willing to take the consequences for these failed leaders by risking my life in school,” she added.

Shively said she doesn’t “see how they are going to avoid outbreaks in schools.”

“I think what we’re doing is conducting this big experiment with schools reopening,” she said. “And the people who are gonna pay the price are the teachers and children, and it’s wrong.”

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