Ellen Von UnwerthMiranda Lambert‘s “Bluebird” flies to the top of the country chart this week, marking the superstar’s first trip to number one since 2014’s “Somethin’ Bad” with Carrie Underwood.
Even though Miranda co-wrote the tune about looking on the bright side in the face of adversity, she admits that’s not necessarily her natural tendency.
“I don’t consider myself optimistic, necessarily,” she reveals. “I think I’m not carefree. I’m definitely a worrier, and I’m a planner.”
“And I think I’ve gotten a little more laidback in my thirties,” she adds.
Especially in light of everything that’s happening in 2020, the Texas native believes “Bluebird” brings a dose of encouragement we can all use.
“I need to hear the message in ‘Bluebird,’ too,” she reflects, “because I have to remind myself to keep a bluebird in my heart also.”
“And that’s the whole point of this song, is to keep hope, and to have that little bit of optimism,” she continues. “And so [it’s] definitely a perfect song for a perfect time.”
“Bluebird” is the second single from Miranda’s Wildcard album, and also happens to contain the line that’s the inspiration for the record’s title.
(NEW YORK) — The novel coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 644,500 people worldwide.
Over 16 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 governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their nations’ outbreaks.
The United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 4.1 million diagnosed cases and at least 146,463 deaths.
Latest headlines: – Teen girl is El Paso’s youngest virus victim, among 3 new deaths to close out deadliest recorded week – Total number of COVID-19 cases worldwide now more than 16 million – Spain removed from UK’s travel corridors exemption list, travelers now required to self-isolate
Here is how the news is developing today. All times Eastern. Check back for updates. 1:15 p.m.: Mexican state health secretary who tested positive for COVID-19 has died
A secretary of health of a Mexican border state who tested positive for COVID-19 has died, the governor of Chihuahua confirms in a statement.
Dr. Jesús Enrique Grajeda Herrera died Sunday morning at a Mexican hospital after suffering cardiac failure, Gov. Javier Corral said in a Facebook post. Corral did not definitively say Grajeda Herrera died of COVID-19.
The health secretary contracted the virus on July 2 after traveling to the state of Tamaulipas to meet with officials there, including Gov. Javier Garcia Cabeza de Vaca, who hours later tested positive for the coronavirus.
Grajeda Herrera was admitted to a Chihuahua hospital on July 5 and had been showing signs of improvement. 10:55 a.m.: Florida sees another 9,000-plus cases in last 24 hours
The state of Florida has seen an increase of 9,344 cases and 78 new deaths in the last 24 hours, according to the Florida Department of Health.
Florida now has 423,855 total cases and 5,972 deaths since the coronavirus pandemic began.
The state currently has an overall positivity rate of 11.06%, officials said.
An additional 334 people were hospitalized on Saturday for COVID-19, bringing the statewide total of active hospitalizations to 8,925. In total, 24,064 people have been hospitalized in the state because of the coronavirus. 3:58 a.m.: Teen girl is El Paso’s youngest virus victim, among 3 new deaths to close out deadliest recorded week
A teenage girl, El Paso’s youngest victim of the coronavirus, was among three new deaths reported Saturday morning by health officials to close out the deadliest recorded week of the entire pandemic for the region.
The number of fatalities for the week reached 42, which not only set a record for El Paso but also surpassed the weekly death in neighboring Ciudad Juarez for the first time since the outbreak began.
El Paso’s Mexican sister city tallied just over half of the Sun City’s weekly death toll at 26, which was its lowest count in months.
It was not immediately known if the teenage victim noted in Saturday’s health department death report was 19-year-old Dariana Rubio, who died earlier this week from what her family believed was the virus.
The other two latest deaths were a man in his 60s and a woman in her 70s, both with underlying health conditions.
The health department also reported 221 newly confirmed virus cases on Saturday, bringing the total number of infections to 12,971.
Of those, officials indicated 3,402 were active cases — while 9,348 El Pasoans were listed as having recovered. Research shows some recovered persons can still have long-term health issues stemming from the virus.
For the week, there were 1,839 new virus cases recorded, which was down from the 2,033 infections occurring last week.
On Saturday morning, 310 people were hospitalized, which was a drop by seven patients from Friday. Of those in the hospital, 97 were listed in intensive care Saturday, marking the first time in ten days that the ICU count dropped below 100. Ventilators are currently required by 49 of the hospitalized patients.
3:35 a.m.: Total number of COVID-19 cases worldwide now more than 16 million
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide has now passed 16 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The total number of global confirmed cases now stands at 16,048,100 while the total number of deaths globally stands at 644,556.
The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their nations’ outbreaks.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases around the world topped the benchmark of 15 million only four days ago on July 22.
Spain is no longer on the U.K.’s travel corridor list and people arriving into England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland from Spain will be required to self-isolate.
The British government has said that those already in Spain can stay for the remainder of their vacation and will have to self-isolate upon return.
The Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) is now advising against all but essential travel to mainland Spain which does not cover the Canary Islands or the Balearic Islands because travel advice is based on the risk to the individual traveler and COVID-19 infection rates are lower there than mainland Spain.
“Protecting public health is our absolute priority and we have taken this decision to limit any potential spread to the U.K.,” a government spokesperson said in a statement released to the media. “We’ve always been clear that we would act immediately to remove a country where necessary. Both our list of quarantine exemptions and the FCO travel advice are being updated to reflect these latest risk assessments.” ABC News’ Jim Parker, Scott Withers, Joshua Hoyos and Alexandra Faul contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Olivia de Havilland, the last living star from the epic film Gone with the Wind and the oldest living actor to have received an Academy Award, has died.
The two-time Academy Award winner died “peacefully from natural causes on July 26 at her residence in Paris, France,” her publicist, Lisa Goldberg told Good Morning America.
She was 104 years old.
De Havilland was best known for playing the role of Melanie “Mellie” Hamilton in the Civil War drama — a role that her younger sister Joan Fontaine had reportedly turned down and suggested go to de Havilland instead. After appearing in Gone with the Wind in her early 20s, de Havilland went on to star in dozens of movies and TV shows.
She was often paired with Errol Flynn, starring opposite him in eight films, including, Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
De Havilland won two Oscars, for 1946’s To Each His Own and 1949’s The Heiress, making her and her sister Fontaine the only siblings to have won lead acting Academy Awards (Fontaine won for 1941’s Suspicion). The reported rivalry between the sisters, born 15 months apart, was considered something of Hollywood legend.
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born July 1, 1916, in Tokyo to British parents. Her parents, Lilian Augusta, a former actress, and Walter Augustus de Havilland, an English professor and patent attorney, divorced when de Havilland was three, and she moved with her mother and sister to Los Angeles.
Both sisters expressed an interest in acting but de Havilland broke into the business first after she was spotted in a community production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She later appeared in the Warner Bros. film version of the play and was signed to a seven-year contract with the studio. De Havilland famously challenged the rules of the studio system in court and won, changing the way performers were treated thereafter.
She made her final appearance on camera in the 1988 TV movie, The Woman He Loved, before stepping away from the spotlight and enjoying a quiet retirement in France.
(NEW YORK) — Like something out of a science fiction film, three nations on Earth are heading to Mars this month — commencing a new, deep space race to explore the Red Planet.
Earlier this month, the United Arab Emirates launched its first-ever deep space mission, sending an orbiter to Mars from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center. China followed earlier this week with its ambitious Mars mission launching from Hainan Island in an attempt to be the first country other than the U.S. to successfully land on Mars.
Next up, the United States is set to launch its Perseverance rover to our neighboring planet July 30 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
While the triple missions are all unique, “the fundamental question that everybody would like an answer to is, was there ever life on Mars?” John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told ABC News.
“Is there any possibility that there is still some sort of microbial life, not little green men, but has life ever existed and might it still exist?” he added. “Then the next level of generality is, what will it take for humans to live on Mars?”
America’s six-legged Perseverance rover is the size of a small car and has the goal of storing rock and soil samples that can be returned to Earth in future missions. It will also test out new technology to pave the way for future robot or human exploration of our neighboring planet, according to NASA.
“There are a bunch of other neat things. There is an attached little helicopter that is going to fly like a drone over the Martian surface and give us images,” Logsdon said of the U.S. mission. “There is an experiment called ‘MOXIE’ that will see whether it is possible to manufacture oxygen out of the methane in the Mars atmosphere, which would be important for eventual human missions.”
The reason all the launches to Mars are happening now is because it is the peak orbit points for when it takes the least amount of energy to get to Mars, which happens every 26 months, according to Logsdon.
The UAE mission is sending an orbiter, which won’t land, Logsdon added, saying, “It’s done in collaboration with the University of Colorado; the UAE. is overseeing the mission, but there is a lot of U.S. contribution.” It is history-making in the sense, however, that it is the first time an Arab nation has launched into deep space.
“This mission is an important milestone for the U.A.E. and the region and it has already inspired millions of youth regionally to dream big and work hard to achieve what seems impossible,” H.E. Yousuf Hamad Al Shaibani, deputy chairman and director general of Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, said in a news conference following the launch.
Meanwhile, the Chinese mission is “an extremely ambitious mission that has an orbiter, a lander and a rover,” Logsdon said. “And it is reflective of how ambitious China is to do significant space activity.”
China’s inaugural Mars mission is named Tianwen-1, which means “Questions to Heaven” and comes from an ancient Chinese poem, according to the nation’s state-run news agency Xinhua.
“We hope the mission will be innovative and help push forward scientific and technological development,” Geng Yan, an official at the China National Space Administration, told Xinhua. They have a multipart goal that includes landing a rover on the surface of Mars that will conduct research.
Liu Tongije, a spokesperson for the China Mars mission, said the launch was a “key step of China marching towards farther deep space,” and that the nation’s aim wasn’t to compete with other countries but to peacefully explore the universe, according to The Associated Press.
Despite elevated political tensions between the U.S. and China, “I don’t think these missions have anything to do with dominance [of space],” Logsdon said.
“They are competitive because scientists are competitive and everyone wants to do the best kind of science and discovery on Mars possible, but in the broader scheme of the things the world profits by multiple missions,” he added.
“We want to learn about Mars, and the more missions that are aimed at learning about Mars, the better off we are,” he said. “The one mission can’t keep the other one from working.”
Still, Logsdon noted that U.S. legislation prohibits NASA from working with China.
“That prohibition is politically based, so collaboration between what in the coming years are probably the two major space powers is currently forbidden by U.S. law,” he said.
He noted that by and large the scientific community has been able to keep the politics and research separate.
As for how soon we can expect to see humans on the Red Planet, Logsdon said that “depends on whether you believe Elon Musk or not.”
“Mr. Musk says he’s going to be sending a number of people to Mars in the not-very-distant future,” he said. “I’m highly skeptical. There’s a lot of difference between the first explorers going to Mars and tourism.”
Still, he said he thinks there is a “reasonable chance” that there will be human footsteps on Mars by 2040.
(NEW YORK) — When the influenza pandemic struck America in 1918, most cities responded with measures that included closing schools.
Yet three cities — New York, Chicago and New Haven, Connecticut — vowed to remain open.
The schools had extensive public health programs in place and argued that keeping students in school was “an opportunity to implement the public health strategies of school medical inspection and intensified disease surveillance,” according to a public health report published in 2010.
Now, more than a century later, as society faces the same question of whether to reopen schools during a pandemic, experts warn that what allowed those three cities to stay open in 1918 is no longer viable.
Dr. Howard Markel, a co-author of the report and a distinguished professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, told ABC News that the situations “differ in a billion ways,” namely that there is still little known about the coronavirus and there is no longer an emphasis on public health in schools.
“There was a system in place that has long been dismantled,” Markel said.
In New York City, then-health commissioner Dr. Royal S. Copeland had relied almost entirely on isolation and quarantine to stop the spread of the virus, but was eventually convinced to keep schools open by Dr. S. Josephine Baker, director of the Department of Health Bureau of Child Hygiene, according to the 2010 public health report.
Baker, a leading reformer in the Progressive era, when officials and experts put more of an emphasis on expanding public programs in health and education, believed that many students would be safer in school than out.
At the time, 75% lived in tenements with crowded and unsanitary conditions that made it easier for infections to spread, according to the report.
In the schools, students underwent routine inspections, the report noted. Teachers looked for signs of a respiratory condition, such as runny noses, red eyes, sneezing or coughing.
If students displayed any symptoms, they were moved to an isolation room where they were inspected by a health professional and, if feverish, sent home or to a hospital if their home was a potential hotspot for spread.
In Chicago, the city’s health commissioner, John Dill Robertson, believed the schools would be able to build off their “already well-developed school medical inspection program,” according to the public health report.
Robertson coordinated with Dr. C. St. Claire Drake, the state director of health, on a regular basis to develop regulations and plans of action. School health officers and nurses also visited the homes of students who were absent and informed the families of proper procedures for isolation and care.
Chicago suffered greater absenteeism than New York City, which Robertson attributed to “fluphobia.”
New Haven’s health officer, Dr. Frank W. Wright, also was among those who urged schools to remain open.
Wright argued that children would “be safer in the well-ventilated schools where physicians and nurses worked full time to identify sick children and send them home for proper care,” according to the 2010 report.
In early October, about a month after the pandemic struck, health and school officials agreed children should stay in school to keep them from congregating elsewhere without supervision and to minimize their exposure to infected adults.
Markel and another co-author of the report, Dr. Alexandra Stern, made a point to note that the influenza outbreak and novel coronavirus outbreak are not the same epidemiologically.
Though the 1918 outbreak was severe, health experts knew much more about influenza than they do now about the novel coronavirus — and its effects on children.
A recent study out of South Korea found that children younger than 10 years old transmitted COVID-19, the disease caused by the respiratory virus, to others much less often than did adults, although the risk is not zero. Those aged 10 to 19 spread the virus at about the same rate as adults, according to the study.
Another study out of the United Kingdom found that children younger than 18 were not as adversely affected by COVID-19 as adults.
Markel put it simply: “The key word in this novel coronavirus is ‘novel.’ It’s new.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has swayed on reopening schools. Originally, the federal agency warned of the risks that come with reopening schools and issued recommendations. But on Thursday, two weeks after President Donald Trump demanded schools reopen, the CDC shifted its tone and released statements about children not being at a high risk of getting seriously ill, though its original guidance still remained on its website.
Markel also said that detailed responses like those available in 1918 would be unlikely or just not possible today because so much funding has been cut for public health programs.
“Over the past several decades, financial cutbacks to public education have severely impacted public health programs, reducing the number of school nurses and resources for activities such as physical education,” according to the 2010 study.
Stern called most public schools “woefully underfunded,” with most having “one rotating nurse who will move between five public schools.”
“The bottom line is that the public health infrastructure that was built into schools as they expanded in the early 20th century has been chipped away at and dismantled to a great extent,” Stern said.
As of 2018, the most recent data available on school nurses, there were 95,776 working full time across the U.S., according to the National Association of School Nurses. With around 50.8 million students in public schools, that is about one nurse for every 530 students.
Statistics like this show how difficult it would be for routine medical inspections, let alone practices adopted in Chicago like how nurses visited the homes of absent students.
Markel and Stern, however, acknowledged the complexity of the issue, saying that for many children school is not just a place for education.
“The best reasons, or the most compelling reasons, of wanting kids to go to school is that they live in an unsafe environment — and school nutrition,” Markel said, though he noted some school districts have vowed to deliver meals.
He’s of the mindset that school is “not a good idea right now.”
Stern felt similarly, saying there are “so many unanswered questions.”
“And when there are unanswered questions about a deadly virus,” Stern added, “one could argue that it makes most sense to follow the precautions principle, which is, ‘Do the least harm.'”
Ellen Von UnwerthMiranda Lambert‘s “Bluebird” flies to the top of the country chart this week, marking the superstar’s first trip to number one since 2014’s “Somethin’ Bad” with Carrie Underwood. 
