A team of young scientists in South Africa is assembling the equipment needed to reverse engineer Moderna's coronavirus vaccine.

New England is giving the rest of the country a possible glimpse into the future if more Americans get vaccinated.

Laura Biggs, a 56-year-old who has already recovered from the virus, is wary of taking the vaccine. “The way I feel about it is: I don’t need the vaccine at this point," she said. She said partisan differences were obvious among her friends and family in all aspects of the pandemic, including vaccine acceptance. I don’t think it is the way God intended for us to be,” said Holloway. “The people who voted for Trump and don’t want to take the vaccine are committed in their opposition.

Laura Biggs, a 56-year-old who has already recovered from the virus, is wary of taking the vaccine. “The way I feel about it is: I don’t need the vaccine at this point," she said. She said partisan differences were obvious among her friends and family in all aspects of the pandemic, including vaccine acceptance. I don’t think it is the way God intended for us to be,” said Holloway. “The people who voted for Trump and don’t want to take the vaccine are committed in their opposition.

(Brookings Institution and Tsinghua University via AP)TAIPEI – Health experts in China say their country is lagging in its coronavirus vaccination rollout because it has the disease largely under control, but plans to inoculate 40% of its population by June. The target is the first China has offered publicly since it began its mass immunization campaign for key groups in mid-December. China has been slow to vaccinate its people relative to other countries, administering 3.56 doses per 100 people so far, according to Zhong, in a population of 1.4 billion. Even at the rate of vaccinating 10 million people a day, it would take roughly seven months to vaccinate 70% of its population, Zhang noted. Gao, along with Zhong and other Chinese health experts, urged more U.S.-China cooperation.

U.S. health officials have sparked a wave of confusion after posting guidelines that coronavirus testing is not necessary for people who have been in close contact with infected people. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)NEW YORK U.S. health officials have sparked a wave of confusion after posting guidelines that coronavirus testing is not necessary for people who have been in close contact with infected people. But on Monday a CDC testing overview page was changed to say that testing is no longer recommended for symptom-less people who were in close contact situations. HHS officials officials have offered little explanation, but scheduled a briefing for Wednesday afternoon to answer questions. Across the country, public health experts called the change bizarre.

"(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)MITO The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide topped 20 million on Tuesday, more than half of them from the U.S., India and Brazil. It took six months or so to get to 10 million cases after the virus first appeared in central China late last year. In the U.S., which has more than 5 million cases, the average has decreased since July 22nd, but remains high at 53,813 new cases a day. About one-fifth of reported deaths, or more than 163,000, have been in the U.S., the highest in the world. Australia was preparing to reopen travel with neighboring New Zealand, which has had no confirmed locally transmitted cases in more than 100 days, when fresh clusters of coronavirus cases popped up in Melbourne and the surrounding region.

HHS officials recently posted a document on the agency's website that redirected hospitals' daily reporting of a range of data meant to assess the impact of the coronavirus on them. The CDC will continue to collect other data, like information about cases and deaths, from state health departments. Collecting and reporting public health data has always been a core function of the CDC, he added. The administration should provide funding to support data collection and should strengthen the role of CDC to collect and report COVID-19 data," he said. Now it looks like the administration might be trying to blind the CDC as well.But Redfield, the CDC director, said the agency will retain access to all the data.

Des Moines Public Schools custodian Cynthia Adams cleans a desk in a classroom at Brubaker Elementary School, Wednesday, July 8, 2020, in Des Moines, Iowa. But it says school districts need to be flexible, consult with public health authorities and be ready to pivot as virus activity waxes and wanes. Lynn Morales, 49, teaches 8th grade English at a high-poverty public school in Bloomington, Minnesota. Middle school students ... are lovely and I love them, but they touch, they get close, they roughhouse. In France, public schools reopened briefly before a summer break, with no sign of widespread virus transmission.

But that process, known as contact tracing, relies on people knowing who theyve been in contact with a daunting task if theyve been to a mass gathering. These events that are happening now are further threats to the trust we need, said Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. And those are the communities that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus in the U.S. and most in need of public health measures to help control it. That is not what contact tracing is, said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Contact tracing is a service to patients and their contacts to provide services for patients and warning for contacts.

A smartphone belonging to Drew Grande, 40, of Cranston, R.I., shows notes he made for contact tracing Wednesday, April 15, 2020. “We are trying to build these teams and processes in the midst of a crisis,” said Sharon Bogan, a public health spokeswoman for Seattle and King County, which are seeking at least 20 more investigators. The work could require as many as 300,000 public health workers — a daunting number given that the combined federal, state, and local public health workforce has been shrinking and is now probably less than 280,000, according to some estimates. To address the shortage of help, governments are weighing whether to enlist people with little to no experience in public health, including the Peace Corps volunteers, furloughed social workers and public health students. Seattle scientist Trevor Bedford has developed a digital interview that public health departments can use if they don’t have enough people trained in contact tracing.