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National

More than 2,000 people have died from the novel coronavirus in the U.S. as of Saturday, per data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Why it matters: Recorded deaths in the U.S. surpassed 1,000 two days ago. The U.S. has the most COVID-19 cases in the world, exceeding China and Italy.

Go deeper: Trump weighs quarantine of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut

U.S. coronavirus deaths top 2,000

Recorded deaths in the U.S. surpassed 1,000 two days ago.

In this image, a group of nurses stand wearing ponchos next to a health center screening

Nurses at Penn State Health St. Joseph conduct drive-thru coronavirus testing on March 27. Photo: Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

Health Care

Coronavirus

Health

An infant less than one year old died in Chicago, Illinois after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, the state health department said on Saturday.

Details: The death would mark the first reported infant mortality from COVID-19 in the U.S. The fatality rate for the novel coronavirus in the U.S. is highest among those over 85 years old, per the CDC.

What they're saying: "There has never before been a death associated with COVID-19 in an infant. A full investigation is underway to determine the cause of death,” Illinois Department of Public Health Director Ngozi Ezike said Saturday in a press release. 

"We must do everything we can to prevent the spread of this deadly virus. If not to protect ourselves, but to protect those around us."

The big picture: Most recorded cases in Illinois are currently in Chicago and the surrounding counties. The state health department has reported 3,491 COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, including 47 deaths.

The state recorded five deaths last Friday.

Flashback: The Los Angeles County health department in California said Tuesday "there may be an alternate explanation" for the death of a teenager whose "early tests indicated a positive result for COVID-19."

Go deeper: Illinois issues stay-at-home order amid coronavirus outbreak

Infant dies after testing positive for coronavirus in Chicago

The death would mark the first reported infant mortality from COVID-19 in the U.S.

In this image, people stand in a white tent

Hospital staff working inside a COVID-19 screening tent in Chicago on March 26. Photo: Jim Vondruska/NurPhoto via Getty Images

As the coronavirus continues to spread throughout the U.S., Axios is answering readers' questions about the pandemic — how it spreads, who's at risk, and what you can do to stay safe.

What's new: This week, we answer five questions on smokers' vulnerability, food safety, visiting older parents, hair cut needs, and rural vs. urban impact.

Q: I've been a smoker for years. Am I more likely to get the coronavirus?

Being a former or current smoker does not necessarily make you more likely to catch the virus, but it could make your symptoms worse if you do catch it. The same goes for vapers and anybody with asthma.

Panagis Galiatsatos, director of the Tobacco Treatment Clinic at Johns Hopkins Medicine, strongly recommends that smokers use the outbreak as an impetus to quit, so "your lungs can reserve all of [their] energy" to fight the virus.

Q: What is the best way to make sure my food deliveries, takeout and packages are all coronavirus-free?

Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds after handling a package, making a trip to the grocery store, or having a quick food run. 

The Food and Drug Administration says there's no evidence that the virus can be transmitted via food. The best thing, of course, is to keep washing your fruit and vegetables with water and possibly with mild soap or fruit/vegetable washes.

Q: My older parents have been quarantined for the past two weeks, and nobody in my family has shown any symptoms. Is it safe for us to visit them and take our kids with us?

It's risky. It only takes one infected person to spread the virus, and you can be contagious before you start feeling any symptoms, Axios' Stef Kight writes.

If you do decide to check in on older family members, make sure everybody is  washing their hands and keeping a six-foot distance from one another.

Q: I'm long overdue for a haircut. Is it safe to get one?

Many state and local governments have ordered salons, spas, and other grooming places to shut down, in the hopes of containing the virus.

The more often you venture outside, the more exposed you are and the higher your chances of infection.

Q: How is the COVID-19 outbreak affecting rural areas of the country, compared to the major cities?

Americans living in rural parts of the country will find it easier than city dwellers to stay away from crowds. But rural communities have more limited access to health care, and people living in rural areas tend to be older, putting them at higher risk, Axios' Kim Hart notes.

Many jobs in rural communities, like those in the service and agriculture sectors, don't offer paid sick leave.

Got a question? Send it to coronavirus@axios.com. We'll get in touch with the experts and answer a new batch of questions every Saturday. 

Q&A: What you need to know about the coronavirus

Q&A: How to help your community while practicing social distancing

Q&A: Minimizing your coronavirus risk

Quit smoking, wash your hands and don't get a haircut.

Illustration of a virus surrounded by question marks

Deep Dive — Coronavirus 3

Science

Axios Science

Researchers are racing to develop tests that detect whether someone may have developed immunity to the coronavirus, which could help society return to normal faster.

Why it matters: These tests could help people know if they are able to go back to work, as well as aid researchers in tracking the scale and death rate of the disease — key data for current and future pandemic policies.

Background: SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is new to the human body, meaning it has no immunity to it yet. And, since there isn't a vaccine — and there won't be for a while — it's difficult to ensure someone will be protected from the virus unless they know they've had the infection.

But people without symptoms can have COVID-19 and not know it, making it more difficult to pinpoint who's had been infected.

How it works:  When the body is exposed to a virus, the immune system begins to produce antibodies to fight the virus and future infections from it.

Those antibodies stick around after the virus is cleared from the body, making them an indicator of past infection.

Serological tests check the blood for these antibodies — providing confirmation of infection and possible protection.

That’s different from the diagnostic tests receiving most of the public's attention; those confirm whether someone has an active infection.

These tests could be especially useful for determining whether health care workers have some immunity and are at lower risk if they go back to work, says Nick Evans, an assistant professor at UMass Lowell.

They can also be used to sample the population in order to form better estimates of the scale of infection and the death rate of the virus, says Jesse Bloom, a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Where it stands: Researchers at universities, companies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working to develop tests to detect antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.

Academic labs can develop the tests relatively quickly but to carry them out on a clinical scale with a large number of samples is "in some ways as much a matter of logistics as science," says Bloom, who's also an investigator with Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

British officials said Wednesday they were ordering at least 3.5 million "finger-prick" serological tests that could be purchased via online entities like Amazon and taken at home, per Nature. 

The catch: The utility of the test hinges on the supposition that people who've had COVID-19 are immune to new infections — an open question as "the evidence is not ironclad," Bloom tells Axios. 

But preliminary research suggests that, unlike influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2 isn't mutating fast and infection with the virus could confer immunity for months to years.

And in a small study that has not been peer-reviewed, researchers were unable to reinfect macaque monkeys that had been previously infected with the virus.

What to watch: Widespread testing could raise privacy concerns. "People still have privacy rights, even in a pandemic, and I don't see a reason for public disclosure. That's important, because my hunch is people's worst natures will show up and they'll start demanding disclosure, much like with other infectious diseases (e.g. HIV)," Evans said.

Go deeper: How does the coronavirus behave inside a patient? (The New Yorker)

Editor's note: This story has been clarified by taking out the word "innate" to describe the immune system.

The other coronavirus test we need

These could help people return to work faster.

Illustration of a multiple choice test with bubbles shaped like a virus

News and analysis of the scientific advances fueling AI and quantum computing, revolutionizing biology and medicine, and tackling climate change. Science is changing the world and colliding with the global politics that shape it.

Data: The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins; Note: Cases are shown on a logarithmic scale; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios

The countries that have most successfully fended off the novel coronavirus have mainly done it with a combination of new technology and old-school principles.

Why it matters: There's a lot the U.S. can learn from the way other countries have handled this global pandemic — although we may not be able to apply those lessons as quickly as we'd like.

The big picture: A handful of Asian countries, including South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, have succeeded where the U.S. and Europe have failed.

They were able to quickly bring the virus under control, reducing the number of new cases that cropped up each day. And they did it largely without shutting down schools, businesses and public life.

The bad news: It’s too late for the U.S. to simply do what worked in those countries. We’ve already made too many mistakes.

But there are still lessons for the U.S. to learn for future outbreaks — and, hopefully, there are some pieces of those countries’ larger strategies that we can adapt to our coronavirus response now.

As a new infection begins to spread, you want to quickly test the people who might have it, and quarantine the ones who do. Then you want to figure out who else they might have infected, and test those people, and quarantine the ones who are indeed sick. This process gets repeated.

“If you don’t know what your population is that you’re supposed to be monitoring, you don't have a chance,” said Claire Standley, an infectious-disease expert at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security.

This test-and-trace process is nothing new. It's the standard playbook. South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan just executed it a lot better than the United States.

Testing and contact tracing are particularly important with this strain of coronavirus because people can spread it before they start to feel sick — so if you’re only testing the sickest patients, the virus is still spreading unchecked.

And it’s important to do this early. It’s a lot easier to stop five people from infecting another 15 than it is to stop 20,000 people from infecting another 60,000.

Next time a mysterious virus starts spreading abroad, better testing and a much faster response will be imperative.

Singapore has gotten pretty draconian with its track-and-trace process. 

The government tracks the location of residents’ smartphones, so it knows exactly who had come within a few feet of an infected or potentially infected person. 

It uses the same location data to help enforce mandatory quarantines.

That might be too Big Brother for the U.S., but a voluntary version of it might work — we already consent to a whole lot of location tracking for much less important ends. 

And researchers are already using population-level smartphone data to see, for example, which cities are flouting stay-at-home orders. That can help inform local response even without individualized tracking.

“I think we’re further along that pathway than maybe people think,” Standley said.

Taiwan, meanwhile, aided its coronavirus response by making better use of data it already had. It quickly merged its immigration and health care databases, giving authorities a real-time view of who was getting sick and where they had traveled.

That might be hard to copy in the U.S., though, because the relevant data are scattered across multiple local, state and federal agencies with little to no integration. And we have no centralized health data.

Public communication is one of the big things Italy — a leading example of what not to do — got wrong.

Some Italian officials downplayed the virus for too long. Leaders often contradicted each other, and sometimes themselves, about piecemeal interventions before finally locking down the entire country as cases skyrocketed.

Singapore, by contrast, came out early with a clear message: This was going to be bad for a while, and people needed to stick together and do their part.

The U.S., so far, looks a lot more like Italy. 

President Trump has sent similarly mixed messages here, initially downplaying the virus and saying it would go away on its own before changing his tone as cases mounted.

The U.S. can't go back in time to get things right at the beginning. So we can't match the success of places like South Korea.

Our best backup plan is to stick with aggressive social distancing and give our testing capacity more time to ramp up. 

We don't seem to be on track to ever achieve the kind of sophisticated track-and-trace programs Asia employed, but hopefully some cruder version can help us find our way out of this if we keep the number of new cases low in the meantime.

The bottom line: “If we had got on top of this thing two months ago, America would look very, very different,” Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, said in a recent interview with the New Yorker.

What the U.S. can learn from other countries in the coronavirus fight

It's too late to do a lot of what worked in other countries, but there are lessons for future outbreaks.

World

President Trump said on Saturday he is considering a "short term" quarantine of New York, New Jersey and parts of Connecticut — areas congruent with the New York metro area, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus in the U.S.

Reality check: These states have already taken steps to quarantine residents and promote social distancing to combat COVID-19. The governors of New York and New Jersey issued statewide stay-at-home orders last week, and non-essential businesses in Connecticut were ordered to close as of this Monday.

Details: The quarantine would not apply to "people such as truckers from outside the New York area who are making deliveries or simply transiting through," Trump said on Saturday as the hospital ship USNS Comfort departed for New York. He claimed the quarantine would not affect trade.

"Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hotspot — New York, New Jersey maybe one or two other places, certain parts of Connecticut quarantined. I’m thinking about that right now. We might not have to do it but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine — short term — two weeks for New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut."

Trump considers quarantine for states near epicenter of U.S. coronavirus outbreak

New York has already taken efforts to quarantine its residents.

Axios

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