SAO PAULO (Reuters) - The health secretary of Osasco city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo metropolitan region was targeted in a shooting attack on Thursday night, the state department of public security said on Friday, adding police were investigating whether the incident was related to his efforts to fight the novel coronavirus.
“The victim, a public server of the city, had his vehicle hit by gunfire, but he was not injured,” the public security secretariat said, identifying him as Fernando Machado Oliveira.
https://www.reuters....k-idUSKBN23C1P2 A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Texans cannot request mail-in ballots out of fear of contracting the coronavirus in the upcoming 2020 elections.
The ruling by the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals blocks an injunction from a federal judge last month that would have allowed Texas voters to request mail-in ballots based over fears of becoming infected with COVID-19 if they cast their ballot in person.
Judge Jerry Smith on Thursday wrote for a unanimous panel of three judges “The spread of the virus has not given ‘unelected federal judges’ a roving commission to rewrite state election codes.”
https://thehill.com/...ver-coronavirus US President Donald Trump’s administration has announced a spate of policies to cut review times for large infrastructure projects and bypass the requirements of some of the country's environmental laws, The Associated Press reported.
The measures are touted as driven by the “economic emergency” triggered by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and aimed at fast-tracking construction project permits for highways, mines, pipelines, fossil fuel export terminals and others.
In compliance with the order, federal agencies would reportedly be called upon to seek “workarounds” from environmental laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act, from which big infrastructure projects typically require lengthy approvals
The order, writes the outlet, would also expedite civil works projects overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers, calling upon the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Defense to wield emergency authorities to hasten projects on federal lands.
https://sputniknews....omic-emergency/‘This is criminal’: Law enforcement seizes thousands of masks sent to help protect protesters from coronavirus
https://www.rawstory...om-coronavirus/ The last person known to have COVID-19 on Vancouver Island has recovered and been released from hospital.
There was no one with COVID-19 in hospital on the Island on Wednesday.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Island Health has reported 130 people with COVID-19; five have died and 125 have recovered, leaving no active cases.
The last known positive case on Vancouver Island was announced on May 8, but public health officials updated their count on May 22 to include an Islander residing in Alberta who fell sick on an unknown date and returned to the Island once recovered.
https://www.timescol...ital-1.24147072 It's hard to miss Paul's Motor Inn if you are driving down Douglas Street in the provincial capital.
The retro-looking building occupies a high-profile piece of land that also includes a diner and a music venue. After welcoming travellers for almost 50 years, the 75-room motel has now been bought by the provincial government to shelter homeless people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It allows the opportunity right now for the most vulnerable people in Victoria to have a place to stay," said B.C. Housing Minister, Selina Robinson, during an interview on On The Island.
In April, the City of Victoria leased 35 rooms at the hotel, which are being used as temporary housing for people in need during the current health emergency.
https://www.cbc.ca/n...chase-1.5598704 B.C.’s earliest cases of COVID-19 came from China and Iran, but the largest number of cases are linked to travel from Europe, the U.S. and Eastern Canada, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says.
Henry reported June 4 on gene sequencing of samples that shows slightly different strains of the virus that causes COVID-19 from different regions. The European-like and Washington state-like strains took off after an international dental conference in Vancouver in early March, and Henry soon ordered self-isolation for everyone who had attended as positive tests started to show up.
“The first parts of those were related to the dental conference that happened in Vancouver, and we started to see people popping up in communities around the province,” Henry said. “And we linked them by our case investigations and contract tracing to the fact that many of them had attended this conference.”
https://www.nanaimob...covid-19-cases/COVID-19 Cases at Kazakhstan’s Tengiz Oil Field Top 1,000
https://thediplomat....field-top-1000/ STORM LAKE, Iowa -- Tyson Foods announced Tuesday that 591 of the workers at its Storm Lake pork processing plant have tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
That's a quarter of the 2,303 workers who work at the facility and were tested for COVID-19.
Tyson said in a statement that more than 75 percent of the workers who tested positive didn't show any symptoms and otherwise wouldn't have be identified.
https://siouxcityjou...7a71a46485.htmlScientists produce first open source all-atom models of COVID-19
https://medicalxpres...tom-covid-.html Since the pandemic began, the question of where the coronavirus came from has been one of the biggest puzzles. It almost certainly originated in bats, and a new study out this week — the most comprehensive analysis of coronaviruses in China — adds further weight to that theory.
But the lack of clarity around how the virus passed to people has meant that unsubstantiated theories — promoted by US President Donald Trump — that it escaped from a laboratory in China persist.
By contrast, most researchers say the more likely explanation, given what is known so far about this virus and others like it, is that bats passed it to an intermediate animal, which then spread it to people.
In mid-May, the World Health Assembly, the World Health Organization’s key decision-making body, passed a resolution that calls on the agency to work with other international organizations to identify the animal source.
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https://www.nature.c...586-020-01541-zNow, researchers are on the trail of a mechanism for this male bias—an effort led by prostate cancer researchers, who have a deep acquaintance with androgens. Christina Jamieson of the University of California (UC), San Diego, who has developed organoids to study prostate cancer, recalls that she was in a Zoom meeting honing ideas on how to link her research to COVID-19 when her sister, also a UC San Diego scientist, sent her a one-word text. It read: “TMPRSS2.”
It was 16 April, and within minutes Jamieson had found the publication that prompted the text: a Cell paper by Markus Hoffmann of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research and colleagues. The paper sent a lightning bolt through the prostate research community, because it showed that infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, relies in part on TMPRSS2, a membrane-bound enzyme. The enzyme cleaves the “spike” protein on the coronavirus' surface, allowing the virus to fuse with the host cell's membrane and get inside the cell.
Jamieson and other prostate cancer researchers were familiar with the enzyme, because in about half of all prostate cancers, a TMPRSS2 mutation revs up an oncogene that kicks cell growth into overdrive. In the prostate, TMPRSS2 is produced when male hormones bind to the androgen receptor. “Doing research, it's like you're trying to throw an anchor into the vast ocean of possibilities,” Jamieson says. The discovery that TMPRSS2 helps the virus enter cells “felt like the anchor hit ground.”
https://science.scie...t/368/6495/1038
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