Los Angeles-area officials have discovered six new COVID-19 cases in the county over the last 48 hours, prompting them to declare a local emergency to help free up federal and state funding. From a report: Kathryn Barger, chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, told reporters Wednesday that she just signed a proclamation declaring a local emergency. "I want to reiterate that this is not a response rooted in panic," she said. County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis said the proclamation allows local officials "to further draw down resources from both the federal and state level of government." Health officials for the City of Pasadena and City of Long Beach said they, too, plan to declare a local emergencies later Wednesday. The new cases in Los Angeles County bring the state's total to 35, more than any other state, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Washington state, where at least nine people have died, there are at least 27 cases. There haven't been any fatalities outside of Washington.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of avoiding social media, drug companies are growing bolder about advertising on Facebook and other social networks, according to interviews with advertising executives, marketers, health-care privacy researchers and patient advocates. That is exposing loopholes around the way data can be used to show consumers relevant ads about their personal health, even as both social networks and pharmaceutical manufacturers disavow targeting ads to people based on their medical conditions. Ads promoting prescription drugs are popping up on Facebook for depression, HIV and cancer. Spending on Facebook mobile ads alone by pharmaceutical and health-care brands reached nearly a billion dollars in 2019, nearly tripling over two years, according to Pathmatics, an advertising analytics company. Facebook offers tools to help drug companies stay compliant with rules about disclosing safety information or reporting side effects.

But seeing an ad for a drug designed to treat a person's particular health condition in the relatively intimate setting of a social media feed -- amid pictures of friends and links to news articles -- can feel more intrusive than elsewhere online. The same opaque Facebook systems that help place an ad for a political campaign or a new shoe in a user's feed also can be used by pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to target consumers who match certain characteristics or had visited a particular website in the past. The ability of drug companies to reach people likely to have specific health conditions -- a far cry from a magazine or TV ad -- underscores how the nation's health privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), has not kept up with the times. HIPAA, which safeguards personal health records, typically does not cover drug companies or social media networks.

The World Health Organization is warning that the novel coronavirus could be far more dangerous than the flu, with a mortality rate of 3.4%. The new estimates come as the U.S. death toll from the virus reaches 9. From a report: The global mortality rate -- which includes more than 3,000 deaths -- is many times higher than the "mortality rate" of the flu, which is less than 1%. WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that is at least partly because COVID-19 is a new disease, and no one has built up an immunity to it. Still, Tedros reiterated the WHO's belief that containment was still within reach. "We don't even talk about containment for seasonal flu," Tedros said. "It's just not possible, but it's possible for COVID-19." Officials say they have learned the coronavirus is less transmissible than the flu, which is often spread by people who are infected yet don't have symptoms. That doesn't seem to be the case for COVID-19, he said. "There are not yet any vaccines or therapeutics, which is why we must do everything we can to contain it."

Tedros said he's concerned by shortages of masks, gowns and other equipment needed by healthcare workers to stop the spread of disease "caused by rising demands and hoarding and misuse." "We can't stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers," said Tedros, noting that prices of surgical masks have increased sixfold.

A tally of the number of people tested for the novel coronavirus disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website on Monday. From a report: The change was first reported by journalist Judd Legum on Twitter. The disappearance of the numbers comes less than a week after the first cases of the virus with unknown origins were reported in the US. In the past few days, six deaths due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, have been confirmed in Washington state.

The coronavirus has found a crack in the nation's public health armor, and it is not one that scientists foresaw: diagnostic testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic test kit, a discovery made only after officials had shipped hundreds of kits to state laboratories. From a report: A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses. And the C.D.C. essentially ensured that Americans would be tested in very few numbers by imposing stringent and narrow criteria, critics say. On Monday, following mounting criticism of the federal response, Trump administration officials promised a rapid expansion of the country's testing capacities. With the help of private companies and academic centers, as many as a million diagnostic tests could be administered by the end of this week, said Dr. Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. But many scientists wonder if the moves come too late. As of Monday evening, 103 Americans were infected with the coronavirus in the United States. Six deaths have been reported. Dozens of patients, in several states, may have caught the virus in their communities, suggesting that the pathogen already may be circulating locally.

The case numbers are rising not just because the virus is spreading, but because federal officials have taken steps toward expanded testing. The persistent drumbeat of positive test results has raised critical questions about the government's initial management of the outbreak. Why weren't more Americans tested sooner? How many may be carrying the virus now? Most disturbing of all: Did a failure to provide adequate testing give the coronavirus time to gain a toehold in the United States? "Clearly, there have been problems with rolling out the test," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, former director of the C.D.C. "There are a lot of frustrated doctors and patients and health departments." Still, Dr. Frieden said he thought the situation was improving. Other experts, although supportive of the agency, were mystified that federal officials could have committed so many missteps. "The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect with the C.D.C.," said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University. "This is not a difficult problem to solve in the world of viruses."

hackingbear writes: According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, Chinese hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients a few weeks ago now have empty beds. Trials of experimental drugs are having difficulty enrolling enough eligible patients. And the number of new cases reported each day has plummeted from thousands per day to 125 cases on March 2. The report is unequivocal. "China's bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic," it says. "This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real."

The WHO team traveled to several cities including Wuhan, the hardest hit city. They visited hospitals, laboratories, companies, wet markets selling live animals, train stations, and local government offices. "Everywhere you went, anyone you spoke to, there was a sense of responsibility and collective action, and there's war footing to get things done," says WHO's Bruce Aylward. The question now is whether the world can take lessons from China's apparent success -- and whether other countries can imitate the massive lockdowns and electronic surveillance measures imposed by an "authoritarian" government (an assertion which real Chinese may not necessarily agree with from their daily experiences).

A woman that tested positive for coronavirus was "mistakenly released" from isolation Saturday, causing the mayor of San Antonio to declare a public health emergency in the city. Dallas News reports: The patient was one of 91 evacuees who were brought to San Antonio from Wuhan, China. She was released Saturday and was in the community for a little more than 12 hours before she was quarantined again. During that time, the woman checked into a Holiday Inn hotel near the San Antonio airport and took a hotel shuttle to the North Star Mall, said Dr. Anita Kurian of the city's Metropolitan Health District. She was at the mall from about 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Kurian said the health department completed its risk assessment of any people the woman could have exposed to the virus and determined that everyone was at low risk, except for health-care personnel who were in direct contact with the woman when she was released.

The CDC said the patient had been treated at a local medical facility for several weeks after she returned from Wuhan on a flight chartered by the State Department. "At the time of discharge from the facility, the patient was asymptomatic and met all of CDC's criteria for release -- resolution of any symptoms and two consecutive sets of negative test results, collected more than 24 hours apart," the agency said. After the patient was released, a lab test was determined to be "weakly positive." The patient was brought back into isolation "out of an abundance of caution," the CDC said. "We simply cannot have a screw-up like this from our federal partners," San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at a news conference Monday.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott also criticized the CDC, saying: "What the CDC did is completely unacceptable. It appears to be a case of negligence with regard to allowing this person who had coronavirus to leave Texas Center for Infectious Disease and go back into the general population. I think they understand the magnitude of the error."

A woman who recently traveled to Iran is New York's first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday night. The Wall Street Journal reports: The woman, who wasn't named, is in her late 30s and contracted the virus while traveling abroad in Iran. She has respiratory symptoms and is isolated in her home, according to the governor's office. She isn't in serious condition and has been in a controlled situation since arriving in New York, according to the governor's office. "There is no cause for surprise -- this was expected," the governor said in a statement. "I said from the beginning it was a matter of when, not if, there would be a positive case of novel coronavirus in New York." A state official said the woman is in Manhattan. The report says there's been a total of eight other cases in New York City, but all of those people had tested negative.

"As of Sunday, 32 people in New York, including the one positive case, have been tested for coronavirus infection," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing New York state health officials. "All the other tests were negative." If the virus spreads, New York City health officials said there are roughly 1,200 hospital beds throughout the city that could be used.

Gordon Moore's 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moore's Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years. Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself. Moore's argument was an economic one. It was a beautiful bargain -- in theory, the more transistors you added to an integrated circuit, the cheaper each one got. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip.

Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore's prediction. It has also fueled today's breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers. But what happens when Moore's Law inevitably ends? Or what if, as some suspect, it has already died, and we are already running on the fumes of the greatest technology engine of our time?

A new system uses software to dictate quarantines -- and appears to send personal data to police, in a troubling precedent for automated social control. From a report: As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens' lives -- by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. But a New York Times analysis of the software's code found that the system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk. It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.

The Alipay Health Code, as China's official news media has called the system, was first introduced in the eastern city of Hangzhou -- a project by the local government with the help of Ant Financial, a sister company of the e-commerce giant Alibaba. People in China sign up through Ant's popular wallet app, Alipay, and are assigned a color code -- green, yellow or red -- that indicates their health status. The system is already in use in 200 cities and is being rolled out nationwide, Ant says. Neither the company nor Chinese officials have explained in detail how the system classifies people. That has caused fear and bewilderment among those who are ordered to isolate themselves and have no idea why.

The news site Axios (founded by former Politico staffers) reports on an issue discovered at an Atlanta lab for America's Centers for Disease Control that was manufacturing "relatively small amounts" of coronavirus testing kits for laboratories around the country. Sources familiar with the situation in Atlanta tell them that manufacturing has now been moved to another lab.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn confirmed to the site that there had been problems with "certain test components." The Commissioner also said the problems had been resolved and "were due to a manufacturing issue," and said the FDA has confidence in the current manufacturing of the tests they're distributing, which "have passed extensive quality control procedures and will provide the high-level of diagnostic accuracy we need..."

Axios adds that "It was not immediately clear if or how possible contamination in the Atlanta lab played a role in delays or problems" that America's been experiencing with its coronavirus testing: The U.S. government had admitted to problems with its diagnostic tests -- which have put the U.S. well behind China and South Korea in doing large-scale testing of the American public for the coronavirus... As of Friday, South Korea had tested 65,000 people for the coronavirus; the U.S. had tested only 459, per Science Magazine. China can reportedly conduct up to 1.6 million tests a week. Although the World Health Organization has sent testing kits to 57 other countries, the U.S. decided to make its own.

There have also been problems with the tests themselves. On Feb. 12, the FDA announced that health labs across the country were having problems validating the CDC's diagnostic test, Science reports in an in-depth account of what went wrong with the tests.

The FDA announced yesterday that public health labs can create their own diagnostic test. Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told Science that he expects that public health labs will be able to do 10,000 tests a day by the end of the week.

"Amazon has pulled more than 1 million items from its digital shelves due to claims that the products could either cure or help prevent the spread of coronavirus," reports SiliconValley.com: The move comes during the same week that Facebook said it would ban advertisements on its platform for products purporting to cure or curtail the spread of the virus that has so far infected more than 80,000 people, and results in almost 3,000 deaths, mostly in China. Amazon said has been taking the products in question down throughout the month... "Amazon has always required sellers provide accurate information on product detail pages and we remove those that violate our policies," said an Amazon spokesperson, in a statement given to this news organization.

"From the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs comes three case studies on people who benefited from LSD overdoses including one woman who took a dose of 55 milligrams of pure powdered LSD," writes clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684).

CNN reports: The 49-year-old woman, known as CB, had contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s, which damaged her feet and ankles and left her in "significant pain." In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually "pure LSD in powder form." The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms -- equal to 0.1 milligrams. The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling "pleasantly high" for the 12 hours after that -- still vomiting, but less often. According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later, she was able to hold a conversation and "seemed coherent."

Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using morphine for five days. While the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LSD every three days. After more than two years, in January 2018, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms, although the case report said she did experience an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawal.

UPDATE: (2/29/2020) Saturday U.S. health officials confirmed the first American death from coronavirus.

And the Boston Globe's Stat News site reports that the new coronavirus "may be spreading in parts of the Pacific Northwest, with California, Oregon, and Washington State reporting Friday that they have diagnosed cases with no travel history or known contact with another case...." Problems with a coronavirus test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have meant that little testing for the new virus has been done in the U.S. Worried infectious diseases experts have warned that the lack of apparent cases in the country cannot be taken as a sign the virus isn't spreading, undetected in some places...

The discovery that the virus may be spreading in the country should not come as a surprise, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. "It just tells us where there is testing, there are cases. And that's what we have to understand," Osterholm said. "There is no such thing as a barrier containment to keep these out. It's going to happen. And what we have to do now is get on with how we're going to deal with them...."

Dr. Sara Cody, health officer for Santa Clara County, said individuals need to start practicing good hand hygiene and learn to stop touching their faces -- people can infect themselves if they pick up viruses off a contaminated surface, then put a finger in their mouth or rub their eyes or nose.

World Health Organization officials said Friday they are increasing the risk assessment of the coronavirus, which has spread to at least 49 countries in a matter of weeks, to "very high" at a global level. From a report: "We are on the highest level of alert or highest level of risk assessment in terms of spread and in terms of impact," said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's health emergencies program. The group isn't trying to alarm or scare people, he said. "This is a reality check for every government on the planet: Wake up. Get ready. This virus may be on its way and you need to be ready. You have a duty to your citizens, you have a duty to the world to be ready." The world can still avoid "the worst of it," but the increased risk assessment means the WHO's "level of concern is at its highest," he said at a press conference at WHO headquarters in Geneva. World leaders still have a chance to contain the virus within their borders, Ryan said. "To wait, to be complacent to be caught unawares at this point, it's really not much of an excuse."

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for Scientific American: Preparing for the almost inevitable global spread of this virus, now dubbed COVID-19, is one of the most pro-social, altruistic things you can do in response to potential disruptions of this kind. We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone. We should prepare not because we are facing a doomsday scenario out of our control, but because we can alter every aspect of this risk we face as a society. That's right, you should prepare because your neighbors need you to prepare -- especially your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time.

Prepper and survivalist subcultures are often associated with doomsday scenarios and extreme steps: people stocking and hoarding supplies, building bunkers and preparing to go off the grid so that they may survive some untold catastrophe, brandishish weapons to guard their compound while their less prepared neighbors perish. All this appears both extreme and selfish, and, to be honest, a little nutty -- just check the title of the TV series devoted to the subculture: Doomsday Preppers, implying, well, a doomsday and the few prepared individuals surviving in a war-of-all-against-all world. It also feels like a scam: there is no shortage of snake oil sellers who hope stoking such fears will make people buy more supplies: years' worth of ready-to-eat meals, bunker materials and a lot more stuff in various shades of camo. (The more camo the more doomsday feels, I guess!) The reality is that there is little point "preparing" for the most catastrophic scenarios some of these people envision. As a species, we live and die by our social world and our extensive infrastructure -- and there is no predicting what anybody needs in the face of total catastrophe. In contrast, the real crisis scenarios we're likely to encounter require cooperation and, crucially, "flattening the curve" of the crisis exactly so the more vulnerable can fare better, so that our infrastructure will be less stressed at any one time.

Federal health employees interacted with Americans quarantined for possible exposure to the coronavirus without proper medical training or protective gear then scattered into the general population, The New York Times reported Thursday, citing a government whistle-blower. From the report: In a portion of a complaint filing obtained by The New York Times that has been submitted to the Office of the Special Counsel, the whistle-blower, described as a senior leader at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the team was "improperly deployed" to two military bases in California to assist the processing of Americans who had been evacuated from coronavirus hot zones in China and elsewhere.

The staff members were sent to Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base and were ordered to enter quarantined areas, including a hangar where coronavirus evacuees were being received. They were not provided training in safety protocols until five days later, the person said. Without proper training or equipment, some of the exposed staff members moved freely around and off the bases, with at least one person staying in a nearby hotel and leaving California on a commercial flight. Many were unaware of the need to test their temperature three times a day.

The fight to contain the coronavirus entered an alarming new phase on Thursday as caseloads soared in Europe and the Middle East, and health officials in the United States and Germany dealt with patients with no known connection to others with the infection. From a report: The German and American cases raised the possibility that the virus could have begun to spread locally, or that infected people had spread it to others sequentially, making it virtually impossible to trace and isolate the origins. Either way, the cases, thousands of miles apart, underscored how quickly the virus was making its way around the globe after emerging in China. Japan's government closed all schools through March in an effort to combat the outbreak. Iran canceled Friday Prayers in major cities, a cornerstone ritual of the Islamic Republic. Saudi Arabia barred pilgrims from visiting Mecca and Medina.

President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would lead the American effort to combat the virus, but the administration continued to send mixed messages. Public health officials warned of potentially "major disruptions," while Mr. Trump blamed Democrats and cable news channels for overstating the threat. Financial markets continued their weeklong declines. In the Middle East, concerns built about the growing severity of the outbreak in Iran, the source of infections in many other countries. The government said on Thursday that 245 people had been infected and 26 had died, but experts say there are probably many more cases. Several countries registered new infections that illustrated the diverse ways the pathogen could cross borders.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a resident from Northern California has contracted the coronavirus without traveling outside the United States or coming in contact with another patient known to have the infection -- the first sign that the disease may be spreading within a local community. The Sacramento Bee reports: "It is a confirmed case. There is one in Northern California," CDC spokesman Scott Pauley told The Sacramento Bee just before 4 p.m. Wednesday. In the Northern California case, "the individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County. The individual had no known exposure to the virus through travel or close contact with a known infected individual," California Department of Public Health officials said in a news release Wednesday evening. State public health officials in Sacramento, citing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the case is the first person-to-person transmission of the COVID-19 virus.

Earlier cases of person-to-person transmission in Illinois and in San Benito County came "after close, prolonged interaction with a family member who returned from Wuhan, China, and had tested positive for COVID-19," California Department of Public Health officials said in their Wednesday statement. Dr. Sonia Angell, the state's public health officer, called the outbreak an "evolving situation" that the state had been monitoring since the first cases in China late last year. but added "there is a lot we already know." "We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California," Angell said in prepared remarks. Earlier today, President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence will lead the government's response to the virus. In the rare White House address, Trump maintained that the risk to the U.S. from the virus "remains very low."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An electronic device that "sniffs" breath may offer a new way to identify people with a condition that can lead to cancer of the oesophagus, researchers have revealed. According to the charity Cancer Research UK, people diagnosed with Barrett's oesophagus -- a precancerous condition in which cells lining the food pipe change and may grow abnormally -- have more than 11 times greater risk of getting a particular type of oesophageal cancer called oesophageal adenocarcinoma compared with the general population. Writing in the journal Gut, Siersema and colleagues reported how they tested their device on 402 patients who were scheduled to undergo an endoscopy. Among these patients, 129 went on to be diagnosed with Barrett's oesophagus, 141 had gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, and 132 had neither problem.

Before they underwent an endoscopy, each patient was asked to breath into an "electronic nose" -- a device that can detect different volatile molecules. In the breath, such molecules result from processes in the body, however while many of these occur in a healthy individual, some may be linked to particular diseases, either reflecting changes in cells or changes in the local community of microbes caused by a disease. As a result, a particular composition within a breath sample may act as a hallmark of a condition. The team's portable electronic nose incorporated a type of artificial intelligence to look for these patterns. [...] Overall the results reveal that the nose correctly identified patients with Barrett's oesophagus 91% of the time, while it correctly identified those without the condition 74% of the time. When the test was restricted to only those with either gastro-oesophageal reflux disease or Barrett's oesophagus, the system was still able to distinguish patients, albeit less accurately.