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Situation Report

Virus Surges Again Across Most of the United States

As the coronavirus races across the country, it has reached every corner of a nursing home in Kansas, infecting all 62 residents inside. There are so few hospital beds available in North Dakota that patients sick with the virus are being ferried by ambulance to facilities 100 miles away. And in Ohio, more people are hospitalized with the virus than at any other time during the pandemic.

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Studies Point To Big Drop In COVID-19 Death Rates

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness.

"We find that the death rate has gone down substantially," says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August.

The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.

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Consumer masks could soon come with labels saying how well they work

As millions of Americans adopted mask-wearing this year to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, they confronted a wild west of options, including artisanal products sold on Etsy, cotton coverings sewn by their family members and mass-produced items marketed by favorite retailers.

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Surprising Results in Initial Virus Testing in N.Y.C. Schools

For months, as New York City struggled to start part-time, in-person classes, fear grew that its 1,800 public schools would become vectors of coronavirus infection, a citywide archipelago of super-spreader sites.

But nearly three weeks into the in-person school year, early data from the city’s first effort at targeted testing has shown the opposite: a surprisingly small number of positive cases.

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UK to infect healthy volunteers in vaccine research trial

LONDON (AP) — U.K. researchers are preparing to infect healthy young volunteers with the virus that causes COVID-19, becoming the first scientists to use the controversial technique to study the disease and potentially speed up development of a vaccine that could help end the pandemic.

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