The limits of antibody testing add to the immunity mystery.
One of the great mysteries of the coronavirus pandemic has been the fact that many stricken people have later discovered that they don’t seem to have antibodies, the protective proteins generated in response to an infection.
This has led to concerns that people may be susceptible to repeat infections.
The problem, writes The Times’s Apoorva Mandavilli, lies in the antibody tests.
Most commercial antibody tests offer crude yes-no answers. The tests are notorious for delivering false positives — results indicating that someone has antibodies when they do not.
But the volume of coronavirus antibodies is known to drop sharply once the acute illness ends, and it has become increasingly clear that tests may miss antibodies that are present at low levels.
Moreover, some tests — including those made by Abbott and Roche and offered by Quest Labs and LabCorp — are designed to detect a subtype of antibodies that doesn’t confer immunity and may wane even faster than the kind that can destroy the virus.
But the declining antibodies indicated by commercial tests don’t necessarily mean declining immunity, several experts said.
“Whatever your level is today, if you get infected, your antibody titers are going to go way up,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University, referring to the levels of antibodies in the blood. “The virus will never even have a chance the second time around.”
A small number of people may not produce any antibodies to the coronavirus. But even then, they will have “cellular immunity,” which includes T cells that learn to identify and destroy the virus. Virtually everyone infected with the coronavirus seems to develop T-cell responses, according to several recent studies.
The pandemic is taking an immense toll on the nonprofit groups that Americans rely on for social services, medical care, cultural and spiritual needs. Tens of thousands are likely to close without some kind of rescue package, the research group Candid has concluded from an analysis of tax filings.
The sector is the nation’s third-largest private employer, with 1.3 million nonprofits employing roughly 12.5 million people, about 10 percent of the total in the private sector. A Johns Hopkins University study estimated that 1.6 million nonprofit jobs were lost from February to May.
Nonprofits range from big-city hospitals to thrift shops that support local charities, and they are being upended by the pandemic in different ways. Many cannot fulfill their functions because of shutdowns and social distancing. For food pantries and free clinics, the economic upheaval has created a surge in clients.
“People who used to donate to nonprofits are now standing in line to receive services, which tells you while demand is soaring the resources are plummeting,” said Tim Delaney, the president and chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits.
Hoping to prevent devastating new cutbacks, large nonprofits like the American Heart Association and the American Red Cross are asking for federal grants and loans.
A group of 3,800 nonprofits recently sent a letter asking congressional leaders to increase the tax deduction for charitable contributions. They also asked lawmakers to expand the Paycheck Protection Program and other lending programs to include larger nonprofits, including some Y.M.C.A. chapters, which are left out if they have more than 500 employees.
In the first wave of the outbreak, the 2,600 national outposts of the Y.M.C.A. transformed into civic centers, caring for the children of emergency medical technicians, doctors and other essential workers when day care centers closed down, as well as feeding the poor when schools that offered meal programs shut their doors.
Now the Y.M.C.A. finds itself in financial jeopardy just as it is needed most.
North Korea said on Sunday that it had locked down Kaesong, a city near its border with South Korea, and declared a “maximum” national emergency after finding what its leader, Kim Jong-un, said could be the country’s first case of Covid-19 there.
It issued the high alert after a North Korean who had defected to South Korea three years ago but secretly crossed back into Kaesong a week ago was “suspected to have been infected with the vicious virus,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
Until now, North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated countries, has repeatedly said that it had no cases of Covid-19, although outside experts questioned the claim.
North Korea has taken some of the most drastic actions of any country against the virus, and it did so sooner than most other nations.
It sealed its borders in late January, shutting off business with neighboring China, which accounts for nine-tenths of its external trade. It clamped down on the smugglers who keep its thriving unofficial markets functioning. It quarantined all diplomats in Pyongyang for a month.
A Covid-19 outbreak could seriously test North Korea’s underequipped public health system and its economy, already struggling under international sanctions. Relief agencies have been providing test kits and other assistance to help the country fight any potential spread.
In other news from around the globe:
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South Korea reported 58 new infections on Sunday, including 46 from abroad, a sharp drop from a day earlier. On Saturday, the country had reported 113 new infections, its highest daily total since March. Those cases included 36 South Korean construction workers who had returned from Iraq, and 32 Russian sailors from a fishing vessel docked for repair.
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Also in South Korea, the office of President Moon Jae-in said that he had received a letter from Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, expressing hope for greater cooperation between South Korea and his foundation in efforts to fight the virus. In the July 20 letter, Mr. Gates praised the country’s pandemic response and said that if the South Korean company SK Bioscience succeeded in developing a vaccine, it would be able to produce 200 million doses a year starting next June. The company has received $3.6 million in research funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
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Australia on Sunday reported its highest one-day death toll — 10 people, all in the state of Victoria. Also, the New South Wales Supreme Court prohibited a Black Lives Matter rally set for Sydney on Tuesday, citing the risk of virus transmission. Organizers say they plan to appeal.
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President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil said on Saturday that he had been cured of Covid-19 after apparently having only mild symptoms from a disease he has repeatedly played down while it has killed more than 85,000 people in his country. “GOOD MORNING EVERYONE,” Mr. Bolsonaro, 65, posted in a message on Twitter Saturday morning, smiling and brandishing a box of hydroxychloroquine pills, the anti-malaria medicine. Mr. Bolsonaro has hailed the drug as a miracle cure, despite a growing scientific consensus that it is not effective to treat Covid-19.
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Vietnam, which has recorded zero deaths from the coronavirus and had gone 100 days without a single case of local transmission, reported two positive cases over the weekend in the central city of Danang: a 57-year-old man and a 61-year-old man. In both cases, the source of the infection was unclear. Officials said that the second man’s condition was deteriorating rapidly and that he had been placed on a ventilator.
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Britain abruptly imposed a two-week quarantine on travelers returning from Spain with just a few hours notice, upending plans for thousands of people. The move by London late Saturday echoed renewed travel restrictions imposed by other European countries, which could further cripple the tourism sector that is a cornerstone of Spain’s economy.
‘A head-snapping reversal’: Trump signals acceptance of a political landscape transformed by the pandemic.
With his sudden embrace of masks and the cancellation on Thursday of the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Fla., President Trump has reluctantly conceded to a political landscape that has been transformed by disease and fear, The Times’s Adam Nagourney writes in a news analysis.
A pandemic that first pummeled Democratic states like New York and California has moved with alarming force into red America and helped recast Mr. Trump’s re-election prospects in the contest with Joseph R. Biden Jr., his presumptive Democratic opponent.
Mr. Trump’s attempt to play down the coronavirus, or deride it as a threat exaggerated by his Democratic opponents and the news media, has met the reality of rising caseloads, death counts and overwhelmed intensive care units in places like Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas, all states that he won in 2016 and that the Biden campaign had until now viewed as long shots.
“The movement of Covid into the South and West has finally caught up with Trump,” said Linda L. Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College.
The political perils of Mr. Trump’s course were driven home a few hours before he announced he was scrapping the Florida convention. A Quinnipiac poll found that Mr. Biden was leading Mr. Trump in Florida by 13 percentage points, a stunning margin in a state that has become — since the recount in the 2000 presidential election — Exhibit A of a nation where elections are decided by decimal points.
And a Washington Post-ABC News poll this past week found that Americans trusted Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump to handle the Covid-19 crisis by a double-digit margin, 54 percent to 34 percent.
Mr. Trump had little choice but to at least try to change course.
“He’s wearing a mask and canceling the convention,” said Mark McKinnon, who was in charge of advertising for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004. “That’s a head-snapping reversal for a guy who hates to be wrong, hates to back down and, worst of all, hates to be perceived as weak.”
Editors and account managers at the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan could once walk out through the modernist lobby and into a thriving ecosystem that existed in support of the offices above. They could shop for designer shirts or shoes, slide into a steakhouse corner booth for lunch and then return to their desks without ever crossing the street.
To approach this block today is like visiting a relative in the hospital. The building, rebranded a few years ago and renovated to fit 8,000 workers, now has just 500 a day showing up. The steakhouse dining rooms are dark.
While other neighborhoods are rushing to reopen, Midtown Manhattan — the muscular power center of New York City for a century — remains stuck in a purgatorial Phase Zero, offering a sign of what may lie in store for business districts across the country.
Ahmed Ahmed, a hot dog vendor looking over what should be prime real estate outside Radio City Music Hall at West 50th Street, said he used to sell 400 hot dogs a day. Now? “Maybe 10,” he said.
Subway data tells a story just as stark.
Consider the area’s Rockefeller Center station, a major stop for four train lines. Last year on June 24, a Monday, there were 62,312 MetroCard turnstile swipes as riders entered the station. On the comparable Monday this year, June 22, the number of swipes was 8,032, a staggering 87 percent decrease.
Robert A.M. Stern, the modern traditionalist architect whose firm has executed many prominent projects in Manhattan and around the globe, said the past was a hopeful indicator in this uncertain time.
“New York survived the late ’70s, and everybody thought the city was over, rampant crime, near bankruptcy,” he said. “It survives the market crashes of ’87 and ’89, it survives the dot-com crash of 2000 or so. It survived 2008. So it will survive. But each time, each one of those moments probably can be traced in relationship to new ideas on how to occupy existing buildings or how to occupy new buildings.”
More than one-third of the United States national women’s rowing team was infected with Covid-19 in March and April, according to Dr. Peter Wenger, the team’s doctor at its training center in Princeton, N.J.
Emily Regan, an Olympic gold medalist from Williamsville, N.Y., was among them. She wrote a post on Facebook this month highlighting how debilitating the disease could be, even for some of the world’s best athletes, who have incredibly powerful and efficient lungs.
“The narrative that has been going around in some places is that you won’t get the virus if you’re young and strong, or if you get it, it won’t be bad, but we’re perfect examples of how that is totally not true,” Regan said. She added: “Look what the virus still did to us. It knocked us down pretty hard.”
The infected rowers ranged in age from 23 to 37, she said, and many battled symptoms for weeks. The cases were categorized as mild, though some athletes dealt with complications for as long as 40 days, according to Wenger. None of the rowers required hospitalization, he said.
Regan, 32, said it had taken her a month to feel back to normal after she fell ill. More than three months later, she is still trying to get back into competitive shape, she said. That level of fitness was extremely high: Regan is a four-time world champion in her ninth year on the national team.
“I’ve never struggled like that before,” she said.
Elaine Roberts, a bagger at a supermarket, tried to be careful. She put on gloves and stopped riding the bus to work, instead relying on her father to drive her. She wore masks — in space-themed fabrics stitched by her sister — as she stacked products on shelves, helped people to their cars and retrieved carts from the parking lot.
But many customers at the Randalls store in a Houston suburb did not wear them, she noticed, even as coronavirus cases began rising in early June. Gov. Greg Abbott, who had pushed to reopen businesses in Texas, was refusing to make masks mandatory and blocked local officials from enforcing mask requirements.
Ms. Roberts, 35, who has autism and lives with her parents, got sick first. Then her father, Paul, and mother, Sheryl, were hospitalized. While no one can be certain how Elaine Roberts was infected, her older sister, Sidra Roman, blamed grocery customers who she felt had put her family in danger.
“Wearing a piece of cloth, it’s a little uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s a lot less uncomfortable than ventilators, dialysis lines, all of those things that have had to happen to my father. And it’s not necessarily you that’s going to get sick and get hurt.”
What happened to the Robertses is in many ways the story of Texas, one of the nation’s hot spots. For weeks, politicians were divided over keeping the economy open, citizens were polarized about wearing masks, and doctors were warning that careless behavior could imperil others.
In southeast Texas, communities already battered by the pandemic faced a new but no less frightening foe on Saturday, as Hurricane Hanna slammed the coast with heavy rains and winds.
Hanna’s eye made landfall on Padre Island, about 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, around 5 p.m. Saturday, with winds of 90 m.p.h. The National Weather Service warned of floods and of gales that could peel roofs from homes, mangle trees and cause power failures.
Many cities and counties in the path of Hanna have been experiencing spikes in Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations.
While the pandemic has made international travel difficult for many, visa restrictions the Trump administration set last month have taken a toll in an unexpected corner: the au pair program, which is run by the State Department and categorized under the J-1 work visa program.
New au pairs — usually young people, mostly women, who come to the United States to provide child care — who had been preparing for posts can longer enter the country. And the American families expecting them, often with working parents, have been left scrambling to find replacements.
When the order was officially announced on June 22, au pairs from around the world, preparing to leave home for a year or longer in the United States, saw their dreams crushed.
“I was honestly heartbroken,” said Kristina Kobzeva, 23, from Kazakhstan. “My mom told me that I can’t wait so much time until next year, that I’ll have to quit the program and get married if the borders won’t be reopened this year for au pairs.”
The au pair program is operated by a network of private agencies, but many host parents have taken to unofficial forums on Facebook and other sites as an additional way to search for potential matches. That has created a frenzied social-media rush to woo the dwindling number of au pairs in the country who are still available.
Families posting in Facebook groups in June announcing benefits like unlimited public transportation passes, new cars, access to beach houses and skydiving trips, and double the pay. “We’re offering a 2000 USD sign-on bonus,” one parent wrote.
On the other end, while au pairs entering the program might speak with only two or three families in the initial interview process, in-country candidates are now hearing from 10, 20, sometimes closer to 50 prospective families.
“Now we feel powerful,” said one Colombian au pair. “For once, we have a choice.”
Steering a course through the ethics of the coronavirus.
Covid-19 has created a whole new set of moral quandaries. Here are a few ways to consider those issues.
Reporting was contributed by Fahim Abed, Sheri Fink, Jennifer Jett, Nicholas Kulish, Ernesto Londoño, Apoorva Mandavilli, Raphael Minder, Adam Nagourney, Jordan Salama, Choe Sang-Hun and Michael Wilson.