India using Kashmir to oppose Silk Road project: Chinese media

Washington, Mar 31: The United States has performed over one million coronavirus tests so far, said President Donald Trump on Monday.

"Today, we reached a historic milestone in our war against coronavirus. Over 1 million Americans have now been tested, more than any other country by far, not even close," Trump said during a press briefing.

US Health Secretary Alex Azar said that approximately 100,000 samples are tested for coronavirus daily.

The number of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) cases within the United States surpassed 150,000 and the death toll has reached 2828, according to Johns Hopkins University. 

Houston, Mar 15: Researchers, studying the novel coronavirus, have found that the time between cases in a chain of transmission is less than a week, and over 10 per cent of patients are infected by someone who has the virus, but does not show symptoms yet, a finding that may help public health officials contain the pandemic.

The study, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, estimated what's called the serial interval of the coronavirus by measuring the time it takes for symptoms to appear in two people with the virus -- the person who infects another, and the infected second person.

According to the researchers, including those from the University of Texas at Austin, the average serial interval for the novel coronavirus in China was approximately four days.

They said the speed of an epidemic depends on two things -- how many people each case infects, and how long it takes cases to spread.

The first quantity, the scientists said, is called the reproduction number, and the second is the serial interval.

Due to the short serial interval of the disease caused by the coronavirus -- COVID-19 -- they said, emerging outbreaks will grow quickly, and could be difficult to stop.

“Ebola, with a serial interval of several weeks, is much easier to contain than influenza, with a serial interval of only a few days,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, study co-author from UT Austin.

Meyers explained that public health responders to Ebola outbreaks have much more time to identify and isolate cases before they infect others.

“The data suggest that this coronavirus may spread like the flu. That means we need to move quickly and aggressively to curb the emerging threat,” Meyers added.

In the study, the scientists examined more than 450 infection case reports from 93 cities in China, and found the strongest evidence yet that people without symptoms must be transmitting the virus -- known as pre-symptomatic transmission.

More than one in ten infections were from people who had the virus but did not yet feel sick, the scientists said.

While researchers across the globe had some uncertainty until now about asymptomatic transmission with the coronavirus, the new evidence could provide guidance to public health officials on how to contain the spread of the disease.

“This provides evidence that extensive control measures including isolation, quarantine, school closures, travel restrictions and cancellation of mass gatherings may be warranted,” Meyers said.

The researchers cautioned that asymptomatic transmission makes containment more difficult.

With hundreds of new cases emerging around the world every day, the scientists said, the data may offer a different picture over time.

They said infection case reports are based on people's memories of where they went and whom they had contact with, and if health officials move quickly to isolate patients, that may also skew the data.

“Our findings are corroborated by instances of silent transmission and rising case counts in hundreds of cities worldwide. This tells us that COVID-19 outbreaks can be elusive and require extreme measures,” Meyers said.

Washington, Jun 18: US Defence officials are concerned over China's use of COVID-19 situation to gain stakes in strategically important companies of United States as the impact of novel coronavirus has left several companies in dire need of capital.

Amid the pandemic, it getting hard for the defence department to keep an eye on national security and help protect smaller companies down the chain, CNN reported.

"We are paying close attention to any indicators that China is leveraging Covid-19 to take advantage of a situation where defence companies need capital more than ever," a defence official told CNN.

In April, Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment said it is paying close attention to 'adversaries' against the 'economic warfare' with the United States.

"We have to be very, very careful about the focused efforts some of our adversaries have to really undergo sort of economic warfare with us, which has been going on for some time," Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment was quoted as saying by CNN.

US Committee on Foreign Investment protects its interest against hostile countries gaining ownership in strategically important companies. But the pandemic is changing the definition of national security concerns to include drugs, protective gear and medical supplies.

"These are now national security needs and we probably should have been thinking about it a long time ago in terms of biowarfare that we should have a trusted industrial base or a set of trusted allies -- the UK, or NATO allies or Japan or Korea -- who are trusted in that regard," Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official.

Give the threat posed by foreign acquisition, Pentagon has been offering tools to help small US businesses defend themselves against adversarial investment and conducting background checks with other government agencies to ensure transparency.

US President Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro recently told CNN if Trump wins reelection, Washington DC will likely take offshore supply chains as national security priorities.

"If we fail to do that in the face of this crisis, we will have failed this country and all future generations of Americans," Navarro said.

The US State Department has also warned US allies to "avoid economic overreliance on China" and "guard their critical infrastructure" from China's influence.

Chad P Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, pointed to recent China's economic coercion of Australia on the political matter saying, "this is how China operates and everybody knows it."