Contagion Live News Network: Coronavirus Updates for April 8, 2020

Welcome to the Contagion Live News Network. I’m Grant Gallagher and this is your coronavirus update for Wednesday, April 8, 2020.

In the United States the coronavirus death toll has passed 13,000, with more than 400,000 cases in the United States and nearly 1.5 million worldwide.

In political news, President Trump and the World Health Organization have traded barbs over the President’s comments that the global health institution has been soft on China during the pandemic.

What are the animal origins of SARS-CoV-2? How long does it cause infectious viral shedding? For these questions and more, check out our interview with virologist Jason Kindrachuk, PhD, on our site.

In part 2 of the interview, Dr. Kindrachuk answers clinician questions submitted during our recent webinar.

We also have 2 new interviews conducted by Contagion senior editor Michaela Fleming, with Dr. Wendy M. Bamberg and with Dr. Robert Salata. Dr. Bamberg is the editor of Contagion’s Emerging and Re-Emerging Infections section, and principal and medical epidemiologist with Medical Epidemiology Consulting. Dr. Salata is a principal investigator in the ARMS-I COVID Investigational Drug Study.

For more information on how social distancing school closures impact essential health care workers with child care obligations, preliminary data on pediatric cases of COVID-19, and the roadmap to national recovery from the pandemic, check out our COVID-19 condition center.

For other stories relevant to COVID-19 and the latest infectious disease news, visit ContagionLive.com. To track the spread of the pandemic in the United States and abroad, be sure to use the Contagion®  Outbreak Monitor.

For the Contagion Live News Network, I’m Grant Gallagher, thanks for listening.