JOHANNESBURG (AP) — An Africa-wide study of antibodies to the coronavirus has begun, while evidence from a smaller study indicates that many more people have been infected than official numbers show, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.
The detection of four new infected family members earlier this week shocked a country that had recorded no locally transmitted cases for more than three months.
Of the new cases, 13 have been linked back to this family, while one is an overseas arrival who was in quarantine.
A three-day lockdown was imposed in Auckland on Wednesday.
"We can see the seriousness of the situation we are in," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a news conference.
"It’s being dealt with in an urgent but calm and methodical way."
....As the United States struggles to control the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the country are using Twitter to announce the arrival of their virus test results. The point of these tweets is not just to broadcast the result itself, but to point out the absurdity of receiving a result so stale that it’s almost completely useless from a public health standpoint.
For a Texas nurse, the first sign that something was wrong happened while brushing her teeth — she couldn’t taste her toothpaste. For a Georgia attorney, it was hitting a wall of fatigue on a normally easy run. When a Wisconsin professor fell ill in June, he thought a bad meal had upset his stomach.
But eventually, all of these people discovered that their manifold symptoms were all signs of Covid-19. Some of the common symptoms — a dry cough, a headache — can start so mildly they are at first mistaken for allergies or a cold. In other cases, the symptoms are so unusual — strange leg pain, a rash or dizziness — that patients and even their doctors don’t think Covid-19 could be the culprit.
