March 25 coronavirus news

The world should have responded to the coronavirus pandemic a month or two ago, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing in Geneva today. 

He added that health officials still believe there are opportunities to fight the virus.

"The time to act was actually a month ago, two months ago. … but we still believe there is opportunity," he said. "This is a second opportunity, which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus. This is a responsibility for all of us — especially the political leadership is key."

There are now more than 10,700 National Guard members activated around the US as part of the coronavirus response.

The National Guard is helping to deliver food to hard-hit communities, supporting local emergency management agencies with response and providing transportation and assessment support to healthcare, among other things during the pandemic.

Calling themselves "the ground troops" in the fight against coronavirus, members of the National Association of Counties (NACo) told reporters on a call Wednesday that they are bracing for an enormous economic fallout during the coronavirus outbreak.

Clark County Commission Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick said that she is anticipating more than a billion dollar loss in her county, which includes Las Vegas, in the coming months as businesses have to close their doors to tourists. 

According to Kirkpatrick, hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off in recent months as the state scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus while implementing emergency economic measures.

A number of county leaders pointed to how expensive it is to transition essential government workers to a "work from home" solution.

Even as Congress appears on the brink of passing a $2 trillion dollar stimulus bill, which is expected to dump $150 billion dollars into state coffers, local officials fear it won't be enough.

"The big unknown right now is the lost revenue and the fact it doesn’t appear at first glance to capture lost revenue," said Matthew Chase, executive director of the National Association of Counties.

NACo members also voiced frustration about the lack of federal response and discussed how they are working around the lack of access to testing.

Each leader on the call spoke about their directives to keep people away from one another, otherwise called the "Safer at Home" initiative.

"We can do things ahead of that testing in order to level the curve and not overwhelm health systems," said NACo President Mary Ann Borgeson. "The more we can do to try and prevent people again being in large crowds, public places."

CNN's Phil Mattingly is answering your questions on the Senate stimulus package.

Under the plan, individuals who earn $75,000 in adjusted gross income or less would get direct payments of $1,200 each. But which tax return is that based on?

If you’ve filed for 2019, that’s what it would based off of. If you haven’t, it would be based off of 2018, Mattingly said.

The World Health Organization is warning that opening schools and businesses too early could cause a resurgence of coronavirus.  

“We understand that these countries are now trying to assess when and how they will be able to ease these measures. The answer depends on what countries do while these population-wide measures are in place," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Speaking on Wednesday, Tedros said, “Asking people to stay at home and shutting down population movement is buying time and reducing the pressure on health systems. But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics.”

A British diplomat stationed in Hungary has died of coronavirus, the UK foreign office said on Wednesday.

Steven Dick, 37, was the deputy head of mission for Britain in Budapest. According to the statement, he died on Tuesday after contracting the virus. 

While Prime Minister Boris Johnson reaffirmed the government's commitment to increasing the number of coronavirus tests carried out in the UK, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty warned that the UK does not have "sufficient testing" capabilities to identify coronavirus cases, telling reporters during a news briefing on Wednesday that there is a "global shortage" of available tests. 

"The thing that we would like to do next — which would certainly make a difference, less to the disease, but definitely to the NHS — is being able to test NHS staff and the critical workers who are self-isolating, who currently are not being tested because we do not have sufficient tests," Whitty added.

Speaking alongside the chief medical officer, Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted that the UK is "massively ramping up" its nationwide testing program, and will continue to increase the number of tests carried out each week. 

"We have done many more tests than most other European countries. The priority should be, and will be, getting those tests to our frontline staff in the NHS, and we are going to that as quickly as we can," Johnson said. 

CNN's Phil Mattingly is answering your questions on the Senate stimulus package.

Mattingly says you don't need to apply in order to receive a check — but the question of when they go out could be a little trickier.

Here's how he put it:

Evidence is emerging that injury to the heart may be a common condition among people hospitalized with Covid-19, according to a new study, and it’s linked to a greater risk of death for those patients.

The study, published in the medical journal JAMA Cardiology on Wednesday, found that among a group of 416 adult Covid-19 patients hospitalized in Wuhan, China, 82 patients — 19.7% — had cardiac injury. The death rate was higher among patients with cardiac injury versus those without: 42 of the patients with cardiac injury died — 51.2% — versus 15 of those without cardiac injury, or 4.5%.

Cardiac injury, sometimes also referred to as myocardial injury, occurs when there is damage to heart muscle and such damage can occur when blood flow to the heart is reduced —vwhich is what causes a heart attack.

Though the study showed cardiac injury is a common condition among patients hospitalized with Covid-19, it did not indicate whether Covid-19 directly causes cardiac injury. The authors state the mechanism of cardiac injury among these patients with Covid-19 remains uncertain, and more evidence is needed to demonstrate Covid-19 directly injures the heart.

Another key “is the potentially important long-term issue," said Brooks Gump, the Falk Family Endowed Professor of Public Health at Syracuse University in New York, who was not involved in the study. "Many patients who pull through may still have cardiac injury and associated long-term cardiovascular issues as a consequence of Covid-19 infection."