The Morning Dispatch: We Have a Road Map

Happy Friday. This is going to be the weekend we start the home workout videos. Promise.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • As of Thursday night, there are now 671,151 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States (a 5.2 percent increase from yesterday) and 33,268 deaths (a 7.9 percent increase from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5 percent (the true mortality rate is difficult to calculate due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 3,401,064 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States, 19.7 percent have come back positive. There are 108,942 Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 complications (a 4.9 percent increase from yesterday), while 56,017 have recovered from the virus (a 6.4 percent increase from yesterday). Several of you noticed a sharp spike in deaths in yesterday’s edition—while we’re still at or around the peak in our curve, the Johns Hopkins official death count reflects retroactive revisions and slight tweaks in reporting methodology in recent days.

  • A Chicago hospital is seeing some early success in treating coronavirus patients with an antiviral medicine from Gilead Science called remdesivir. The drug is currently in two Phase 3 trials and not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but STAT News is reporting that only two of 125 coronavirus patients (113 of whom were severely ill) in one of the trials have died after being treated with daily infusions of remdesivir.

  • Another 5.2 million jobless claims were filed last week, bringing the total over the past month to more than 20 million. More jobs have been lost in that timeframe than had been gained since the Great Recession.

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