According to the Associated Press, Olympics Begin, Tokyo Posts Highest Number of New COVID Cases in Six MonthsThe 1,979 cases reported on Thursday are the most seen since 2,044 cases were recorded on Jan. 15. Japan has reported about 853,000 cases and 15,100 deaths since the pandemic began, most of them this year. Still, the number of cases and deaths as a share of the population is much lower than in many other countries, the AP said.
The city was placed under a state of emergency on July 12, but there's been a spike in daily cases since then, prompting growing concerns about holding the games, which end on Aug. 8
The emergency measures largely involve an alcohol sales ban and shorter hours for restaurants and bars, all of which are scheduled to continue until Aug. 22, the AP reported.
No spectators are allowed at venues in the Tokyo area, but limited audiences will be allowed at a few outlying competition sites, the AP said.
Superbug' Candida Auris Fungus Spreads in the US
An untreatable "superbug" fungus is spreading in a Washington, D.C., nursing home and two Dallas-area hospitals, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.
There were 101 Candida Auris cases at the nursing home and 22 cases at the hospitals from January to April, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which did not identify the facilities, the Associated Press reported.
Three of the patients at the nursing home and two at the hospitals had infections resistant to all three major classes of antifungal medications. Of those patients, both patients in Texas and one in Washington died.
Both outbreaks are ongoing and more infections have been identified since April, but the CDC didn't release those additional numbers, the AP reported.
"This is really the first time we've started seeing clustering of [drug] resistance" in which infections appear to be spreading between patients, the CDC's Dr. Meghan Lyman told the AP.
C. Auris is a form of yeast that threatens hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems. It is most dangerous when it enters the bloodstream, heart, or brain. For years, health officials have sounded alarms about the drug-resistant fungus after seeing infections in which commonly used medicines had little effect. In 2019, doctors diagnosed three cases in New York that were also resistant to a class of drugs, called echinocandins, that was considered a last line of defense, the AP reported.
In those cases, there was no evidence the infections had spread from patient to patient — scientists concluded the resistance to the drugs had formed during an individual patient's treatment. But these new outbreaks could be different, the CDC's Lyman said fungal skin infections and fungal nail infections are gross and itchy, but they are not usually serious. Fungal infections like athlete’s foot, ringworm, and jock itch are easy to pick up and transmit to others. Healthy people do not usually experience a spread of fungus beyond the skin's surface, so they are easy to treat. If you spend a lot of time at the gym or public pool, follow these steps to guard against fungal infections.
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