H-ISAC TLP Green: Coronavirus Daily Update - June 1, 2021

Headlines

• The US looks to continue what has been a steady decline in cases, deaths and hospitalizations since mid-April, this week, and as of Sunday, its seven-day averages of cases and deaths are the lowest since June 2020, and hospitalizations are at the lowest level since early in the pandemic.
• About 6 million people were expected to go through US airports this weekend, with many, including Los Angeles International, breaking their 2021 records for daily passenger travel, and more than 37 million Americans projected to travel 50 miles or more, an increase of 60 percent compared with this time last year, which registered the lowest number of Memorial Day travelers on record, according to AAA, when just 23 million traveled last year for the holiday.
• India, after a terrifying surge in April and early May, has seen cases plummeting for three weeks, but the death toll, which often lags a few weeks behind changes in case numbers, is still high and began dropping modestly only last week.
• Scientists in England are raising the alarm that a new wave of COVID-19 cases may be hitting the United Kingdom after it reported more than 3,000 new infections for the sixth consecutive day Monday, a number the country hadn’t seen since April 12.
• Starting Tuesday, the Guardian reports that a system will be in place to let European Union member states issue a digital Covid passport to citizens proving their status and allowing them to travel, with a deadline set for July 1 for all 27 EU countries to accept the documentation as sufficient proof of vaccination.
• Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus., the head of the World Health Organization called on Monday for launching negotiations this year on an international treaty to boost pandemic preparedness, as part of sweeping reforms envisioned by member states, telling the annual ministerial assembly that the United Nation agency faced a "serious challenge" to maintain its COVID-19 response at the current level and required sustainable and flexible funding.
• In an effort to simplify terms and avoid stigmas, the World Health Organization has unveiled a naming system for coronavirus variants based on the Greek alphabet, and henceforth, the variant first identified in the United Kingdom, will be commonly known as Alpha, instead of B.1.1.7 or the "British variant,'' and likewise, the variant that first emerged in South Africa (B.1.351) will be called Beta, the P.1 detected in Brazil will be Gamma and the variant that helped fuel the spike in India, B.1.671.2, will go by Delta.
• More than 11 million Americans are behind on their rent and many could be pushed from their homes when the national eviction ban expires in June, and although the policy has been far from perfect at keeping renters housed, it’s reduced the normal number of eviction filings over the same time period by at least a half, according to Peter Hepburn, an assistant professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and research fellow at The Eviction Lab.
• The Japanese government is considering requiring spectators of the Tokyo Olympics to be either tested or vaccinated, with a draft plan that calls proof of a negative result within a week of the event being viewed.

At Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Labradors are being trained to sniff out Covid-19 in humans, as part of a global corps of dogs to be used to detect the virus, with preliminary studies, conducted in several countries, continuing to suggest that their detection rate may surpass that of the rapid antigen testing often used in airports and other public places.