Dr. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who was the first to sound the alarm about the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan, China, died of the virus early Friday morning.
In late December, the 34-year-old ophthalmologist wrote a message to his medical school classmates, letting them know he was quarantined in a hospital with seven people suffering from a mystery illness. In the middle of the night, Wuhan health authorities visited Li, and asked him why he shared this information; three days later, police officers came and pushed him into signing a statement declaring his warning was "illegal behavior."
Chinese journalists and doctors have criticized the government's reaction to the outbreak, saying officials did not fully comprehend the threat of the virus and then tried to downplay the threat. Last month, Li told The New York Times if officials had shared information on the coronavirus earlier, "I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency."
On Jan. 10, Li treated a woman for glaucoma who did not know she had coronavirus, and he caught it from her. He was married with one child and another on the way. On Thursday, the World Health Organization said there are 28,060 confirmed coronavirus cases in China, with the death toll reaching 564. Wuhan, a city of about 11 million people, has been under lockdown for the last two weeks, in an attempt to keep the virus from spreading. Catherine Garcia
The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use approval for Becton Dickinson's COVID-19 antigen test, the New Jersey company said Monday. The test can be used by people with little laboratory training on a portable device about the size of a smartphone that returns results within 15 minutes, Becton Dickinson said in a statement.
The tests can be run on the company's Veritor Plus System, which is already in use at about 25,000 U.S. health care facilities, at a cost of about $20 per test, not counting the $250 to $300 price for the platform itself. "People keep saying 'For that, I want to buy one for my house,'" Becton Dickinson chief executive Tom Polen told Bloomberg News. (The FDA approved the test only for specific facilities, not home use.) In comparison, an antigen test by Quidel Corp. approved by the FDA in May can cost as little as $5 to administer, while Abbott Laboratories' rapid ID NOW system costs thousands of dollars.
Antigen tests are a relatively new form of diagnostic test that scan for proteins on or inside a virus, Reuters explains. Becton Dickinson suggested its test could be used in retail pharmacies, urgent care clinic, and doctor's offices, and set a goal of producing 2 million tests a week by the end of September. The downside of antigen tests is that they "may not detect all active infections," the FDA said in May. "This means that positive results from antigen tests are highly accurate, but there is a higher chance of false negatives, so negative results do not rule out infection." Peter Weber
The faculty of Washington and Lee University voted overwhelmingly Monday to remove Robert E. Lee's name from the Virginia university. The faculty of then-Washington College voted to add Lee's name in 1870, right after the former Confederate general died. The resolution to remove Lee's name passed 188-51, while a proposed motion to remove George Washington's name failed.
Lee, who had served as the college's president after the Civil War, "was a symbol of who that faculty wanted to be, and who they were," said Alison Bell, head of the Faculty Affairs Committee. "The faculty is back 150 years later, asking the university for a name change because Lee does not represent who we are and who we want to be." Washington and Lee's student government formally asked for Lee's name to be scrapped last week, and more than 200 faculty members had signed a petition with the same goal.
The board of trustees, which would have to approve the name change, is "carefully monitoring developments regarding issues of race, monuments, and symbols of the Confederacy and their implications" for Washington and Lee, a spokeswoman said last week.
Elsewhere in Virginia, Confederate names are being stripped from public K-12 schools at a rapid clip, The Washington Post reports. Stonewall Middle School in Prince William County is getting a new name, as is Robert E. Lee High School, one of the most diverse schools in Fairfax County. Loudon County High School is getting a new mascot after the school board voted unanimously to drop the Raiders, a reference to Confederate Col. John S. Mosby's guerrilla troops.
"Historians said the wholesale rejection of Confederate iconography by Virginia schools is unprecedented," the Post reports, though James Grossman at the American Historical Association noted Black students, parents, and communities have objected since the schools were named in the 1950s and '60s, in an angry backlash to the Supreme Court's seminal ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
"It was trying to make Black students feel unwelcome, while white students and white communities were emboldened to resist desegregation," said historian Adam Domby. Peter Weber
You can, if you choose, take White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany at her word that President Trump was taking no position on the Confederate flag when he tweeted Monday morning that NASCAR's decision to ban the flag from its races helped cause NASCAR's "lowest ratings EVER!" But that "second part of Trump's tweet, about NASCAR's TV ratings, is completely false," says Daniel Roberts at Yahoo Finance.
Ratings for the first NASCAR event after the sport announced its Confederate flag ban, the June 10 race at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, jumped 113 percent from the same race last year, Fox Sports said. And overall, ratings are up 8 percent since the sport returned from COVID-19 lockdown on May 17 and 8 percent since the June 10 post-flag race. "In fact, every NASCAR race on Fox since the Confederate flag ban, except for Talladega on June 22, has rated higher than the equivalent race the year before," Roberts writes.
There is room for speculation over why Trump demanded an apology from Bubba Wallace, NASCAR's only top-tier Black driver, for a noose incident he played no real part in, and it isn't entirely clear why NASCAR's ratings are rising. "Whether the extra eyeballs are because of the controversial Confederate flag ban or despite it, or whether it's all thanks to the current dearth of live sports to watch, is up for debate," Roberts writes. "But the sport is enjoying a clear ratings bump over last year." Peter Weber
President Trump can breathe a sigh of relief — the latest tell-all book from a member of his orbit isn't about him, but rather first lady Melania Trump.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend and senior adviser to Melania Trump, is writing a memoir that will detail their 15-year relationship, from beginning to implosion. Melania and Me is due to hit shelves on Sept. 1, Vanity Fair's Emily Jane Fox reports, and will be published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster — the same company behind former National Security Adviser John Bolton's The Room Where it Happened and the upcoming Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, written by the president's niece, Mary Trump.
Wolkoff, a former special events director at Vogue, helped plan the 2017 inauguration, and soon after became a senior adviser to the first lady. Her time in the White House was short-lived; she was ousted in February 2018 after it was revealed that the Trump inaugural committee paid her firm $26 million to assist with the inauguration.
Wolkoff told The New York Times in 2019 that she had been "thrown under the bus." Time has evidently not healed all wounds, as people with knowledge of Melania and Me told The Daily Beast it is "largely negative," "explosive," and "heavily trashes the first lady." Catherine Garcia