It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it: Researchers are reportedly turning to Number Two in order to predict where the next major coronavirus outbreak will be, The Washington Post reports. "S--- is a great source of information," explained David Hirschberg, the founder of a biotech firm that is working to track COVID-19 by studying sewage.
The novel coronavirus can be detected in wastewater as much as two weeks before a person begins to show symptoms, which means that studying a city's raw sewage can help researchers understand how much of a population is ill. More than 170 wastewater facilities around the country (which account for about 13 percent of the population) have been sending samples to labs, which are finding that based on what goes down the toilet, outbreaks are likely even worse than official numbers are showing. "Our estimates are about 10 times higher than the cumulative [confirmed] cases up to that date," said Mariana Matus, a co-founder of the sewage testing company Biobot.
Using the data gleaned from sewage could be crucial as the country slowly begins to reopen. For example, if researchers detect a spike in the amount of COVID-19 virus circulating in the bowels of a particular population, it might be time to snap closed a quarantine again; low virus counts, on the other hand, could lead to tentative openings.
"This is the kind of early warning system you want to have," Hirschberg said. "When people start showing up at hospitals and start dying, that's not the indicator you want to have. That's too late." Read more at The Washington Post. Jeva Lange
President Trump has received a dose of good polling news days ahead of the election — but it may not be enough to turn his fate.
In polls wrapping just a week before Election Day, Democratic nominee Joe Biden has posted no new gains in the swing states of Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, a Quinnipiac University survey out Thursday reveals. Meanwhile Trump's support has grown in Florida, Iowa, and Pennsylvania — and enough so in Florida and Iowa to be well in contention of winning.
In Florida, Biden has 46 percent to Trump's 42 percent, the poll of likely voters showed. That's a 6-point loss for Biden and a 2-point gain for Trump from Quinnipiac's poll earlier this month, in which Biden posted a massive 11-point lead. Biden also lost 4 points in Iowa as Trump gained 2, enough to give the incumbent a narrow 47-46 lead. Biden meanwhile maintains a solid 51-44 point lead in Pennsylvania and a 48-43 lead in Ohio, where Trump slid 4 points from earlier this month.
Analysts say a loss in Florida for Trump will likely cost him the whole election, but Biden has enough support in the midwest to override a Florida slump. A CNN poll out late Wednesday — its last before election day — gives Biden a 12-point lead over Trump nationally, also a gain of 4 points for Trump from CNN's previous poll.
Quinnipiac surveyed between 1,186 to 1,324 likely voters from Oct. 23–27 in each of the states, with margins of error between 2.7 and 2.9 percentage points. Kathryn Krawczyk
At least one swing state may be spared the political controversy of a late absentee ballot count seemingly changing its 2020 election results.
Every U.S. state is receiving a boatload more mail-in ballots than it usually does during a typical election year, and four of them — Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — won't even be able to open those ballots until Election Day. This almost guarantees a delayed result from those four states, but Wisconsin is confident it'll have everything set by the morning after the election, local election officials tell NBC News affiliate WTMJ Milwaukee.
Wisconsin's electoral votes will be critical in determining the winner of the 2020 election, as the previously Democratic state went for President Trump in 2016. County clerks all say they'll count ballots nonstop until they're finished, and expect results at 9:30 p.m. at the earliest. Waukesha County, the third most populous in the state, says its count will wrap around 3 a.m. And Milwaukee County, home to nearly a million people, expects to be done by 6 a.m. Wednesday.
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) is preparing for a long haul, including pushback from Republicans. The state accepts all absentee ballots that were mailed before Election Day even if they arrive later, meaning a count to finalize the swing state's results could take days. Shapiro fears Republicans may use these late ballots "as a hook to challenge all mail-in ballots," and a court may then halt the count of all absentee ballots while the challenge is considered, he told The Washington Post. So to prepare, Pennsylvania officials will separate late-arriving ballots in hopes of avoiding a total counting shutdown.
Find when every state expects to count its absentee ballots at The New York Times. Kathryn Krawczyk
Unemployment claims are continuing to sink, but they're still far above even pre-pandemic records.
Around 751,000 Americans filed unemployment claims for the first time last week, Labor Department numbers released Thursday revealed. That's down 40,000 from the week before, marking a continuing slide in the final jobs report before the election.
Jobless claims hit an overwhelming record high in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and have largely decreased since then. But their decline has slowed over the past few months as the pandemic continues — and starts to worsen again. Congress has also failed to agree on a COVID-19 relief package that could extend loans to businesses that would let them rehire workers, as well as boost the amount of benefits unemployed people receive.
Also growing in the past week are the number of people applying for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for the first time. More than 360,000 people filed for PUA benefits, which Congress created to help gig workers, the self-employed, and others not eligible for typical unemployment. Meanwhile continued jobless claims decreased 709,000 to 7.8 million in the week. Kathryn Krawczyk