News from the global fight against coronavirus

President Donald Trump once again downplayed the need for widespread testing for the coronavirus. Speaking at a medical equipment distributor in Allentown, Pa., the president said the testing may be "overrated." Public health officials agree that widespread testing is crucial to safely reopening public spaces and getting Americans back to work. "We have the best testing in the world," Trump told employees at Owens & Minor Inc. on Thursday. "Could be that testing's, frankly, overrated." He continued: "We have more cases than anybody in the world, but why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. … If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases. They don't want to write that. It's common sense."

Are you standing or sitting too close to your co-worker? Soon a bracelet might vibrate to let you know. Companies are rolling out wearables that will buzz or light up when co-workers aren't maintaining social distance in the workplace. They're part of a flood of new technologies intended to help companies adapt their workplaces to keep people safe amid the global pandemic. Campbell Macdonald, the chief executive of Proxxi, a Canadian company, says the company has already sold tens of thousands of vibrating wristbands. The wristbands, which cost $100, will start shipping to customers at the end of the month.

Many state and local governments across the country have suspended public records requirements amid the coronavirus pandemic, denying or delaying access to information that could shed light on key government decisions. Public officials have said employees either don't have the time or ability to compile the requested documents or data because they are too busy responding to the outbreak or are working from home instead of at government offices. The result is that government secrecy has increased at the same time officials are spending billions of dollars fighting the COVID-19 disease and making major decisions affecting the health and economic livelihood of millions of Americans. The nonprofit Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press has tracked more than 100 instances in at least 30 states and the District of Columbia in which state agencies, counties, cities or other public entities have suspended requirements to respond to open-records requests by regular deadlines or told people to expect delays.

Ordinary speech can emit small respiratory droplets that linger in the air for at least eight minutes and potentially much longer, according to a study that could help explain why infections of the coronavirus so often cluster in nursing homes, cruise ships and other confined spaces. The report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. This new study did not involve the coronavirus or any other virus, but instead looked at how people generate respiratory droplets when they speak. The experiment did not look at large droplets but instead focused on small droplets that can linger in the air much longer. The consensus among infectious disease experts is the virus is typically spread through large respiratory droplets. But the smaller droplets still could potentially contain enough virus particles to represent an infectious dose, the authors said.