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THURSDAY, June 25, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Sports fans are itching to watch their favorite teams return to play, but are jam-packed arenas even remotely safe in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic? For Glenn Rall, chief academic officer and a virologist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, the answer isn't simple. "There are inherent dangers," he said. "And the rational decision may simply be that, no, we can't do this. But I don't think we, as scientists, can just sit in our prototypical ivory tower and just say this is too dangerous, and nothing can happen until we have a vaccine. Because we are not going to have a vaccine available until at least mid-2021. And it's not realistic to say to the public 'Just stay inside forever.'" For one thing, Rall explained, the...

THURSDAY, June 25, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A saliva-based test for the new coronavirus will be assessed in a study that includes NBA players and staff, Yale University researchers said. "Our players are excited to be a part of this study," said Joe Rogowski, chief medical officer of the National Basketball Players Association. "Not only does it offer the potential for players to have an alternative method of testing within the NBA campus in Orlando, but more importantly it allows them to leverage their regular testing to make a larger contribution to public health in the fight against this virus," he said in a Yale news release. The new method, called SalivaDirect, was developed at Yale as an alternative to the widely used nasal-swab method for SARS-CoV-2 testing. The swabbing...

THURSDAY, June 25, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- The United States recorded its worst day of new coronavirus infections since the pandemic began, as health officials around the country reported a total of 36,880 new cases on Wednesday. COVID-19 infections in the United States had been slowing since the previous record of 36,739 cases back on April 24, but case counts have roared back in recent weeks, The New York Times reported. On Thursday, the latest evidence of the pandemic's economic toll also arrived, with the U.S. Labor Department reporting that 1.5 million more jobless claims were filed last week. It's the 14th straight week that new unemployment claims have topped 1 million, the Times noted. Meanwhile, new coronavirus infections are rising fastest in the South and West. Florida,...

WEDNESDAY, June 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Kids as young as age 8 can show signs of being at increased risk for diabetes in adulthood, a British study finds. Researchers analyzed blood samples collected from more than 4,000 participants at ages 8, 16, 18 and 25, looking for patterns specific to early stages of type 2 diabetes development. "We knew that diabetes doesn't develop overnight. What we didn't know is how early in life the first signs of disease activity become visible and what these early signs look like," said study co-author Joshua Bell, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol. While diabetes is most common in older age, signs that one is prone to it can be seen about 50 years before it's typically diagnosed, the researchers said. "Knowing what these early...