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Membersof The Conference Board get exclusive access to the full range of products and services that deliver Trusted Insights for What's Ahead TM including webcasts, publications, data and analysis, plus discounts to conferences and events.

The Consumer Confidence Survey reflects prevailing business conditions and likely developments for the months ahead. This monthly report details consumer attitudes, buying intentions, vacation plans, and consumer expectations for inflation, stock prices, and interest rates. Data are available by age, income, 9 regions, and top 8 states.

Consumers expressed mixed feelings this month: their view of the present situation improved slightly overall, driven by an uptick in sentiment about the current labor market, but their assessment of current business conditions cooled. Meanwhile, for the second month in a row, consumers were a bit less pessimistic about future labor market conditions. However, their expectations for both future income and business conditions weakened, weighing down the overall Expectations Index."

Consumers were positive about the stock market, with 48.4 percent expecting stock prices to increase over the year ahead, compared to 23.5 percent expecting a decrease and 28.1 percent expecting no change. Meanwhile, the share of consumers expecting higher interest rates over the next twelve months dropped to 52.6 percent, its lowest level since February.

The monthly Consumer Confidence Survey, based on an online sample, is conducted for The Conference Board by Toluna, a technology company that delivers real-time consumer insights and market research through its innovative technology, expertise, and panel of over 36 million consumers. The cutoff date for the preliminary results was June 19.

The Conference Board publishes the Consumer Confidence Index at 10 a.m. ET on the last Tuesday of every month. Subscription information and the technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website: -board.org/data/consumerdata.cfm.

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The revised cause of death shows that the deadly disease had footholds in the United States earlier than previously thought. Similar reports have surfaced elsewhere in recent weeks. In late March, a non-peer-reviewed epidemiology study of the Lombardy region in northern Italy found that the virus might have been circulating there for more than a month before it was detected.

A devout Christian, Houghton co-founded and led the John Ray Initiative, a charity in Gloucester, UK, focused on promoting environmental stewardship through both science and Christianity. He convinced a prominent US evangelical lobbyist of the compatibility of climate change and Christian thought in the early 2000s.

Momentum is building to speed the development of coronavirus vaccines by intentionally infecting healthy, young volunteers with the virus. A grass-roots effort has attracted nearly 1,500 potential volunteers for the controversial approach, known as a human-challenge trial.

The effort, called 1Day Sooner, is not affiliated with groups or companies developing or funding coronavirus vaccines. But co-founder Josh Morrison hopes to show that there is broad support for human-challenge trials, which have the potential to deliver an effective coronavirus vaccine more quickly than standard trials.

Typical vaccine trials take a long time because thousands of people receive either a vaccine or a placebo, and researchers track who becomes infected in the course of their daily lives. A challenge study could in theory be much faster: a much smaller group of volunteers would receive a candidate vaccine and then be intentionally infected with the virus, to judge the efficacy of the immunization.

A team led by bioethicist Nir Eyal at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, argued that a human challenge trial could be conducted safely and ethically, in a paper in The Journal of Infectious Diseases last month.

The approach is also gaining some political support. This week, 35 members of the US Congress, led by Bill Foster (Democrat, Illinois) and Donna Shalala (Democrat, Florida), called on Department of Health and Human Services director Alex Azar to consider human-challenge trials of coronavirus vaccines.

Built by UAE and US engineers, the orbiter is scheduled to launch from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan in a window that starts on 15 July, when Earth and Mars are suitably aligned. The craft should reach Martian orbit in 2021.

Hope was scheduled to ship to Japan by cargo plane in early May. But mission leaders brought the date forward to 20 April, to account for a 14-day quarantine imposed on all travellers entering the country. Team members who travel with the probe will be quarantined for two weeks when they reach Japan, but moving the spacecraft early gives them enough time to arrive at the site and prepare for launch.

Last month, the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos delayed launch of a major rover in their ExoMars mission for two years, citing travel restrictions imposed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic among their reasons.

The government hopes to be able to analyse 100,000 coronavirus tests daily by the end of the month, health secretary Matt Hancock reiterated on 9 April. Fewer than 300,000 tests have been carried out in the country so far, according to official reports.

Universities across the United Kingdom and around the world are also running COVID-19 diagnostic tests, as Nature previously reported. But these efforts in the United States have been hampered by bureaucratic and logistical barriers, and a lack of a cohesive national strategy.

CERN staff are also manufacturing 3D-printed masks and face shields, and making hand sanitizer for local emergency-response departments. The centre is offering high-performance computing resources to epidemiologists and virologists searching for a COVID-19 vaccine. And some staff are distributing necessities to elderly and otherwise at-risk community members.

The COVID Symptom Tracker smartphone app, which has recruited more than 1.5 million people in the United Kingdom, asks users to record health information on a daily basis, including their temperature, any tiredness and other potential symptoms of coronavirus infection. An analysis of data collected between 24 and 29 March found that users who tested positive for COVID-19 were three times more likely to report losing their sense of smell and taste than were those who had symptoms of the virus but tested negative. Other common symptoms experienced by people who tested positive for COVID-19 were fever, persistent cough, fatigue, diarrhoea, abdominal pain and loss of appetite.

By taking into account the location, age and gender of their users, and extrapolating their sample to the whole population, the researchers estimated that 1.9 million people in the United Kingdom aged between 20 and 69 had symptomatic COVID-19 on this date. The latest data suggest that by 5 April, this figure might have fallen to 1.4 million, which they say indicates that social-distancing measures implemented in the nation are slowing the spread of the virus.

The figures suggested that social distancing, isolation and quarantine would reduce that peak daily demand to less than 5,000 beds. Australia currently has some 2,200 ICU beds, but plans to increase that to 7000.

Australia restricted entry to the country for travellers from mainland China on 1 February. Health officials have conducted more than 304,000 coronavirus tests, and have introduced contact tracing, quarantining and isolation, as well as broader physical-distancing measures, such as closing businesses and restricting gatherings.

The authors conclude that social distancing needs to be part of ongoing efforts to isolate infected people and quarantine contacts to ensure that hospitals can cope, although they did not look at the effects of specific measures.

According to the Chinese National Health Commission, there were 32 new confirmed cases and 12 new suspected cases in the country yesterday. All were imported into the country from elsewhere. There are also 1,033 people with the infection but no symptoms who are under medical observation.

Ramjee was the chief scientific officer at the Johannesburg-based Aurum Institute, a health-care non-profit organization aimed at eradicating HIV and tuberculosis. Scientists who worked with her praised her tenacity, passion and ability to connect with the communities in which she worked.

Several other renowned scientists have also died from COVID-19 in recent weeks. Among them are John Murray, a pioneering tuberculosis clinical researcher at the University of California, San Francisco; James Goodrich, a paediatric neurosurgeon at Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, known for separating conjoined twins; and molecular biologist Michael Wakelam, the director of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK.

More than one million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed as of 2 April, according to data compiled by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But in much of the world, people exhibiting mild or no symptoms are unable to get tested, meaning that the true number of cases could be much higher.

The finding comes from the 31 March Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A study found that of about 7,000 people with COVID-19 for whom information about chronic conditions had been reported, just over one-third had an underlying condition. People with such conditions made up 71% of those hospitalized for COVID-19 and 78% of those who required intensive care.

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