A 5-year-old female snow leopard at the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky, has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 in humans.

It is the first confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a snow leopard, the zoo said. 

The zoo said in a news release Friday that it is awaiting results of its two male snow leopards — Kimti and Meru.

All the cats have "very mild symptoms," the release said, adding that the zoo "continues to monitor their health closely."

The snow leopards all began exhibiting minor respiratory symptoms, including an occasional dry cough or wheeze, within the last two weeks.

NeeCee is believed to have acquired the infection from an asymptomatic staff member, "despite precautions" by the zoo, the release said.

All three cats are expected to recover and no other animals at the zoo are showing symptoms.

The zoo said that the risk of infected animals, including the snow leopard, spreading the virus to humans is "considered low," as Covid-19 "remains predominantly a disease transmitted from person to person."

Walgreens and CVS are gearing up for the coronavirus vaccine rollout, which could start in less than two weeks. 

Once the vaccine is approved for emergency use authorization and administered to health care workers and first responders, Walgreens is expected to distribute the vaccine to vulnerable long-term care facilities -- and that could start as soon as December 21, Walgreens chief medical officer Kevin Ban said Friday on TODAY. 

"We're working very hard to make sure the vaccine is distributed and administered safely, but also that people have the facts to make a decision so that they'll decide to get vaccinated,” said Ban. 

The federal government has contracted with Walgreens and CVS to vaccinate millions of residents in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. While health care workers and nursing home residents will get the vaccine first the initial supplies won't cover all 21 million health care workers and 3 million long-term care residents across the country. 

Consumers hunting for Clorox wipes to disinfect counters and surfaces from the coronavirus will face difficulties until at least “mid-2021," the company’s chief operating officer, Eric Reynolds, told NBC News.

The new date represents the third time the company has pushed back availability of the wipes, which were one of the first things to disappear in stores as the pandemic took hold, along with toilet paper and paper towels.

In May, the company said supplies would be ready by this summer. In August, an executive said it would take until at the least the end of 2020. Yet at year’s close, the wipes are still hard to find on the shelves — or going for a premium via online resellers.

While Clorox has ramped up capacity, making and shipping 1 million canisters every day and hiring more than 2,000 employees worldwide, that’s still not enough to meet demand that has surged 500 percent since the start of the pandemic.

The biggest holdup is the cloth itself, made from nonwoven polypropylene, a plastic that is also used in face masks, which comes from specialized suppliers.

Read the story here.

Public health experts are bracing for what they expect to be a dark and deadly winter. But as the vaccines become available, it will ultimately give way to a more hopeful spring.

With the U.S. on the brink of a turning point in potentially taming the virus, NBC News spoke to more than a half-dozen experts to answer the most pressing questions about the Covid-19 vaccines and the months ahead.

As part of this effort, NBC News has also compiled data on how many Americans live near pharmacies that are preparing to distribute vaccines — and where it could end up hard to get one.

Read the full story here.

A group of scientists from leading Russian universities have published an open letter slamming the lack of publicly available data on the safety and efficacy of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.

Calling the process "completely unacceptable" and "ridiculous," the letter entitled "Behind the hype: design defects, poor execution and questionable publication" calls on British medical science journal The Lancet to withdraw a paper published by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute that said the Russian vaccine was safe and effective. 

"This completely unacceptable, even ridiculous, political move to create competition between vaccines is a violation of the most important testing standards," the letter's authors say.

In the letter in the Lancet, the Gamaleya Institute said their Phase II trials showed the vaccine was safe and effective.  

Within Russia, these claims have not seen any significant challenge from government officials or the state media. Soon after publishing those initial results in The Lancet, Russia moved on to register the vaccine with regulators and began distributing it beyond the scope of Phase III trials.  

The letter was published last month but first reported on in the Russian media on Thursday. One of the authors of the letter is Vasily Vlasov, a virologist at the Higher School of Economics and former World Health Organizations advisor.  

The letter’s authors say they requested the raw research data Gamaleya used in their paper, so that their claims could be scrutinized, but "for more than two months they have not responded to our request."

"We consider this to be a gross violation of the norms of publication ethics," they added.  

Due to the global coronavirus pandemic, concert trade publication Pollstar puts the total lost revenue for the live events industry in 2020 at more than $30 billion.

Pollstar on Friday said the live events industry should have hit a record-setting $12.2 billion this year, but instead it incurred $9.7 billion in losses.

In March hundreds of artists announced that their current or upcoming tours would need to be postponed or canceled because of the pandemic. While a small number of performers have played drive-in concerts and others have held digital concerts, the majority of artists have not played live in 2020.

Pollstar said the projected $30 billion figure in losses includes “unreported events, ancillary revenues, including sponsorships, ticketing, concessions, merch, transportation, restaurants, hotels, and other economic activity tied to the live events.”

How was a microscopic virus able to bring the world’s richest and most powerful country to its knees?

Americans might have expected that their country would marshal its tremendous financial and intellectual resources, and its technological might, to fend off Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Instead, it has been crippled for the better part of a year, and is now heading into a winter that one of its top doctors said could be the gravest public health crisis in its history. Ten months after the first Covid-19 death in the United States, the country is hurtling toward an appalling milestone: 300,000 deaths out of more than 15 million confirmed cases.

Yes, vaccines are coming, and the first vaccinations may begin next week. But their cumulative effect on the nation’s health will not be felt until well into 2021. If Americans do not change their behavior quickly, experts warn, the weeks and months ahead will be filled with more death and despair, packed hospitals and unemployment lines, and further political polarization and alienation.

“We have to act like everybody we come into contact with has Covid, and we are going to have to make the kind of sacrifices beyond what we were asked to make in March and April,” said Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician in Washington who is a scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Read the full story here.

FDA Commissioners Drs. Stephen M. Hahn and Peter Marks said Friday morning that the regulatory body will "rapidly work toward finalization and issuance of an emergency use authorization" for the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine after the "positive advisory committee meeting outcome."

"The agency has also notified the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Operation Warp Speed, so they can execute their plans for timely vaccine distribution," Hahn and Marks said. 

CANBERRA, Australia — Australian researchers say they have abandoned development of a potential coronavirus vaccine because it produced false positive results on HIV tests.

A statement said Friday that the University of Queensland vaccine that was to be manufactured at Australian biopharmaceutical company CSL’s Melbourne headquarters proved safe and produced a “robust response” to the virus during initial trials.

But it said the researchers and the government agreed not to proceed further because of the false positive result of some HIV tests due to a protein contained in the potential vaccine.

It was one of five potential vaccines on which the Australian government had signed contracts with developers.