Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Thursday, May 7. In today's news, reversing course, President Trump says the coronavirus task force will continue

indefinitely.

America's coronavirus divide is reflected in the story of two New Mexico mayors.

And a woman in New York goes $600,000 in debt

to buy protective equipment for medical workers.

But first, the big idea.

The global search for a treatment targeting the coronavirus

has led to an unlikely potential savior

a cocoa-colored llama named Winter whose blood could hold a secret weapon to blunt the contagion. She lives at a research

farm in Belgium with about 130 other llamas and alpacas and like all of

them she produces a special class of disease-fighting antibodies,

tiny even by antibody standards, that show early promise in laboratory tests

in blocking the novel coronavirus from entering

and infecting cells. In a new paper for the journal, Cell, an international team

of scientists reports that these antibodies

harvested from winter's blood were used to engineer a new antibody that binds to

the spiky proteins that stud the surface of the coronavirus,

thereby neutralizing its insidious effect.

This study, though preliminary, points to a possible treatment for COVID-19 if the result... is the

human- human- if the results can hold up an animal and then human studies.

Winter the Lama is the cuddly face of a broader and urgent scientific crusade to create coronavirus drugs

...