Group items tagged

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped tracking every case that occurs when a COVID-19 vaccine fails to protect someone. Instead, the agency is focusing on people who get very sick or die.

Critics argue the strategy could miss important information that could leave the U.S. vulnerable, including early signs of new variants that are better at outsmarting the vaccines.

But at least 2,298 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized, and at least 439 people have died from COVID-19, according to the CDC.

West Virginia is giving its vaccine incentive program a boost to get more residents immunized from the coronavirus, Gov. Jim Justice announced on Tuesday.

All residents who get a COVID-19 vaccine will be enrolled in the chance to win a college scholarship, a tricked-out truck, or hunting rifles, in addition to a $1.588 million grand prize. The program, which will run from June 20 through Aug. 4, will be paid for through federal pandemic relief funds.

Justice announced in April that West Virginians ages 16 to 35 who got vaccinated could get a $100 savings bond. The immunization drive in the state has since drastically slowed after showing a strong early start.

India’s economic liberalization in the ’90s brought with it a rapid expansion of the private health-care industry, a shift that ultimately created a system of medical apartheid: World-class private hospitals catered to wealthy Indians and medical tourists from abroad; state-run facilities were for the poor.

The Indians who bought their way to a healthier life did not, or chose not to, see the widening gulf. Today, they are clutching their pearls as their loved ones fail to get ambulances, doctors, medicine, and oxygen.

I have covered health and science for nearly 20 years, including as the health editor for The Hindu, a major Indian newspaper. That time has taught me that there is no shortcut to public health, no opting out from it. Now the rich sit alongside the poor, facing a reckoning that had only ever plagued the vulnerable in India.

"There's a shortage of coronavirus tests. Nobody's getting tested! So the government's numbers for our district are totally wrong," he told NPR on a crackly phone line from his village. "If you're able to get tested, results come after five days."

This village's ordeal is not atypical. Across India, there are shortages of testing kits, hospital beds, medical oxygen and antiviral drugs as a severe second wave of the pandemic crushes the health infrastructure. The country has been breaking world records daily for new cases. On Friday, India's Health Ministry confirmed 386,453 infections – more than any country on any day since the pandemic began.

Part of the reason for the huge numbers is India's size: a population of nearly 1.4 billion. The rate of known coronavirus infections per capita is still less than the United States endured at its peak.

Disneyland Park and Disneyland California Adventure Park will reopen their gates to state residents on April 30, more than a year after shutting down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"Beloved characters will pop up in new ways and sometimes in unexpected places as they remain mindful of physical distancing,"

"It's going to be a great opportunity for us, I think, to bring that magic back to everyone involved."

Last June, as Americans began to emerge from lockdowns and into a new, uncertain stage of the pandemic, Amy Ryan and her family set sail in a 44-foot-long catamaran and headed up the Atlantic coast. They haven’t stopped sailing since.Ms. Ryan’s husband, Casey Ryan, 56, was on a partially paid leave from his job as an airline pilot, based out of Denver. School was remote for their daughters, now 7 and 11. Ms. Ryan, a real estate agent, could manage her team from anywhere. And they could rent out their house in Evergreen, Colo., on Airbnb. The family saw a window open, and they leapt through it.

For many of us, the past 12 months have been lived in a state of suspended animation, with dreams and plans deferred until further notice as we worry about venturing out for even basic excursions. But some people, like the Ryans, took the restrictions — virtual school and remote work — as an opportunity to pick up and go somewhere else. With a good internet connection, a Zoom conference call can happen just as easily on a boat or in the back of a camper as it can in a living room.

n March 12, the Transportation Security Administration screened 1.35 million people, the most passengers on any day since March 15, 2020 — still well below 2019 numbers, but a sign that more Americans are traveling again. Nearly half of Americans say that a desire to travel has played a role in their willingness to get vaccinated, according to a February survey by The Points Guy.But the survey also found that 56 percent of Americans haven’t traveled at all during the pandemic. Public health officials have voiced a growing concern that spring-break travel could lead to another surge in Covid-19 cases and increase the spread of troubling variants.

There are more shots available. The challenge is getting people to take them.

On Thursday, there were more than 73,000 slots to be had on the state’s scheduling website, up from 68,000 on Tuesday.

But public health experts say the pileup of unclaimed appointments in Mississippi exposes something more worrisome: the large number of people who are reluctant to get inoculated.“It’s time to do the heavy lifting needed to overcome the hesitancy we’re encountering,” said Dr. Obie McNair, an internal medicine practitioner in Jackson, the state capital, whose office has a plentiful supply of vaccines but not enough takers.

The lifting of a wide range of coronavirus rules Monday coincided with a small but worrying spike in cases of a variant, first identified in India, that threatens a lockdown-lifting road map frequently described by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “cautious but irreversible.”

In recent days the authorities have scrambled to ramp up testing and inoculation in parts of the country seeing a sharp rise in cases of the more transmissible variant.

The opposition Labour Party has accused Mr. Johnson of bringing on the trouble by delaying a decision to close borders to flights from India last month, while government scientific advisers have expressed their concerns about moving too fast to remove curbs.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., racing against a surge in coronavirus cases and the emergence of a new variant that could significantly worsen the pandemic, is planning a vaccination offensive that calls for greatly expanding access to the vaccine while promising to use a wartime law to expand production.

The president-elect said he would invoke the Defense Production Act, if necessary, to build up vaccine supply.

The Biden team promised to ramp up vaccination in pharmacies, and build mobile vaccination clinics to get vaccine to hard-to-reach and underserved rural and urban communities, emphasizing equity in distribution.

s it better to prioritize by age, since the disease is far more likely to seriously harm older people? How about essential workers — many of whom are poor people of color — since they suffer strikingly high rates of illness and death? Should everyone who works at a hospital be vaccinated, even those with no patient contact? And so on.

As President-elect Joe Biden noted in outlining his plan to expand production and distribution of vaccines, that is a particularly dangerous gap because we are not only racing against time; now we also face a faster foe, at least one new variant that’s up to 50 percent more transmissible, which means many more infections, which would lead to more deaths.

Unlike earlier in the pandemic, though, we have an excellent weapon. Not only does each vaccination mean one less person is in danger; it also means one person less likely to transmit the coronavirus to someone else.

A new study published by the University of Bonn on Thursday suggests weekly rapid tests for 42% of Germany’s population in May 2021 played a more crucial part in the steep drop-off in infection rates than vaccines.

“From a doctor’s point of view, I understand the reservations”, said Hans-Martin von Gaudecker, a professor of Applied Microeconomics at the University of Bonn and one of the study’s co-authors. “But from a public health perspective, it made a massive difference”.

Since Germany’s Robert Koch Institute only records the number of certified PCR tests, the study has had to work with projections based on surveys of people who make use of rapid antigen tests. It estimates that vaccinations account for only around 16% of the drop in infections during May, while mass testing accounted for 41% and seasonal weather change another 43%.

US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams on Sunday said he has "no reason to doubt" the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Covid-19 death toll, contradicting President Donald Trump's claim that the agency has "exaggerated" its numbers.

In a little more than a month, the county doubled its number of infections, climbing from about 400,000 cases on November 30 to more than 800,000 cases on January 2, health officials said Monday.

With no hospital beds available, ambulance crews in the county were given guidance not to transport patients with little chance of survival. And the patients who are transported often have to wait hours before a bed is available.

And a person is dying of the virus every 15 minutes, Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said.

But many Black Americans have expressed reluctance to take the vaccine, a wariness some attribute to the enduring legacy of the egregious Tuskegee syphilis study.

Both expose the depth of structural discrimination in the United States. Both remind us to listen and hear patients when they express distrust or reluctance about medical treatment.

It recruited Black men in Macon County, Alabama, who had already contracted syphilis. The men were told they would be treated for syphilis, but the actual purpose of the study was to learn whether untreated syphilis progressed differently in Black people compared with White people.

Florida is the third U.S. state to announce it has a case of the more contagious coronavirus strain that first emerged in the United Kingdom.

The man's diagnosis follows a similar case identified in California on Wednesday in which a male patient, also in his 20s, had not spent any time outside of the U.S. in the weeks prior to his illness.

The first two cases in the U.S. also adhere to that pattern. Two male members of the Colorado National Guard tested positive for the new strain — referred to as B.1.1.7 or VUI-202012/01

In the days leading up to New Year's Eve, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged people to find an alternative option for celebrating the holiday — with an aim to avoid large crowds and indoor gatherings

Many cities made it easy for residents to stay home by implementing lockdown measures. The restrictions left the normally bustling Times Square in New York City and the Las Vegas Strip nearly empty.

But this year just a few invited frontline health workers gathered in socially distanced pods. The city closed Times Square to the public and police patrolled the area to prevent any revelers from entering.

President Trump is extending a freeze on new temporary work visas for tech and other highly skilled workers.

The extension means hundreds of thousands of foreigners looking to work in the United States will continue to have to wait until at least the end of March before having another chance to attain coveted visas to enter the country.

Trump signed the original proclamation in June, citing the need to protect the U.S. labor force during the coronavirus pandemic.

California reported Sunday that 45,352 people newly tested positive for Covid-19, continuing a surge that has pushed hospitals and their exhausted staff to the brink.

Overall, at least 123,000 people nationwide were in the hospital with coronavirus on Sunday, marking more than a month that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

As of Sunday, more than 20.4 million people have been infected with the virus in the US and at least 350,000 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.