“There wasn’t a single I.C.U. bed available in Alabama on Wednesday, a possible sign of what other states may confront soon amid a deadly surge of new infections in parts of the United States with low vaccination rates.
I.C.U. beds are filling up across Southern states, and Alabama is one of the first to run out. The Alabama Hospital Association said on Wednesday night that there were “negative 29” I.C.U. beds available in the state, meaning there were more than two dozen people being forced to wait in emergency rooms for an open I.C.U. bed.
The situation has grown desperate in Alabama, one of several states reporting a wave of cases driven by the highly contagious Delta variant and low vaccination rates….
Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama said last month that the surge in new cases was attributable to the large number of people who remain unvaccinated. On Friday, she reinstated Alabama’s state of emergency, which had expired in early July, in an effort to expand hospital capacity.” (A)
“The summer surge in coronavirus cases in the United States, led by the domination of the more contagious Delta variant, is well into its second month, and the number of those hospitalized with Covid-19 has reached heights last seen during the overwhelming winter wave.
The number of those patients who are critically ill, requiring treatment in an intensive care unit, has risen, too. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that the number of hospitals with very full I.C.U.s doubled in recent weeks. Now, one in five I.C.U.s have reached or exceeded 95 percent of beds occupied, a level experts say makes it difficult or impossible for health professionals to maintain standards of care for the very sick.” (B)
March 31, 2020
“The New York Times reviewed triage strategy documents from Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Washington State to see what factors they propose to use to decide which patients get potentially life-saving treatments….
If a hospital has a shortage of resources, the first thing it may consider is whether to decline admission to an intensive care unit to people who have conditions that will likely result in near-immediate death even if they get that treatment.
One common strategy, including for New York and Maryland, is to exclude patients who may have a cardiac arrest that is unresponsive to standard interventions such as defibrillation. Plans can also exclude those who may have had a major brain injury or severe burns where the likelihood of survival is low.
Federal civil rights officials recently announced they will not allow hospitals to discriminate on the basis of disabilities, race, age or religion.
The plan on Alabama’s website would also use AIDS as a factor in deciding to exclude someone for ventilator support, but Alabama officials said they have replaced the plan with a different set of guidelines. The newer policies do not address questions about ventilator triage.
In Washington State, doctors can also consider withholding advanced care for patients with “severe congestive heart failure,” “severe chronic lung disease” or “severe cirrhotic liver disease with multiorgan dysfunction,” as well as other major problems with a poor prognosis for recovery.
Louisiana may exclude patients with severe dementia….
Some of the states rely at least in part on a score known as the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), which measures the functioning of major body systems, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, blood and neurological system. Patients with high SOFA scores would be less likely to qualify.
The scoring system was never meant for this use, and some experts question how accurate it will be in predicting survival. Some plans use different scoring systems or use a sliding scale so that someone whose score is slightly higher than an arbitrary cutoff does not get automatically excluded if it turns out there are enough ventilators.
The guidelines in Maryland also look at severe pre-existing health problems likely to result in death within a year. But they do not seek to project survivability beyond a year, in part to avoid disadvantaging the poor and people of color.
An interim guideline produced in Pennsylvania in March uses SOFA scoring but also takes into consideration the likelihood of long-term survival, such as for patients with Alzheimer’s disease or those with cancer who have less than 10 years of expected survival….
Here’s an example of how the guidelines could compare patients needing a ventilator in Maryland:
Patient A: 24 years old, with a SOFA score of 13 (indicating signs of failure across multiple organ systems) but no pre-existing conditions that would limit life expectancy to less than a year. The person’s high SOFA score would give them three overall points.
Patient B: 72 years old, with a SOFA score of 10 (indicating significant but less-severe signs of organs failing), and moderate Alzheimer’s disease but no pre-existing conditions that would limit life expectancy to less than a year. This patient would end up with an overall score of two because the SOFA score is lower.
The older person would qualify for care first.
But in Pennsylvania, the person with moderate Alzheimer’s would score additional points, under the guidelines, leading the younger person to qualify for care first.” (C)
JAN. 8, 2021
Stretched to the breaking point by a deluge of COVID-19 patients, Los Angeles County’s four public hospitals are preparing to take the extraordinary step of rationing care, with a team of “triage officers” set to decide which patients can benefit from continued treatment and which are beyond saving and should be allowed to die.
The county’s top health officials have not yet declared a shift to a crisis level of care, which would trigger the rationing system, but the leader of the public hospitals acknowledged in a letter reviewed by The Times this week that “there will likely come a point when we simply don’t have sufficient staffing or critical supplies to care for all our patients in the way we normally would.”
The crisis designation would empower the newly named triage officers — usually critical care and emergency room doctors — to decide which patients at county hospitals would get access to resources such as ventilators, respiratory therapists and critical care nurses when they become too scarce to be provided to every patient.
Hospitals outside the county system will have to decide on their own whether to invoke similar urgency measures, though state officials told them last week that they should have triage plans ready.
Inside many overflowing Southern California hospitals, a form of undeclared rationing appears already to be taking place. Ambulances carrying COVID patients have been diverted from overtaxed medical centers. Critically ill patients sometimes wait days to get intensive care beds.
At one private hospital in Lynwood this week, doctors stood in a hallway, loudly arguing over whether to give one of the few remaining ventilators to an elderly woman. The doctor describing the scene said the hospital had no formal plan to resolve such disputes.
Paramedics having some patients stay home as hospitals struggle with COVID-19 wave
To confront the life-and-death triage choices, the California Department of Public Health and some hospital systems recommend reliance on clinical scoring systems that evaluate patients’ organ functions, generating numerical scores meant to indicate an individual’s survival chances.
County health leaders called the most common scoring system too rigid and imprecise to be used as the lone criterion for making triage decisions.
They have directed triage officers to use a broader “principle-based approach” that seeks to shift care away from patients judged to be terminal to patients judged to have the best chance of survival.
“Our goal as a health system will be to save as many lives as possible,” Dr. Christina Ghaly, who oversees the county’s public hospitals, said in a letter to staff this week. “That means shifting from providing the best care for each individual patient to providing the best care for our whole patient population. It also means possibly reallocating resources from a patient who is not benefiting to a patient who would benefit.”
Physicians, clerics and ethicists have debated for generations how to equitably allocate scarce resources in a time of crisis.
“Now we are on the verge of entering uncharted territory, as we may have to actually make those decisions,” said Dr. Arun Patel, the physician and lawyer overseeing the triage program for L.A. County. “No one in the United States has had to implement guidelines like this, at this scale, or for the duration that we may have to.”
Doctors and ethicists in Los Angeles and across the U.S. have not been able to agree on a single methodology for prioritizing patients, or even concur on the appropriate factors when determining who should get medical care.” (D)
“Due to a rapid increase in patient hospitalizations, both with and without a COVID-19 diagnosis, Kaweah Health called a Code Triage on Monday, August 16, 2021 at approximately 1:30 p.m. A Code Triage is a disaster or problem that may affect the hospital and/or the patients and puts us at a heightened level of crisis preparedness so that we are better positioned to respond to emergencies.
On Monday as of 6:00 p.m., there were 340 inpatients being cared for in the downtown medical center and zero beds available for additional patients needing hospitalization. As of 6:00 p.m., there were 163 patients seeking care in the Emergency Department, 63 of which were awaiting admission. The remaining 100 patients were waiting to be seen by emergency providers or were holding for additional examination.
Patients are being cared for in overflow areas using nursing staff from other clinical and non-clinical teams. Currently, Kaweah Health Medical Center has 89 admitted patients with COVID-19, with six additional COVID-19 positive patients holding in the Emergency Department. More than ninety percent (90%) of all currently admitted patients with COVID-19 are being treated for a primary diagnosis of the virus. The surge of patients began on Saturday, August 14 and has steadily increased since that time.
“We cannot discharge enough patients to handle the number of admissions that are coming in,” said Keri Noeske, Kaweah Health Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer. “We are asking people to please reach out to their primary care doctors, day or night, for medical needs versus using the Emergency Department for non-life threatening issues. Right now, we have 63 patients waiting for beds and only 45 patients ready to be discharged.” (E)
“The goal of triage is to ensure the best outcome for the largest number of patients. COVID-19 has overwhelmed Intensive Care Units in regions around the world so that there are simply not enough resources to provide the highest standard of care to every patient who might possibly survive.
In those cases, triage should select patients who have the best chance of pulling through over those with low odds of survival.
The great difficulty in COVID-19 cases is that not enough is known about the disease for strong evidence-based approaches. Using what is known and being discovered, ICUs should form triage committees to evaluate patients and handle the critical decisions over which patients should receive care and which should be offered only palliative measures when the unit becomes overwhelmed.
Those interprofessional teams should: Ensure standards are developed to account for care equity; Develop and impose ICU admission criteria; Assess currently admitted patients regularly; Handle removal of critical care when warranted; Handle family communication; Document triage decisions; COVID-19 Is Requiring Old Skills To Be Relearned in Some ICUs…
Review The Principles of Triage
The essential principle of triage is straightforward: patients with the best short-term prognosis with the available treatments should be admitted in preference to those who face a poor prognosis even with intensive intervention.
Triage guidelines should also incorporate aspects such as:
Equity of care – Ensuring that patients are treated on a strictly medical basis, without preferential treatment for the wealthy, well-connected, or based on racial or cultural judgements.
Preservation of as many lives as possible – Although triage is based in part on the conditions of an individual patient, the overriding goal should take in the overall community to ensure the maximum benefit is available to the largest number.
Protection of medical staff – There may be circumstances where further treatment not only endangers the community, but also healthcare workers. Preserving the capacity to treat other and future patients takes precedence over individual treatment. This means triage considerations also have to incorporate factors such as current staffing, PPE availability, and staff qualifications.
Develop Allocation Standards
Predetermining as many decision points as possible will help reduce decision fatigue and allow triage committees to make more objective judgements even during periods of high stress.
Each facility will need to determine its own specific criteria for allocating resources based on both availability, local standards of care, and patient status. Those criteria should broadly cover the following elements:
ICU Admission – Strict standards for initial admission should be adopted early on to reduce crowding. Data out of Italy shows that the median time a patient will be in ICU after admission is 15 days for survivors, and 10 days for fatalities. Either way, once they are admitted, they’ll be taking up a bed for a while. Tight criteria should be developed around critical procedures that are only possible in an ICU environment, including: Mechanical ventilation; Advanced hemodynamic care
ICU Exclusions – Beyond determining criteria for initial ICU admission, standards should be determined for specific categories of patient to be excluded from consideration for advanced care, even when current clinical presentation might argue otherwise. These will usually involve comorbid conditions or other factors that make a long-term recovery unlikely, including:Do not resuscitate orders; Trauma or recurrent cardiac events; Life expectancy less than 12 months, or otherwise in end-stages of fatal diseases like: COPD, Heart or severe circulatory failure, Cirrhosis of the liver….” (F)
Alberta Health Services has released a triage plan for determining who will receive critical care in the event that COVID-19 patients outnumber available ICU beds in the province.
The 50-page Critical Care Triage plan, unveiled Friday, would not be activated until the health authority has exhausted all other options, such as transferring patients, health-care staff, equipment and medication between different hospitals in the same health zone or across the province. It would be implemented based on direction from the AHS CEO, in consultation with the executive leadership team.
“When activated the triage protocol will be utilized in all health-care facilities and critical care units in Alberta to prioritize patients who have the greatest likelihood of overall survival,” the report states.
The plan lays out four “pandemic or disaster” stages, which would determine whether triaging is necessary.
In a “minor surge,” the number of patients requiring critical care would exceed resources. As a result, staff may be pulled from other critical care units to help with care and patients may be moved into recovery rooms.
A “moderate surge” would see staff brought in from other areas of hospitals and patients moved to recovery rooms or subspecialty ICUs. Transfers for patients in emergency departments would be delayed.
Triaging may be required in a “major surge,” which would occur when 90 per cent or more of available ICU beds in the province are occupied. The first phase of triaging would only allow patients who are predicted to have more than 20 per cent likelihood of surviving one year to enter the ICU.
A “large-scale surge” would see 95 per cent or more of available ICUs in the province occupied and could see the second phase of triaging activated. Under that scenario, those with a 50 per cent chance of surviving one year would be admitted to the ICU. Pediatric triaging will be considered.” (G)
“Surging COVID-19 cases in recent weeks have led to intensive care units across the country nearing capacity. In turn, this has prompted governments and health systems to review their existing ICU triage protocols for allocation of scarce ventilators and critical care resources.
Douglas White, MD, MAS and Bernard Lo, MD argue in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine for the adoption of three strategies to mitigate health inequities during ICU triage. Their paper, ‘Mitigating Inequities and Saving Lives with ICU Triage During the COVID-19 Pandemic,’ provides a practical triage framework that incorporates the three strategies and attends to the twin public health goals of promoting population health and social justice.
“The pandemic has laid bare the deep inequities in society and disproportionately disadvantaged the poor and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities,” said Dr. White, who is the UPMC Endowed Chair for Ethics in Critical Care Medicine. “If we don’t factor health inequities into revised policies for ICU triage, we’ll simply be compounding these inequities.”
Three strategies to mitigate health inequities during ICU triage
Introducing a correction factor into patients’ triage scores to reduce the impact of baseline structural inequities
Giving heightened priority to individuals in essential, high-risk occupations
Rejecting use of longer-term life expectancy and categorical exclusions as allocation criteria. (H)
“How are my obligations different under triage protocols?
Be aware that triage protocols focus on maximizing benefits for the public at large and may override the duty of care to individual patients.
Follow any applicable and relevant triage protocols established by your healthcare institution, health authority, public health agency, or government. In some jurisdictions, such protocols have the force of law if ordered under emergency management legislation.
Thoroughly document your understanding of the triage protocols being applied, as well as your rationale for deviating from or deciding not to apply an established protocol if this is necessary for a specific patient.
Proactively communicate with patients, substitute-decisions makers, and families (where appropriate) how triage protocols might affect patient care and how they might impact the application of any advance care directives and other end-of-life wishes.
Apply triage protocols fairly and consistently across all patients with similar prognoses. While the primary purpose is to prioritize certain patients over others, patients cannot be discriminated against based on a prohibited ground of discrimination. Some protocols include guiding principles for triage, which specifically reference non-discrimination and protection of individual human rights.” (I)
“Science alone cannot tell us how to allocate ICU beds. Should they go to the sickest patients? Should they go to those who are most likely to benefit from treatment? Should we use a lottery system? Should we withdraw treatment from patients if they are not going to have a meaningful recovery to give the bed to someone who will? And what constitutes a meaningful recovery? These are ethical questions requiring value judgements.
Many pandemic response plans focus on maximizing the benefit of scarce resources to save the most lives. Allocating ICU beds to people who are unlikely to benefit from them is often considered unethical and inefficient. Clinicians who work in the ICU often talk about the moral difficulty of providing treatments that sometimes do more harm than good. The moral burden of care in these circumstances weighs heavily on ICU clinicians when left to make these decisions alone and without ethical guidance…
Human rights advocates, disability rights advocates, Indigenous health partners and members of the Black community have voiced concerns about the potential for discrimination when triage does not take stock of societal factors and when they are not involved in the process of developing triage criteria. Meaningful inclusion of these communities and their perspectives is essential for the ethical legitimacy of ICU triage frameworks to balance utility with equity.
The public needs to join the conversation on an ethical approach to triage
Consensus on a proposed ethical framework for pandemic triage, even just among bioethicists, is unrealistic. Nor is it necessarily desirable. In fact, the role of dissensus in bioethics is crucial to avoiding the narrowing of possible policy avenues and avoiding presumptive constructions of various stakeholders.
As bioethicists, our expertise is in sketching the moral landscape, providing options and framing ethical debate. Our job is to propose a possible approach to intensive care triage that the public and stakeholders can then weigh and deliberate. It is also to propose and promote accessible and ethically defensible processes for doing so.
Bioethicists are not moral authorities, and governments ought not decide on an approach to intensive care triage without engaging in broader moral deliberation with the public and with those who will be most affected.
To be sure, public deliberation will not make the decisions about how to prioritize patients for intensive care any easier, nor will it necessarily make it easier to live with the consequences. But it would ensure that all voices have been heard, innovative approaches have been considered, and that new ethical considerations can come to light. It is a distinctly political obligation to ensure that the triage protocol is grounded in an ethical, democratic process and that it is based on values that have been justified through stated public reasons.” (J)
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.’” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
POST 151. April 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the J&J vaccination pause. “ Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to spot or treat the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it…” “…a standard treatment for blood clots — use of an anticoagulant drug — could be dangerous or even fatal in such cases…”
POST 152. April 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s director said Saturday authorities are considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines because the country’s domestically made doses “don’t have very high protection rates,”
POST 153. April 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “At least 35 hospitals across Michigan were listed Thursday as nearing capacity and three were at full capacity for COVID-19 patients..”.. We can manufacture beds. We can open up beds. We can create entire wings of the hospital if we have to, but if we don’t have staff for those beds, we’ve got nothing.”..
POST 154. April 19, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Breakthrough infections, which occur when fully vaccinated people are infected by the pathogen that their shots were designed to protect against, are an entirely expected part of any vaccination process.” “Pfizer’s chief executive said that a third dose of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.”
POST 155. April 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. As the J&J vaccine pause is ended Senator Johnson said “The science tells us that vaccines are 95% effective. So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not? I mean, what is it to you?”
POST 156. April 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. As CDC revises guidance on outdoor masking, Texas Governor Abbott says “the state is “very close” to herd immunity… despite acknowledging that he does not know what the herd immunity threshold is for the virus, an uncertainty echoed by the public health community.”
POST 157. April 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Ohio hospitals; “We agreed in multiple conversations, there’s nothing in fighting a pandemic that creates a competitive advantage.”…
POST 158. May 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. . As populations get closer to herd immunity “ it may be helpful to introduce some nuance to what we mean by the term. Nationwide herd immunity. Regional herd immunity. Temporary herd immunity. Endemicity.”
POST 159. May 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Without deeper sharing of expertise in how to make vaccines…waiving patent obligations is unlikely to be a game-changer… Having access to the “recipe” certainly helps, but understanding how to put it together and produce it at scale is something else.”
POST 160. May 13, 2021.CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC acknowledged Friday that airborne spread of COVID-19 among people more than 6 feet apart “has been repeatedly documented.”” Meanwhile states relax or eliminate indoor dining restrictions. HUH?
POST 161. May 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Even if the spread of Covid-19 decreases enough to allow a return of most activities, there are some aspects of pandemic life that epidemiologists say will persist much longer. In particular, they say that masks are a norm that should continue, even if that view puts them at odds with the new C.D.C. guidance. More than 80 percent of them say people should continue to wear masks when indoors with strangers for at least another year, and outdoors in crowds.”
POST 162. May 21, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is refusing to lift his indoor mask mandate for vaccinated residents…” “…fully vaccinated residents in New York and Connecticut are no longer required to wear masks..”..” “California says it isn’t ready to follow the federal lead and unmask, at least for another month..”.. “..Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday prohibiting state governmental entities such as counties, public school districts, public health authorities and government officials from requiring mask wearing.”
POST 163. May 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey announced a mandate…saying supervisors and those of higher rank must get the vaccine by June 30. They will eventually require the system’s 35,000 employees to do the same.
POST 164. May 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. On Wednesday, health minister Norihisa Tamura warned Olympic organizers they would have to “secure their own” hospital beds for anyone falling ill at the Games, explaining the government would not release beds set aside for Japanese covid-19 patients.”
POST 165. May 31,2001. CORONAVIRUS. “Like all pandemics, this one will end either with millions — maybe billions — being infected or being vaccinated. This time, world leaders have a choice, but little time to make that choice before it is made for them.”
POST 166. June 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “President Biden said Wednesday that he has asked intelligence agencies to double down on their efforts to investigate whether the coronavirus originated from human contact with an animal or in an laboratory in China, saying there is not “sufficient information” to assess whether one is more likely than the other.”
POST 167. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Hospitals prevaricate on mandatory staff vaccinations. Florida’s Governor forbids cruise ship vaccine mandates. Pfizer and Moderna apply for FDA full approval.
POST 168. June 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our species has a tendency to get distracted. We have a very strong appetite for distraction, and when something is not in the spotlight, when it’s not a crisis anymore, we tend to forget and move on to something else. So the biggest challenge is going to be maintaining focus on this next step of developing vaccines that anticipate pandemics.”
POST 169. June 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospitals in Washington, D.C…announced a consensus agreement to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for more than 30,000 workers, 70% of which are already vaccinated. Each of 14 hospitals will set their own deadline…”
POST 170. June 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Ashish Jha…is worried about the potential impact the delta variant could have in the United States… “I’m concerned about the Delta variant,”… “Why? Most contagious variant yet. Wreaked havoc in India. Spiking cases in UK. Growing rapidly in the US.”
POST 171. June 19, 2021. “A 34-year-old man (a Covid-19 survivor) has been diagnosed with India’s first known case of “green fungus” infection.”… “Green fungus is the new infection to join the earlier known cases of black, white and yellow fungus.”…”green fungus was earlier seen only as a “junior partner” in other infections… In the current patient, this fungus is acting as the aggressor.”
POST 172. June 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman said: “If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office.”…”remote work can “dramatically undermine” the character and culture a company is attempting to build; and “virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity.”
POST 173. June 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The daily toll of COVID-19, as measured by new cases and the growing number of deaths, overlooks a shadowy set of casualties: the rising risk of mental health problems among health care professionals working on the frontlines of the pandemic.”
POST 174. July 1, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “..while the WHO is encouraging people to keep wearing masks even if they’re vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci says it doesn’t look like the CDC currently plans to change its guidelines.” … health officials in Los Angeles recommended that “everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors in public places as a precautionary measure.”..”
POST 175. July 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Can a health care worker who is not against vaccines in general still harbor sincere concerns that scientists don’t yet know about all the side effects of these vaccines? Yes, says Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD — but those people should not work in health care.”
POST 176. July 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Mercy Springfield ( Missouri) hospital…” ran out of ventilators for its patients over the Fourth of July weekend…”…“Mercy will require all current and future employees to be fully vaccinated.”…“The US government is deploying a Covid-19 surge team to provide public health support in southwest Missouri
POST 177. July 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the Delta variant is “the 2020 version of Covid-19 on steroids,”… “It is the most hypertransmissible, contagious version of the virus we’ve seen to date…it’s a superspreader strain if there ever was one .” but… now, there’s a Delta Plus variant…
POST 178. July 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Tennessee’s top vaccine official says she has been fired as punishment for doing her job in the face of political pushback.”..” More than 180 state and local public health leaders…have resigned, retired or been fired since April 1…”“Former President Trump and his GOP allies have stepped up attacks on Anthony Fauci…”
POST 179. July 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It, therefore, follows that the “harm principle” (“first, do no harm.”) can be used to justify compulsory vaccination programs in specific instances where the community interests or benefits are deemed to be significant.”
POST 180, July 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Most people will either get vaccinated, or have been previously infected, or they will get this Delta variant,”.. “And for most people who get this Delta variant, it’s going to be the most serious virus that they get in their lifetime in terms of the risk of putting them in the hospital,”
POST 181. July 22, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Health experts fear the Tokyo Olympics could become a COVID-19 superspreader event.” “Whatever happens in Japan isn’t likely going to stay in Japan since all of the athletes and accompanying coaches and staff will be returning to their home countries.”
POST 182. July 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R): “Folks supposed to have common sense.”…“But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.” ““Beginning in mid-September, New York City will require all of its 340,000 municipal workers, including police, firefighters and teachers, to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly.”
POST 183. July 29, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. When I was appointed President and CEO of Jersey City Medical Center in1989 in the peak of the HIV/ AIDS crisis, we had a dedicated, and always full, dedicated 60 bed AIDS unit, staffed by one full time nurse and numerous part-time and per diem nurses. Today, right now, hospitals caught in the Covid-19 surge, are forced to redeploy nursing staff, respiratory therapists and other clinicians, most without prior infectious diseases experience. Why are we tolerating the unvaccinated putting our hospital staffs at risk?
POST 184. August 1, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The coronavirus could be “just a few mutations potentially away” from evolving into a variant that can evade existing COVID-19 vaccines, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said..” (A) “The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox..” (I)
POST 185. August 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ‘If you aren’t going to help, please get out of the way’: Biden turns up the pressure on GOP governors as Delta spreads”
POST 186. August 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late,” she added, referring to patients who have to be put on a ventilator.” (A) “There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.”.. “The question of when the crisis will be over is a layered one — with different answers from local, national and global perspectives.”
POST 187. August 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As a result of the increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the state of Florida requested 300 ventilators from the federal government.”… “An 11-month-old girl with Covid-19 is stable and no longer intubated one day after she was airlifted to a Texas hospital 150 miles away because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area.”
POST 188. August 15, 20201. CORONAVIRUS. “According to an internal CDC briefing….an estimated 1.1 million people have already gotten unauthorized booster shots…”….”If it is left up to the honor system, I think many Americans will suddenly wake up and find themselves immunocompromised enough to get a 3rd dose,”
POST 189. August 19,2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There wasn’t a single I.C.U. bed available in Alabama on Wednesday…”…”A triage plan on the Alabama health department’s website suggests that “persons with severe mental retardation” are among those who “may be poor candidates for ventilator support.”
“According to an internal CDC briefing reviewed by ABC News, an estimated 1.1 million people have already gotten unauthorized booster shots. The number is most likely an undercount because it includes Moderna and Pfizer recipients who have re-upped but not those who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine and then sought out another shot. The leading states for booster-shot seekers are Florida (a state with many older residents currently facing one of the worst outbreaks in the world), Ohio, California, Illinois, and Tennessee.” (Q)
“With the Delta variant surging, and breakthrough cases in Massachusetts nearing 8,000, people are already deciding they do not have time to wait. Some are crossing state lines in hopes of evading detection. Others are darting into pharmacies where they’ve heard no questions will be asked or falsely declaring that they have not already gotten a jab.
People who got J&J may be particularly eager to get an extra shot (even though a new study, out of South Africa, shows it is effective against Delta), but as cases mount, and COVID closes in again, many who got Moderna or Pfizer are also interested, according to observers, as are those with compromised immune systems.
“People are trying to get that third shot by hook or by crook,” said Peter Grinspoon, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital who’s been bombarded with “can you help me’s” from patients and friends….” (A)
“While Pfizer has said it plans to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for booster shots, health authorities say that for now, the fully vaccinated seem well protected.
Yet health care providers in the U.S. have reported more than 900 instances of people getting a third dose of COVID-19 vaccines in a database run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an Associated Press review of the system’s data found. Because reporting is voluntary, the full extent of people who have received third doses is unknown. It’s also unknown if all of those people were actively trying to get a third dose as a booster.
“I don’t think that anyone really has the tracking” in place to know how widespread it is, said Claire Hannan, executive director for the Association of Immunization Managers.
One entry in the CDC database shows a 52-year-old man got a third dose from a California pharmacy on July 14 by saying he had never received one and by providing his passport, rather than a driver’s license, as identification. But when the pharmacy contacted the patient’s insurance provider, it was told he had received two doses in March.
In Virginia, a 39-year-old man got a third shot from a military provider on April 27 after he showed a vaccine card indicating he had received only one dose. A review of records turned up his previous vaccines. The patient then told the provider that the time between his first and second doses was more than 21 days, “so they spoke to their provider, who ‘authorized’ them to get a third shot,” an entry states.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said at a recent news briefing that he knew of residents who had received third dose by using fake names, but neither his office nor the state health department could provide any evidence.
Despite a lack of FDA approval, public health officials in San Francisco said Tuesday that they will provide an extra dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine for people who got the single-shot Johnson & Johnson variety — referring to it as a supplement, rather than a booster.” (B)
“….Should the nearly 60% of adult Americans who have been fully vaccinated seek out a booster or not? Is the protection that has allowed them to see loved ones and go out to dinner fading?
Ultimately, the question of whether a booster is needed is unlikely to determine the FDA’s decision. If recent history is predictive, booster shots will be here before long. That’s because of the outdated, 60-year-old basic standard the FDA uses to authorize medicines for sale: Is a new drug “safe and effective”?
The FDA, using that standard, will very likely have to authorize Pfizer’s booster for emergency use, as it did the company’s prior covid shot. The booster is likely to be safe — hundreds of millions have taken the earlier shots — and Pfizer reported that it dramatically increases a vaccinated person’s antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. From that perspective, it may also be considered very effective.
But does that kind of efficacy matter? Is a higher level of antibodies needed to protect vaccinated Americans? Though antibody levels may wane some over time, the current vaccines deliver perfectly good immunity so far.
What if a booster is safe and effective in one sense but simply not needed — at least for now?
Reliance on the simple “safe and effective” standard — which certainly sounds reasonable — is a relic of a time when there were far fewer and simpler medicines available to treat diseases and before pharmaceutical manufacturing became one of the world’s biggest businesses.” (C)
“Pfizer reported on Wednesday that the power of its two-dose Covid vaccine wanes slightly over time, but nonetheless offers lasting and robust protection against serious disease. The company suggested that a third shot could improve immunity, but whether boosters will be widely needed is far from settled, the subject of heated debate among scientists.
So far, federal health officials have said boosters for the general population are unnecessary. And experts questioned whether vaccinated people should get more doses when so many people have yet to be immunized at all.
“There’s not enough evidence right now to support that that is somehow the best use of resources,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University in Atlanta.
Still, the findings raise questions about how well the Pfizer vaccine will prevent infection in the months to come. And with coronavirus cases surging again in many states, the data may influence the Biden administration’s deliberations about delivering boosters for older people.
If third shots are cleared for the general population, the boosters would likely represent a multi-billion-dollar business for Pfizer.” (D)
“Moderna said Thursday that its COVID-19 vaccine maintained 93 percent efficacy six months after the second dose but said that a booster shot will likely still be needed before the winter.
The 93 percent efficacy after six months announced by Moderna ahead of an earnings call on Thursday is a positive sign and compares to 84 percent efficacy after that time for the Pfizer vaccine.
Still, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said on CNBC on Thursday that the data was collected before the delta variant became prevalent in the United States, meaning the equation could change now that the delta variant is widespread.
“We are pleased that our COVID-19 vaccine is showing durable efficacy of 93% through six months but recognize that the Delta variant is a significant new threat, so we must remain vigilant,” Bancel said in a statement.
While there is strong data for six months, the company said in a presentation that it believes antibody levels will “continue to wane and eventually impact vaccine efficacy.”
It added that the combination of delta, fatigue with wearing masks and people moving indoors as the weather gets colder will cause an “increase of breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals.”
“Given this intersection, we believe dose 3 booster will likely be necessary prior to the winter season,” the company said.” (E)
“The Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine provides immunity that lasts at least eight months. The immunity appears to provide adequate protection against the worrying delta variant, the company said in a statement Thursday night.
“Current data for the eight months studied so far show that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine generates a strong neutralizing antibody response that does not wane; rather, we observe an improvement over time,” Dr. Mathai Mammen, head of research and development at J&J’s Janssen vaccine arm, said in a statement.
One dose of the vaccine elicits a lasting antibody response and generates immune cells called T-cells that last eight months, the company said.
A research team tested blood from vaccinated volunteers against different variants of the virus. One of the variants tested was the delta variant.
“We see robust neutralizing antibody coverage of the variant,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.
The immune system utilizes neutralizing antibodies to inactivate a virus before it can replicate.
J&J said a second or booster dose of its vaccine would not be necessary.” (F)
“There are generally two reasons why people might consider vaccine boosters. The first is that immunity naturally wanes over time. Without repeated exposure to certain antigens, the immune system may become less able to prevent infection or disease. Vaccine boosters help the immune system maintain a protective response.
“Another reason we may need booster vaccinations is viral variants,” a spokesperson from the COVID-19 Vaccine Team at the University of Oxford told Medical News Today. They went on to explain:
“Some variants have evolved to avoid some parts of our immune response, which means they can more easily infect those who have an existing immune response to the virus — i.e., those who have been previously infected or vaccinated. However, the virus cannot avoid all parts of our immune response. A booster vaccination is helpful, as it can improve the parts of our immune response the viral variant cannot avoid.”
“Alternatively, we can use a booster vaccine that specifically targets the viral variant. This works by producing a new immune response to the parts of the virus which have changed from the original vaccine whilst also improving the existing immune response against the unchanged parts of the virus, which also should help protect against other variants,” they added.” (G)
“In late June, O’Halloran and her team at the Washington University School of Medicine researchers published their study in the journal Nature showing that germinal centers were still forming in participants for up to 15 weeks after vaccination. Although that might not seem like a long time, O’Halloran says the idea is that those germinal centers “are potentially producing these long-lived memory cells that we need to give long-term immunity.” The study’s lead author Ali Ellebedy told National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins that the germinal center response is so robust that he believes it could last for years.
“This gives us insight that the body is doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” O’Halloran says. Wherry, who wasn’t involved with the study, agrees. “Now we know for sure that’s happening really robustly with these vaccines,” he says.
But the study provides a fairly small dataset, particularly when compared to the abundant studies measuring antibody levels. That’s because studies like this one are much harder and take longer—meaning fewer researchers have been able to take them on.
“Sometimes the easy bit to measure is not the thing that gives us the best window into what’s going on in the body,” O’Halloran says.
O’Halloran also points out the study only speaks to the durability of the Pfizer shot. Some observers have extrapolated that Moderna’s vaccine may have similar durability since it relies on the same mRNA technology. But for that and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, O’Halloran says, you’ll have to look to how they’re performing in the real world.
Another argument Pfizer has made for booster shots has pointed to real-world data out of Israel showing that the efficacy of its vaccine declines six months after full vaccination. On July 5, Israel’s Ministry of Health said that it has observed a “marked decline” in the vaccine’s efficacy to 64 percent in preventing both infection and symptomatic illness.
There’s also some indication that protections are waning among the immunocompromised, leading Israel to begin administering a third jab to transplant patients. (Here’s why COVID-19 vaccines are so complex for immunocompromised people.)
Wherry says that the dramatic decline in efficacy in Israel can be attributed in part to the country’s robust COVID-19 testing program. “They test everybody all the time,” he says. “They’re picking up asymptomatic infections.”
He points out that Israel’s data shows the vaccine remains 93 percent effective in preventing serious illness and hospitalization. This suggests that, while the vaccines may no longer be producing the robust levels of antibodies that shield people entirely from infection, the long-term memory response is still kicking in and preventing the infection from spreading.
Public health data elsewhere would seem to back that up: Earlier this month, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said that more than 99 percent of the U.S. deaths from COVID-19 in June were among unvaccinated people. O’Halloran says that’s really the point of getting vaccinated.
“At no point have the vaccines been said to 100 percent prevent infection,” O’Halloran says. “The most important thing is their impact on severe disease and death.”” (H)
“If there were enough vaccines for every adult in the world, third doses for those in rich countries wouldn’t appall so many researchers. But disparities are growing. A July report from KFF, a health-policy organization based in San Francisco, California, finds that low-income countries won’t achieve substantial levels of protection until at least 2023, at current vaccination rates. Almost all of the roughly 3.2 billion mRNA vaccine doses expected this year from manufacturers Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have been purchased by the United States and Europe, according to the London-based analytics company Airfinity. Although some of those will be donated to countries in need, the KFF report suggests that they will be insufficient. The pace of vaccination in low-income countries needs to increase 19-fold to inoculate 40% of those nations’ populations by the end of the year, the report says.
This modest vaccination target of 40% is endorsed by the WHO, the World Bank and the IMF as a threshold that would significantly reduce deaths and allow economies to begin recovery. But because it looks increasingly out of reach, the IMF has revised its economic forecasts for 2021, downgrading projections for developing and emerging economies. It warns that highly infectious variants could derail worldwide economic recovery and wipe US$4.5 trillion from the global gross domestic product by 2025.” (I)
“The World Health Organization on Wednesday called for a halt on booster shots of coronavirus vaccines through at least September, as poorer countries struggle to access doses, even for high-risk populations such as health-care workers and the elderly.
“We cannot and we should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference.
Tedros said the focus for now should be meeting the U.N. health agency’s goal of 10 percent vaccination coverage in every country by the end of September. So far, more than 80 percent of vaccine doses globally have gone to high- and upper-middle-income countries that account for less than half of the world’s population.
The remarks come as the United States and other wealthy nations weigh whether and when booster shots are necessary and consider how to balance domestic calls for additional doses against growing evidence of an alarming vaccine gap around the world.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday said the WHO was presenting a “false choice.”
The United States announced Tuesday “an important milestone” of more than 110 million vaccine doses donated to the world, she said, more than all other countries have shared, combined.
“More needs to happen, but we believe we can do both,” she said.” (J)
“Here, Nature looks at what scientists know — and what they wish they knew — about COVID-19 vaccine boosters.
Do boosters actually work?
Can COVID vaccines stop transmission? Scientists race to find answers
Is immunity from vaccines waning?
Are vaccinations given months ago still preventing infections?
What about protection from serious illness with COVID-19?
What else could change the calculation on boosters?
What it will take to vaccinate the world against COVID-19?…
Despite the lack of evidence in favour of offering boosters now, Aran expects policymakers to err on the side of caution and begin offering boosters to at-risk groups in the coming weeks. “The risk is low, the advantage is high,” he says. After initially spurning the idea of third doses for most people, the US government is now considering them, according to news reports…. “(K)
“Israel and other countries are rolling out third doses of COVID-19 vaccines to people fully vaccinated. But more research is needed on the benefits and timing of booster doses.
Germany plans to start offering booster doses in September to older adults and people with weakened immune systems. The United Kingdom will also begin its own booster rollout next month.
The United States has yet to fully embrace COVID-19 boosters.
As Delta variant surges threaten to erode pandemic progress, some highly vaccinated countries are offering booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines to their citizens.
This week, Israel began administering third doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to people over age 60 who are already fully vaccinated, reports the Associated Press.
According to Reuters, Germany plans to start offering booster doses in September to older adults and people with weakened immune systems. The United Kingdom will also begin its own booster rollout next month.
The United States has yet to fully embrace COVID-19 boosters, but it’s edging in that direction.
As recently as early July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.”
But the agencies added that they’re continuing to monitor the scientific data in order to decide if and when a booster might be needed.” (L)
“Sure enough, the United States is again awash in virus, with the incidence of new COVID-19 cases having soared 131 percent in the third week of July. To be clear, the vaccines available work well—especially the Pfizer and Moderna products based on mRNA technology. But it is likely that waning vaccine efficacy, coupled with a stubborn one-fifth of the adult population refusing any immunization, has opened the door for the dangerous mutant delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 to wreak havoc among the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
That’s why the United States is going to need a third dose of mRNA vaccines; for the nation’s older population, the triple play is already overdue. “I don’t see the virus just disappearing,” said Stanley Plotkin, considered the godfather of vaccinology. The University of Pennsylvania vaccine inventor and immunologist told me that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should comply with requests from Pfizer, following Israel’s example, and immediately approve third-dose immunization for adults over the age of 60, with general triple dosing for all Americans to follow. I agree…
In Atlanta, CDC scientists are scrambling to comprehend what havoc the variant strains are wreaking, how well the vaccines are working, and what forecast ought to end up on the president’s desk. For several months, the CDC has refereed a sort of artificial intelligence conference of modelers and forecasters from all over the United States, mostly academics. Each epidemic modeling team uses its own methodology to track the U.S. epidemic and forecast where it’s headed. Some of the teams are very cautious and consistently lowball the scale of future trends. Some routinely tend to the opposite extreme. The CDC grinds it all up to reach a sort of projection consensus. And so far, these forecasts have been scary correct.
In its latest modeling mashup, the CDC forecast predicts that the new delta-driven surge won’t peak until October, possibly not until Thanksgiving. By late August, at least 2,500 Americans will die, every week, bringing the nation’s cumulative mortality to some 660,000.
With a forecast so grim, it’s time for a Hail Mary move. And that would be the mass third-dose vaccination of every American over 60 years of age, coupled with a return to mask-wearing and social distancing and a massive escalation in genomic surveillance nationwide. Anything less means ceding the battlefield to the virus.” (M)
“To determine whether and when boosters will be needed, experts say there are three key questions that government health officials will need to answer:
How does the immune response generated by the shots hold up over time?
Are there new virus variants that elude the vaccines?
How are the strong efficacy numbers seen in clinical trials holding up in the real world?..
One reason for the ongoing debate is that the science behind Covid-19 boosters is unsettled. There are no agreed-upon blood measurements that scientists can use to confidently determine when protection has eroded.
So deciding when a third jab is needed will be a judgment call by public health officials, one that may differ from country to country. U.S. authorities emphasize they won’t rely only on drug company data in making their decision….
“Everyone wants an answer before we have data,” Andrew Pavia, chief of the University of Utah School of Medicine’s pediatric infectious diseases division, said at an event Tuesday. Recommending boosters prematurely would use up valuable shots that could go to billions of people around the world who aren’t vaccinated at all, he said.” (N)
“U.S regulators authorized a third dose of COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer Inc (PFE.N)-BioNTech and Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) on Friday for people with compromised immune systems who are likely to have weaker protection from the two-dose regimens.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration amended its emergency use authorization for both vaccines on Thursday, paving the way for people who have had an organ transplant, or those with a similar level of weakened immune system, to get an extra dose of the same shot they have initially received.
An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted to recommend the additional shots, and the agency’s director signed off on that recommendation on Friday. Immunocompromised individuals can begin receving the shots immediately, according to an agency spokesperson.
Mixing of mRNA vaccines is permitted for the third shot if their original vaccine is not available.
Patients will not need a prescription or the signoff of a healthcare provider in order to prove they are immunocompromised and receive the additional dose, according to officials.
“It will be a patient’s attestation, and there will be no requirement for proof or prescription or a recommendation from an individual’s healthcare provider,” CDC official Dr. Amanda Cohn said, speaking before the advisory panel.
There is growing concern about breakthrough infections in vulnerable populations in the United Stats as the country sees a huge spike in new infections from the contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus…
Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Minnesota, backed the FDA decision, noting that most of the fully vaccinated patients he has seen in the hospital are immunocompromised.
Boulware said that the plan to let patients attest to their own status may lead to more people receiving the shots than intended.
“Clinical experts on the CDC panel spent a good deal of time trying to suss out exactly what conditions might fall under the FDA’s umbrella for a third dose.
In a presentation to the committee, Neela Goswami, MD, an assistant professor of infectious disease and epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, stressed that the shots are intended for patients who are moderately or severely immunocompromised in close consultation with their doctors, but that people who should qualify would include:
Those receiving treatments for solid tumors or blood cancers.
Those taking immunosuppressing medications after a solid organ transplant.
People who were within 2 years of receiving CAR-T therapy or a stem cell transplant.
People who have primary immunodeficiencies — rare genetic disorders that prevent the immune system from working properly.
People with advanced or untreated HIV.
Those taking high-dose corticosteroids (more than 20 milligrams of prednisone or its equivalent daily), alkylating agents, antimetabolites, chemotherapy, TNF blockers or other immunomodulating or immunosuppressing biologics.
Certain chronic medical conditions may also qualify, such as chronic renal disease or asplenia — living without a spleen.
People receiving dialysis may also need a third dose
In discussion, CDC experts clarified that these third doses were not intended for people whose immune function had waned with age, such as elderly residents of long-term care facilities, or people with chronic diseases like diabetes.” (P)
“White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday everybody will someday “likely” need a booster shot of the Covid-19 vaccines.
“We’re already starting to see indications of some diminution” in the durability of the vaccines, Fauci told “CBS This Morning.”
However, he said it’s not likely that they will be widely administered any time soon. The priority, Fauci said, is to give boosters to people who have compromised immune systems, including those with cancer and transplanted organs.
“We don’t feel at this particular point that, apart from the immune-compromised, we don’t feel we need to give boosters right now,” he said…
The CDC does not currently recommend booster doses of the vaccines for otherwise healthy people at this time. But Fauci, speaking Thursday on NBC’s “TODAY,” said “inevitably there will be a time when we’ll have to get boosts.”
“No vaccine, at least not within this category, is going to have an indefinite amount of protection,” he said.” (R)
“With a stockpile of at least 100 million doses at the ready, Biden administration officials are developing a plan to start offering coronavirus booster shots to some Americans as early as this fall even as researchers continue to hotly debate whether extra shots are needed, according to people familiar with the effort.
The first boosters are likely to go to nursing home residents and health care workers, followed by other older people who were near the front of the line when vaccinations began late last year. Officials envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received. They have discussed starting the effort in October but have not settled on a timetable.
While many outside experts argue there is no proof yet that the vaccines’ protection against severe disease and hospitalization is waning in the United States, administration officials say they cannot afford to put off figuring out the logistics of providing boosters to millions of people until that tipping point is reached. The spotty nature of the nation’s disease-reporting network makes the question of timing even trickier…
Any booster policy decision is fraught, officials said, because the administration does not want to undermine public confidence in what have proved to be powerfully effective vaccines. Nor does it want to overvaccinate Americans when many other countries have yet to even begin vaccination campaigns in earnest, increasing the threat of dangerous new variants that could spread to the United States and evade the vaccines…
Administration officials continued to insist that boosters remained unnecessary for the general population for now. Determining at what point that changes is difficult because administration experts lack up-to-date data on so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated people, including their prevalence, when such people were vaccinated and which vaccine they received…
Some federal officials cast the booster discussions as contingency planning; others suggested boosters for the general population were extremely likely and the questions were how to give it to them and when.
Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said that if and when extra shots were needed, they would be rolled out “in a fast and efficient way.”” (S)
“The director of the National Institutes of Health says the U.S. could decide in the next couple weeks whether to offer coronavirus booster shots to Americans this fall.
“Dr. Francis Collins tells “Fox News Sunday” that federal health officials are looking at the U.S. numbers “almost daily” but no decision has been made because cases so far still indicate that vaccinated people remain highly protected from COVID-19, including the delta variant…
Collins says because the delta variant only started hitting hard in July, the “next couple of weeks” of case data will help the U.S. make a decision.” (T)
“Across the United States, the number of coronavirus cases has skyrocketed, leading to calls from public health officials to mask up regardless of vaccination status. Many vaccinated people are asking whether it’s time to get a booster dose. But the math behind the spread of infectious diseases like covid-19 can help us see that it’s not.
The change in coronavirus guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from some local authorities came about because of the delta variant, which epidemiologists estimate has a basic reproductive number between 6 and 9. The basic reproductive number, or R0 (pronounced arr-naught), is a measure of the average number of people directly infected by a single infectious person in a scenario where no one in the population has any immunity to the disease. The original virus that caused covid-19 had an R0 of about 3, meaning that someone infected in April 2020 would, on average, infect three others. The delta variant is two to three times more infectious; on average, one infected person may infect between six and nine people if none of them are vaccinated or had a prior infection.
But the basic reproductive number alone doesn’t tell the whole story. To really understand what we can expect from the delta variant, we need to consider vaccinations, natural immunity and any precautions people are taking to lower their chances of being exposed, such as wearing masks and social distancing. To do that, epidemiologists calculate another measure, called the effective reproduction number, or Re (pronounced arr-eee). The Re helps us estimate how much a disease may spread when a population has at least some immunity. Technically speaking, the Re measures how many new people a single person infects, accounting for whatever precautions people are taking and overall immunity levels. Whether we’re talking about the Re or the R0, any value larger than 1 means trouble, because if each person can infect more than one other person, any disease outbreak will continue to spread exponentially unless we take action….
The math of outbreaks helps us to understand that we cannot control the delta variant by maximizing the immunity of only a segment of the population. If you’ve already been vaccinated, your best next step for lowering your risk of a breakthrough infection is to help your friends, family and neighbors decide to get vaccinated themselves. Seeking out a booster won’t help as much, unless you are immunocompromised — in which case, do talk to your doctor.
Vaccinating everyone eligible is a lofty goal, but it’s worth aiming for. Vaccines have been a key tool of public health since the first smallpox vaccine was developed in 1796. Widespread vaccination campaigns have stopped outbreaks of polio, measles, chickenpox and many other infectious diseases. We can make sure covid-19 is next by working to vaccinate everybody, not just in the United States but around the world. As of Aug. 10, just under 16 percent of the world’s population was fully vaccinated. Our global Re is still very high, and it will take global cooperation to bring it below 1, but we have the tools and knowledge to do so. All that’s left is to act.” (U)
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.’” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
POST 151. April 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the J&J vaccination pause. “ Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to spot or treat the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it…” “…a standard treatment for blood clots — use of an anticoagulant drug — could be dangerous or even fatal in such cases…”
POST 152. April 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s director said Saturday authorities are considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines because the country’s domestically made doses “don’t have very high protection rates,”
POST 153. April 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “At least 35 hospitals across Michigan were listed Thursday as nearing capacity and three were at full capacity for COVID-19 patients..”.. We can manufacture beds. We can open up beds. We can create entire wings of the hospital if we have to, but if we don’t have staff for those beds, we’ve got nothing.”..
POST 154. April 19, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Breakthrough infections, which occur when fully vaccinated people are infected by the pathogen that their shots were designed to protect against, are an entirely expected part of any vaccination process.” “Pfizer’s chief executive said that a third dose of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.”
POST 155. April 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. As the J&J vaccine pause is ended Senator Johnson said “The science tells us that vaccines are 95% effective. So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not? I mean, what is it to you?”
POST 156. April 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. As CDC revises guidance on outdoor masking, Texas Governor Abbott says “the state is “very close” to herd immunity… despite acknowledging that he does not know what the herd immunity threshold is for the virus, an uncertainty echoed by the public health community.”
POST 157. April 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Ohio hospitals; “We agreed in multiple conversations, there’s nothing in fighting a pandemic that creates a competitive advantage.”…
POST 158. May 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. . As populations get closer to herd immunity “ it may be helpful to introduce some nuance to what we mean by the term. Nationwide herd immunity. Regional herd immunity. Temporary herd immunity. Endemicity.”
POST 159. May 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Without deeper sharing of expertise in how to make vaccines…waiving patent obligations is unlikely to be a game-changer… Having access to the “recipe” certainly helps, but understanding how to put it together and produce it at scale is something else.”
POST 160. May 13, 2021.CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC acknowledged Friday that airborne spread of COVID-19 among people more than 6 feet apart “has been repeatedly documented.”” Meanwhile states relax or eliminate indoor dining restrictions. HUH?
POST 161. May 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Even if the spread of Covid-19 decreases enough to allow a return of most activities, there are some aspects of pandemic life that epidemiologists say will persist much longer. In particular, they say that masks are a norm that should continue, even if that view puts them at odds with the new C.D.C. guidance. More than 80 percent of them say people should continue to wear masks when indoors with strangers for at least another year, and outdoors in crowds.”
POST 162. May 21, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is refusing to lift his indoor mask mandate for vaccinated residents…” “…fully vaccinated residents in New York and Connecticut are no longer required to wear masks..”..” “California says it isn’t ready to follow the federal lead and unmask, at least for another month..”.. “..Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday prohibiting state governmental entities such as counties, public school districts, public health authorities and government officials from requiring mask wearing.”
POST 163. May 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey announced a mandate…saying supervisors and those of higher rank must get the vaccine by June 30. They will eventually require the system’s 35,000 employees to do the same.
POST 164. May 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. On Wednesday, health minister Norihisa Tamura warned Olympic organizers they would have to “secure their own” hospital beds for anyone falling ill at the Games, explaining the government would not release beds set aside for Japanese covid-19 patients.”
POST 165. May 31,2001. CORONAVIRUS. “Like all pandemics, this one will end either with millions — maybe billions — being infected or being vaccinated. This time, world leaders have a choice, but little time to make that choice before it is made for them.”
POST 166. June 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “President Biden said Wednesday that he has asked intelligence agencies to double down on their efforts to investigate whether the coronavirus originated from human contact with an animal or in an laboratory in China, saying there is not “sufficient information” to assess whether one is more likely than the other.”
POST 167. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Hospitals prevaricate on mandatory staff vaccinations. Florida’s Governor forbids cruise ship vaccine mandates. Pfizer and Moderna apply for FDA full approval.
POST 168. June 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our species has a tendency to get distracted. We have a very strong appetite for distraction, and when something is not in the spotlight, when it’s not a crisis anymore, we tend to forget and move on to something else. So the biggest challenge is going to be maintaining focus on this next step of developing vaccines that anticipate pandemics.”
POST 169. June 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospitals in Washington, D.C…announced a consensus agreement to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for more than 30,000 workers, 70% of which are already vaccinated. Each of 14 hospitals will set their own deadline…”
POST 170. June 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Ashish Jha…is worried about the potential impact the delta variant could have in the United States… “I’m concerned about the Delta variant,”… “Why? Most contagious variant yet. Wreaked havoc in India. Spiking cases in UK. Growing rapidly in the US.”
POST 171. June 19, 2021. “A 34-year-old man (a Covid-19 survivor) has been diagnosed with India’s first known case of “green fungus” infection.”… “Green fungus is the new infection to join the earlier known cases of black, white and yellow fungus.”…”green fungus was earlier seen only as a “junior partner” in other infections… In the current patient, this fungus is acting as the aggressor.”
POST 172. June 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman said: “If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office.”…”remote work can “dramatically undermine” the character and culture a company is attempting to build; and “virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity.”
POST 173. June 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The daily toll of COVID-19, as measured by new cases and the growing number of deaths, overlooks a shadowy set of casualties: the rising risk of mental health problems among health care professionals working on the frontlines of the pandemic.”
POST 174. July 1, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “..while the WHO is encouraging people to keep wearing masks even if they’re vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci says it doesn’t look like the CDC currently plans to change its guidelines.” … health officials in Los Angeles recommended that “everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors in public places as a precautionary measure.”..”
POST 175. July 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Can a health care worker who is not against vaccines in general still harbor sincere concerns that scientists don’t yet know about all the side effects of these vaccines? Yes, says Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD — but those people should not work in health care.”
POST 176. July 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Mercy Springfield ( Missouri) hospital…” ran out of ventilators for its patients over the Fourth of July weekend…”…“Mercy will require all current and future employees to be fully vaccinated.”…“The US government is deploying a Covid-19 surge team to provide public health support in southwest Missouri
POST 177. July 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the Delta variant is “the 2020 version of Covid-19 on steroids,”… “It is the most hypertransmissible, contagious version of the virus we’ve seen to date…it’s a superspreader strain if there ever was one .” but… now, there’s a Delta Plus variant…
POST 178. July 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Tennessee’s top vaccine official says she has been fired as punishment for doing her job in the face of political pushback.”..” More than 180 state and local public health leaders…have resigned, retired or been fired since April 1…”“Former President Trump and his GOP allies have stepped up attacks on Anthony Fauci…”
POST 179. July 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It, therefore, follows that the “harm principle” (“first, do no harm.”) can be used to justify compulsory vaccination programs in specific instances where the community interests or benefits are deemed to be significant.”
POST 180, July 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Most people will either get vaccinated, or have been previously infected, or they will get this Delta variant,”.. “And for most people who get this Delta variant, it’s going to be the most serious virus that they get in their lifetime in terms of the risk of putting them in the hospital,”
POST 181. July 22, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Health experts fear the Tokyo Olympics could become a COVID-19 superspreader event.” “Whatever happens in Japan isn’t likely going to stay in Japan since all of the athletes and accompanying coaches and staff will be returning to their home countries.”
POST 182. July 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R): “Folks supposed to have common sense.”…“But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.” ““Beginning in mid-September, New York City will require all of its 340,000 municipal workers, including police, firefighters and teachers, to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly.”
POST 183. July 29, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. When I was appointed President and CEO of Jersey City Medical Center in1989 in the peak of the HIV/ AIDS crisis, we had a dedicated, and always full, dedicated 60 bed AIDS unit, staffed by one full time nurse and numerous part-time and per diem nurses. Today, right now, hospitals caught in the Covid-19 surge, are forced to redeploy nursing staff, respiratory therapists and other clinicians, most without prior infectious diseases experience. Why are we tolerating the unvaccinated putting our hospital staffs at risk?
POST 184. August 1, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The coronavirus could be “just a few mutations potentially away” from evolving into a variant that can evade existing COVID-19 vaccines, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said..” (A) “The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox..” (I)
POST 185. August 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ‘If you aren’t going to help, please get out of the way’: Biden turns up the pressure on GOP governors as Delta spreads”
POST 186. August 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late,” she added, referring to patients who have to be put on a ventilator.” (A) “There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.”.. “The question of when the crisis will be over is a layered one — with different answers from local, national and global perspectives.”
POST 187. August 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As a result of the increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the state of Florida requested 300 ventilators from the federal government.”… “An 11-month-old girl with Covid-19 is stable and no longer intubated one day after she was airlifted to a Texas hospital 150 miles away because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area.”
POST 188. August 15, 20201. CORONAVIRUS. “According to an internal CDC briefing….an estimated 1.1 million people have already gotten unauthorized booster shots…”….”If it is left up to the honor system, I think many Americans will suddenly wake up and find themselves immunocompromised enough to get a 3rd dose,”
“The request was made on Friday “to replace expended state stores,” the document said.
The ventilators were expected to be delivered on Monday, though it was not said how they will be allocated.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that he was not aware of such a request when asked about it.
“I have not heard about that, so I have to check to see if that’s true or not,” he said. “I would honestly doubt that that’s true, but I’ll look. We have a lot of stuff that we stockpiled over the last year and a half through the department of emergency management. I have not had any requests across my desk. I haven’t been notified of that.””(A)
“Dozens of Texas hospitals have run out of intensive care unit beds as COVID-19 surges faster than any other time during the pandemic, propelled by the new delta variant.
The state is divided into 22 trauma service areas, and half of them reported 10 or fewer available ICU beds on Sunday. As more than 9,400 COVID-19 patients fill the state’s ICUs, which are reserved for the patients who are the sickest or most injured, the trauma service area that includes Laredo reported no available ICU beds, while the area that includes Abilene reported having one.
At least 53 Texas hospitals have no available ICU capacity, according to numbers reported to the federal government during the week ending Aug. 5. In Austin, five hospitals were at or above 90% of their ICU capacity during the same period, with two reporting no available ICU beds.
“This surge is by far the fastest and most aggressive that we’ve seen. Almost all of our hospitalizations are due to unvaccinated patients developing severe illness,” Dr. Desmar Walkes, Austin-Travis County’s health authority, told reporters last week. “ICU staff are seeing a younger population in our hospitals. Patients in the ICU are sicker and stay in the hospital longer than with prior surges, putting more strain on hospital resources.”
Around 87.1% of all hospital beds in Texas are in use — the highest level since the start of the pandemic — with 14.1% of those beds occupied by COVID-19 patients. When Gov. Greg Abbott began to relax some COVID-19 restrictions on businesses in October, his order maintained reduced restaurant capacity and kept bars closed in regions in which 15% or more of hospital beds were filled with COVID-19 patients…
Medical professionals are afraid that hospitals will become so overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients that they won’t have space for new patients — a situation that many hospitals faced during previous COVID surges.
“We need to make sure that there’s beds and hospitals and staff in hospitals available to take care of people who don’t just have COVID-19, but … all of those other conditions,” said Dr. Jennifer Shuford, chief state epidemiologist for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “As we see hospitalizations increasing at this rapid rate, we are afraid that we’re going to stress hospitals to the point that they can’t take care of some of those other people who are coming in to the hospital for a stroke or a heart attack or any number of other things.”
Already, Shuford said she’s heard of hospitals that can’t accept patient transfers from other hospitals because they have no beds open.” (B)
“A hospital system in Texas is prepping tents for the overflow of patients after a surge in Covid-19 cases filled its hospitals to the verge of capacity.
Harris Health System in Houston is reporting 1 in 4 patients at its two hospitals have tested positive for Covid-19.
Ben Taub Hospital’s intensive care unit is at 95% capacity with 27% of utilization by Covid-19 patients and Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, where the tents are being set up, is at 100% ICU utilization with 63% Covid cases, Harris Health spokesperson Bryan McLeod told CNN in an email.
“They are still in the process of completing set up, and installing IT equipment, etc. There is no pre-determined time for when they will begin to be used, but they want the tented environment to be ready to go in the event they are needed,” McLeod said…
Another lagging problem is personnel shortages. Porsa said he would welcome federal aid to relieve some of the pressure. The hospitals are 254 nurses short leaving hospitals with no options but to hire agency nurses at high prices, he said…
“The situation is bad and only getting worse. We are not heading towards a crisis, we are in the middle of a crisis,” Porsa said.” (C)
“The resurgence of COVID-19 in Texas has put some cities’ health systems in dire circumstances, as intensive care unit beds fill up, officials say.
In Austin, the health department said there were only nine ICU beds available on Friday in the 11-county trauma service region that includes the city and serves 2.3 million people.
“We are running out of time and our community must act now,” said Dr. Desmar Walkes, Austin’s medical director/health authority. “Our ICU capacity is reaching a critical point where the level of risk to the entire community has significantly increased, and not just to those who are needing treatment for COVID. If we fail to come together as a community now, we jeopardize the lives of loved ones who might need critical care.”…
San Antonio is also facing a nursing shortage caused by an increase of coronavirus patients. City leaders had hoped the state would help fill the shortage, but in a letter sent Thursday to city and county leaders across Texas, the state directed local governments to instead make their own plans to increase hospital staffs before asking the state for help, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
The state previously hired staffing companies to send traveling nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists to help hospitals cope with COVID-19 surges.
In San Antonio, COVID-19 hospitalizations on Saturday were up by 430% since the start of July, the newspaper reported.
“We have patients waiting in the lobby; we have patients in the hallway,” said Tommye Austin, the chief nurse executive for University Health, one of the largest hospitals in San Antonio. “Every nook and cranny in this organization has a patient.” (D)
“As hospitalizations for COVID-19 continue to rise, health leaders have been warning for weeks that staffed ICU beds are in short supply. They’ve asked the community to get vaccinated and return to mask-wearing to help with the surge.
In a joint meeting with Austin City Council and Travis County Commissioners last week, Dr. Desmar Walkes, the local health authority, said area hospitals were already going into what’s called “diversion” mode. That means the hospital has to ask EMS to take patients elsewhere…
Dr. Walkes also said in that meeting that the Austin-Travis County area has adopted a mass casualty care plan to prioritize patients based on severity and resources available, should we hit a point where hospitals area-wide are over capacity, and patients cannot be transferred…
We have previously reported that the Austin Convention Center could turn into an alternate hospital to take in patients who need critical care. It was not clear how that facility would be staffed.” “ (E)
“”What I am seeing during my shifts is just as bad, if not worse, than what I saw last year,” said Dr. Owais Durrani, an emergency medicine physician who works at several freestanding emergency departments and hospitals in East Texas. “Before COVID, sending patients home on oxygen was unheard of. We are now sending patients home on oxygen again due to hospital capacity issues.”
Critical access hospitals and freestanding emergency departments, like the ones Durrani works in, usually aren’t designed or staffed to keep patients for extended time periods. Instead, they rely on transferring patients to other facilities for critical care. But given the lack of available beds across the state, transferring is now nearly impossible, Durrani explained.
“We are having extreme difficulty transferring patients out,” he said. “I have personally transferred patients to other states due to not having any Texas beds.”….
He shared the story of a patient he treated with an acute medical issue that required surgery. ER physicians are trained to stabilize patients, not perform surgery. During non-pandemic times, that patient’s wait would have been a few hours. Instead, the patient sat in the emergency department for 16 hours because partner hospitals with surgeons were full.
“This patient of mine was vaccinated, not a COVID patient, but due to the pandemic brought on by the unvaccinated they received suboptimal care,” Durrani said.” (F)
“Arkansas, among the states hardest-hit by a new wave of coronavirus cases linked to the highly contagious delta variant, says it is down to eight unoccupied ICU beds statewide with which to care for COVID-19 patients.
Gov. Asa Hutchison, in a tweet on Monday, said the latest report highlighted “startling numbers.”
“We saw the largest single-day increase in hospitalizations and have eclipsed our previous high of COVID hospitalizations,” the governor wrote. “There are currently only eight ICU beds available in the state.”
“Vaccinations reduce hospitalizations,” he added.
Hospitalization of COVID-19 patients jumped by 103 to 1,376, the report cited by Hutchison shows. It’s the biggest daily jump and total in the state since the start of the pandemic.
“This is unlike anything that we experienced before during the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Dr. Cam Patterson, who serves as chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which includes the UAMS Medical Center hospital in Little Rock…
About 17% of nursing positions at the hospital are vacant, which increases the load on the current staff.
“They’re taking care of more patients than they’re used to and they’re just flat worn out,” he says…
In April, Hutchison signed into law a statewide ban on further mask mandates. However, in a news conference last week, the governor said he regretted signing the measure, which has complicated his state’s efforts to control the spread of the virus.
“In hindsight, I wish that it had not become law,” he said. “But it is the law, and the only chance we have is either to amend it or for the courts to say that it has an unconstitutional foundation.” “ (G)
“There is only one COVID ICU bed available in the state Tuesday morning with five hospitals showing limited bed space for COVID patients.
“We have nowhere to send COVID-19 patients within the State of Arkansas. There is limited bed capacity at trauma centers increasing pressure on the time-sensitive healthcare system,” said Jeff Tabor, program director for the COVIDComm system, which helps match covid-19 patients with hospitals.
Tabor said the one COVID ICU bed which is available is located in southern Arkansas. There are five hospitals, also in southern Arkansas, showing limited COVID bed space.
Tabor said some COVID-19 patients are so critical at rural Arkansas hospitals that they cannot be transferred to other hospitals because the patient is too critical and because of bed space.
UAMS struggling amid pandemic while staff shortage at its peak
“It’s been a slow-moving train to this situation over the last couple of days,” said Tabor, noting that hospital capacity is affecting all Arkansas hospital systems.
Tabor said that with less staff and fewer beds the situation has become “the perfect storm.”” (H)
“A steep increase in seriously ill COVID-19 patients has pushed hospitals statewide into crisis mode again this week, prompting worries that the new surge may overwhelm facilities already struggling to find enough nurses to adequately staff emergency rooms and intensive care units.
Large hospitals in metro Atlanta frequently went on diversion status this week because they were so full, sending ambulances elsewhere. Some elective procedures started to get pushed back across the state to free up medical staff and hospital beds.
Everywhere, top doctors monitored a trendline driven by the highly contagious delta variant they worry could surpass the January surge that flooded every hospital in Georgia….
With cases and hospitalizations rising quickly across Georgia, it’s hard for hospitals from one part of the state to help out hospitals elsewhere that are overloaded.
“This is an extraordinary point of the pandemic,” said Dr. Dianna Grant, chief medical officer at the Phoebe Putney Health System in Albany, which was the first in Georgia to be hit hard by COVID-19. “Seventeen months ago, when the Albany area was an early hotspot, we were an outlier. Other hospitals that were not dealing with an onslaught of patients had the ability to help. That’s not the case now. All hospitals are operating at capacity.”
The trendlines suggest that the coming days will further test a healthcare workforce that has already been on the front lines for more than a year.
“This is the most rapid of all the surges,” said Dr. Danny Branstetter, medical director of Infection prevention for the Wellstar Health System. “How far will it go? Will it get to those peak numbers we saw in December or January? Who knows. But the quickness with which it is getting there is of concern today.”…
While large hospitals in Atlanta struggle for nurses, rural hospitals often face even greater challenges finding the staff they need. Angela Ammons, CEO of Clinch Memorial Hospital in Homerville, also is a registered nurse. Because of staffing shortages, she is also working on the floor while she serves as CEO. She went to work Tuesday in her scrubs and packed an overnight bag in case she had to stay at the hospital because of the rise in cases.
She said she has been calling an agency that provides nurses to healthcare facilities, but the agencies have no more nurses to send to her.
“If we don’t have enough staff to come in and patients start flooding our ER, we’re not turning them away,” Ammons said. “We will do the best we can. It’s similar to another wartime effort, like what we were in last year. We’re doing the best we can with what we got.”…
Wait times are longer at almost every emergency room right now, whether it’s a large hospital in Atlanta or a rural hospital in a small town. At Southeast Georgia Health System, the hospital publishes statistics every day showing that the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients have not been vaccinated.
“It’s very hard, very disheartening for our health care teams to be going through this again. The hardest part is that we aren’t experiencing the community support that was shown last year when there wasn’t a vaccine available,” said Michael D. Scherneck, president and CEO at Southeast Georgia Health System.
He said that while vaccination rates are low in the community, patients are also complaining about long waits for emergency care at the overloaded hospital.” (I)
“Gov. Greg Abbott appealed for out-of-state help to fight the third wave of COVID-19 in Texas while two more of the state’s largest school districts announced mask mandates in defiance of the governor….
The Republican governor has directed the Texas Department of State Health Services to use staffing agencies to find additional medical staff from beyond the state’s borders as the delta wave began to overwhelm its present staffing resources. He also has sent a letter to the Texas Hospital Association to request that hospitals postpone all elective medical procedures voluntarily.
Hospital officials in Houston said last week that area hospitals with beds had insufficient numbers of nurses to serve them.
Abbott also directed the state health department and the Texas Division of Emergency Management to open additional COVID-19 antibody infusion centers to treat patients not needing hospital care and expand COVID-19 vaccine availability to the state’s underserved communities. He also announced about $267 million in emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food benefits for August. That was on top of the $3.9 billion in benefits previously allocated since April 2020.
The governor is taking action short of lifting his emergency order banning county and local government entities from requiring the wearing of masks and social distancing to lower the COVID-19 risk. Abbott has said repeatedly that Texans have the information and intelligence to make their own decisions on what steps to take to protect their health and the health of those around them.” (J)
“COVID-19 cases have filled so many Florida hospital beds that ambulance services and fire departments are straining to respond to emergencies.
In St. Petersburg, some patients wait inside ambulances for up to an hour before hospitals can admit them — a process that usually takes about 15 minutes, Pinellas County Administrator Barry Burton said.
While ambulances sit outside emergency rooms, they are essentially off the grid.
“They’re not available to take another call, which forces the fire department on scene at an accident or something to take that transport. That’s caused quite a backlog for the system.”…
Burton stressed that the most serious non-COVID cases, such as heart attacks and strokes, still get prompt attention in emergency rooms. And he says the county is working with fire rescue officials to find more ambulances and have extra staff on hand. But “that really taxes on already overstressed fire and rescue staff,” he warned.
Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals are expecting critical staffing shortage in the next seven days, according to the Florida Hospital Association. The COVID-19 influx is also hitting as Florida hospitals are seeing “unusually high numbers of very ill non-COVID patients,” said the association’s president Mary Mayhew.” (K)
“More Florida children were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Tuesday than in any other state, reflecting a rapid rise in serious illness among an age group considered to be at the lowest risk of severe outcomes from the disease and many still not eligible for the vaccine.
A total of 46 pediatric patients were admitted to a Florida hospital with a confirmed infection while an additional 22 were hospitalized with a suspected case, according to the federal government’s hospital capacity data.
Only Texas reported a higher total number of pediatric patients in hospitals with confirmed COVID-19 on Tuesday — 142 children — compared to 135 in Florida…
Physicians and public health experts attribute the rise in pediatric hospital admissions to the more contagious delta variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 — which produces a viral load that is roughly 1,000 times higher than the original coronavirus strain — and the low rate of vaccination among those younger than 20.
‘It just went boom.’ ICUs are being overwhelmed with younger — and sicker — patients” (L)
“An 11-month-old girl with Covid-19 is stable and no longer intubated one day after she was airlifted to a Texas hospital 150 miles away because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area.
The baby has made “an amazing recovery,” said Dr. Dominic Lucia, a pediatric emergency physician and chief medical officer at Baylor Scott & White McLane Children’s Medical Center — Temple, where the child was transported on Thursday.
“She’s no longer requiring the breathing machine. She’s actually off that right now… and she’s actually resting with mom. She’s looking great.”
The child, Ava Amira Rivera, tested positive for Covid-19, according to Amanda Callaway, a spokeswoman for Harris Health System. Callaway said Ava was having seizures and needed to be intubated but Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, where she was first taken, does not offer pediatric services.
None of the major pediatric hospitals in the area had beds available, Callaway said.” (M)
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.’” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
POST 151. April 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the J&J vaccination pause. “ Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to spot or treat the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it…” “…a standard treatment for blood clots — use of an anticoagulant drug — could be dangerous or even fatal in such cases…”
POST 152. April 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s director said Saturday authorities are considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines because the country’s domestically made doses “don’t have very high protection rates,”
POST 153. April 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “At least 35 hospitals across Michigan were listed Thursday as nearing capacity and three were at full capacity for COVID-19 patients..”.. We can manufacture beds. We can open up beds. We can create entire wings of the hospital if we have to, but if we don’t have staff for those beds, we’ve got nothing.”..
POST 154. April 19, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Breakthrough infections, which occur when fully vaccinated people are infected by the pathogen that their shots were designed to protect against, are an entirely expected part of any vaccination process.” “Pfizer’s chief executive said that a third dose of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.”
POST 155. April 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. As the J&J vaccine pause is ended Senator Johnson said “The science tells us that vaccines are 95% effective. So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not? I mean, what is it to you?”
POST 156. April 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. As CDC revises guidance on outdoor masking, Texas Governor Abbott says “the state is “very close” to herd immunity… despite acknowledging that he does not know what the herd immunity threshold is for the virus, an uncertainty echoed by the public health community.”
POST 157. April 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Ohio hospitals; “We agreed in multiple conversations, there’s nothing in fighting a pandemic that creates a competitive advantage.”…
POST 158. May 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. . As populations get closer to herd immunity “ it may be helpful to introduce some nuance to what we mean by the term. Nationwide herd immunity. Regional herd immunity. Temporary herd immunity. Endemicity.”
POST 159. May 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Without deeper sharing of expertise in how to make vaccines…waiving patent obligations is unlikely to be a game-changer… Having access to the “recipe” certainly helps, but understanding how to put it together and produce it at scale is something else.”
POST 160. May 13, 2021.CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC acknowledged Friday that airborne spread of COVID-19 among people more than 6 feet apart “has been repeatedly documented.”” Meanwhile states relax or eliminate indoor dining restrictions. HUH?
POST 161. May 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Even if the spread of Covid-19 decreases enough to allow a return of most activities, there are some aspects of pandemic life that epidemiologists say will persist much longer. In particular, they say that masks are a norm that should continue, even if that view puts them at odds with the new C.D.C. guidance. More than 80 percent of them say people should continue to wear masks when indoors with strangers for at least another year, and outdoors in crowds.”
POST 162. May 21, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is refusing to lift his indoor mask mandate for vaccinated residents…” “…fully vaccinated residents in New York and Connecticut are no longer required to wear masks..”..” “California says it isn’t ready to follow the federal lead and unmask, at least for another month..”.. “..Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday prohibiting state governmental entities such as counties, public school districts, public health authorities and government officials from requiring mask wearing.”
POST 163. May 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey announced a mandate…saying supervisors and those of higher rank must get the vaccine by June 30. They will eventually require the system’s 35,000 employees to do the same.
POST 164. May 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. On Wednesday, health minister Norihisa Tamura warned Olympic organizers they would have to “secure their own” hospital beds for anyone falling ill at the Games, explaining the government would not release beds set aside for Japanese covid-19 patients.”
POST 165. May 31,2001. CORONAVIRUS. “Like all pandemics, this one will end either with millions — maybe billions — being infected or being vaccinated. This time, world leaders have a choice, but little time to make that choice before it is made for them.”
POST 166. June 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “President Biden said Wednesday that he has asked intelligence agencies to double down on their efforts to investigate whether the coronavirus originated from human contact with an animal or in an laboratory in China, saying there is not “sufficient information” to assess whether one is more likely than the other.”
POST 167. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Hospitals prevaricate on mandatory staff vaccinations. Florida’s Governor forbids cruise ship vaccine mandates. Pfizer and Moderna apply for FDA full approval.
POST 168. June 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our species has a tendency to get distracted. We have a very strong appetite for distraction, and when something is not in the spotlight, when it’s not a crisis anymore, we tend to forget and move on to something else. So the biggest challenge is going to be maintaining focus on this next step of developing vaccines that anticipate pandemics.”
POST 169. June 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospitals in Washington, D.C…announced a consensus agreement to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for more than 30,000 workers, 70% of which are already vaccinated. Each of 14 hospitals will set their own deadline…”
POST 170. June 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Ashish Jha…is worried about the potential impact the delta variant could have in the United States… “I’m concerned about the Delta variant,”… “Why? Most contagious variant yet. Wreaked havoc in India. Spiking cases in UK. Growing rapidly in the US.”
POST 171. June 19, 2021. “A 34-year-old man (a Covid-19 survivor) has been diagnosed with India’s first known case of “green fungus” infection.”… “Green fungus is the new infection to join the earlier known cases of black, white and yellow fungus.”…”green fungus was earlier seen only as a “junior partner” in other infections… In the current patient, this fungus is acting as the aggressor.”
POST 172. June 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman said: “If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office.”…”remote work can “dramatically undermine” the character and culture a company is attempting to build; and “virtually eliminates spontaneous learning and creativity.”
POST 173. June 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The daily toll of COVID-19, as measured by new cases and the growing number of deaths, overlooks a shadowy set of casualties: the rising risk of mental health problems among health care professionals working on the frontlines of the pandemic.”
POST 174. July 1, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “..while the WHO is encouraging people to keep wearing masks even if they’re vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci says it doesn’t look like the CDC currently plans to change its guidelines.” … health officials in Los Angeles recommended that “everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors in public places as a precautionary measure.”..”
POST 175. July 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Can a health care worker who is not against vaccines in general still harbor sincere concerns that scientists don’t yet know about all the side effects of these vaccines? Yes, says Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD — but those people should not work in health care.”
POST 176. July 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Mercy Springfield ( Missouri) hospital…” ran out of ventilators for its patients over the Fourth of July weekend…”…“Mercy will require all current and future employees to be fully vaccinated.”…“The US government is deploying a Covid-19 surge team to provide public health support in southwest Missouri
POST 177. July 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the Delta variant is “the 2020 version of Covid-19 on steroids,”… “It is the most hypertransmissible, contagious version of the virus we’ve seen to date…it’s a superspreader strain if there ever was one .” but… now, there’s a Delta Plus variant…
POST 178. July 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Tennessee’s top vaccine official says she has been fired as punishment for doing her job in the face of political pushback.”..” More than 180 state and local public health leaders…have resigned, retired or been fired since April 1…”“Former President Trump and his GOP allies have stepped up attacks on Anthony Fauci…”
POST 179. July 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It, therefore, follows that the “harm principle” (“first, do no harm.”) can be used to justify compulsory vaccination programs in specific instances where the community interests or benefits are deemed to be significant.”
POST 180, July 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Most people will either get vaccinated, or have been previously infected, or they will get this Delta variant,”.. “And for most people who get this Delta variant, it’s going to be the most serious virus that they get in their lifetime in terms of the risk of putting them in the hospital,”
POST 181. July 22, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Health experts fear the Tokyo Olympics could become a COVID-19 superspreader event.” “Whatever happens in Japan isn’t likely going to stay in Japan since all of the athletes and accompanying coaches and staff will be returning to their home countries.”
POST 182. July 26, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R): “Folks supposed to have common sense.”…“But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.” ““Beginning in mid-September, New York City will require all of its 340,000 municipal workers, including police, firefighters and teachers, to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly.”
POST 183. July 29, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. When I was appointed President and CEO of Jersey City Medical Center in1989 in the peak of the HIV/ AIDS crisis, we had a dedicated, and always full, dedicated 60 bed AIDS unit, staffed by one full time nurse and numerous part-time and per diem nurses. Today, right now, hospitals caught in the Covid-19 surge, are forced to redeploy nursing staff, respiratory therapists and other clinicians, most without prior infectious diseases experience. Why are we tolerating the unvaccinated putting our hospital staffs at risk?
POST 184. August 1, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The coronavirus could be “just a few mutations potentially away” from evolving into a variant that can evade existing COVID-19 vaccines, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said..” (A) “The Delta variant is more transmissible than the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and it is as contagious as chickenpox..” (I)
POST 185. August 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ‘If you aren’t going to help, please get out of the way’: Biden turns up the pressure on GOP governors as Delta spreads”
POST 186. August 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late,” she added, referring to patients who have to be put on a ventilator.” (A) “There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.”.. “The question of when the crisis will be over is a layered one — with different answers from local, national and global perspectives.”
POST 187. August 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As a result of the increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the state of Florida requested 300 ventilators from the federal government.”… “An 11-month-old girl with Covid-19 is stable and no longer intubated one day after she was airlifted to a Texas hospital 150 miles away because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area.”
“The infamous and popular tradition known as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally will gather bikers as they cruise through the countryside from August 6 to August 15.
The event will attract crowds of enthusiastic bikers in South Dakota’s Black Hills starting this weekend. There is an astounding 700,000 people expected to show up in the small town for the rally…
The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, is speaking out about how much risk is involved in the popular biking rally.
“The Sturgis rally is about hopping on your bike and exploring this great country through our open roads. Bikers come here because they WANT to be here. And we love to see them! There’s a risk associated with everything that we do in life. Bikers get that better than anyone,” Noem tweeted.” (F)
“When will the pandemic finally end?
“Even among the scientific community, you would get really different answers,” “There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.”
A pandemic is by definition a global crisis. Lifting some U.S. public health measures and interventions “gave people a sense that the panic was waning,” Piltch-Loeb says. That euphoria blinded many to the worldwide reality, which remains bleak.
“Until this [virus] is controlled or more limited globally, it’s not going away,” Piltch-Loeb says. That means declaring the pandemic’s “end” may be a distant goal, requiring different conditions depending on who’s asked.
Where do diseases go?
When the worldwide spread of a disease is brought under control in a localized area, it’s no longer a pandemic but an epidemic, according to the WHO. If COVID-19 persists globally at what the WHO judges to be “expected or normal levels,” the organization will then re-designate the disease “endemic.”
At that stage, SARS-CoV-2 will become a circulating virus that’s “less consequential as we build immunity,” says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. (Read more about how we’ll live with COVID-19 as an endemic disease.)
Only two diseases in recorded history that affect humans or other animals have ever been eradicated: smallpox, a life-threatening disease for people that covers bodies in painful blisters, and rinderpest, a viral malady that infected and killed cattle. In both instances, intensive global vaccination campaigns brought new infections to a halt. The last confirmed case of rinderpest was detected in Kenya in 2001, while the last known smallpox case occurred in the U.K. in 1978…
There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.
Most causes of past pandemics are still with us today. More than 3,000 people caught the bacteria that cause both bubonic and pneumonic plague between 2010 and 2015, according to the WHO. And the virus behind the 1918 flu pandemic that ravaged the globe, killing at least 50 million people, ultimately morphed into less lethal variants, with its descendants becoming strains of the seasonal flu.
As with the 1918 flu, it’s likely the SARS-CoV-2 virus will continue to mutate, and the human immune system would eventually adapt to fend it off without shots—but not before many people fell ill and died. “Developing immunity the hard way is not a solution that we should be aspiring to,” Omer says.
Finding ways to slow the spread of a disease and manage its effects is by far the safer path, experts say. Today, for instance, pest control and advanced hygiene keep the plague at bay, while any new cases can be treated with antibiotics.
For other diseases, such as the flu, vaccines can also make a difference. The available COVID-19 vaccines are highly safe and effective, which means getting enough people vaccinated can end this pandemic faster and with lower mortality than natural infections alone.” (B)
“Vaccination is one part of the solution and is a huge help, but we are unlikely to ever reach global herd immunity, which means there is always an opportunity for the virus to evolve. And we’re seeing this now with virus mutants. Vaccination will help us prevent the health system from being overwhelmed, but it’s not going to solve it completely.
Testing people is the only way to know whether individuals are presenting a hazard to other people and to understand how well the vaccines are suppressing infection. There are a variety of tests that can be deployed both nationally and internationally. Antigen-antibody tests provide reasonable data when you measure a population on a regular basis. Other tests—nucleic-acid tests, like PCR [polymerase chain reaction], and quantitative tests—provide other elements of specificity but may not be easily accessible to all nations, particularly middle-income and developing countries. To focus on global solutions, we may require a very complex network of different levels of tests designed to fill specific yet varying purposes.
The endpoint of this virus is that we will just start to live with it; it will become endemic in the population. And we can hope that it becomes less virulent over time, as diseases tend to. But there may be spikes, as there are with influenza, where occasionally a new variant comes about that is more deadly. We have to be prepared for the next thing to come along, potentially while we’re still dealing with this one.” (C)
“That probably sounds bleak, but don’t despair. The truth of the matter is that pandemics always end. And to date vaccines have never played a significant role in ending them. (That doesn’t mean vaccines aren’t playing a critical role this time. Far fewer people will die from Covid-19 because of them.)…
The viruses became endemic.
If the pattern holds, and it is expected to, SARS-2 will at some point join a handful of human coronaviruses that cause colds, mainly in the winter, when conditions favor their transmission.
When will that happen? That’s the big, unanswerable question. “I thought that we’d be out of this acute phase already,” admitted Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s leading coronavirus expert. Van Kerkhove’s thinking, though, is influenced by her adamant view that the world could stop the pandemic if countries would only take the steps countries like New Zealand, Vietnam, and others have done, and bring transmission under control.
“There’s nothing — there’s nothing — including the virus variants, that suggests we couldn’t be out of the acute phase already,” she told STAT in a recent interview. “Because this is controllable.”
Experience from the last four pandemics — the ones mentioned above — would suggest that viruses morph from pandemic pathogens to endemic sources of disease within a year and a half or two of emerging. But all of those pandemics were influenza pandemics. A different pathogen could mean we’ll see a different pattern…
Endemic SARS-2 would have a seasonal pattern, spreading in the winter months when kids are in school and when we spend more time indoors in proximity to each other. Florian Krammer, a vaccinologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said that early on some of these seasons may be more severe than others — but not pandemic severe.
“If this thing becomes seasonal and you have countries where the vaccination rate is low and the immunity background is low, those seasons in the beginning might be a little bit stronger. In countries where vaccination rates are high, they might be very low,” said Krammer.
He and others told STAT this transition will play out at different times across the globe. “I think we will see a huge difference between the West and everybody else who kind of didn’t get enough vaccines,” Krammer said. “Although there might be countries like Iran, where the infection rates have been incredibly high, and I think they have by now so much background immunity that if they bring it down now, it’s unlikely to come back as a wave.”
Lavine believes the shift could happen fairly soon in countries like the United States that have had both high levels of infections and large numbers of vaccinated people.
“In the U.S., I would say that is not far off,” she said. “Not to say that it’s just going to disappear, but the idea that it would no longer be this kind of pathogenic scourge, I think we might not be too far from that.”… (D)
“The question of when the crisis will be over is a layered one — with different answers from local, national and global perspectives.
There are no set-in-stone metrics for when it’s over…
The delta variant has spread just as fast through the U.S. as epidemiologists feared it would. It now accounts for more than half the cases in the U.S. and far more than that in certain states.
Lynn Goldman, an epidemiologist and the dean of the school of public health at George Washington University, says the U.S. has certain things working for it — and some against it.
The good news is we’ve shown the ability to lower rates of transmission and deaths from the virus. And of course, Americans have widespread access to COVID-19 vaccines.
The bad news is there’s resistance to the two main ways to prevent transmission — getting vaccinated and wearing a mask.
“And unfortunately, those two attributes tend to coincide within the same people and within the same population subgroups,” Goldman says. In other words, many of the same people who don’t want to get a vaccine also don’t want to wear a mask.
As a result, Goldman says, we’re likely to see continued transmission of the virus in the U.S., concentrated in the areas with lowest rates of vaccination.
Experts say the next big challenge will come this winter. Another wave is expected as people move inside during colder months. There will likely be some outbreaks as students go back to school — children under 12 are not yet eligible for the vaccines.
How dangerous the virus continues to be will depend on vaccination levels of the population and the lethality of the variant that’s circulating when winter comes. How quickly a state or local government is willing to go back into restrictive measures — like wearing masks indoors — will play a role too…
“For the short term, it will be seasonal, like what we see with the flu, simply because we don’t have enough vaccine to vaccinate everybody in the world,” Mokdad says.
If we do the right things, like increasing production of the vaccine, he says, it’s possible we eventually won’t have to worry about COVID-19 anymore…” (E)
“Health experts say there are three main ways that pandemics end.
The first is that a virus can be eradicated.
The only disease that has been wiped out in humans is smallpox. A combination of factors — a very effective vaccine, people could be vaccinated after they were exposed to the disease, and it was easy to tell when someone had the disease — made eradication possible, said Dr. Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health.
People shouldn’t count on the elimination of COVID-19, though the fact that the virus “seems to be exclusive to humans” does make eradication a possibility, said Dr. John Carlo, CEO of Prism Health North Texas and a member of the Texas Medical Association’s COVID-19 task force.
“Through an aggressive vaccination campaign, we actually could eradicate it and completely shut it off,” he said.
The second way a pandemic can end is that a virus becomes what’s known as endemic. Endemic viruses, like influenza, are always present and circulating but don’t cause public health emergencies.
“Just like we see with flu, people still get sick, people die, but we don’t change our routines,” Troisi said.
The final way pandemics can end is though what’s known as a social ending. Essentially, people are no longer afraid, or no longer care, about the virus and return to their normal lives, Troisi said.” (G)
“Dr. Elliott says this pandemic is like no other and, unfortunately, he does not not see a short-term end to it.
Travel has changed which impacts the spread of the virus, there have been huge scientific advances since 1918, and there was no vaccine in 1918 but there are a few options now.
Beyond those points, Dr. Elliott says, the 1918 pandemic was a single type of influenza that did not mutate much. During the COVID pandemic, he says, there are more than 4,000 variants, some of which are re-infecting people or making people more contagious.
”What I think most people are expecting is that the Coronavirus is going to turn into an annual component of our viral milieu, meaning we have flu every year. Okay, we’re going to probably have SARS Coronavirus 2 every year. And so, we may be looking at vaccine boosters every year because we failed to get on top of this thing in the first year,” he said.” (H)
“We can still make progress on the vaccination rates, but we shouldn’t set our hopes too high. If our current slowed pace continues — which is an optimistic projection — 70 percent of the entire country will have gotten at least one dose by mid-December, according to an analysis published in the New York Times. It will be very difficult to exceed 70 percent until those under 12, who make up 15 percent of the population, are approved for the shot. We might not get higher than 70 percent even then. Vaccination rates are high for children, but only about 66 percent of 2-year-olds have received the complete recommended seven-dose regimen of childhood vaccines, and they have no say in the matter, so don’t automatically expect spectacular numbers of Covid-19 vaccination among kids.
As we settle in to live with Covid, we should recognize that too many people misunderstood the powers of the various vaccines. They mistook what the vaccines could do for what they wanted them to do. The vaccines don’t turn your body into a sterilizing chamber that extinguishes the virus. All that they do — and all that their makers ever claimed they did — was to trigger your immune system to create responses to combat a Covid-19 infection. Companies never said their vaccines would magically prevent you from catching the disease, only that they would dramatically increase your chances to escape illness, avoid a ventilator and dodge death. They understood from the beginning that “breakthrough” infections were in the offing. They also never said vaccines would prevent the vaccinated from transmitting the disease. They didn’t deliver magic, but they did deliver a miracle, one that could be even more miraculous if more of us would only vax up.
At some juncture, policymakers and civilians alike need to study what we’ve learned about Covid-19 and set a toleration point for what sort of Covid-19 contagion level we can accept. Should that toleration point be a level at which the burden doesn’t collapse our hospitals’ capacities? Should it look something like a recent week’s level of mortality rate, which translates to about 90,000 to 165,000 annual Covid-19 deaths? That death rate would be comparable to what we experienced during the 2017-18 flu season, when the flu hospitalized 810,000 people and killed 61,000. Every one of those flu deaths was tragic and every hospitalization arduous, but the toll didn’t translate into lockdowns or panic.
Setting a sensible toleration point for Covid-19 won’t come easy. Nobody wants to be the guy who says, “It’s regrettable but acceptable that this many people die.” But our day of reckoning is drawing near. We can’t hide in our burrows forever.” (I)
“College and universities. More than 400 colleges and universities are requiring students to be vaccinated for Covid-19. Almost all are in states that voted for President Biden.
Hospitals and medical centers. Many hospitals and major health systems are requiring employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine, citing rising caseloads fueled by the Delta variant and stubbornly low vaccination rates in their communities, even within their work force. In N.Y.C., workers in city-run hospitals and health clinics will be required to get vaccinated or else get tested on a weekly basis.
Federal employees. President Biden announced that all civilian federal employees must be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be forced to submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel. State workers in New York will face similar restrictions.
Can your employer require a vaccine? Companies can require workers entering the workplace to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to recent U.S. government guidance…
Many universities and businesses like Walmart, Disney, Google and Uber are requiring employees to be vaccinated before returning to campus or the office. New York City will require vaccinations for indoor restaurants, gyms and other activities. But carrying out such policies is unnecessarily difficult because of the archaic state of vaccination records…
California and New York State (and many countries) have shown that there is a better way. The basic idea is to turn the information on that card into a digital Covid vaccine record. Specifically, the record contains your name, birth date and vaccination history. That information is captured in a QR code that can be scanned easily. The QR code can be stored on a smartphone or printed.
It is important to stress that New York State and California have made this digital record an option for their residents — they did not require that anyone get it. Furthermore, the information captured by the QR code is merely what is already on that card. No one’s rights or privacy is at stake.
There have been inevitable start-up glitches, but these states have been leading the way. Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to expect the federal government to play at least a facilitating role in making this happen. Many people have gotten shots in two states or in one other than the state in which they live. Without federal coordination, creating reliable electronic documentation across jurisdictions will be a major database management problem.
Being unvaccinated in 2021 is similar to smoking in public, though it is more immediately hazardous. The unvaccinated are endangering themselves and those with whom they come into contact. It would be good public policy if those who refuse to be vaccinated are compelled to spend more time alone.” (J)
(A) ‘It’s too late’: US doctor says dying patients begging for Covid vaccine, by Sarah Betancourt,
