Do I still need the vaccine or a booster if Ive already had Covid-19? South China Morning Post
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Do I still need the vaccine or a booster if Ive already had Covid-19? - South China Morning Post
It's commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu, but that's a misnomer, as there's no consensus it started in Spain. If you call it the 1918 Influenza pandemic, that's not quite accurate either. The CDC says flu season in the United States typically ramps up in October and peaks between December and February. Dr. Carl Fichtenbaum says that pandemic wasn't like that.
"It lasted far more than a flu season. It lasted for a couple of years around the world," he says. "There were different waves at different times in different countries."
Fichtenbaum is a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Cincinnati. He says records from several countries show three waves of flu.
"Most likely it did exactly what the coronavirus is doing now, which is that there were changes, there were mutations. There were variants."
Fichtenbaum says the records of the period aren't good enough to demonstrate how the virus changed from wave to wave. He says medicine looked a lot different then.
"There were no vaccines," he says. "There was no specific treatment. There was actually very little in the way of oxygen that was really available for the treatment. There were no intensive care units."
There are some similarities between the influenza and coronavirus pandemics. Fichtenbaum says the human response to the 1918 illness is very familiar.
"Some physicians recognized that this was probably a respiratory illness and that people should be wearing masks. Other people objected to the idea of wearing masks. What a strange phenomena," he says. "And there were people who said you should be separated out if you're sick. Let's put all the sick people together and keep them away from the healthy people."
The flu stuck around, by some accounts until 1920. Some historians point to a fourth wave that hit a few scattered American cities, and assorted nations. After that, the virus petered out.
"There were no longer big spikes, because probably most people had been infected by then and had developed a measure of immunity so it wasn't spreading quite as much," Fichtenbaum says. "And it wasn't spreading at times when we wouldn't expect influenza to spread."
Fichtenbaum says the pandemic ended not because of a vaccine. There wasn't one. It wasn't masking, or isolation that stopped it either. He says it ended because of herd immunity. But that immunity came at a cost. There were an estimated 675,000 deaths in the United States, and at least 50 million deaths worldwide.
The pandemic transformed the world in a lot of ways. Fichtenbaum says it led to more medical research and better ideas about public health. He says those are the most important lessons.
"Unfortunately most humans have a very short memory. And we do not learn very well from history. We are very suspect," he says. "There's this kind of feeling that 'Well, you need to really prove to me that this works.' "
Fichtenbaum says both pandemics, influenza and the coronavirus, revealed a number of flaws in society: a lack of critical thinking skills, along with poor messaging, conflicting recommendations, and bad decisions from public health officials, politicians and military leaders.
"When you are not an open-minded, critical thinker willing to look at history, you are destined to make the same mistakes that were made at the time of a previous pandemic, because all emergency situations threaten people in such a way that makes it hard to make decisions."
Fichtenbaum says had more people learned from history, there would have been fewer deaths from COVID-19.
This story is part of a series as WVXU looks at the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects its had on our world.
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The similarities between the 1918 influenza pandemic and coronavirus are striking - WVXU
CLEVELAND Right now, there is no clear cause or cure for long COVID, or Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection, known as PASC.
Depending on the study, some estimates are 30-40% of COVID-19 patients will experience at least one symptom a month after initial infection.
All three major hospital systems in Northeast Ohio have clinics dedicated to treating COVID long-haulers.
The reCOVer Clinic at Cleveland Clinic has been open a year now, and the push for answers isnt slowing down, and neither is the patient population.
Doctor William Lago is the medical director at the reCOVer Clinic. He says they're seeing about 125 new patients a month.
"We had a large backlog to begin with," said Lago when they opened in February 2021. "Every time we thought it would slow down, COVID would raise its head, and we got more patients, and we anticipate that we're going to continue to grow."
He anticipates the clinic will be here for at least another year or two.
They are treating people like 35-year-old Hinda Stockstill.
"How long is this going to last? When am I going to get better? Am I going to get 100% better? Those are all the things that run through my mind every single day," she said.
Stockstill is a COVID-19 long-hauler. Life changed for Hinda in December 2020 when she contracted COVID-19 and went from a healthy 30-something with a future as bright as her smile to nearly bed-ridden with pain and despair.
"The symptoms never changed," she said. "It felt like every day I had COVID."
Her symptoms are head to toe. She's fighting tooth and nail and says healing finally began after months of suffering.
Her mother told her about the reCOVer Clinic opening at the Cleveland Clinic.
A graduate of the University of Dayton now living in Cincinnati, Hinda made the trip up to Cleveland. She said had she not found her way up to the reCOVer Clinic, "I think I would've lost my mind."
"A lot of the patients who come to us are frustrated," said Lago. "They feel like no one really understands whats wrong with them.
Lago said confirming to the patient that long COVID is real, their symptoms are real, and so is hope for healing is important.
"Our goal right now is trying to get people back to functioning, normal lives," he said.
"The main thing we focus on is trying to improve their symptoms," said Lago. "If we can improve somebody's symptoms to where they're less short of breath, to where they have enough energy to get up and take care of their kids or go to work every day, it makes a huge difference. And hearing that from patients, from a provider's standpoint, makes it worth it."
The most common symptoms they say are fatigue, brain fog, and shortness of breath.
"For me, I think some of the neurological symptoms are the most perplexing," said Brittany Baloun, clinical lead at the reCOVer Clinic.
She says 60-70% of the people they treat are women. Their largest patient population is people ages 40 to 50.
"Everybody's journey with this is unique; with the way they present, with the way that they heal and move forward," said Baloun.
Healing is happening, including for Stockstill.
"My improvement isn't a linear or a straight-line progression," she said. "I get better, and then I seem to regress. And then I improve even more."
Stockstill also found healing in online support groups where she said there's a tsunami of people and emotions.
"Anger, because some people who are long haulers feel they did everything right and they still got sick," said Stockstill. "Feeling misunderstood..."
She still has a list of health complications, but she'll keep fighting, and says she shares her story to encourage others to do the same, and for us all to have empathy for each other.
"I have a lot of fire," smiled Stockstill. "I have a lot of tenacity! I call myself a firecracker long-hauler because I don't give up."
Lago says it is not unheard of to see reactions from a viral infection, but the scale and scope were seeing with COVID is different.
He said they're not seeing anything yet specific to the different variants.
Baloun and Lago say they have long-haul patients who had a very mild, acute phase of initial infection all the way to people who had severe illness.
They also said that they have both unvaccinated and vaccinated patients. The CDC says the best way to prevent long COVID is to try and prevent getting COVID-19, and the best way to do that is with vaccination for those who are eligible.
To get into the reCOVer Clinic, you need to be referred by a Cleveland Clinic practitioner who identifies you meet the criteria of being at least a month out and having symptoms. They then run you through a series of questions and labs and tests, and come up with a game plan unique to you that pulls from 18 different specialists.
A lot of people dont have a PCR test to prove they had COVID. Testing wasnt widely available or accessible for a long time. They said dont let that be a barrier to seeking care.
And Cleveland Clinic says health insurance companies do recognize the diagnosis of long COVID and cover as they do others. The Cleveland Clinic has programs to help cover medical costs for people without insurance and say patients can speak with a financial counselor before visiting the reCOVer Clinic to talk about this kind of help.
Baloun and Lago want people to know long COVID is a legitimate medical condition and to seek treatment.
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An order of four at-home COVID-19 tests sent out by the federal government in January 2022. (Photo: Alix Martichoux/Nexstar)
(NEXSTAR) The website to order another batch of free at-home COVID-19 test kits from the federal government is now live, the White House announced Monday.
In January, the government allowed every residence to request one order of four tests. Now, each residential address is entitled to an additional four tests.
To request a second batch of tests, go to COVIDtests.gov and click Order Free At-Home Tests. From there, you enter your name and residential address. (If youre having trouble getting the website to recognize your address, check here for common issues.)
The kits will be shipped out by the United States Postal Service starting this week.
If you didnt request a first shipment, you can now place two separate orders totaling eight COVID tests, according to the USPS.
At the end of February, nearly half ofthe 500 million free COVID-19 teststhe Biden administrationrecently made available to the publicstill had not been claimed as virus cases plummeted and people felt less urgency to test. On the first day of theWhite House test giveawayin January,COVIDtests.govreceived over 45 million orders. However, officials said fewer than 100,000 orders a day were coming in about a month later.
The Biden administration has also been making free at-home tests available through libraries, clinics and other community venues. It has also worked with pharmacies and community centers to distribute free, highly protective N95 masks.
The number of COVID-19 cases has dropped sharply from its winter peak of omicron. The country is now seeing an average of about 48,000 cases and 1,500 deaths every day for the past week.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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You can get 4 more free COVID-19 tests from the federal government: Heres how - WGN TV Chicago
Public health experts are warning local leaders to prepare for a future COVID-19 outbreak as cases continue to drop.
Whats happening: The seven-day average for COVID-19 cases in the United States hovered around 59,000 cases per day last week, a sign that the coronavirus outbreak is still here, though dropping compared to winter peaks.
What to expect: Public health experts recently told The Guardian that leaders should use the ongoing lull period to prepare for future outbreaks.
What theyre saying: Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician at Stanford University, told The Guardian the pandemic isnt over and that officials should use the time right now to prepare for the next COVID-19 variant, which could be more transmissible.
The bottom line: Jason Salemi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida College of Public Health, told The Guardian: We need to expect the unexpected with COVID-19.
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New COVID variant: Will the next COVID outbreak happen soon? - Deseret News
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 446.2 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths has now passed 5.99 million. More than 10.85 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Thursday that 93% of the US population now live in areas where COVID-19 levels are low enough that people do not need to wear masks indoors.
Pfizer is expected to provide around 10 million courses of its COVID-19 antiviral treatment Paxlovid to low- and middle-income countries this year, according to an official with the Global Fund, a healthcare NGO working to buy the pills from the drugmaker.
Germany will provide a further $1.5 billion to a global initiative for better access to COVID-19 vaccines for poorer countries, Finance Minister Christian Lindner said last Tuesday.
Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people in selected countries.
Image: Our World in Data
The COVID Response Alliance to Social Entrepreneurs - soon to continue its work as the Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship - was launched in April 2020 in response to the devastating effects of the pandemic. Co-founded by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship together with Ashoka, Echoing Green, GHR Foundation, Skoll Foundation, and Yunus Social Business.
The Alliance provides a trusted community for the worlds leading corporations, investors, governments, intermediaries, academics, and media who share a commitment to social entrepreneurship and innovation.
Since its inception, it has since grown to become the largest multi-stakeholder coalition in the social enterprise sector: its 90+ members collectively support over 100,000 social entrepreneurs across the world. These entrepreneurs, in turn, have a direct or indirect impact on the lives of an estimated 2 billion people.
Together, they work to (i) mobilize support for social entrepreneurs and their agendas; (ii) take action on urgent global agendas using the power of social entrepreneurship, and (iii) share insights from the sector so that social entrepreneurs can flourish and lead the way in shaping an inclusive, just and sustainable world.
The Alliance works closely together with member organizations Echoing Green and GHR Foundation, as well as the Centre for the New Economy and Society on the roll out of its 2022 roadmap (soon to be announced).
Countries around the world continue to ease their COVID-19 restrictions.
Belgium will relax almost all its remaining restrictions from today, including requirements to wear masks indoors and the need to show a COVID-19 pass for indoor venues from cafes to sports halls.
"I think it is an important page that we are turning. It is a symbol principally of our resilience and perseverance faced with a pandemic that gave us little chance to rest," Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told a news conference.
Turkey also eased similar restrictions last Wednesday, ending the need to wear masks indoors or outdoors where there is enough ventilation. A contact tracing app code will no longer be needed when entering places such as shopping malls or public institutions.
In France, rules requiring people to show a COVID-19 vaccine passport to access venues will be lifted from 14 March. However, it will remain in place for access to elderly home care centres.
And in Greece, a requirement to wear masks outdoors was lifted from Saturday.
Almost a third of people report at least one ongoing symptom between six and 12 months after their COVID-19 infection, a survey of 152,000 people in Denmark has found.
The study which is yet to be peer-reviewed includes one of the largest groups yet of people who were not hospitalized with COVID, and followed them for longer than other major studies, the researchers from Denmark's State Serum Institute said.
The questionnaire-based study suggests that the most commonly reported long-term symptoms are changes in sense of smell and taste, as well as fatigue.
Separately, a small US study of patients suffering from persistent symptoms long after COVID-19 found that nearly 60% had nerve damage possibly caused by a defective immune response a finding that could point to new treatments.
The study involved in-depth examinations of 17 people with so-called long COVID, a condition that arises within three months of a COVID-19 infection and lasts at least two months.
"I think what's going on here is that the nerves that control things like our breathing, blood vessels and our digestion in some cases are damaged in these long COVID patients," said Dr Anne Louise Oaklander, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lead author on the study published in Neurology: Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation.
Written by
Joe Myers, Writer, Formative Content
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
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As pandemic restrictions ease, some of the estimated 57% of Americans who have not yet contracted the virus may be wondering: If I start to live more like normal going mask-free at restaurants, shopping and even parties what are the odds that I will never get COVID-19?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that around 43% of people in the U.S., or about 140 million people, have been infected with the coronavirus, which leaves almost 60% never having had it. The estimate counts each person once, so some of the more than 140 million Americans estimated to have had COVID may have been infected more than once.
While during the omicron surge experts and public health officials cautioned that the highly contagious variant would infect many people, they dont think ending up with the virus is inevitable, at least in the near future. But, they say, its going to require a fine balance as we transition into the endemic stage of COVID-19.
From my perspective, no, its not inevitable over the next year or two, said UCSF Chair of Medicine Dr. Bob Wachter, who also hasnt gotten COVID yet. He said when case rates are low, as they are now in the Bay Area, the roughly 60% of the population that has not had COVID is unlikely to get it, since they wont be exposed very much.
Those who are vaccinated and boosted, he added, will remain relatively protected even if they do get exposed.
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF, agreed, adding that as long as were in the transition period into the endemic stage of the virus, theres no clear answer for whether youll inevitably get COVID in the long run but it doesnt have to be now.
Are we all going to get it? Yes, biologically, that might happen, he said. Are we at a time to embrace that philosophy? No, because the virus is still causing a lot of suffering. Almost 2,000 deaths per day is no walk in the park.
But Chin-Hong and other experts agree that with some vigilance its still possible to avoid the virus while enjoying life.
Chin-Hong said for him, that means still engaging with life, still eating indoors and all that stuff, but still having his spider sense up for risky situations. For example, if case counts are high like they were in January, Im not going to jump up and down in a crowded room, he said.
Its a fine balance between anxiety and wanting to go back to what you lost in the last few years, and that balance is tough, he added.
Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease expert at Stanford, also said that easing restrictions doesnt have to and shouldnt mean inevitable infection.
Fundamentally, I still think there are things we can get safer, he said, adding the government has an obligation to help people move more toward a normal-seeming life while staying safe by doing things like improving ventilation in buildings, especially places like schools, and to make testing and N95 masks widely available for those who need them.
He noted that for people who are risk averse, immunocompromised or otherwise trying to avoid infection altogether, a high-quality N95 mask allows you to do things like go to the gym or shop and be relatively well protected.
Experts also said there are benefits to avoiding infection for now, even if its possible you contract the coronavirus later: The longer the pandemic goes on, the more we understand about the virus, they said, which means that treatments are likely to be better and more accessible.
Delaying infections is actually an undervalued or underappreciated point, Karan said. Who knows what well have six months or a year from now, right? Well have even more things that we can offer patients.
While there are no guarantees in a pandemic, experts said, the most important thing is for people to start finding ways to return to life while staying flexible as the virus continues to fluctuate.
Even for the highest risk population, theres a balance, Chin-Hong said. Its about engaging with life and not being lonely, but also being responsible at all levels.
Danielle Echeverria is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: danielle.echeverria@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DanielleEchev
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This story will be updated.By Christopher Burns, Bangor Daily News StaffThree more Mainers have died and another 565 coronavirus cases reported across the state since the weekend, Maine health officials said Tuesday.
This story will be updated.
By Christopher Burns, Bangor Daily News Staff
Three more Mainers have died and another 565 coronavirus cases reported across the state since the weekend, Maine health officials said Tuesday.
Tuesdays report brings the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 231,285, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Thats up from 230,720 on Saturday.
Of those, 167,482 have been confirmed positive, while 63,803 were classified as probable cases, the Maine CDC reported.
Three men in their 60s and 70s from Androscoggin, Oxford and York counties have succumbed to the virus, bringing the statewide death toll to 2,138.
The number of coronavirus cases diagnosed in the past 14 days statewide is 9,879. This is an estimation of the current number of active cases in the state, as the Maine CDC is no longer tracking recoveries for all patients. Thats down from 11,923 on Monday.
The new case rate statewide Saturday was 4.22 cases per 10,000 residents, and the total case rate statewide was 1,728.07.
The most cases have been detected in Mainers younger than 20, while Mainers over 80 years old account for the largest portion of deaths. More cases have been recorded in women and more deaths in men.
So far, 4,415 Mainers have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. Information about those who are currently hospitalized wasnt immediately available.
The total statewide hospitalization rate on Saturday was 32.99 patients per 10,000 residents.
Cases have been reported in Androscoggin (22,207), Aroostook (12,168), Cumberland (47,500), Franklin (5,581), Hancock (7,138), Kennebec (22,283), Knox (5,749), Lincoln (5,040), Oxford (10,951), Penobscot (26,760), Piscataquis (2,912), Sagadahoc (4,914), Somerset (9,369), Waldo (5,888), Washington (4,154) and York (38,688) counties. Information about where an additional 13 cases were reported wasnt immediately available.
An additional 446 vaccine doses were administered in the previous 24 hours. As of Saturday, 989,710 Mainers are fully vaccinated, or about 77.3 percent of eligible Mainers, according to the Maine CDC.
As of Tuesday morning, the coronavirus had sickened 79,339,497 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as caused 960,314 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.
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The arc of the pandemic, from the dark beginnings to this new awakening, is efficiently told through the story of the chef Sean Rembold, who has worked in some of Brooklyns best loved kitchens. For him, the past week was clearly a turning point. Mr. Rembold and his wife, the fashion designer Caron Callahan, had Covid in the initial phase of the pandemic, that long, terrifying stretch when you could not be sure that you would get a hospital bed if you needed one. He spent a lot of time worrying, and he lost his taste for four months.
Immediately before that he had been working as a private chef and taught cooking to people who had come out of prison. But when the crisis upended everything, he somehow saw an opportunity to open a restaurant of his own. He had wanted to do that for a long time. During the preceding five years he had looked at every available space in Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, but nothing quite worked.
Then, last winter he found something on a residential stretch of Hicks Street on the north end, a block off the water. The space had previously been occupied by a longstanding neighborhood restaurant that closed early in the pandemic.
We said were not going to move upstate; were not going to move to Nashville, he told me. We are going to stay and commit and be a part of whatever was going to happen next in the city. Mr. Rembold had always wanted a neighborhood restaurant, not a concept.
His restaurant, Ingas Bar, quietly opened this week after many months of stops and starts. At one point it was to open in early December and then in February, but supply chain issues, the labor shortage and the increasingly slow pace of the states liquor-licensing apparatus also a result of the shrinking labor pool delayed everything.
On Wednesday, the restaurant received friends and family. Neighbors walked by and took pictures. Mr. Rembold imagined a place where an architect might land at the bar next to a contractor, a writer next to an editor and so on. He was, in his heart, a cross-pollinator.
But at the same time it was true that you might walk several blocks and still find many people wearing masks outside. And why was it that, despite the science about surface viral transmission, some restaurants continued to deal only in those pointless digital menus? For the immuno-compromised, the pandemic is certainly not over but its unclear how a measure like that will help them. It will take a long time for all of us to recalibrate, to shed pandemic worn habits. But for now, at least, it feels like a moment.
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Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Over? New Yorkers Are Cautiously Optimistic. - The New York Times
Scientists have identified a new, highly mutated version of the coronavirus in white-tailed deer in southwestern Ontario, one that may have been evolving in animals since late 2020.
They also found a very similar viral sequence in one person in the area who had close contact with deer, the first evidence of possible deer-to-human transmission of the virus.
The virus is evolving in deer and diverging in deer away from what we are clearly seeing evolving in humans, said Samira Mubareka, a virologist at Sunnybrook Research Institute and the University of Toronto and an author of the new paper.
The report has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and there is no evidence that the deer lineage is spreading among, or poses any elevated risk to, people. Preliminary laboratory experiments suggest that the lineage is unlikely to evade human antibodies.
But the paper was posted online just days after another team reported that the Alpha variant may have continued to spread and evolve in Pennsylvania deer even after it disappeared from human populations.
Together, the two studies suggest that the virus may be circulating among deer for extended periods of time, raising the risk that the animals could become a long-term reservoir of the virus and a source of future variants.
Theres certainly no need to panic, said Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan who was not involved in either study.
But, he added, The more hosts you have, the more opportunities the virus has to evolve.
Previous studies have found that the virus is widespread in white-tailed deer. Research suggests that humans have repeatedly introduced the virus to deer, which then transmit it to one another. How humans are spreading the virus to deer remains a mystery, and until now, there has been no evidence that the animals are passing it back to humans.
The Canada study was a collaboration involving more than two dozen researchers at institutions across Ontario. The scientists collected nasal swabs and samples of lymph node tissue from 300 white-tailed deer killed by hunters in Ontario between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, 2021. Six percent of the animals, all from southwestern Ontario, tested positive for the virus, suggesting that they were actively infected when they died.
The researchers sequenced the full viral genomes from five infected deer and found a unique constellation of mutations that had not been previously documented. Overall, 76 mutations some of which had previously been found in deer, mink and other infected animals set the lineage apart from the original version of the virus.
The deer samples were most closely related to viral samples taken from human patients in Michigan, not far from southwestern Ontario, in November and December 2020. They were also similar to samples taken from humans and mink in Michigan earlier that fall.
Those findings, as well as the rate at which the virus accumulates mutations, suggest that the new lineage may have diverged from known versions of the virus, and been evolving undetected, since late 2020.
But its precise path is unclear. One possibility is that humans might have passed the virus directly to deer, and the virus then accumulated mutations as it spread among the cervids. Alternately, the lineage may have evolved at least partly in another, intermediate species perhaps farmed or wild mink which then somehow transmitted it to deer.
March 5, 2022, 7:14 p.m. ET
We dont have all the pieces in the puzzle, Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, a veterinary microbiologist at Penn State, who was not involved in the research, said in an email. We cannot rule out the involvement of an intermediate host.
A viral sample collected from one human patient in southwestern Ontario in the fall of 2021 closely matched the deer samples. That person is known to have had close contact with deer, the researchers said.
(They could not disclose more details about the nature of this contact for privacy reasons, although Dr. Mubareka noted that people should not worry about incidental, indirect encounters, like simply having a deer wander through their backyard.)
The sample size is tiny, scientists cautioned, and there is no conclusive proof that the person caught the virus from deer. We dont have enough information yet to confirm that transmission back to humans, said Roderick Gagne, a wildlife disease ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
But at the time the human sample was collected, Ontario was sequencing samples of the virus from everyone in the region who tested positive on a P.C.R. test. The researchers did not find any other people who had been infected by similar versions of the virus, making it less likely that it evolved independently in humans.
Had it been circulating widely in humans, even narrowly in humans, I think we would have picked it up, Dr. Mubareka said.
There is also no evidence that the person infected with the lineage passed the virus on to anyone else.
Mask guidance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated data that suggests 90 percent of the U.S. population are in a location with low or medium Covid-19 community levels and can now stop wearing masks.
N.F.L. drops protocols. The National Football League and the players union agreed to suspend all Covid-19 protocols, effective immediately. The league, which is not in season, is the first of the major professional sports leagues in the United States to halt its coronavirus-related policies
And early data suggest that existing vaccines should still be able to protect against the lineage. Antibodies from vaccinated people were able to neutralize pseudoviruses harmless, nonreplicating viruses that had been engineered to resemble the deer lineage, the scientists found.
In the second study, scientists from the University of Pennsylvanias veterinary and medical schools analyzed nasal swabs from 93 deer that died in Pennsylvania in the fall and winter of 2021. Nineteen percent were actively infected with the virus. When the researchers sequenced seven of the samples, they found that five of the deer were infected with the Delta variant, while two were infected with Alpha.
At the time the samples were collected, Delta was widespread among the human residents of the United States, but the Alpha wave that hit Americans in the spring of 2021 had long since faded.
Alpha seems to be persisting in the white-tailed deer even during the time when its not circulating in humans, said Eman Anis, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and an author of the study.
Indeed, the Delta samples in deer were genetically similar to those from humans, suggesting that it had crossed species lines relatively recently. But the two Alpha sequences had diverged more significantly from human lineages. (They were also substantially different from each other, suggesting that the variant had been introduced to the deer population at least twice.)
The main implication would be that the deer sustain transmission and infections within their populations, Dr. Gagne, an author of the Pennsylvania study, said. So that is not just, you know, a spillover event from humans, deer get infected and then it fizzles out.
Whether these lineages will continue to circulate and evolve in deer is unknown, as is the risk they may pose to humans and other animals.
Based on current information, Id say that the risk of wildlife, including deer, spreading the virus to people is low, said Jeff Bowman, a research scientist at the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry and an author of the Canada paper.
But ongoing surveillance is critical, scientists said. Dr. Mubareka suggested that officials should enhance wastewater screening in Ontario and other nearby regions to look specifically for the deer lineage and to ensure that it is not becoming more prevalent.
Experts also urged people to continue to follow guidelines put out by public health agencies, including not feeding deer or other wildlife and wearing gloves while butchering game.
We should also be reducing the biggest reservoir for this virus, which is us, Dr. Mubareka said, to make sure were not continuously spilling into deer and creating these new lineages.
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New Coronavirus Lineage Discovered in Ontario Deer - The New York Times
