Category: Corona Virus

Nearly 5,000 new COVID-19 cases have been reported statewide, the Pennsylvania Health Department said Tuesday.

The department reported 4,939 new cases Tuesday and the state has regularly approached or exceeded 5,000 cases per day over the last week. Earlier this summer, the number of new cases had dwindled to less than 200 a day.

Hospitalizations continue to rise. Across Pennsylvania, 2,421 people are being treated for COVID-19 in hospitals, including 609 patients in intensive care units, the health department reported. In July, the number of hospitalizations had dropped to about 250.

Penn State Health reported Monday 92 patients are being treated for COVID-19 in its hospitals, including 7 in the pediatric unit. The hospitals include the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Holy Spirit Medical Center in Cumberland County and St. Joseph Medical Center in Berks County.

The health department reported 68 new deaths Tuesday, raising the statewide total to 28,932. About half of the states COVID-19 deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes.

Health officials said nearly all the states hospitalizations and deaths since the beginning of the year have occurred among those who arent fully vaccinated.

Doctors and health officials continue to stress the COVID-19 vaccines offer the best protection against serious illness and death. As of Monday, 67.8% of Pennsylvanians age 18 and older are fully vaccinated.

Since the pandemic began, the state has reported 1,387,872 COVID-19 cases.

Every county in Pennsylvania continues to show high transmission of COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The states positive test rate for COVID-19 was 8.9% from Sept. 10-16, down from 9.1% the previous week. That marked the first dip in the positive test rate in weeks.

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Coronavirus in Pa.: Nearly 5,000 new cases reported again - PennLive

Boghuma Kabisen Titanji was just 8 years old when the hyper-contagious virus swept through her classroom. Days later, she started to feel feverish, and developed a sparse, rosy rash. Three years after being fully dosed with the measles vaccine, one of the most durably effective immunizations in our roster, Titanji fell ill with the very pathogen her shots were designed to prevent.

Her parents rushed her to a pediatrician, worried that her first inoculations had failed to take. But the doctor allayed their fears: It happens. Shell be fine. And she was. Her fever and rash cleared up in just a couple of days; she never sickened anyone else in her family. It was, says Titanji, now an infectious-disease physician and a researcher at Emory University, a textbook case of modified measles, a rare post-vaccination illness so mild and unthreatening that it doesnt even deserve the full measles name.

The measles virus is ultra-infectious, much more so than SARS-CoV-2, and kills many of the uninoculated children it afflicts. But for those who have gotten all their shots, its a less formidable foe, which weve learned to live with long-term. Thats the direction that many experts hope were headed in with SARS-CoV-2 as it becomes endemic, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written.

Were not yet at the point where we can officially label post-vaccination COVID-19 cases as modified; maybe we never will be. Some immunized people are still getting dangerously sick. But the shots are softening COVID-19s sharp edges: On average, breakthrough infections seem to be briefer, milder, and less contagious. Among the fully immunized, catching the coronavirus doesnt mean the same thing it did last year. Its a very different kind of infection than in people who are immunologically naive, Lindsey Baden, an infectious-disease physician and COVID-19 vaccine researcher at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, told me.

If this virus becomes as inescapable as the culprits behind the colds and flus that trouble us most years, we could all have to grapple with one of these infections, and learn that lesson on a personal level. Thats the social tax of a forever virus: Nearly everyone may eventually know what it is to get COVID-19but a tamer, more domesticated version of its pre-inoculation self.

Since the start, COVID-19 has been tough to define.

Part of the problem is that COVID-19 is the disease, not the virus. Actual microbes, compared with the problems they cause, are arguably neater conceptual packages. SARS-CoV-2 is a knowable pathogen, a tangle of genetic material swaddled in a protein coat; COVID-19 has fuzzier boundaries, dependent on both the virus and how our bodies react to it. To understand that interaction, researchers had to, unfortunately, wait for a decent number of people to get sickto observe the virus screwing with us in real time.

Next to other airway-loving viruses, such as the ones that cause the flu and common colds, SARS-CoV-2 can be a bit of an oddball. It lopes almost indiscriminately throughout the body, invading a plethora of tissues; it winds up certain immune responses, while dialing others down, sparking bouts of inflammation that can afflict everything from brain to toe. COVID symptom lists that at first focused on the viruss ground zerothe respiratory tracteventually ballooned to include nausea, vomiting, changes in mental status, and chest pain. Infection severity operates on a continuum, and SARS-CoV-2 occupies its spectrum fully. Many people never realize theyre infected; others might have a two-day tickle in their throat, while some weather the disability of long-haul COVID for months; a fraction end up ventilated in the ICU.

The experience of having COVID is now poised to splinter further, along immunological boundaries largely defined by vaccines. Inoculated bodies are less hospitable to SARS-CoV-2, making it harder for the pathogen to infect them; when it still manages to, it seems to be purged much faster, affording it less time to cause symptomsespecially the bad onesand fewer opportunities to hop into other hosts. I think about it as defanging the virus, Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory, told me.

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A recent study from the United Kingdom illustrates this well. Researchers surveyed nearly 4.5 million people through a cellphone app, asking whether theyd tested positive for the virus, and if they were experiencing any of about two dozen symptoms. Roughly 1 million of them had received at least one vaccine dose. Among the fully immunized, nearly all the symptomsincluding fever, nausea, and brain fogwere rarer. Many of the cases were totally asymptomatic. Even rates of long COVID, which can sprout from initially silent infections, seemed to be substantially slashed by shots.

These qualitative shifts arent easy to capture, especially with the studies coming out now that measure vaccine effectiveness in the real world. Most of them gravitate toward metrics at two opposite ends of the SARS-CoV-2 spectrumhow well the vaccines protect against all infections, or against severe disease, hospitalizations, and deathwith less precision around the murky hinterlands of mid-level symptoms that exist in between. (The most serious outcomes are, to be fair, what vaccines are intended to prevent, and what inoculated immune systems are best at staving off, making that metric a pretty good one to concentrate on.)

Focusing on the extremes, though, blurs the texture in the middle. In studies of effectiveness against severe disease, anything too mild to be considered a serious illnesswarranting hospitalization, for instanceends up collapsed into a single category. At the other end of the spectrum, counting all infections equates every positive test to a case of concern, regardless of how gentle the viral encounter was. All of this makes it very difficult to characterize what post-vaccine COVID actually isand to know whether immune responses are diluting the diseases sting. Just looking at the rate loses that point, Holly Janes, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told me. The experience of infection can be considerably different for someone who was vaccinated.

Read: Were asking the impossible of vaccines

This isnt an easy dilemma to solve. During the vaccine makers clinical trials, researchers were able to study participants closely enough to examine how well the shots were blocking any symptomatic cases of COVID-19. (Studying only the severest disease, which are relatively rare events, wouldnt have been feasible without making the trials even larger, or stretching them out longer.) Real-world studies are like the wild, wild West, Dean told me. Researchers often have to wrestle evidence out of electronic medical records, which arent logged consistently, or they have to depend on people to seek out tests and accurately remember their symptoms. They might monitor only the worst infections, because theyre more likely to prompt people to seek clinical care and are easier to document and study. Milder cases, meanwhile, are squishier, more subjective; not everyone will interpret an ache or a pain in the same way, or follow up on it with a professional. The studies that have tackled the task of measuring real-world vaccine effectiveness against all symptomatic disease may not always count the same COVID-19 symptoms, experts told me, potentially inflating or deflating numbers. Thorniest of all may be the data investigating long COVID, which still lacks a universal case definition, after vaccination, Lekshmi Santhosh, a critical-care physician at UC San Francisco, told me. Most studies arent even looking, she said.

Important variations exist, even at SARS-CoV-2s extremes. Some hospitalized patients might be admitted for just a couple of days, while others need weeks of critical care or die. Early evidence hints that vaccines are batting away the worst blows here as well, another nuance lost when hospitalizations are lumped together. Positive test results, too, can be misleading. Tests, which hunt for precise pieces of the pathogen, cant distinguish between viruses that are intact, or that have been blown to smithereens by a protective immune response; SARS-CoV-2 carnage, especially in a person whos immunized and asymptomatic, doesnt guarantee disease or transmission. It doesnt mean the same thing to test positive if youre vaccinated, Julie Downs, a health-communications expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told me.

Still, some infections among immunized people will pose a low-but-not-nonexistent transmission risk, especially to the vulnerable among us, and we cant yet afford to tune the milder cases out. A much larger fraction of the global population will need protection before COVID-19 can truly be considered mellower than before. But the fates of the inoculated and the uninoculated are clearly already forking, a potential preview of whats to come, Baden, the Boston physician, told me. If I were a betting man, Id say, years from now, this will be another common cold. Titanji, of Emory, has already confronted the likelihood that her childhood bout of modified measles might foreshadow her experience with the coronavirus. When she sees patients in her clinic in Georgia, she tells them, Were all very likely going to have COVID, including myself. But it is okay. I have a vaccine that will prevent me from landing in the hospital.

COVID-19s march toward diminution wont be linear or uniform. Immune cells forget; viruses shape-shift; our vaccines will need touch-ups or boosts. Behavioral slipupsvaccine refusals, spotty masking during outbreakswill create cracks for the pathogen to wriggle through. But on a population level, our future could look quite good. Most people will end up getting COVID-19 in their lifetime. In most cases, it wont be so bad. Eventually, silent or mild infections will feel less catastrophic, because many of us will have confidence that they are unlikely to progress. Outbreaks might be smaller and slower-spreading, and breakthroughs will no longer be headline-making news. Positive test results, in the absence of symptoms, could generally be shrugged off, and infection will no longer feel quite so synonymous with disease. Our bodies will come to see the virus as familiarnot necessarily a welcome guest, but not quite the intruder it was before.

Data alone wont define our experience here; our understanding of post-vaccination infection will need to come firsthand, too. For me, the pandemic anxiety that dominated much of 2020 is slow to fade, and the idea of getting COVID-19 still feels far worse than getting the flu, even if the symptoms were identical. It takes time to get over that, Downs told me.

Read: Your vaccinated immune system is ready for breakthroughs

A small number of post-vaccination infections are now trickling into my social circles, and its actually been sort of comforting to hear some of the stories. A few days ago, I talked with Jayne Spector, who just became mother-in-law to one of my best friends. Spector tested positive for the coronavirus a couple of weeks agoshortly after attending her grandmothers funeral, where shed hugged and kissed dozens of family members. Among them was her daughter, who was, at the time Spector received her test result, about to have her wedding, just 11 days later.

I was really worried I had infected my soon-to-be-married daughter, Spector told me. And had Spector not been vaccinated, I think it would have been a disaster. But Spector was vaccinated. So were almost all the family members she mingled with at the funeralher daughter includedand not a single one of her contacts has tested positive. (They also kept a lot of the interactions outdoors, and wore masks inside.) Spector isolated at home, where she dealt with what she compares to a nasty but relatively fast-resolving colda paltry echo, she suspects, of the sickness she would have had, if not for her shots. The fact that Im vaccinated means that its tolerable, she told me. I took the precautions; I stayed away from others. Now Im going back to my life. Her daughters wedding was this past Saturday. All 18 people in attendance were fully vaccinated, and tested negative before the ceremony. Spector was one of them.

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'Post-Vax COVID' Is a New Disease - The Atlantic

The ban, European officials point out, has kept families separated since early 2020, when the coronavirus was erupting across Europe. European countries have weathered a third wave of infections propelled by the Delta variant. But in several countries, including Britain, infection rates have begun to level off and even decline.

British newspapers played up the fact that the parents of Emma Raducanu, the British woman who won the U.S. Open tennis tournament, could not travel to New York to watch her play.

Europe is the largest market for passenger flows to and from Britain, according to the International Air Transport Association, but North America is the second biggest, accounting for 10.1 million passengers.

Constantin Film, one of Germanys biggest production and distribution companies, is based in Munich and has an office in Los Angeles, according to the companys chief executive, Martin Moszkowicz.

During the 18 months of the travel ban, the companys investment in the U.S. economy was basically zero, Mr. Moszkowicz said. The company had to move the production of two feature films and one show to Canada and South Africa, he said.

For many, the travel ban meant losing time with family.

I am trying not to cry because its such a beautiful day, said Giovanni Vincenti, 42, an Italian professor who lives in Baltimore. Mr. Vincentis daughter, who was born last May, has never met her grandparents because of the travel restrictions.

Cristina Garbarino, 55, a babysitter in Genoa, Italy, said the travel ban put on hold her visa and her plan to get married, and kept her apart from her fianc, who lives in New Hampshire, for almost two years.

At my age, I dont have much time to lose, she said, and I lost two years like this.

Reporting was contributed by Emma Bubola from Rome, Stephen Castle from London, Ceylan Yeginsu from Istanbul and Patrick Wehner from Washington.

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U.S. to Lift Pandemic Travel Restrictions, Easing Tension With Europe - The New York Times

Winter is coming, again.

A year ago, experts warned that the United States faced a grim winter if Americans didnt mask up and social distance to slow transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus before indoor weather aka winter settled in for its long stay. We all know how well that warning was heeded. In January, cases topped 300,000 a day; Covid ended the lives of about 95,000 Americans before the month was out.

Now indoor weather again looms in many parts of this country, and daily case counts are rising well into the six figures. The highly transmissible Delta variant is driving spread, even among fully vaccinated people. Children are back in classrooms that can function as germ incubators. As you walk around in public you see noses poking out of masks, masks under chins, faces that are mask free.

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So what should we expect as we head into our second Covid autumn and winter?

The bottom line is, I think, uncertainty, said Jeffrey Duchin, health officer for the Seattle and King County public health department, who has been mired in the Covid response since the earliest days of the U.S. outbreak.

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Were experiencing a new virus, a newly emerged pathogen, and were trying to fight it with new tools that we dont have a lot of experience with, he said. And were dealing with unpredictable human behavior which is a very important factor as well, and environmental factors that may influence the severity of Covid outbreaks and how well it transmits.

Theres a lot of moving parts, said Duchin, who is also an infectious diseases professor at the University of Washington. Among them: the questions of when Covid vaccines will be approved for use in children and what percentage of parents will agree to vaccinate their kids.

While the crystal ball may be cloudy, who can resist taking a peek? Lets talk about some things we might face in the months ahead.

The high, high crests of Delta transmission are subsiding in some parts of the country, as they have in countries where Delta took off before it did in the U.S.

Ccile Viboud, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Healths Fogarty International Center, said nine modeling efforts her group is monitoring suggest that by the end of November, the Delta wave will have waned and new cases will be down at quite a low level. How low? Down to where the country was in late June and early July, before Delta took off. At that point the country was reporting somewhere between 7,500 to 15,000 new cases most days.

Sounds heavenly, doesnt it? So does what Viboud said next. Were probably going to stay there, because there is quite a bit of immunity in the population, she told STAT.

That heartening prediction comes with a big but. That assumes that no new variant comes in. Because if you get a new variant that either has a higher transmissibility or immune escape potential, then we will see a resurgence.

Late November coincides with Thanksgiving, Americas favorite week for cross-country travel. Last year, Thanksgiving and Christmas turbo-charged Covid spread. Can transmission levels remain low if large family gatherings occur across the nation this year?

Viboud said all the models factor in events like Thanksgiving. The expectation of low transmission by around that time is predicated on the amount of immunity there will be by then in the country, antibodies generated by vaccination 63.9% of eligible Americans are fully vaccinated or acquired the hard way, through Covid infection.

Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, thinks the massive summer wave the country has been experiencing will have taken some of the loft out of the balloon when it comes to fall and winter spread. By crashing over the country in the summer, Delta pulled forward in time some infections that otherwise would have occurred later, he said.

It is likely that well see some wave, Bedford said. I would like to think its very unlikely to be as big as it was last year.

The World Health Organizations top coronavirus expert is less hopeful in her prognostication. Maria Van Kerkhove thinks people are making the mistake of trying to interpret SARS-2s behavior and predict its path by looking through the prism of influenza. SARS-2 may one day behave much more like that seasonal scourge, which causes a wave of illness in winter months in temperate climes but its not there now, she said.

I feel that a lot of people want it so badly to behave like flu. So that we can get into this pattern of OK, in the summer everybody can relax. And then we just need to gear up for the fall. We need to get the vaccines underway. Get people vaccinated and just ride it out through that peak, that winter peak, Van Kerkhove said. But I dont see that in the data that we have.

She believes human behavior whether thats wearing masks, social distancing, or getting vaccinated has much more to do with declines of Covid transmission still than built-up immunity. The Delta variant hasnt run through all the unprotected people, she insisted.

Delta still has a lot more energy in it, Van Kerkhove said. I think we should expect more ups and downs. I think we should expect more peaks and troughs. I think the peaks could become less [lofty]. Potentially. But I think those peaks will be very sharp in specific populations like unvaccinated, unprotected populations. That should be expected.

As peoples immune systems have acquired experience grappling with SARS-2 again, via vaccine or infection deaths as a percentage of overall cases have declined. That trend will hopefully continue.

Its not clear how long immunity lasts following infection. It can be pretty transient with human coronaviruses, but so far there havent been huge numbers of people reporting their second or third case of Covid. Were going to learn how long infection-induced protection lasts as time goes on as well as how long protection lasts after vaccination. When immunity levels in communities start to subside, that could trigger a new resurgence of cases, Viboud said, but she added the expectation is that with further waves of cases, hospitalization and deaths will not resemble the earlier waves of Covid.

Bedford agreed. You could also imagine a large Covid wave this fall-winter, but with much lower morbidity and mortality than it was last year, he said, noting that it seems almost certain that the infection fatality rate the percentage of infected people who die from the disease will remain lower than it was earlier in the pandemic.

Early in the pandemic, coronavirus experts confidently opined that this family of viruses mutates far more slowly than, say, influenza, and major changes werent likely to undermine efforts to control SARS-2. But no one alive had watched a new coronavirus cycle its way through hundreds of millions of people before. (The global estimate has now passed a quarter of a billion cases.) Our baseline assumptions didnt figure on Delta.

Whatever comes next will almost certainly be some new twist of this now-dominant variant, Bedford said. Thats because Delta has so effectively swept the globe it has crowded out almost all the other lineages of viruses; about 88% of recent viruses that have been sequenced belong to the Delta family. Basically everything that is circulating is Delta, so then the only avenue for evolution becomes mutations on top of Delta, he said.

As effective as the Delta variant is, Bedford assumes it could acquire more tricks. It seems unlikely that Delta is the ceiling, but there is going to be some ceiling, he said.

Barney Graham, who led the vaccine design work that laid the foundation for many of the current Covid vaccines, is hopeful, though, that in Delta the virus has hit a sweet spot that will eventually undermine it.

Im hoping the virus has gotten itself to a point where its basically trapped now, said Graham, who was deputy director of the NIHs Vaccine Research Center until his retirement at the end of August. That it cant get any better at transmission, and any adaptation it makes in the immune response is going to make it less transmissible.

If the virus effectively stands still, the increase in the rollout of vaccines worldwide that is projected to take place over the next half year or so could start to hem the virus in.

Im hoping now that were going to level out on the nature and the amount of change thats going to be happening, especially if we can get people immunized and as the number of new infections diminishes, the less the chance that new mutations will occur, Graham said.

Fingers crossed, everyone.

One of the amazing things about the control measures countries used to slow Covid transmission is the effect they had on the swarm of other viruses that cause colds and flu-like illnesses every fall and winter. Rhinoviruses, the most common cause of the common cold, continued to spread. But respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human coronaviruses, adenoviruses, and mother of all influenza-like illnesses, influenza itself, all but disappeared.

With kids back in school, mask-wearing more sporadic, and people abandoning Covid controls because theyre frankly just sick of them, these bugs are coming back. They may hit us especially hard when they do, because our immune systems are out of shape from the 20-month hiatus.

Last fall Hong Kong, which has had much more success controlling Covid than the U.S. has, resumed in-person teaching for children. Schools were quickly hit with large outbreaks of rhinoviruses. These ubiquitous viruses are generally just pests, but some of the infected children became so sick they needed to be admitted to hospitals.

We could see similar outbreaks here. And when kids, parents, and teachers start to get sick, there will be a lot of scrambling to figure out whats the cause.

Before Covid, people rarely got tested if they came down with a respiratory infection, unless they got really sick. But now, much more is at stake. Is this a cold or the early stages of Covid? There are ramifications, depending on the answer to that question.

How do you distinguish between Covid and flu or Covid and RSV in a child? You cant without a diagnostic, said Van Kerkhove, whose youngest son had a series of three severe respiratory illnesses in the spring. He was so sick she and her husband took him to the hospital, but Switzerland doesnt test children for Covid and they still dont know what made him so ill.

Kids will get sick, and I think that these other viruses that are circulating will complicate these matters, she said.

Duchin worries were not ready for whats coming when influenza-like illnesses and Covid collide. Its going to put a lot of stress on the health care system to help people figure out whether they have Covid-19 or not and what they need to do next, he said. Cheap and easy-to-access Covid rapid tests could fill this gap, but tests are still too expensive and havent yet been adopted widely enough, he and others argue. Its a huge gap, I think, in our national preparedness still, Duchin said.

Influenza activity hasnt yet rebounded globally from the coma induced by Covid control measures. But flu will be back. Whether that happens this season isnt in the realm of knowable things.

Respiratory viruses each have their own patterns and there may be interactions among them spread of one, for instance, may delay spread of another. What happens to that ballet when a new prima ballerina takes center stage? No one knows.

I wonder what the role of the co-circulation of other pathogens will be in the dynamics of Covid transmission and/or the manifestations of Covid-19 illness, Duchin said. Will influenza facilitate the spread of Covid? Will RSV or parainfluenza viruses or adenoviruses facilitate Covid or will they possibly crowd it out?

These are things somebody smarter than me needs to figure out, he said.

Viboud doesnt have answers either, but sees an enormous opportunity ahead. Its going to be a really interesting season to watch. Well learn a lot.

Nicole Lurie fears that what were about to learn is that flu plus Covid is going to make winters miserable and deadly.

Lurie, who was the assistant secretary for preparedness and response in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration, notes that in pre-Covid times, between 20,000 and 60,000 Americans died each winter from influenza. Covids toll could be higher than that still, because people have largely given up on changing their lifestyles to avoid becoming infected, and a substantial portion of people remain unvaccinated.

I feel like we have to be giving this some thought and preparing the public for some kind of a steady state that minimizes morbidity and mortality and has a set of actions that you can take to mitigate the bad consequences, said Lurie, who is now the U.S. director for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

Bedford shares her concerns.

My expectation would be that it will become a seasonal respiratory disease, but it will be the worst of our seasonal respiratory diseases, he said. Im imagining something that circulates at three times the level of flu and has a similar [infection fatality rate] to flu. So maybe causing three times flus deaths every year.

But Ben Cowling of Hong Kong University voiced some optimism. People may be fed up with Covid restrictions, but they have learned that respiratory illnesses dont have to be inevitable features of winter. In the face of surges of virus, they may choose to protect themselves, he said. Certainly Covid has changed the perception of respiratory infections. People are much more concerned about them than they used to be.

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Winter is coming, again: What to expect from Covid-19 in the new season - STAT

BANGKOK, Sept 22 (Reuters) - With demand for taxis drying up in Thailand and thousands of drivers leaving town, one Bangkok cab company has turned its vehicles into mini vegetable gardens, hoping to take the edge off the coronavirus crunch.

The Ratchapruek Taxi Cooperative has taken hundreds of cars off the road in the past year amid a slowing economy worsened by months of lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which has left many drivers with insufficient income to pay the lease on their vehicles.

The cooperative grows vegetables on the roofs and bonnets of 300 of the disused cabs, providing its drivers and members with food to share while sending a message to the government to do more to help with the hardship.

"We discussed among each other and decided to grow vegetables to eat because there is no use for these taxis," said Thapakorn Asawalertkul, a business consultant for the company.

"They have become just metal as they've been parking for over a year now."

Thailand has recorded more than 1.5 million coronavirus cases and 15,600 deaths, 99% of those since April this year. Just 21% of the population has been vaccinated.

On hundreds of pink and orange taxis, chilis, eggplants, cucumbers and basil leaves sprout from soil contained in black plastic sheeting reinforced with bamboo or wooden poles.

Kamolporn Boonnitiyong, an administrator with the company, said though the gardens keep people occupied, they are only a temporary fix.

"To a certain extent, it has helped with lessening our stress but it isn't really the answer," Kamolporn said.

"The government should also step in to help us too."

Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Christian Schmollinger

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Green-thumbed Thai cabbies turn taxis into gardens amid COVID-19 crunch - Reuters

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. The major strain on hospitals from the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be easing, state health officials said Tuesday.

Mary Mayhew has reason to feel a little better these days.

"After nearly two-and-a-half months, our hospitals seeing a dramatic reduction in overall COVID hospitalizations," said Mayhew, the CEO of the Florida Hospital Association.

Mayhew is glad to see the pressure on health providers easing across Florida, including the Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast.

Doctors credit the surge from back-to-school slowing to a rise in vaccinations, monoclonal antibody drugs, and more masking.

"I get asked this question often. When will it end? The question is, when we make it end?" said infectious disease specialist Dr. Larry Bush.

Bush said we are still far from herd immunity and putting COVID behind us.

"We may never be done with COVID. This may be something we have forever, and keep in mind, if this current coronavirus mixes with another animal coronavirus, we may get a whole new strain just like SARS, just like MERS," Bush said.

Mayhew said hospitals are still dealing with large numbers, but keeping the numbers going down is the challenge now.

"We need people to get vaccinated. That is one way we can try to avoid a future mutation of the virus and a future surge," Mayhew said.

Right now, more masking and social distancing are also helping, but medical experts worry the coming holiday travel season may likely send COVID numbers rising again by winter.

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'We may never be done with COVID,' infectious disease doctor says - WPTV.com

SACRAMENTO Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who four days ago beat back a pandemic-fueled attempt to recall him, is following all Covid protocols with his family after two of his four children tested positive for the coronavirus.

The governor, the first partner and their two other children have since tested negative, Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for the governors office, confirmed late Friday. The children, she said, tested positive on Thursday and have mild symptoms. They are being quarantined.

The report came on the heels of Mr. Newsoms victory over a Republican-led recall attempt that had gained traction as Californians became impatient with health restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. The rate of new Covid-19 cases in California is among the lowest in the nation, and the rate of vaccination is among the highest.

The governors children, however, are all under 12, the threshold age for inoculation. In a victory speech Tuesday night, the governor mentioned that his oldest daughter was about to turn 12 this weekend.

The Newsoms continue to support masking for unvaccinated individuals indoors to stop the spread and advocate for vaccinations as the most effective way to end this pandemic, Ms. Mellon said.

Governor Newsoms spokeswoman did not specify which of his children had tested positive for the virus. But this is not the first time it has affected his family. In November, three of his children were quarantined after being exposed to a California Highway Patrol officer in the familys security detail who was infected, and one child was quarantined after a classmate tested positive.

This summer, the Newsoms pulled their children out of a summer camp after it was determined that masking requirements were not being strictly followed.

The governor has been vaccinated since April, when he received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a news conference. The unvaccinated head of the recall effort, Orrin Heatlie, said this week that he had recovered after being sidelined with Covid-19 during the last weeks of the campaign.

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California's Governor Says Two of His Children Tested Positive for the Coronavirus - The New York Times

DENVER (KDVR) COVID-19 continues to rise in Colorado over the last 7-day days.

As of Monday, the states 7-day positivity rate was 6.37%, which is up from 6.06%. The highest positivity rate in the state over the past seven days is Jackson County with 41.7% positivity.

From Sept. 13-20,34 counties saw a rise in COVID-19 positivity, 25 saw a decline in COVID-19 positivity, two counties had no movement and three counties administered fewer than 10 tests in the past week.

According to theColorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the incidence rates have also risen over the last seven days.

Heres a look atpositivity rates for every county over the last seven days:

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COVID-19 is still rising in Colorado; here are the counties with the highest rates - FOX 31 Denver

Lions and tigers and Covid? Oh my. Some of the lions and tigers of the Smithsonians National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., have tested positive for the virus that causes Covid-19.

According to a release on Friday from the Smithsonian, the felines are closely being observed and treated with anti-inflammatories, anti-nausea medication and antibiotics for secondary infections.

Animal keepers noticed that some of the great cats had decreased appetite, seemed lethargic and were coughing and sneezing. Fecal samples from those six African lions, a Sumatran tiger and two Amur tigers tested presumptive positive for the coronavirus. Additional results are expected in the next day or so.

The zoo said it wasnt clear how the animals were infected. All staff members have been wearing masks indoors and in public areas as standard practice.

Gorillas at the Zoo Atlanta as well as the San Diego Zoo have previously tested positive for the coronavirus. In Atlanta, as many as 18 of the 20 gorillas at the zoo had tested positive during a recent outbreak while the San Diego infections in January were believed to be the first detected in gorillas in the United States.

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Lions and Tigers at the Smithsonian National Zoo Test Positive for Coronavirus - The New York Times

In a random sample of adults from Long Beach, California, one third of those who previously had a ... [+] SARS-CoV-2 positive test result, continued to suffer long Covid two months afterward. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The long in Long Beach, California, doesnt stand for long Covid. But a study just published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (MMWR) showed that long Covid may be affecting quite a few people in Long Beach. A survey of Long Beach residents who had tested positive for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) revealed that about a third still had health problems two months later.

Heres a tweet from the CDC MMWR on this study:

Long Covid is when you experience health problems four or more weeks after you were first infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus, as described by the CDC. You may have heard of other names for long Covid, such as long-haul Covid, post-acute Covid-19, long-term effects of Covid, chronic Covid, or hey Covid is not just the sniffles or a cold. Such health problems can be continuing, returning, or even new ones that werent present the first time around. As can be seen in other contexts, the word long can be very subjective and apply to a wide variety of actual lengths. Similarly, long Covid can encompass a wide variety of symptoms that may differ greatly in how long they may last.

Its also not yet completely clear who may be more likely to get long Covid. There just has not been enough research on long Covid or time for that matter. After all Covid-19 has only been around for about 20 months, which may seem like a long time haircut-wise but not long enough to understand how long Covid may evolve.

Here is a scene from Long Beach, California, back in March 2020, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom ... [+] directed all Californians to stay at home and maintain safe distances from each other to prevent further spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. (Photo by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)

Therefore, the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services (LBDHHS) sought to shed more light on the long Covid situation in their region. So for the MMWR study, they randomly selected about three percent of the 29,594 Long Beach residents (18 years and older) who had positive PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 from April 1 to December 10, 2020. This amounted to 791 who were then contacted for follow-up interviews with 366 ending up being interviewed.

Compared to the total Long Beach population, this sample had greater percentages of people in the 25 to 39 year age range (39% vs. 25%), women (57% vs. 50%), and those identifying as Hispanic/Latino (66% vs. 40%). Prior to their initial Covid-19 diagnosis, close to one half (46%) of the participants had at least one chronic preexisting condition. Covid-19 had led to the hospitalization of 19 or 5% of the participants. The SARS-CoV-2 infection had initially led to an average of 5.26 different symptoms with 92.3% suffering at least one symptom during their initial bout of Covid-19.

Two months after their initial positive SARS-CoV-2 test result, 35.0% reported still having persistent symptoms. They had on average 1.30 symptoms with the most common being fatigue (16.9%), loss of taste (12.8%), smelling issues (12.6%), shortness of breath (12.8%), and muscle or joint aches (10.9%). In this case, loss of taste didnt mean that they were wearing socks with sandals and smelling issues didnt refer to body odor. They meant loss of the ability to taste things and loss of the sense of smell respectively. Of the folks who still had symptoms two months later, 55.5% had initially had severe or critical Covid-19 symptoms, 52.6% moderate symptoms, 29% mild symptoms, and 3.7% no symptoms during their initial bout with the Covid-19 coronavirus. In fact, by the time they were interviewed, which in many cases was much later than two months after their initial positive SARS-CoV-2 test, 31.4% reported still suffering symptoms, with fatigue (13.7%), shortness of breath (10.4%), and smelling problems (9.6%) being the most common.

Who were more likely to report symptoms after two months? Well, women were 2.83 times more likely than men, those with at least one preexisting condition were 2.17 more likely than those without, and those from 40 to 54 years of age were 1.86 more likely than those 25 to 39 years of age. Also, on average, women reported 2.13 times as many symptoms as men did, those with preexisting conditions 1.96 times as those without, those 40 years and older 1.73 as those between 25 and 39 years of age, and Black persons 1.95 times as White persons.

Of course, this study was far from perfect. After all, surveys and polls have plenty o limitations. First of all, the LBDHHS surveyed only a sample of people and not everyone who had tested positive for the virus. Secondly, people dont always answer questions accurately. To see this, all you have to do is ask someone how many sexual partners have you had, without clarifying that firm handshakes do not count, that there are no group discounts, and that you will be requiring proof. The LBDHHS study did not involve examinations by medical doctors, reviews of medical records, or anything else to verify the accuracy of the study participants. Finally, just because a symptom is occurring well after a Covid-19 coronavirus infection doesnt mean that it necessarily represents long Covid.

Nonetheless, this certainly is not the first study to show a fairly high prevalence of long Covid. In this case, prevalence of long Covid is the percentage of those suffering long Covid out of everyone who had previously tested positive for the Covid-19 coronavirus. A systematic review published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice identified 25 observational studies that encompassed a total of 5440 participants. In these studies, the prevalence of long Covid to range from 4.7% to 80%, with chest pain (up to 89%), fatigue (up to 65%), dyspnea (up to 61%), and cough and sputum production (up to 59%) being the most common symptoms.

All of this is further evidence that Covid-19 is not simply a die or survive situation. Some opposing Covid-19 precautions such as vaccination and face masks have been trying to make the rather ridiculous argument that only 672,970 plus people have died in the U.S. from Covid-19. This has been sort of like arguing that only part of your house is on fire or that you didnt accidentally reveal all of your genitals during a job interview. Even so, deaths are only part of the toll of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Overlooking long Covid and those suffering from it can ignore a big part of the impact of the pandemic. The long and short of it is that this country has failed badly to control the spread of the virus. And many people will continue to live with the consequences of this failure.

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Long Covid Affecting One Third Of People After Covid-19 Coronavirus Infection, CDC MMWR Study Finds - Forbes