Category: Covid-19

Kansas law will discourage vaccinations

COVID-19 is surging in Kansas, and new variants are on the sidelines eager to get into the game. Vaccination remains the only medically and scientifically accepted way to reduce or prevent serious illness, long-term disabling aftereffects and deaths from the virus. Yet, Kansas has a new law thatll do far more to discourage than to encourage getting vaccinated.

First, those who lose their jobs due to vaccine requirements will be eligible for unemployment benefits. This enables anti-vaxxers to thumb their noses at the requirement and benefit financially for doing so. Second, the law facilitates getting religious exemptions from the requirement.

This should result in a flood of late-stage come to Jesus moments and, at least on the surface, will appear to bring about religious revivals on a scale which the likes of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham would envy.

But precious "freedumb" will be preserved for the anti-vax cult, most of whom are Republicans, and theyll have free rein to spread their viruses to multitudes of citizens who dont want it.

Caution: Dont put the facemasks back in mothballs just yet. Theres lots of game remaining to be played.

Richard Schutz, Topeka

Lately, the irony in news stories is thick enough to cut with a knife. On the one hand, it is reported that vaccination rates in Kansas are several percentage points below the national rate, and COVID cases have once again surged.

At the same time, it is reported that Attorney General Derek Schmidt cheered the ruling of a Georgia judge which halted the vaccine mandates for federal contractors. Schmidt called the vaccine mandates overreaching and one-size-fits-all, and he said that personal health care decisions should be made by individuals and not the government.

I might agree if we were not in such dire circumstances. Allowing individuals a personal choice to be vaccinated is not working. And what is the judge's ruling if not overreaching and one-size-fits-all? I am wary of a judge being able to slam the door nationwide and exert more power than the chief executive.

Marvin Burris, Topeka

The Republican argument is that the government has no constitutional authority to require anyone to be vaccinated and that only people, not the state, have the sole say when it comes to their own bodies. Yet these same people argue quite the opposite when it comes to a woman's right to end a pregnancy.

How is it that one argument is applicable while another is not? How is it that Mississippi can argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that autonomy does not exist when it comes to abortion while its own governor recently and on CNN said any COVID-19 mandate issued by the federal government is, basically, unconstitutional. People, according to him, should have a fundamental right to choose. After all, it's their body.

Yes, abortion results in the death of the unborn, but resistance to vaccines can also kill, since a person refusing to be vaccinated and wearing a mask can spread the deadly virus to another that could result in their death. So please get voluntarily vaccinated and let's keep abortion safe for all women who live in this great nation of ours. After all, it's our bodies and we have the right to take care of them as we see fit.

Michal Betz, Wichita

I see Republicans in Congress are freaking out about communism again their latest stunt involving a bill to mandate schools to teach about the "failed" history of communism.

One might point out that China is just celebrating 100 years of communism and is currently the biggest rival to U.S. interests in the world.

Capitalism, communism and socialist ideas have been successfully woven into the common sense fabric of society here in the U.S. as we know it for a very long time, under the leadership of a democratically run government. Just how much of each ideal, along with many other ideals, are regulated by us and our government.

For example, Kansas stands to receive around $4 billion in highway funding from the federal government with some of the current legislative initiatives coming out of Washington. I don't hear many complaining about this being a communist threat to society. Kansas is fortunate for getting these funds to support our highways, particularly for those good people out in areas where population density is very low.

The real drawbacks of communism in the countries we tend to associate un-needed failure and suffering have more to do with governments run as totalitarian regimes, with autocratic leaders difficult to remove from power, who abuse their people in order to retain their authority.

So I think this effort by Republicans to dictate education has more to do with knee-jerk decisions based upon nothing but dumb fear and personal political fortune, more than wanting to enlighten our young about political and social theories. I doubt most lawmakers supporting the bill have any expertise whatsoever in the fields they're looking to affect change upon.

It's a stunt.

David Hewitt, Topeka

Read more here:

Topeka-area readers have a lot of say about COVID-19 vaccinations and Republicans - The Topeka Capital-Journal

by: Staci Zavattaro University of Central Florida via AP The Conversation

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(THE CONVERSATION) We stopped doing heads. It was the second time Id heard a medical examiner say this while I was studying how the roles of medical examiners and coroners have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A medical examiner from Ohio explained to me that opening a skull is one of the mostdangerous parts of an autopsyin the COVID-19 era. This is because the kind of saw often used during autopsies has a beating motion that produces aerosols among theprimary modes of transmissionof SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The medical examiner explained that his office would not open a skull unless absolutely necessary for the exam and then would use a high-powered vacuum to reduce particle spread from the process.

This wasone of several policiesand practices medical examiners and coroners in the U.S. had to change when adapting to the ongoing pandemic.

In the early months of the pandemic, doctors and nurses or front-line health care workers received much-deserved praise and recognition for their heroic actions. This includedNew Yorkers banging on pots and pansevery night at 7 p.m. and Denver residents howling like wolves at 8 p.m. in support of front-line workers for months in 2020 a tradition thatreturned in 2021a year after the pandemic began.

But death care workers such as coroners and medical examiners, who also are providing critical services during the ongoing pandemic, have been far less celebrated and recognized. Yet they have been struggling under the unceasing pressure ofexcess deaths,backed-up funeral systemsandincreased data-gathering responsibilities. They have also had to take on additional tasks of reporting COVID-19 data for public health purposes. And these workers have suffered alot of burnout.

I am apublic administration professorwho isstudying public servants in death care services. My work has highlighted the need to better understand the complex roles that these medical professionals play, especially when much of their work is unseen and not well understood by the general public.

The roles of medical examiners and coroners

Since the beginning of the pandemic, medical examiners and coroners have dealt with repeated COVID-19 surges that as of November 2021have left more than 768,000Americans dead. Public health and reporting requirements following COVID-19 deaths added to these professionals already heavy workloads.

Medical examiners and coronersare public servants charged with carrying out medical, scientific and legal death investigations. Medical examiners have board-certified medical training in pathology, forensic pathology or another associated medical field and are appointed by county commissioners or other leaders.Coroners, who receive training in medical and legal investigation, are elected to their roles by voters.

Outside of the context of COVID-19, these death care workers are called in to investigate suspicious, unnatural deaths. The process of death investigation in the U.S. is complicated and bureaucratic, andeach state sets its own criteria. Some states have medical examiner systems, others have a coroner system, while still others might have a hybrid approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for additional safety precautions toreduce exposure and spreadfor the protection of medical examiners, coroners and death investigation teams.

COVID-19 and excess deaths

Throughout the pandemic, public-facing offices of medical examiners and coroners offices might have closed, following COVID-19 guidelines, but the behind-the-scenes operations accelerated. The Centers for Disease Control and Preventionestimates that COVID-19contributed tomore than 902,000excess deaths meaningdeaths in addition to those statistically projectedfor an area based on past trends in the U.S. as of late November 2021.

One challenge that became critical in the early months of the pandemic was distinguishing cause of death from manner of death.Cause of deathrefers to a specific and immediate injury, disease or condition that led to a death.Manner of deathis a medical and legal description grouping deaths into five categories for public health purposes: natural, accident, homicide, suicide or undetermined.

These distinctions are critical for accurately tracking and reporting whether someone died from COVID-19-related complications or whether someone died while carrying the virus but from another cause such as a car accident or heart attack, for example. Initially,there was no agreed-upon standardfor deciding what constituted a COVID-19-related death. As COVID-19 deaths surged early in the pandemic, some people began toquestion those numbers, given the medical complexities and unknowns associated with the virus. TheCDC eventually provided guidancein April 2020 on how COVID-19 deaths should be officially reported.

Supporting death care workers as the pandemic drags on

Research has shown that long before the pandemic medical examiners and coroners, who deal daily with psychological stressors such as handling human remains and talking with grieving families, were athigh risk of depression and post-traumatic stress. COVID-19 has taken an already stressful job andadded additional pressure.

A 2020 studycollected stories from forensic workersat the University of Michigan who had to drastically change policies for their personal safety while also finding ways to support and assist grieving families. For example, when social distancing rules prohibited in-person memorial services, the team devised thoughtful ways to use photographs to preserve a loved ones memory. For example, one biomedical photographer provided families with high-quality photos of their loved ones hands or tattoos.

The ongoing pandemic means death care workers are still providing these much-needed services to families. One quality and research manager I spoke with from a medical examiners office in Minnesota noted that people who work at funeral homes are often left out of the support network that health care professionals have received during the pandemic. People believe that health care ends at death, and it does not, he said.

Excerpt from:

Medical examiners and coroners bear heavy burden during the COVID-19 pandemic and often felt invisible and unsupported - KRQE News 13

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky gives her opening statement during the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing on "Next Steps: The Road Ahead for the COVID-19 Response" on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., November 4, 2021. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

WASHINGTON, Dec 10 (Reuters) - The seven-day average of COVID-19 cases in the United States was up 37% and average deaths per day climbed 28%, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said on Friday.

Initial data suggests that COVID-19 vaccine boosters help to bolster protection against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, Walensky said at a White House briefing.

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Reporting by Ismail Shakil, Ahmed Aboulenein, and Jeff MasonEditing by Sonya Hepinstall

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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U.S. weekly average of COVID-19 cases and deaths up -CDC director - Reuters

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is an epidemiologist and writer based in Sydney, Australia. His work covers chronic disease, the pandemic response, and more recently, error detection in science. In this op-ed, he discusses issues with research that have become increasingly apparent during the pandemic.

There are no two ways about it: Science is flawed. Were not talking about the philosophical leanings of science or the origins of white coats and linoleum-floored laboratories, but about the nuts and bolts of the process by which we determine whether things are true or false.

In the decades before the pandemic, scientists spent endless hours wrestling with the painful fact that much of the knowledge base of science and medicine is reliant on research that is flawed, broken, or potentially never occurred at all.

Science has a gap between its mechanics and outputs. The mechanics of science are fine. The machines always get bigger and more efficient. New tools are always developed. Techniques become more sophisticated over time, and more knowledge is acquired.

The outputs of science are not. The culture of academia demands publication and warrants little retrospection about potential errors this means that mistakes are rarely corrected, and even outright fraud is often left undetected in academic literature.

And then along came a pandemic, and the gaps in science widened to an inescapable chasm. While biomedical research has had obvious and immediate success in COVID-19 mitigation, it has been accompanied by an enormous tidal wave of garbage, which instantly overwhelmed our garbage mitigation mechanisms.

From fraud to wasteful research to papers so error-filled that it is amazing that theyve been published, the pandemic has produced a tidal wave of woeful scientific output that has, nevertheless, had staggering consequences for peoples lives.

Take ivermectin. It is an amazingly successful antiparasitic medication that has treated literally billions of people in the time since it was invented, and it has almost eliminated some parasitic diseases from the world.

It has also been globally promoted as a cure for COVID-19 by a group of passionate fans. It is likely that more ivermectin has been taken to prevent or treat COVID-19 than any other single medication, except perhaps dexamethasone.

And yet, we do not know if ivermectin is actually useful in the treatment of COVID-19 at all.

A recent review from the Cochrane collaboration long considered the gold standard in medical research concluded that ivermectin should not be used for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19 outside of well-conducted clinical trials, which is a stark contrast to the hundreds of millions of doses still being taken for those exact reasons.

In early 2020, people were desperate for any kind of treatment for COVID-19. A melange of partial evidence emerged.

This included: a laboratory study showing that the drug acted as a strong antiviral in a petri dish, a study in a French nursing home where the residents took ivermectin to treat a scabies outbreak and seemed to subsequently enjoy higher survival rates, and preprint reporting that ivermectin reduced the mortality from COVID-19 by 90%.

All three were weak evidence in different ways. Single in vitro studies are very poorly predictive of eventual clinical outcomes, and the nursing home paper was an accidental and uncontrolled observational study what if the residents had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the first place?

The clinical study was entirely fabricated and later withdrawn from the preprint server, subsequent to great scandal.

The ivermectin story somehow got even worse from there. In late 2020, studies started popping up showing what can only be described as simply incredible results for the medication a 90% mortality benefit or a 100% reduction in cases when used as a prophylactic.

After nearly a year, myself and other data sleuths demonstrated that many of these studies probably never happened, but the damage was well and truly done long before the first fake paper was retracted.

A meta-analysis of ivermectin, which is usually considered the gold standard of research practices, found a huge benefit for the drug. However, the paper has not been corrected, even though the studies underlying its results were found to be likely fraudulent.

In any other discipline media, government, private enterprise such an analysis would be taken down with apologies immediately. Instead, the paper is allowed to stand as a testament to the general disinterest of the scientific world in correcting errors.

This story couldve been told very differently. Imagine a world where the initial laboratory paper came with a disclaimer, where the fraudulent preprint was looked on with skepticism immediately, and where the positive trials were assessed for fraud before they were even published.

Instead, at every stage, the process of highlighting concerns with data is ignored, with peer-review being the only flimsy barrier to publication for terrible research.

When we most needed effective fact-checking, our grand institutions of scientific research instead reviewed studies in a matter of days, if not hours, and posted fraudulent studies online to be shared across the world.

Its tempting to say that research into ivermectin is uniquely flawed, but thats clearly not true realistically, it would be remarkable if a broken system produced only one failure.

Trials of favapiravir, another repurposed COVID-19 medication, have recently been retracted due to data concerns.

There are now nearly a dozen studies looking at whether vitamin D has a benefit in COVID-19 that have been corrected or withdrawn entirely over the last 18 months.

The website Retraction Watch keeps a running tally of the pandemic-related studies that have been retracted. As of publication, the figure is 199 and growing every week.

Even worse, those are just the papers that people have looked into. Errors in science are rarely noticed because there is simply no reward for pointing out other peoples mistakes.

If we were to start looking at all of the useless, wasteful, terribly done research, we might expand that number to thousands, or even tens of thousands of papers.

There are published ecological studies of ivermectin where researchers compare entire countries drug use and COVID-19 mortality. These studies use mass drug administration protocols as their measure of the number of people who received ivermectin during the pandemic. This is despite those protocols mostly being disrupted or canceled early in 2020.

One study of vitamin D was retracted from the SSRN preprint server after it became clear that the authors had incorrectly labeled it as a randomized trial, though they had not randomized the participants at all. It has since been republished largely unchanged, with no mention of the previous retraction at all in the final paper.

None of this is to say that there is no good science. The vaccine trials alone are perhaps the most impressive scientific work that has ever been done, with efficacious immunizations developed, tested, and trialed in under 1 year.

The RECOVERY and SOLIDARITY clinical trials, which looked at repurposed drugs to treat COVID-19, have almost certainly saved millions of lives during the pandemic.

The problem is that large, well-conducted clinical trials are far from the norm. In a recent systematic review of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, the median number of people enrolled per arm in clinical trials was 59 one study looked at just two patients.

Without even carefully assessing these studies, we can say that most of them were probably a waste of time.

Indeed, if you look at the meta-analytic model from this review, virtually our entire knowledge of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 comes from just two studies, which recruited about 70% of all the people whom this drug had ever been tested on.

This is despite nearly 300 trials of the drug registered on clinicaltrials.gov, and the highest research spend of any single medication in the early pandemic.

If all of those tiny trials had been linked together, they may have achieved something useful, but instead, were left with two good studies and a smattering of largely pointless research.

All of this is, perhaps, the predictable outcome of a system that pushes publication above all else and punishes error-checking with disdain, scorn, and lawsuits. Publishing a terrible study can earn you praise and promotions; at worst, it might end up a line on your CV somewhere.

Checking studies for errors publicly earns you a steady payment of hate mail and death threats, and it nets you none of the citations, publications, and awards that academia regards as important.

Science has some enormous issues. Unless we can find a way to reward error-checking with actual money, we will continue to accept that a worrying proportion of our research output the studies that we use to make life-and-death decisions is either fake or incredibly problematic.

While it is tempting to think of this as a tedious problem among eggheads, that couldnt be further from the truth.

It is not unlikely that you or your family have personally been impacted by bad research during COVID-19 maybe you were given hydroxychloroquine during a hospital stay or took some metformin just in case. Perhaps you live in a place that reopened schools based on a study with mathematical errors or were told that masks constituted child abuse due to a paper that was later withdrawn.

Overall, there is a real impact of bad science in our everyday lives that the pandemic has thrown into stark relief.

Worse still, we know another pandemic is coming eventually. If we dont fix these issues now, the next time a new disease spreads through our world, we will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of COVID-19. And that is perhaps the most worrying thought of all.

See original here:

The perils of flawed research and the ivermectin debacle - Medical News Today

Low scoring Lions and Broncos game may be your best bet in Week 14 | Lorenzo's Locks

Lorenzo Reyes is back with his three locks for Week 14 on the NFL schedule. Find out why he thinks the under is fully in play between the Lions and Broncos.

Lorenzo's Locks, USA TODAY

The Detroit Lions' first win came at a price.

The Lions had three moreplayers test positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, bringing the total number of COVID cases to seven in the six days since their 29-27 win over the Minnesota Vikings.

The Lions placed cornerbacks Ifeatu Melifonwu and Mark Gilberton the reserve/COVID-19 list Saturday, and placed linebacker Tavante Beckett on practice squad COVID-IR.

On Monday, the Lions placed center Evan Brown on reserve/COVID. On Thursday, cornerback Bobby Price joined Brown on the list. And Friday, the Lions placed safety Tracy Walker and running back Jamaal Williams on reserve/COVID.

The Lions, who previously declared three players out (and a fourth doubtful) because of injuries forSunday's game against the Denver Broncos,will be without at least 19% of their 53-man roster because of injury or illness for the game.

[Time to root hard for NFL losses (fromLions and Matthew Stafford)]

The Lions elevate six COVID replacements from their practice squad for the affected players - cornerbacks Nickell Robey-Coleman and Corey Ballentine, linebacker Curtis Bolton, tight end Shane Zylstra, running back Craig Reynolds and defensive tackle Bruce Hector -but Sunday's game could have a distinct preseason feel.

Walker, Williams, Brown and Melifonwu were expected to play significant roles Sunday, and the Lions are down to two healthy cornerbacks, starters Amani Oruwariye and Jerry Jacobs, on their 53-man roster.

Williams was ticketed for starting running back duties with D'Andre Swift out for a second straight week with a shoulder injury. Godwin Igwebuike and Jermar Jefferson are expected to share the workload in his absence, withReynolds also in the mix.

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Ryan McCollum is expected to make his first career start at center in place of Brown, himself an injury replacement for Frank Ragnow.

Dean Marlowe will replace Walker, the Lions' best defensive back this season, at safety.

And the Lions have options on their 53-man roster (Will Harris, with C.J. Moore or Jalen Elliott playing safety in sub packages) and practice squad (Robey-Coleman, Ballentine and Parnell Motley) to help their depleted cornerback corps.

The Lions (1-10-1) reconfigured practice this week to account for an illness outbreak that coach Dan Campbell said Wednesday was not COVID related.

On Wednesday, the Lions practiced in shifts, with the offense working in the morning and the defense in the afternoon, so as to avoid spread between position groups.

On Thursday, the Lions held 21 players out of practice, bringing McCollum and offensive skill players in for an afternoon workout and sending linemen on both sides of the ball home early.

The Lions held a normal practice Friday, but listed 12 players on theirinjury report withan illness other than COVID. Neither Melifonwu nor Gilbert was among that group.

Ten players were listed as questionable due to an illness, including Alim McNeill, Levi Onwuzurike and Charles Harris, who did not practice Friday.

NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy said by email Saturday the league has no plans to investigate the Lions' COVID spread "beyond the standard genomic sequencing" the league does to determine where cases originate.

In general, McCarthy saidmost cases around the NFL have been the result of community spread.

Contact Dave Birkett atdbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@davebirkett.

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Detroit Lions up to 6 COVID-19 cases, will be without 19% of roster vs. Denver Broncos - Detroit Free Press

A growing surge of COVID-19 patients is stressing already packed hospitals and causing more cancellations of elective procedures.

"We have a severe bed shortage crisis," said UMass Memorial Health President Eric Dickson. "The patients are backing up into the emergency department that need to be admitted into the hospital."

The latest coronavirus surge is impacting hospitals across Massachusetts, and hospital officials worry the situation will get worse as the coronavirus spreads over the holiday season. On Thursday, there were 1,238 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the state, up from 1,026 a week earlier. To make more room for patients as cases swell, the state is recommending hospitals reduce certain elective services and procedures a strategy some hospitals had already implemented.

Dickson noted the charts showing new cases and hospitalizations look similar to last year at this time. He encourages people to get vaccinations and booster shots, as well as wear masks and keep their distance from crowds. Without those precautions, he expects the situation will worsen.

"And if last year is a predictor of what we're going to see this year, the worst will be somewhere in the first couple of weeks of January, and then we'll start to see some relief," he said. "But that's going to be a rough, rough six to eight weeks, if that's what we have to go through."

Dickson said UMass Memorial Health is seeing roughly twice as many COVID-19 patients as it had a week ago. On top of that, he said patient numbers are up because staffing problems at skilled nursing facilities have made it harder to move patients out of the hospital and into those facilities. And 100 hospital beds at St. Vincent's Hospital are not available because of an ongoing nurses strike.

"It's all adding up to be like the perfect storm for an inpatient bed crisis here in Central Mass.," he said.

Mass General Brigham hospitals had 205 COVID-19 inpatients on Friday, up from 128 three weeks ago.

The Wellforce Healthcare system which includes Tufts Medical Center, Lowell General and Melrose Wakefield hospitals has seen a 26 percent increase in COVID-19 patients over just the last week.

"We've been living at or over capacity now for weeks," said Terry Hudson-Jinks, the chief nursing officer at Tufts Medical Center. "And the patients here with COVID equates to about an additional inpatient unit or two of additional patients."

The state Department of Public Health released new guidance to hospitals Friday to reduce certain nonessential elective services and procedures by fifty percent, starting next week. The state also issued an emergency order providing hospitals with some flexibility on nursing staff ratios for ICUs.

The Commonwealths hospitals continue to face significant challenges due to staffing shortages, Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders said in a written statement. Todays actions will help alleviate pressures by providing hospitals with staffing flexibility in order to reopen inpatient capacity in licensed and alternate space not currently being utilized.

Some hospitals, including Tufts Medical Center and UMass Memorial Health, have already limited elective procedures beyond the state's new recommendations in an effort to create more capacity as patient numbers swell.

Tufts Medical Center opted to cancel all in-patient elective procedures.

"And that was helpful for the past month," Hudson-Jinks said. "This week, we're finding that that's just not enough space to care for the patients that need our care. So we're beginning to review patients who are on the ambulatory side of elective procedures and canceling or rescheduling those cases so that we can create space to care for additional patients that need our care. We're really in our surge mode we're surging and looking for space and resources so that we can be larger to care for more sick patients every day. "

Hudson-Jinks said those canceled outpatient procedures include some joint surgery and orthopedic procedures, as well as some minor gastrointestinal procedures. She said they don't take postponing that kind of care lightly, but the decision was necessary to care for patients with immediate and often life-threatening needs.

UMass Memorial Health opted to postpone some, but not all, elective services at this time.

"You can stop doing mammography and redeploy the people for other areas," Dickson said. "But that only means that you're going to see people with later stage breast cancer down the line because you didn't do that early screening."

He said one of the reasons the hospitals were full now, even before the latest COVID surge, is the consequence of important screening and outpatient work that was delayed in the earlier surges.

"I'm not criticizing the decision to to stop doing ambulatory procedures and visits at the time," he said. "But you're just kicking the can down the road and it actually becomes a bigger problem down the line. It doesn't go away."

One difference that will make dealing with the current surge harder, Dickson said, is that this time the state hasn't set up field hospitals to care for the overflow. FEMA assistance for that kind of facility would require a disaster declaration by Gov. Charlie Baker. Baker said earlier this week that there are no plans for now to set up field hospitals, but that he's exploring the idea of bringing in the National Guard to support the state's healthcare system during the surge.

Dickson said he understands Baker has a lot to consider before making a disaster declaration.

"I understand that he's got a very difficult job in terms of understanding the impact it would have elsewhere on the economy within the state," he said. "So for right now, we're going to just have to manage this."

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Massachusetts hospitals are once again crowded with COVID-19 patients - wgbh.org

OSTERHOLM: You cannot outrun the game clock with this pandemic. This virus will find you and, unfortunately, many of the outcomes are very sad. Look at what's happening right now in the US. We have health care systems around the country, including in my home state of Minnesota, that are hanging on by a thread. We've seen health care systems virtually broken by this pandemic. They just couldn't provide critical care to non-Covid patients.

If you're not going to get vaccinated for yourself, please get vaccinated for your loved ones and for the community because this is a very challenging situation.

The other thing to emphasize is that I don't know if the Omicron variant will replace the Delta variant. But I think it is likely. Could that be a good thing? Maybe if it results in milder illness than we see with the Delta variant. But nonetheless, you still are going to get infected if you are not vaccinated.

BERGEN: Can the pandemic continue indefinitely? We are already almost two years into it in the US.

OSTERHOLM: I look at this through a lens of evolution. Early on in the pandemic, I anticipated this would go at least 18 months. That was because the only real perspective I had to understand what this coronavirus might look like was previous influenza pandemics. And I think that many of us assumed that at some point it would become a seasonal infection like influenza after two years or so.

I got a rude awaking earlier this year in March and April when I saw the new Alpha variant emerge as well as the Beta and Gamma variants, and I had a sense that this was going to change how the pandemic would unfold. As a result, I thought that some of the darkest days of the pandemic would be ahead of us and that was at a time in the spring when case numbers were dropping markedly in the United States and vaccine was flowing. But I realized that variants were like 210-mile-an-hour curveballs, and we couldn't predict if they might have increased transmissibility or the ability to cause severe illness. This conclusion was not popular among many of my colleagues and policy makers.

BERGEN: Do you have a theory about why Delta emerged first in India?

So there just hasn't been a predictability about why or where Covid will take root.

If I could understand why surges occur or why they go away or why they don't happen, then I'd be in a better place to answer questions about where Covid is headed. All I can tell you is when a surge starts, the level of vaccination has a tremendous impact on how much pain and suffering occur with that surge.

BERGEN: The travel bans on South Africa and other African countries -- are they helpful?

A "travel ban" is something that nations might do initially just to lock things down while they understand what's going on -- it is not meant to be a long-term solution. It's like police at a crime scene. They lock it down for several hours to gather information and then open it back up again.

The political reaction of implementing a travel ban is not helpful in most cases. If it gives you 24 to 36 hours to at least get a lay of the land about what's happening, then I think it can be useful. But if it persists after that, particularly when you have widespread transmission of the virus in other parts of the world already, it's counterproductive.

OSTERHOLM: I based my estimates at the time on historic data from previous pandemics.

The reality is you can't model beyond 30 days out. Just look at what is happening right now. We can't even predict why these surges occur or when they occur. Who, 30 days ago, could have developed a model that would accurately predict what we're seeing right now with Omicron? Who could have predicted that?

BERGEN: Do we know how deadly the Omicron variant is compared to previous variants?

OSTERHOLM: While it's early, I believe that Omicron is less virulent than Delta. The variant is being studied in South Africa, which is important because the virus has been in that country longer than others. And we do know that hospitalizations, serious illness and deaths are lagging indicators. Rates often rise two to three weeks after rises in case numbers start to occur. But as of today, the epidemiologic and clinical data on Omicron cases around the world support this virus is less lethal than Delta.

OSTERHOLM: When we first investigated the Covid-19 vaccines, we had to prioritize the assessment of the safety of the vaccines, which was done well. But we never really understood how to best use the vaccine in terms of number of doses, dose spacing, even the dose amount to maximize our immune response both for the short and long-term. We know that oftentimes the best immune response occurs when you have an extended period between the doses; in other words, allowing the immune system to basically recover and be capable of this enhanced response with the next dose. Look at how many vaccine schedules we have where that's the case.

The whole world should have access to three doses of a mRNA Covid vaccine and there would be nothing more tragic to me than having someone protected by a two-dose regimen for six to eight months, and then to get seriously ill and die because they didn't get a booster. I think that one day this won't even be a question. It will be a minimum three-dose vaccine.

OSTERHOLM: Two things: One is that this pandemic has really provided a window into our global vaccine capacity in a way nothing else has ever done before.

I think that there's been some red herrings in terms of what the issues are. For example, we keep hearing about technology transfer and giving these countries the ability to make their own vaccines, and yet the expertise needed to make these vaccines is really at a premium. It's very difficult to find people who know how to do this. So, it's not enough to transfer technology to a low-income country if you don't provide the expertise to make these vaccines. It's not as simple as making chicken soup.

Also, our focus has been almost solely on getting vaccines to people around the world, which is surely important. But we haven't been thinking nearly enough about what it would take to turn a vaccine into a vaccination, that needle into the arm. We have seen the challenges in this country with administering vaccinations, and those challenges also exist around the world.

So, just shipping a couple of pallets of vaccines to a low-income country may be a useless effort if, in fact, they don't have the infrastructure to deliver the vaccine and they don't have a means for helping the population understand how and why they should want to be vaccinated. What this whole situation has highlighted, is the fact that we have a lot more work to do to understand not just how to make vaccines, but also how to turn vaccines into vaccinations.

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The infectious disease expert who warned us 800,000 Americans would die of Covid-19 - CNN

Carney gets booster, warns 'people have let their guard down'

Gov. John Carney wanted to use the occasion of his Moderna COVID vaccine booster as an example for all Delawareans - wear masks indoors and get vaccinated, he said.

William Bretzger, Delaware News Journal

Though the omicron variant has yet to be confirmed in Delaware, the COVID-19 delta variant has led to a massive spike in cases with the state seeing about a 50% surge in cases in the last week.

This weekend, the state saw the highest number of new daily COVID-19 cases since January, according to state data. Hospitalizations have increased by 77% since Nov. 1, and the weekly average of positive tests is 8.5%, the highest its been since September.

None of this is rocket science, said Dr. Karyl Rattay, director of the Division of Public Health, during a Dec. 7 press briefing. Its time to double down.

DELAWARE'S PANDEMIC: Bayhealth, Beebe pausing COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees due to federal injunction

Following Thanksgiving, Delaware has seen a significant increase in the rate of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Health officials warned residents in late November to be cautious again as the country battles the emergence of the omicron variant.

Nearly all ZIP codes in Kent and Sussex counties are experiencing COVID-19 positivity rates of 10% or higher. Many of these areas are seeing low vaccination rates, Rattay said.

The highest case rate last week was among 18- to 34-year-olds. For several months, this high case rate has primarily been seen among school-aged children.

Its a critical time for children and adults to get their COVID-19 vaccinations, Rattay said, because its seen as the best and most effective way to fend off the virus.

MAP BELOW: Click on the map for detailed information. You may need to adjust the map to see all of thedata.

Clinical trials, Rattay said, found the vaccine to be more than 90% protective against the virus in younger age groups. There are also no lasting side effects.

WORKFORCE ISSUES: Delaware nurses say they are in a crisis. Many fear it will only get worse.

Rattay specifically raised concern for the number of COVID-19 cases among children and theirlower vaccination rates. Delaware is in the bottom half of all states in terms of pediatric vaccination rates.

Though children are experiencing lower rates of death and hospitalizations, many are still becoming very sick from COVID-19, Rattay said. Children are being hospitalized and dying from the virus. They can also suffer long-term effects from the disease.

Nine children were hospitalized within three days this month, she said.

Gov. John Carney urged Delawareans during the briefing to wear a mask while in public indoor settings, but said he will not mandate it at this time.

"The best way to do this is to encourage people to take the protective measures, he said. Sometimes you get more pushback by mandates.

Contact Meredith Newman at (302) 256-2466 or at mnewman@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MereNewman.

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'It's time to double down': Delaware reports nearly 50% increase in COVID-19 cases - The News Journal

An international passenger arrives near a new rapid COVID-19 testing site for arriving international passengers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Friday in Los Angeles. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption

An international passenger arrives near a new rapid COVID-19 testing site for arriving international passengers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Friday in Los Angeles.

The fast-spreading omicron variant of the coronavirus has now been reported in 50 countries and 19 states, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She added, "we expect that number to continue to increase."

States that have detected the variant range from Hawaii to Texas to Massachusetts. The reports are part of a new surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. that now tops 100,000 cases per day.

While officials and researchers are concerned about the transmissibility of the omicron variant, they also say it's too early to know what toll it might take in the U.S.

Experts say it will likely be weeks before meaningful data about patient outcomes will emerge from South Africa, which first reported the variant. The country has seen an exponential rise in COVID-19 cases in Gauteng Province, the epicenter of the outbreak.

In what could be a source of cautious optimism, the South African Medical Research Council recently said that over the past two weeks, the majority of patients in hospitals' COVID-19 wards have not required extra oxygen to breathe. The council also said that many of the omicron COVID-19 diagnoses arose from what is known as incidental findings like when a patient is tested after coming to the hospital for other reasons, like a surgery or a pregnancy.

There are also key differences in circumstances: in South Africa, for instance, only about a third of the eligible population has been fully vaccinated far lower than in the U.S.

Walensky said Tuesday that while the number of omicron cases is expected to rise in the U.S, the most recent data show that more than 99% of coronavirus samples that have been genetically sequenced showed the delta variant. She added that it is too early to know whether omicron will become dominant against delta or not.

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19 U.S. states now have detected the omicron COVID-19 variant - NPR

As the rest of the world struggles to vaccinate adults in the face of a threat from a new coronavirus variant, China has embarked on an ambitious campaign that it says will give the country better protection against Covid-19: full inoculation of 160 million of its youngest citizens by the end of the year.

The campaign powered in part with red flower stickers, balloons and boxes of toys for children who step up to become what nurses call little inoculated warriors has gotten off to a fast start. In the first two weeks of the effort, which began in late October, 84 million boys and girls between the ages of 3 and 11, about half of the eligible population, received the first of two shots, according to the most recent government data.

By contrast, in the United States, 2.6 million children between ages 5 and 11, or about 10 percent of the eligible population, received one dose over roughly the same time period.

The push is part of Beijings unrelenting march toward herd immunity, the point at which enough people are immune to the virus that it cannot spread through the population. With less than three months before the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Chinese officials are doubling down on that strategy. And with 1.1 billion adults already vaccinated, young people are seen as an important part of its success.

The campaign faces significant obstacles, including parental reluctance in a country with a checkered history of safety on childrens vaccines. The government insists that child inoculations are voluntary, but parents have described coming under pressure to get their children vaccinated.

When You Xun declined to have his 3-year-old son vaccinated in the city of Ningde, the boy was suddenly sent home from school. Urgent notice! Urgent notice! Please, parents of all the babies who havent had the Covid vaccines, come to the kindergarten now to take your child home, the message said.

Many parents rushed to have their sons and daughters inoculated, worried that they would not be allowed to attend school otherwise. Mr. You and his wife decided not to, fearing that the vaccine might not be safe for young people. After several days of silence from the kindergarten, he visited local authorities to complain about his sons apparent expulsion.

Officials told him that there was no rule forbidding unvaccinated children to attend class. So Mr. You took his son back to school the next day. From top to the bottom, it is a disguised pressure campaign to enforce vaccination, he said.

Though Chinese vaccines are generally considered safe, the country also has a history of administering spoiled shots and guarding any information about negative incidents.

In a 2018 scandal, possibly hundreds of thousands of children were injected with ineffective vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. And in 2013, 17 infants died after receiving a Chinese-made hepatitis B vaccine. While that vaccine has been widely used since, the authorities moved quickly to silence critics.

Herd immunity is a goal most countries have abandoned particularly with the emergence of new variants such as Omicron and Delta but one that China has set as a prerequisite for reopening its borders.

Their hope is that by increasing the vaccination rate, it will give them the confidence to open up in the future, said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University.

Dec. 7, 2021, 6:36 p.m. ET

Getting there will be difficult, in part because the countrys vaccines appear to be less effective than their Western competitors. By relying solely on its current vaccines, China is unlikely to build this herd immunity, he said.

That has not stopped officials from working tirelessly to get vaccines into the arms of the countrys smallest citizens. Kindergarten teachers across the country have sent out personal appeals urging parents to hurry up and get their students vaccinated. Please respond to the national call to guide your child to take the initiative and actively get vaccinated, one education bureau wrote in a public letter to parents.

In the eastern city of Hangzhou, in the southern cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and in Beijing, kindergartens have sent out notices in private chat groups with parents suggesting that vaccination is required, according to interviews and messages reviewed by The New York Times. The parents are often asked to answer publicly whether their children have received a shot. If the parents decline, they are asked to submit in writing the reason for not getting their child vaccinated.

Responding to a request for comment, officials at the education bureaus in Guangzhou and Ningde said vaccination for children ages 3 to 11 was not mandatory. An official at the Guangzhou office said no directive had been issued to prohibit children without vaccines from attending school.

In June, China approved the use of its Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines in children between the ages of 3 and 17. But until late October, only children 12 and up were being given shots, with the exception of at-risk children who were younger.

New Covid treatments. Two Covid-19 pills, by Merck and Pfizer, should be available soon. These new treatment options may be just the beginning: Scientists say we will need an arsenal of drugs to deploy against new variants especially if those foes erode the protection of existing vaccines.

Though limited data has been provided, the two vaccines were approved based on Phase 1 and 2 trials showing them to be safe for children. The National Health Commission has said the safety and effectiveness of the Chinese vaccine for young children does not differ significantly from that for older children and adults.

Still, some parents are uneasy.

On Nov. 5, Nicolas Zhang got a message in the chat group he shares with other parents from his 5-year-old daughters kindergarten class in the southern city of Shenzhen. The school informed the parents that their children were required to get vaccinated, Mr. Zhang said. He and his wife, who are both vaccinated, hesitated.

After massive vaccinations in our country, how many of them have had adverse reactions? said Mr. Zhang, 35. There is also no public media to do the follow-up, nor any government department to deal with it publicly.

China is the worlds last zero-Covid holdout, and officials have shown no willingness to change course. Cities of millions of people continue to be locked down during minor outbreaks; tourist sites like Shanghai Disneyland have been shut down to carry out on-the-spot testing. People who lie about infections, hide symptoms or try to escape quarantine do so under threat of prison.

This is about the collective force, so that if you dont comply you will be left behind. Your kids will be looked down on by the community and their teachers, said Bei Wu, a professor of global health at New York University and an expert in Chinas public health policy.

Despite the lingering doubts of parents like Mr. You and Mr. Zhang, China will probably succeed in getting most of its youngest citizens inoculated by the end of the year. The authorities have galvanized nurses, doctors and community health workers to convince every parent that their child should roll up a sleeve not only for their own health, but for the good of the country.

The ruling Communist Party has pointed to the countrys low Covid-19 numbers fewer than 5,000 people have died as evidence that Chinas authoritarian model is superior to the rest of the world, even as its borders remain closed and ordinary citizens find their personal freedom severely restricted during outbreaks.

What we need is collective freedom, social freedom and national freedom, Zhong Nanshan, Chinas top disease expert, said. Only with these freedoms can we have individual freedom.

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China Calls on Little Inoculated Warriors in Its War on Covid-19 - The New York Times