Category: Covid-19

Another 472 new COVID-19 cases were reported on Saturday in Utah, after officials said the numbers of new cases has again plateaued after previously declining since mid-January.

In all, there have been 395,150 known infections of the SARS-CoV-2 virus since cases were first detected in Utah in March 2020. The state has tested more than 2.5 million people, including 6,260 since Friday, according to a daily COVID-19 report from the Utah Department of Health.

The state reports 2,031,780 vaccines have been administered, including 1,251,115 people, or 39% of Utahns who have received one dose and 866,873 27% of the population who have been fully vaccinated.

The number of vaccines administered daily in Utah has been decreasing slightly since the beginning of April, but is still increasing at a much faster pace than infections are being detected, according to the health department. Health and medical officials across the state have discussed ways to get more people to participate in mass vaccination to achieve herd immunity and prevent further spread of more deadly variants of the virus.

While every case of COVID-19 isnt scanned for its presence of a variant virus, the Utah health department has identified 516 cases of B.1.1.7, the variant of COVID-19 first identified in the United Kingdom; about a dozen cases of the Brazil variant; and just one of the variant identified in South Africa.

The rolling seven-day average for positive COVID-19 tests is now 378 per day, which is higher than Fridays report of 369 but less than the 394 average reported a week ago.

The rolling seven-day average for percent positivity of COVID-19 tests in Utah is 2.9% when all results are included, the method used by the state to help determine county transmission levels, and 5.9% when multiple tests by individuals are excluded, which is also fewer than last weeks reports of 3.8% and 7.6%, respectively.

There are 152 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 in Utah, up 12 people from last Saturdays report. Of those hospitalized, there are 63 people being treated in intensive care units across the state.

The health department also reported one new death resulting from COVID-19 in the state, bringing the disease death toll to 2,180. The latest death was a Salt Lake County man between the ages of 45 and 64 who was hospitalized at the time of his death.

Read the rest here:

Vaccination rate still far outpacing new COVID-19 infections in Utah - Deseret News

As of Friday, the hospital said 89% of employees have been vaccinated. Theyre telling everyone else they must get the vaccine by June 7 in order to keep their job.

HOUSTON Some employees at Houston Methodist are upset over the hospitals mandatory COVID-19 vaccine rule, saying they want more time.

As of Friday, the hospital said 89 percent of employees have been vaccinated, and theyre telling everyone else they must get the vaccine by June 7 in order to keep their jobs.

Its a decision Jennifer Bridges never thought shed have to make: get the COVID-19 vaccine or lose her job.

Its not fair to be forced to inject something that were not comfortable with," Bridges said.

I think our rights as human beings is more important than keeping that job. If I am blacklisted, whatever it takes. I will go find another form of employment," Bridges said.

As a registered nurse at Houston Methodist, shes one of thousands of employees being told to get the vaccine by the hospital, or come June 7, she could be terminated.

What theyre doing on June 7, is youre suspended for two weeks and if you do not comply, you are terminated," Bridges said.

The hospital says its the same protocol as with the flu vaccine which was made a requirement back in 2009.

CEO Dr. Marc Boom calls the COVID-19 vaccine rule their opportunity to keep leading medicine," and says by doing this, they are helping to stop the spread of this deadly virus. He says it is the employees obligation to keep their patients safe.

But Bridges says shes not alone in her concerns. Since shes gone public, she says hundreds of employees have reached out to her, and they feel the same.

Basically, theyre either going to quit, get fired, and some have reached out to me literally crying, saying theyre going to hold off until the last day and take that shot against their will because they have to feed their family," Bridges said.

She says all theyre asking for is more time.

Once the research is done in a couple of years, its fully FDA approved, then I am sure we will all line up and take it. Just not yet. Let us have more time," Bridges said.

But the hospital says that June 7 deadline is firm, and the vaccines have been shown to be very safe.

Read more:

Houston Methodist employees have until June 7 to get COVID-19 vaccine or they're fired - KHOU.com

Champaign-Urbana, Ill. (WCIA)

I was not testing because I had kidney problems and I was scared of getting Covid-19, Antonio Ruiz, dismissed from the University of Illinois, said.

Thats the emotional response from one former student at the U of I. He was dismissed for failing to comply with Covid-19 testing. Hes the second student to be dismissed for that reason. Weve brought you his story before, but now were hearing directly from him.

Antonio Ruiz says he has health problems so he did not want to get the tests. He was worried he would get the virus while out getting tested, and hardly left his apartment.

He says he has appealed the universitys decision, but we have covered another student who had a similar situation just months ago. That student appealed and was re-instated. Ruiz hopes the same can be done for him.

In my view, my dismissal was a function of systemic ableism, Ruiz said.

The university says federal privacy law prevents them from discussing a specific students disciplinary case. The university went on to say Ruizs appeal will be heard and decided by a panel of students, faculty, and staff.

Continue reading here:

U of I student dismissed for failing to comply with Covid-19 testing - wcia.com

COVID-19 symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as long as 14 days after exposure to the virus. The virus may cause respiratory symptoms such as coughing, high fever, breathing problems, shortness of breath, chills, muscle pain, sore throat, fatigue, & extreme exhaustion. There are other symptoms less commonly associated with COVID-19, such as headache, loss of taste and smell, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting.

View post:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Rochester Regional Health

Powered by Watson:

Our COVID Q&A with Watson is an AI-powered chatbot that addresses consumers' questions and concerns about COVID-19. It's built on the IBM Watson Ads Builder platform, which utilizes Watson Natural Language Understanding, and proprietary, natural- language-generation technology. The chatbot utilizes approved content from the CDC and WHO. Incidents information is provided by USAFacts.org.

To populate our Interactive Incidents Map, Watson AI looks for the latest and most up-to- date information. To understand and extract the information necessary to feed the maps, we use Watson Natural Language Understandingfor extracting insights from natural language text and Watson Discovery for extracting insights from PDFs, HTML, tables, images and more.COVID Impact Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Data Foundation

Excerpt from:

Rochester, NY Coronavirus Information - Safety Updates ...

News Release

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

A Phase 2/3 trial to evaluate a new fully-human polyclonal antibody therapeutic targeted to SARS-CoV-2, called SAB-185, has begun enrolling non-hospitalized people with mild or moderate cases of COVID-19. The trial, ACTIV-2, is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The therapeutic was developed by SAB Biotherapeutics, Inc. (Sioux Falls, South Dakota).

NIHs Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) program is a public-private partnership to develop a coordinated research strategy for speeding development of the most promising treatments and vaccine candidates. ACTIV-2 is a master protocol designed for evaluating multiple investigational agents in adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who are not hospitalized. Led by the NIAID-funded AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) and supported by PPD (Wilmington, North Carolina), a global contract research organization that is responsible for trial execution, the trial will enroll participants at sites around the world.

The ACTIV-2 study design allows researchers to evaluate SAB-185 in a small group of volunteers and then continue testing it in a larger group if the antibody appears safe and effective. The trial began on Aug. 4, 2020 and has since added several therapeutics for testing.

SAB-185 is a fully-human polyclonal antibody therapeutic candidate for COVID-19 that has completed enrollment of Phase 1 and Phase 1b clinical studies. In previous pre-clinical studies, SAB-185 demonstrated neutralization of live SARS-CoV-2 at titers higher than convalescent plasma. The therapeutic candidate was developed from SABs platform, which uses genetically engineered cattle to produce fully-human antibodies in a process designed to potentially be both scalable and reliable.SAB-185 is administered intravenously, with the dose depending on the patients weight in kilograms (kg). A high and a low dose of SAB-185 will be tested in this trial.

When participants enroll in ACTIV-2, they will be assigned at random to receive either SAB-185, another therapeutic currently being evaluated in ACTIV-2, or a placebo. Other therapeutics currently being evaluated in ACTIV-2 include:

In the Phase 2 evaluation, each agent tested in ACTIV-2, and the shared placebo group, will enroll 110 participants with mild or moderate COVID-19 who are at risk for disease progression. The trial is blinded, so neither participants nor investigators will know whether a participant is receiving the therapeutic or the placebo. Participants will attend a series of clinic or at-home visits by clinicians and will be followed for a total of 72 weeks.

An independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) overseeing the trial will review the data collected at 28 days. They will monitor data to see if the therapy is safe, reduces the duration of COVID-19 symptoms and eliminates virus from the body. If there are no serious safety concerns and the results of this Phase 2 study seem promising, the trial will transition to Phase 3. It will then enroll 421 additional volunteers to receive the SAB agent, and 421 volunteers in the placebo group. The primary objective of the Phase 3 trial is to determine if the SAB therapy prevents either hospitalization or death by 28 days after study entry.

The study team for ACTIV-2 is led by protocol chairs Kara W. Chew, M.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Davey Smith, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego. Eric S. Daar, M.D., of UCLA, and David Wohl, M.D., of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), serve as protocol vice-chairs. Babafemi Taiwo, MBBS of Northwestern University is a co-investigator focused on the SAB agent. The ACTG network is led by chair Judith Currier, M.D., (UCLA) and vice-chair Joseph Eron, M.D., of UNC.

For more information on this study, please visit http://www.riseabovecovid.org, or visit clinicaltrials.gov and search identifier NCT04518410.

NIAID conducts and supports researchat NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwideto study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

NIHTurning Discovery Into Health

###

Read more here:

Large NIH clinical trial will test polyclonal antibody therapeutic for COVID-19 - National Institutes of Health

Highlights

**Risk Communication and Community Engagement. **Around 270 million people more than half of the total population in MENA were reached with information on how to prevent COVID-19 and how to access essential social services during lockdowns.

Health. UNICEF launched a jumpstart package for countries showing declines in utilization of health services, advocating on the importance of continuing essential health services for women and children and directly supporting countries in the region to ensure continuity of access to essential health services, reaching around 4.7 million women and children. Across the MENA region, 750,000 women in underserved areas benefitted from an essential maternal health package.

Nutrition Design of an essential tool for malnutrition screening: the disposable mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) tape; provision of counselling and advice on infant and young child feeding (IYCF) to around 1.7 million mothers and caregivers.

WASH. Around 18 million people in 14 MENA countries were able to better protect themselves from COVID-19 infection thanks to the provision of handwashing stations, hygiene kits, soap and hand sanitizers. More than 19,349 health staff and community health workers were trained in IPC and more than 198,054 facility-based and community health workers received PPE, including gloves and masks.

Education. Nearly 9.5 million children in all countries were reached through various UNICEF-supported remote learning initiatives since the pandemic started in MENA in late February 2020. Development of a Teachers Preparedness Training Package to help teachers reflect on the changes COVID-19 has and will have on teaching practices, and to assist them in teaching in the new normal.

Child Protection. More than 450,000 parents and children benefited from COVID-specific mental health and psychosocial support programmes. UNICEF supported adapted child protection programming and specialized services, including remote and in-person case management. By the end of 2020, more than 3,000 children were released from detention in 13 countries.

Social Protection. Over 110,000 households received a humanitarian cash grant, and approximately 13 million households benefited from new or additional social assistance measures, as part of UNICEFs support to governments expansion of shock responsive social protection programmes.

Supplies. Despite movement restrictions and transport constraints, UNICEF succeeded in delivering nearly 1.6 million units of supplies across the region since the start of the pandemic. UNICEF procured a net worth of US$40 million from local markets in MENA.

Original post:

Supporting Children, Adolescents and Women Affected by COVID-19 in the Middle East and North Africa - 2020 - World - ReliefWeb

The following is information about the City of San Joss response to slow and reduce the spread of COVID-19 and support our most at-risk communities.

SOURCE:City of San JosEmergency Operations Center

Contact:Carolina Camarena / Vicki Day, City of San Jos Media Line: 408-535-7777City of San Jos Customer Contact Center: 3-1-1 or 408-535-3500

Email: News/Media: EOC_PIO@sanjoseca.govResidents: 311@sanjoseca.govBusinesses: covid19sjbusiness@sanjoseca.govNon-Profits: covid19sjcbo@sanjoseca.gov

Updates on City of San Jos Services and/or Operations

Additionally, Project Sentinel and Catholic Charities will host a webinar for landlords this Thursday at 10 a.m. Register in advance for this webinar at COVID-19 Rental Assistance.

Please note: If you are scheduling for a minor or another individual who is legally unable to provide consent for their vaccination, then a person legally authorized to make healthcare decisions for the individual must be present at the appointment to sign the Consent Form, or the form needs to be printed and signed by the legal representative ahead of time and brought to the vaccination appointment. In addition, if the legal representative is not present at the appointment, the legal representative must be available by phone at the time of the appointment if discussion is needed with the decision-maker.

Appointments can be made starting seven days in advance of the testing date until all slots are reserved at http://www.sccfreetest.org. Appointment-based testing is also available in San Jos at the Fairgrounds, with appointments now available five days in advance. Testing is free at all these sites.

All healthcare systems are required by the County order to offer free testing to symptomatic persons, persons who have been exposed to a confirmed COVID-19 case, and all essential workers. For more information on testing rights, see our Frequently Asked Questions page.

All test sites are mapped on the County's website at http://www.sccfreetest.org. The site is available in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Tagalog. Information is also available by calling 2-1-1.

Esta informacin est disponible en espaol enwww.sanjoseca.gov.

Thng tin ny c sn bng Ting Vit trn trang:www.sanjoseca.gov.

http://www.sanjoseca.gov

A persons risk for COVID-19 is not related to race, ethnicity or culture. City employees must abide by the Discrimination and Harassment policy, and treat colleagues and members of the public with courtesy and respect. Discrimination and/or Harassment of any kind is a violation of the policies and will not be tolerated.

###

Read the rest here:

FLASH REPORT #156 - COVID-19 Response and Recovery | News - City of San Jose, CA

Story

Gov. Jay Inslee today announced applications will be accepted for the next round of assistance under the Washington COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund starting April 21.

The additional $65 million allocated by the Legislature this year will provide additional relief to support new applicants. Similar to the first round, the fund will rely on the continued partnership between the state and community organizations, including Scholarship Junkies and the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, with the Department of Social and Health Services providing oversight.

This round of funding builds on the governors prior allocations totaling $62.6 million for COVID-19 relief to immigrants in 2020, which provided much-needed assistance to nearly 60,000 individuals who were not eligible for federal COVID assistance due to immigration status. The fund coincides with other relief commitments by the governor in small business grants and rental assistance.

We know many immigrant workers have served on the front line during our pandemic response, and we know that their communities still need our support, Inslee said. I applaud the tireless work of our agencies and nonprofit partners to assist those Washingtonians who were ineligible for federal stimulus relief. I thank the legislators who continue to advocate on behalf of our states immigrants, including the budget chairs, Sen. Rolfes and Rep. Ormbsy, as well as Sen. Saldaa, Rep. Gregerson, and Rep. Harris-Talley.

Applicants must demonstrate Washington state residency; be at least 18 years old; have been significantly affected by the coronavirus pandemic; be ineligible for federal stimulus payments or unemployment insurance benefits due to their immigration status; and have an income at or below 250% of the federal poverty level.

The Washington COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund is considered one-time disaster relief assistance. Receiving assistance from this fund should not impact peoples ability to obtain a green card.

Applications for the second round of the Washington COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund will be accepted from April 21 to May 21.

Applications will be accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis, prioritizing those according to need. Eligible community members can apply by:

Public and constituent inquiries | 360.902.4111Press inquiries | 360.902.4136

Read the original:

Washington COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund opens for new applications | Governor Jay Inslee - Access Washington

Jeremy Edwards, director of the Computational Genomics and Technology (CGaT) Laboratory at The University of New Mexico, and his colleagues at Centrillion Technologies in Palo Alto, Calif. and West Virginia University, have developed a chip that provides a simpler and more rapid method of genome sequencing for viruses like COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequence

Their research, titled, Highly Accurate Chip-Based Resequencing of SARS-CoV-2 Clinical Samples was published recently in the American Chemical Societys Langmuir. As part of the research, scientists created a tiled genome array they developed for rapid and inexpensive full viral genome resequencing and applied their SARS-CoV-2-specific genome tiling array to rapidly and accurately resequenced the viral genome from eight clinical samples acquired from patients in Wyoming that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Ultimately, they were able to sequence 95 percent of the genome of each sample with greater than 99.9 percent accuracy.

This new technology allows for faster and more accurate tracing of COVID and other respiratory viruses, including the appearance of new variants, said Edwards, who is a professor in the UNM Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.With this simple and rapid testing procedure, scientists will be able to more accurately track the progression and better prevent the onset of the next pandemic.

With more than 142 million people worldwide having contracted the virus, vigilant testing and contact tracing are the most effective ways to slow the spread of COVID-19. Traditional methods of clinical testing often produce false positives or negatives, and traditional methods of sequencing are time-consuming and expensive. This new technology will virtually eliminate all of these barriers.

"Since the submission of the paper, the technology has further evolved with improved accuracy and sensitivity, said Edwards. The chip technology is the best available technology for large-scale viral genome surveillance and monitoring viral variants. This technology could not only help control this pandemic and also prevent future pandemics."

The mission of the Computational Genomics and Technology (CGaT) Laboratory is to provide training in bioinformatics research for undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. students, as well as postdoctoral fellows; provide collaborative research interactions to utilize bioinformatics computing tools for researchers at UNM, and to conduct state-of-the-art and innovative bioinformatics and genomics research within the center.

Read the original:

Researchers develop chip that improves testing and tracing for COVID-19 - UNM Newsroom