Incredible, if true. They are using online questionnaires, how reliable is that? The study is not peer-reviewed yet.Some good news for the vaxxed, appears the vaccine does indeed significantly protect againtst long COVID appears to be quite rare amongst those with at least 2 shots.
(Mother Jones) Glenn Youngkin, the first Republican governor of Virginia since 2014, is wasting no time enacting policies that will harm the state’s people of color. On Saturday, his first day in office, he signed 11 executive actions that, among other things, will make it harder for schools to teach kids about racism. The orders also scrap rules that slowed the spread of the coronavirus amid a pandemic that the state’s health department says has hit Black and brown families the hardest.
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Here’s a sampling of his day one executive actions:
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• Masks in schools: Youngkin rescinded a statewide mask mandate for public school students, giving parents the power to send their kids to class without face coverings even as coronavirus cases skyrocket because of the omicron variant. He said he was “reaffirming the rights of parents in the upbringing, education, and care of their children.”
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• Vaccines: Youngkin rescinded a rule requiring state employees to get a coronavirus vaccine or submit to weekly testing.
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At least in certain corners of the state, the governor is already facing pushback: On Saturday, the superintendent of Richmond schools announced that he would keep the mask requirement in place for students, staffers, and visitors. Other school districts will too.
(EurekAlert) One viral protein could provide information to deter pneumonia causing the body’s exaggerated inflammatory response to respiratory viruses, including the virus that causes COVID-19.
That viral protein is NS2 of Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), and a study has found that if the virus lacks this protein, the human body’s immune response can destroy the virus before exaggerated inflammation begins. The research, conducted at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, was published Jan. 18 in the journal MBio.
Like other respiratory viruses, including the COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, RSV infects the lung cells responsible for exchanging gases and uses them as factories to make more viruses. Uncontrollable virus multiplication in these cells leads to their destruction and manifestation of severe inflammation; lung diseases like pneumonia; and sometimes death.
“Exaggerated inflammation clogs the airways and makes breathing difficult,” said Kim Chiok, a WSU post-doctoral researcher who led the study. “This is why people who have these long-term and severe inflammatory responses get pneumonia and need help breathing, and it’s why they end up in the hospital in the ICU.”
Chiok and fellow WSU researchers are laying the framework to break that cycle by understanding how respiratory viruses, like RSV, persist in the cell. RSV causes 160,000 deaths annually primarily in infants, children, elderly and immune-compromised individuals, according to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
(WHO -World Health Organization) WHO has recommended two new drugs for COVID-19, providing yet more options for treating the disease. The extent to which these medicines will save lives depends on how widely available and affordable they will be.
The first drug, baricitinib, is strongly recommended for patients with severe or critical COVID-19. It is part of a class of drugs called Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors that suppress the overstimulation of the immune system. WHO recommends that it is given with corticosteroids.
Baricitinib is an oral drug, used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. It provides an alternative to other arthritis drugs called Interleukin-6 receptor blockers, recommended by WHO in July 2021.
WHO has also conditionally recommended the use of a monoclonal antibody drug, sotrovimab, for treating mild or moderate COVID-19 in patients who are at high risk of hospitalization. This includes patients who are older, immunocompromised, having underlying conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, and those unvaccinated.
Sotrovimab is an alternative to casirivimab-imdevimab, a monoclonal antibody cocktail recommended by WHO in September 2021. Studies are ongoing on the effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies against Omicron but early laboratory studies show that sotrovimab retains its activity.
caltrek's comment: A couple in our neighborhood here in California recently contracted the Omicron variant, apparently from a relative. While they report that it was not a pleasant experience, they have recovered nicely. They had been vaccinated, including a booster shot.(Axios) The Omicron wave is likely beginning to recede in the U.S., experts say.
Why it matters: Omicron is still wreaking havoc in parts of the country, but infectious disease experts are optimistic that relief is around the corner.
Details: In South Africa and in the U.K., which experienced their Omicron waves before the U.S., cases spiked dramatically and then fell almost as quickly.
That appears to be happening now in parts of the U.S. that got hit with the variant early, including Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.
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Yes, but: While cases are beginning to fall in the East Coast cities that were among the first to see the variant take hold, Omicron likely hasn't peaked yet in other parts of the U.S.
(University of Pittsburgh via EurekAlert) PITTSBURGH, Jan. 19, 2022 – Children in sub-Saharan Africa who are hospitalized with COVID-19 are dying at a rate far greater than children in the U.S. and Europe, according to a new multicenter study published today in JAMA Pediatrics and led by a University of Pittsburgh infectious diseases epidemiologist.
Among African children admitted to 25 hospitals with COVID-19 between March and December 2020, infants younger than 1 year had nearly five times the risk of death than adolescents aged 15 to 19 years. Children of all ages with comorbidities, including high blood pressure, chronic lung diseases, hematological disorders and cancer, also were at higher risk of dying.
“Although our study looked at data from earlier in the pandemic, the situation hasn’t changed much for the children of Africa—if anything, it is expected to be worsening with the global emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant,” said lead author Jean B. Nachega, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., associate professor of infectious diseases and microbiology and epidemiology at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health. “Vaccines are not yet widely available, and pediatric intensive care is not easily accessible.”
The study examined outcomes in 469 children who ranged in age from 3 months to 19 years and were hospitalized in one of six countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda. A quarter of the children had pre-existing conditions. Eighteen had confirmed or suspected multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a serious complication of COVID-19 where different parts of the body become inflamed.
The study, which included investigators across all six of the African countries that provided data, found that 34.6% of hospitalized children were admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) or required supplemental oxygen, and 21.2% of those admitted to the ICU required invasive mechanical ventilation. During the time frame studied, 39—over 8%—of the children died. This compares with rates between 1% and 5% that have been reported in high-income countries.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... n95-masks/The Biden administration plans to distribute 400 million high-quality N95 masks for adults free of charge at thousands of pharmacies and other locations starting next week, a White House official said. With the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus spurring record levels of infections and hospitalizations, public health experts have repeatedly said masking, especially with superior-quality products, is an important tool to control spread of the airborne virus.
The distribution of the masks is the largest deployment of personal protective equipment in U.S. history, said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement. The N95 masks will come from the government’s Strategic National Stockpile and will be given out at tens of thousands of pharmacies and federal community health centers, the same locations where Americans have received their vaccinations. U.S. officials are starting to ship masks at the end of this week.
The masks will be available at pharmacies and community health centers late next week. The program will be fully up and running by early February. There will be three masks available per adult. Also, “we anticipate making additional, high-quality masks for children available in the near future,” the official said.N95 and KN95s are known as respirators that filter out most virus particles — and come with markings to indicate they are authentic. Both types of masks must form a seal to the face to work properly. The announcement comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided its most explicit guidance to date Friday on the protection offered by masks.
Well-fitting respirators, such as the N95 products that are approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “offer the highest level of protection” at reducing the spread of the virus, compared with cloth coverings and other masks. The United States has more than 750 million N95 masks in the stockpile. Unlike earlier in the pandemic when severe shortages of personal protective equipment affected hospitals, forcing hospital staff to make homemade face shields and use bandannas, an ample supply of high-quality masks exists for health-care workers, officials said. Those masks are also widely available to the public online and in stores.
While recent trends may be hitting Trump supporters hard, the overall effect of Covid has hit people of color hardest. These are people who demographically do not support Trump.Journalist states the obvious: COVID is killing Trump supporters by the hundreds each day
(The Conversation) From the earliest days of the pandemic, COVID-19 has wrought a far higher toll in communities of color than in the general population – thrusting the long-standing issue of health disparities in the U.S. into the attention of public health officials and the general public.
Even though non-Hispanic white people make up 60% of the population, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States have borne significantly higher risks of COVID-19 infections than white people, as well as hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19.
So a conversation is raging among doctors, health researchers, public health officials, policymakers and activists about how to address the social determinants of health that are driving this unequal toll on communities of color.
I am a global public health professor with expertise in multicultural health and health disparities. My teaching and research focus on the social determinants of health: the layers of policies, economic factors and social structures that affect health and quality of life, and the complicated ways they interact. I also study social justice in the context of public health, including the sociocultural context of infectious diseases.
Throughout the pandemic, American Indians and Alaska Natives as well as Hispanics and Latinos have borne more than twice the risk of white people of death from COVID-19, and Black people have been at nearly twice the risk.
(The Conversation) The world now has a new COVID-19 vaccine in its arsenal, and at a fraction of the cost per dose.
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All COVID-19 vaccines teach the immune system how to recognize the virus and prepare the body to mount an attack. The CORBEVAX vaccine is a protein subunit vaccine. It uses a harmless piece of the spike protein from the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 to stimulate and prepare the immune system for future encounters with the virus.
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Unlike the three vaccines approved in the U.S. – Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines and Johnson & Johnson’s viral vector vaccine, which provide the body instructions on how to produce the spike protein – CORBEVAX delivers the spike protein to the body directly. Like those other approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, CORBEVAX also requires two doses.
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A large U.S.-based clinical trial found the vaccine to be safe, well tolerated and over 90% effective at preventing symptomatic infections. The vaccine received emergency use authorization in India, and other developing countries are expected to follow.
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Protein subunit vaccines have an advantage over mRNA vaccines in that they can be readily produced using well-established recombinant DNA technology that is relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to scale up. A similar protein recombinant technology that’s been around for 40 years has been used for the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which is available for use in 170 countries, and the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine.
