Nature reports:

On 21 June, Israel’s Ministry of Health recommended that all individuals aged 12–15 be vaccinated against COVID-19 — making the nation one of the few that have so far approved vaccinations for younger adolescents. The decision came in response to a trend that many countries with high rates of vaccination are experiencing: an ever-increasing proportion of new infections are in younger age groups.

Israel’s swift vaccination campaign — which has now reached more than 85% of the adult population — saw case numbers drop to around a dozen a day in early June. But later that month, cases began to rise to more than 100 a day, many of in people under 16, leading the government to open up vaccinations to all teenagers.

The younger profile of cases is not surprising, says Ran Balicer, an epidemiologist at Israel’s largest health-care provider, Clalit Health Services, in Tel Aviv. But it highlights the possibility that subsequent waves of community spread could be driven by younger age groups, especially in the presence of new, more transmissible variants. [Continue reading…]

NBC News reports:

To describe Dr. Ryan Dare as frustrated would be a gross understatement.

Dare and his colleagues at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock are dealing with a surge in extremely ill Covid-19 patients — one that is “nearly 100 percent preventable.”

That’s because virtually all of their patients are unvaccinated. And now they wish they had gotten the shots when they had the chance.

“It is heart-wrenching to see unvaccinated individuals come into the hospital with regret,” said Dare, an infectious diseases physician. They are patients who, “if they could do it all over again, would have had the vaccine in a second.” [Continue reading…]