Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Officials in Louisiana have been willing to try just about anything to jolt the state’s lagging Covid-19 vaccination rates, from a $1 million cash giveaway to a public service announcement featuring the recent 14-year-old national spelling bee champion. But when Madeline LeBlanc relented and got her first vaccine dose this week, she was motivated by something entirely different: fear. After seeing news reports about the Delta variant raging across the state, Ms. LeBlanc, 24, had…

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Allan Massie writes: I was sitting on an examination table at an urgent care clinic in Timonium, giving my history to a physician’s assistant. An hour later, she would call me to confirm that I was positive for COVID-19. Given the way that I felt, it was what I expected. But it wasn’t supposed to happen: I’ve been fully vaccinated for months. Five days earlier, I had gone to a house party in Montgomery County. There were 15 adults there,…

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Houston Chronicle reports: Fueled by the delta variant, a surge in Houston COVID-19 hospitalizations is growing as fast as at any time during the pandemic so far, and is projected to pass previous records by mid-August — even though roughly half of all eligible Houstonians are fully vaccinated. “We’re heading into dark times,” said Texas Medical Center CEO Bill McKeon. Already, he said, “our ICUs are filled with unvaccinated people.” On Tuesday, Texas Medical Center hospitals listed 1,372 people in…

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STAT reports: In some respects, the Delta variant has changed everything in the Covid-19 pandemic. In others, the same rules still apply. Before the variant of SARS-CoV-2 began spreading rapidly in the United States, Covid-19 vaccines were drastically cutting the number of cases. They were preventing people from being infected. And vaccinated people who got infected were unlikely to infect others. That’s all still true, even with Delta — if just to a lesser extent. Despite the threat of Delta,…

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Nature reports: Scientists are scratching their heads over the precipitous decline in daily COVID-19 infections in the United Kingdom following their rapid rise earlier in the year. Officially recorded new cases more than halved in just two weeks: from a high of 54,674 on 17 July to 22,287 on 2 August. “Nobody really knows what’s going on,” says epidemiologist John Edmunds at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). In particular, it’s not clear whether this sudden trend…

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The New York Times reports: As coronavirus cases rise across the United States, the fight against the pandemic is focused on an estimated 93 million people who are eligible for shots but have chosen not to get them. These are the Americans who are most vulnerable to serious illness from the highly contagious Delta variant and most likely to carry the virus, spreading it further. It turns out, though, that this is not a single set of Americans, but in…

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Science reports: Individuals facing the threat of COVID-19 may care most about a vaccine’s ability to forestall grave disease that could lead to a hospital bed or worse. And a number of vaccines perform that vital task well, including those from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which are based on genetically engineered cold viruses, as well as the not-yet-authorized protein vaccine from Novavax. But for public health experts trying to halt a global pandemic, shutting down even the mildest infections…

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The New York Times reports: As Mindy Greene spent another day in the Covid intensive care unit, listening to the whirring machines that now breathed for her 42-year-old husband, Russ, she opened her phone and tapped out a message. “We did not get the vaccine,” she wrote on Facebook. “I read all kinds of things about the vaccine and it scared me. So I made the decision and prayed about it and got the impression that we would be ok.”…

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The New York Times reports: In yet another unexpected and unwelcome twist in the pandemic, fully immunized people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant may spread the virus to others just as easily as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report published on Friday. The vaccines remain powerfully effective against severe illness and death, and infections in vaccinated people are thought to be comparatively rare. But the revelation follows a series of…

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NBC News reports: At least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive for Covid and 1,400 of those have died, according to data collected by NBC News. The 125,682 “breakthrough” cases in 38 states found by NBC News represent less than .08 percent of the 164.2 million-plus people who have been fully vaccinated since January, or about one in every 1,300. The number of cases and deaths among the vaccinated is very small compared to the number among the unvaccinated….

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The New York Times reports: The recommendation that vaccinated people in some parts of the country dust off their masks was based largely on one troublesome finding, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New research showed that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carry tremendous amounts of the virus in the nose and throat, she said in an email responding to questions from The New York Times. The finding contradicts what…

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The Washington Post reports: This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t. The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick Wednesday, when the country reported 27,734 cases. That’s still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago. The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and…

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CNN reports: A third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine can “strongly” boost protection against the Delta variant — beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses, new data released by Pfizer on Wednesday suggests. The data posted online suggest that levels of antibodies that can target the Delta variant grow fivefold in people 18 to 55 who get a third dose of the vaccine. Among people ages 65 to 85, the Pfizer data suggest that antibody levels that…

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