Browsed by
Category: Health

Iran’s health system ‘beyond disastrous’ from Covid surge

Iran’s health system ‘beyond disastrous’ from Covid surge

The New York Times reports: Hospital medics in Iran are triaging patients on the floors of emergency rooms and in cars parked on the roadside. Lines stretch for blocks outside pharmacies. Taxis double as hearses, transporting corpses from hospitals to cemeteries. In at least one city, laborers are digging mass graves. Iran is under assault from the most cataclysmic wave yet of the coronavirus, according to interviews with physicians and health workers, social media postings from angry citizens, and even…

Read More Read More

Delta has changed pandemic endgame

Delta has changed pandemic endgame

Ed Yong writes: In September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. And…

Read More Read More

Current public-health messaging on Covid breakthrough cases may understate the scale and risk

Current public-health messaging on Covid breakthrough cases may understate the scale and risk

David Wallace-Wells writes: The term itself, perhaps, is a problem. “Breakthrough” sounds bad — implying an immune-escape mutation, likely rare, and therefore alarming. The vaccines were never tested to prevent transmission, only symptomatic disease, and those who knew the science expected, from the outset, that we would see some number of such cases, and that they would be, overwhelmingly, mild. But Delta appears to have changed things. Not everything: The vaccines are working to suppress severe outcomes from COVID infection…

Read More Read More

The Texas governor surrenders to the coronavirus

The Texas governor surrenders to the coronavirus

Adam Serwer writes: A year and a half into the pandemic, Texas is running out of hospital beds. The Texas Tribune reported on Tuesday that nearly 10,000 COVID-19 patients are in intensive-care units, some in areas where hospitals are close to capacity. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order asking hospitals to delay elective procedures and authorizing local facilities to seek out-of-state medical staff to help with the coronavirus surge, which is approaching levels not seen since winter. Despite…

Read More Read More

‘We’re in trouble’: Rural America can’t escape Delta

‘We’re in trouble’: Rural America can’t escape Delta

Politico reports: Steven was finally getting his Covid-19 shot because Mama told him to. And nobody crosses Mama. Standing between the fried bread and slushie stands at the Uinta County fairgrounds in southwestern Wyoming, the 42-year-old in the Trump 2020 hat said “Mama” — his wife — forced him to get vaccinated because of the Delta variant. “The missus is worried about me going out on a trucking trip,” said Steven, who declined to give his last name. “I don’t…

Read More Read More

Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

The New York Times reports: In late July, Andrew Torba, the chief executive of the alternative social network Gab, claimed without evidence that members of the U.S. military who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus would face a court-martial. His post on Gab amassed 10,000 likes and shares. Two weeks earlier, the unfounded claim that at least 45,000 deaths had resulted from Covid-19 vaccines circulated online. Posts with the claim collected nearly 17,000 views on Bitchute, an alternative video…

Read More Read More

The world is nowhere near the end of the pandemic, says epidemiologist Larry Brilliant

The world is nowhere near the end of the pandemic, says epidemiologist Larry Brilliant

CNBC reports: The pandemic is not coming to an end soon — given that only a small proportion of the world population has been vaccinated against Covid-19, a well-known epidemiologist told CNBC. Dr. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was part of the World Health Organization’s team that helped eradicate smallpox, said the delta variant is “maybe the most contagious virus” ever. In recent months, the U.S., India and China, as well as other countries in Europe, Africa and Asia have…

Read More Read More

‘This is really scary’: Kids struggle with long Covid

‘This is really scary’: Kids struggle with long Covid

The New York Times reports: Will Grogan stared blankly at his ninth-grade biology classwork. It was material he had mastered the day before, but it looked utterly unfamiliar. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he blurted. His teacher and classmates reminded him how adeptly he’d answered questions about the topic during the previous class. “I’ve never seen this before,” he insisted, becoming so distressed that the teacher excused him to visit the school nurse. The episode, earlier this year,…

Read More Read More

Too many people are dying right now

Too many people are dying right now

David Wallace-Wells writes: A few weeks ago, in a back-of-the-envelope calculation during an interview with Eric Topol of Scripps, I suggested that because of widespread vaccination of the most vulnerable elderly, we may have reduced overall mortality risk in the country by 90 percent. Topol thought that was a little high, but agreed that vaccines were delivering great protection against death and hospitalization, and while we would likely see some of each during the Delta wave, “it won’t be like…

Read More Read More

Neighbors’ deaths from Covid-19 have an Arkansas town reassessing vaccines

Neighbors’ deaths from Covid-19 have an Arkansas town reassessing vaccines

The Wall Street Journal reports: Michael Lejong fully intended to get vaccinated for Covid-19, his wife said, standing in the pavilion that the prominent architect designed for his hometown. But he was relatively young, very healthy and not overly concerned about the virus. He wanted to get his shots separately from his wife, so he could care for her if she had adverse side effects. She got hers immediately in April and he put his off. In late June, he…

Read More Read More

Republicans treated Covid like a bioweapon. Then it turned against them

Republicans treated Covid like a bioweapon. Then it turned against them

Rebecca Solnit writes: Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and…

Read More Read More

Alarmed Louisiana residents turn to vaccines in ‘darkest days’ of pandemic

Alarmed Louisiana residents turn to vaccines in ‘darkest days’ of pandemic

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…

Read More Read More

I went to a party with 14 other vaccinated people; 11 of us got Covid

I went to a party with 14 other vaccinated people; 11 of us got Covid

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,…

Read More Read More

‘Dark times’: Houston’s fourth Covid wave to be the largest yet, medical leaders predict

‘Dark times’: Houston’s fourth Covid wave to be the largest yet, medical leaders predict

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…

Read More Read More

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped

Will Douglas Heaven writes: When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools. But there was data coming out of China, which had a four-month head start in the race to beat the pandemic. If machine-learning algorithms could be trained on that data to…

Read More Read More

What Delta has changed in the Covid pandemic — and what it hasn’t

What Delta has changed in the Covid pandemic — and what it hasn’t

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,…

Read More Read More