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Category: Health

The medical system should have been prepared for long Covid

The medical system should have been prepared for long Covid

Vice reports: Last March, Lisa O’Brien began experiencing mild symptoms of what she thought might be COVID-19: scratchy throat, body aches, fatigue. But with no fever and just a hint of a cough, she decided to wait on a COVID test. Then new symptoms appeared, including chills and shortness of breath. After two weeks they were alarming enough for her to get tested: Negative. But the negative result didn’t resolve her health problems. Four weeks out, O’Brien was barely able…

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Rich countries signed away a chance to vaccinate the world

Rich countries signed away a chance to vaccinate the world

The New York Times reports: In the coming days, a patent will finally be issued on a five-year-old invention, a feat of molecular engineering that is at the heart of at least five major Covid-19 vaccines. And the United States government will control that patent. The new patent presents an opportunity — and some argue the last best chance — to exact leverage over the drug companies producing the vaccines and pressure them to expand access to less affluent countries….

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Where Europe went wrong in its vaccine rollout, and why

Where Europe went wrong in its vaccine rollout, and why

The New York Times reports: The calls began in December, as the United States prepared to administer its first batches of Covid-19 vaccine. Even then, it was clear that the European Union was a few weeks behind, and its leaders wanted to know what they could learn from their American counterparts. The questions were the same, from President Emmanuel Macron of France, President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, and Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium….

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Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

Nature reports: As COVID-19 vaccination rates pick up around the world, people have reasonably begun to ask: how much longer will this pandemic last? It’s an issue surrounded with uncertainties. But the once-popular idea that enough people will eventually gain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 to block most transmission — a ‘herd-immunity threshold’ — is starting to look unlikely. That threshold is generally achievable only with high vaccination rates, and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse,…

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Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies

Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies

Antibodies (white) binding to a coronavirus (red and orange). Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock By Sarah L Caddy, University of Cambridge and Meng Wang, University of Cambridge The emergence of “variants of concern” has raised questions about our long-term immunity to the coronavirus. Will the antibodies we make after being infected with or vaccinated against the dominant lineage, called D614G, protect us against future viral variants? To answer this question, scientists have been examining how our antibody responses to the coronavirus develop over…

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U.S. to send millions of vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada

U.S. to send millions of vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada

The New York Times reports: The United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, the White House said Thursday, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the United States was planning to share 2.5 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada,…

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Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science

Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science

The New York Times reports: After days of touting the safety of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, took a call from his German counterpart on Monday and learned that Germany was concerned enough about a few cases of serious blood clots among some who had received the vaccine to suspend its use. For Italy and its neighbors, that call could not have come at a worse time. Their vaccine rollouts were already lagging because of shortages, and they…

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Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines

Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines

The Washington Post reports: Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for eight months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain. But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. Thirty-six hours after her second shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned. “I really felt back to myself,” the 34-year-old Brooklyn therapist said, “to a way that I didn’t think was…

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How did so many rich countries get Covid so wrong? How did others get it so right?

How did so many rich countries get Covid so wrong? How did others get it so right?

David Wallace-Wells writes: “I’m bashing my head as well,” says Devi Sridhar. It is January 2021, and the Florida-born, Edinburgh-based professor of global public health is looking back on the pandemic year, marveling and despairing at opportunities lost. From early last winter, Sridhar has been among the most vocal critics of the shambolic U.K. response — urging categorically more pandemic vigilance, which she believed might have yielded a total triumph over the disease, a cause that has picked up the…

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Why the pandemic experts failed

Why the pandemic experts failed

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal write: A few minutes before midnight on March 4, 2020, the two of us emailed every U.S. state and the District of Columbia with a simple question: How many people have been tested in your state, total, for the coronavirus? By then, about 150 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, and 11 had died of the disease. Yet the CDC had stopped publicly reporting the number of Americans tested for…

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A year in America’s first Covid epicenter

A year in America’s first Covid epicenter

James Ross Gardner writes: America’s coronavirus nightmare began on the last day of February, in a leap year. On that scarce, quadrennial appendage of a date, the twenty-ninth, we learned of what was then believed to be the first Covid-19 fatality in the U.S. A man in his fifties had died of the virus at a Kirkland hospital, about ten miles northeast of Seattle. Though there had been a few other, as yet non-fatal cases, the death marked an obvious…

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Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

Traditional healers are preserving their knowledge, and with it, the biodiversity of Brazil’s savanna

Sarah Sax writes: Since Lucely Pio was a little girl, she has been collecting medicinal plants in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna. At 5, she walked through the grasslands and forests of the Cerrado with her grandmother, a midwife and healer, who taught her about where to find and how to harvest the thousands of different plants that only existed there. When picking leaves and flowers, they would arise in the dark hours of the morning, before the sun came…

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‘Covid is taking over’: Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe

‘Covid is taking over’: Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe

The Guardian reports: It was midway through February when André Machado realized Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe was racing into a bewildering and remorseless new phase. “The floodgates opened and the water came gushing out,” recalled the infectious disease specialist from the Our Lady of the Conception hospital in Porto Alegre, one of the largest cities in southern Brazil. Since then, Machado’s hospital, like health centres up and down the country, has been engulfed by a deluge of jittery, gasping patients –…

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Europe confronts a Covid-19 rebound as vaccine hopes recede

Europe confronts a Covid-19 rebound as vaccine hopes recede

The Wall Street Journal reports: The European Union’s fight against Covid-19 is stuck in midwinter, even as spring and vaccinations spur hope of improvement in the U.S. and U.K. Contagion is rising again in much of the EU, despite months of restrictions on daily life, as more-virulent virus strains outpace vaccinations. A mood of gloom and frustration is settling on the continent, and governments are caught between their promises of progress and the bleak epidemiological reality. Virus infections and deaths…

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The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

Akshat Rathi writes: The exuberance of vaccine rollouts in rich countries is masking an ugly reality. Greenhouse gas emissions are already creeping higher than before the pandemic as economies come back to life. That shouldn’t be a total surprise. Even as governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars to aid their nation’s recoveries, only a tiny fraction has gone toward initiatives that would also cut pollution. Many politicians, including U.S. president Joe Biden, have adopted the phrase “build…

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Long Covid is raising awareness about pervasive undercared-for chronic suffering

Long Covid is raising awareness about pervasive undercared-for chronic suffering

Vox reports: Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor in New York City, was no stranger to dangerous viruses when a brush with one landed him in Bellevue Hospital for 19 days. But it was only after he was discharged, and declared virus-free, that the really bizarre symptoms set in. Back at home, he noticed he couldn’t taste anything for several days. For months, he was tired all the time and his joints felt heavy and painful. When he woke…

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