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Category: Health

As virus variants spread, ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’

As virus variants spread, ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’

The New York Times reports: As a dangerous variant of the coronavirus first discovered in South Africa sickens and kills thousands across the country, Jan Matsena has shown up every day to stock the shelves at a Cape Town supermarket, terrified that he, too, will catch it. A neighbor died in December, then a co-worker in January. Now Mr. Matsena is waiting for a vaccine so he can return home to his township and hold his baby daughter again. But…

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Trump officials actively lobbied to deny states money for vaccine rollout last fall

Trump officials actively lobbied to deny states money for vaccine rollout last fall

STAT reports: Top Trump officials actively lobbied Congress to deny state governments any extra funding for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout last fall — despite frantic warnings from state officials that they didn’t have the money they needed to ramp up a massive vaccination operation. The push, described to STAT by congressional aides in both parties and openly acknowledged by one of the Trump officials, came from multiple high-ranking Trump health officials in repeated meetings with legislators. Without the extra money,…

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‘It’s a mess’: Biden’s first 10 days dominated by vaccine mysteries

‘It’s a mess’: Biden’s first 10 days dominated by vaccine mysteries

Politico reports: Joe Biden promised he’d bring in a competent, tested team to run the pandemic response, set ambitious vaccination targets and impose strict public health guidelines. His team arrived at the White House with a 200-page response plan ready to roll out. But instead, they have spent much of the last week trying to wrap their hands around the mushrooming crisis — a process officials acknowledge has been humbling, and triggered a concerted effort to temper expectations about how…

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Racial disparity seen in U.S. vaccination drive

Racial disparity seen in U.S. vaccination drive

The Associated Press reports: A racial gap has opened up in the nation’s COVID-19 vaccination drive, with Black Americans in many places lagging behind whites in receiving shots, an Associated Press analysis shows. An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through Jan. 25 found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below. That is true even though…

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Covid-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning?

Covid-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning?

Nature reports: When Emanuel Goldman went to his local New Jersey supermarket last March, he didn’t take any chances. Reports of COVID-19 cases were popping up across the United States, so he donned gloves to avoid contaminated surfaces and wore a mask to prevent him inhaling tiny virus-laden droplets from fellow shoppers. Neither gloves nor masks were recommended at the time. Then, at the end of March, a laboratory study showed that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 can persist on plastic and…

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From Michael Lewis, a ‘superhero story’ about the pandemic

From Michael Lewis, a ‘superhero story’ about the pandemic

Alexandra Alter writes: In his 2018 book, “The Fifth Risk,” Michael Lewis posed an unsettling question: What if the government agencies tasked with managing catastrophes — natural disasters, climate change-induced food shortages, epidemics — failed to prepare for some unanticipated, looming crisis? “Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions,” he wrote. Last year,…

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The hard lessons of modeling the Covid-19 pandemic

The hard lessons of modeling the Covid-19 pandemic

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: For a few months last year, Nigel Goldenfeld and Sergei Maslov, a pair of physicists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, were unlikely celebrities in their state’s COVID-19 pandemic response — that is, until everything went wrong. Their typical areas of research include building models for condensed matter physics, viral evolution and population dynamics, not epidemiology or public health. But like many scientists from diverse fields, they joined the COVID-19 modeling effort in March, when the response…

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N.Y. severely undercounted virus deaths in nursing homes, report says

N.Y. severely undercounted virus deaths in nursing homes, report says

The New York Times reports: For most of the past year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has tried to brush away a persistent criticism that undermined his national image as the man who led New York through the pandemic: that his policies had allowed thousands of nursing home residents to die of the virus. But Mr. Cuomo was dealt a blow when the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, reported on Thursday morning that Mr. Cuomo’s administration had undercounted coronavirus-related…

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The day we let Covid-19 spin out of control

The day we let Covid-19 spin out of control

Daniel P. Oran and Eric J. Topol write: Jan. 24 marks the one-year anniversary of a momentous but largely unnoticed event in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic: the first published report of an individual infected with the novel coronavirus who never developed symptoms. This early confirmation of asymptomatic infection should have set off alarm bells and profoundly altered our response to the gathering storm. But it did not. One year later we are still paying the price for this…

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U.S. suffers sharpest rise in poverty rate in more than 50 years

U.S. suffers sharpest rise in poverty rate in more than 50 years

Bloomberg reports: The end of 2020 brought the sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s, according to a study released Monday. Economists Bruce Meyer, from the University of Chicago, and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame found that the poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points during the latter half of 2020 as the U.S. continued to suffer the economic impacts from Covid-19. That percentage-point rise is nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty…

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Asia’s Covid recovery: Vietnam’s breakout moment

Asia’s Covid recovery: Vietnam’s breakout moment

Nikkei Asia reports: On a recent Friday in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, friends kissed hello as they entered the Racha Room, a tunnel-shaped bar lit by warm, ochre lamps. Inside, patrons shouted over booming classic rock and sipped from each other’s Old-Fashioneds. It was a scene to strike a chill into the hearts of the COVID-conscious. A standing-room-only venue, windows clamped shut against the night air, and not a mask in sight. It might have been a glimpse into…

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‘Worse than we imagined’: Team Trump left Biden a Covid nightmare

‘Worse than we imagined’: Team Trump left Biden a Covid nightmare

The Daily Beast reports: Twelve minutes before noon on Wednesday, President Joe Biden was sworn into office as the nation’s 46th president. Seven hours later, the United States reported more than 4,409 new deaths from the novel coronavirus, according to data collected by the COVID-19 Tracking Project. The Biden administration came into power with purpose and an extensive agenda to combat the coronavirus pandemic, but purpose and planning only gets you so far—particularly when the president’s team is only just…

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Covid vaccine: WHO warns of ‘catastrophic moral failure’

Covid vaccine: WHO warns of ‘catastrophic moral failure’

BBC News reports: The world faces a “catastrophic moral failure” because of unequal Covid vaccine policies, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was not fair for younger, healthy people in richer nations to get injections before vulnerable people in poorer states. He said over 39 million vaccine doses had been given in 49 richer states – but one poor nation had only 25 doses. Meanwhile, both the WHO and China were…

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Emerging coronavirus variants may pose challenges to vaccines

Emerging coronavirus variants may pose challenges to vaccines

The New York Times reports: The steady drumbeat of reports about new variants of the coronavirus — first in Britain, then in South Africa, Brazil and the United States — have brought a new worry: Will vaccines protect against these altered versions of the virus? The answer so far is yes, several experts said in interviews. But two small new studies, posted online Tuesday night, suggest that some variants may pose unexpected challenges to the immune system, even in those…

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U.S. life expectancy drops dramatically due to Covid-19

U.S. life expectancy drops dramatically due to Covid-19

Live Science reports: U.S. life expectancy just dropped by more than a year — the largest decline in decades — as a result of the sheer number of deaths from COVID-19, according to estimates from a new study. The study researchers project that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the average U.S. life expectancy in 2020 will drop by 1.13 years, bringing it to 77.48 years, according to the study, published Thursday (Jan. 14) in the journal Proceedings of the National…

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Citizens from around the world share their coronavirus stories

Citizens from around the world share their coronavirus stories

Dhruv Khullar writes: Kirtiraj Rana grew up in Rajamunda, a village of fewer than a thousand people in the northeastern Indian state of Odisha, which faces the Bay of Bengal. A migrant worker, he dropped out of school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family—his parents, a brother who also dropped out, and a sister who received only a fifth-grade education. Odisha’s farming revolves around its brief rainy season. Unable to find work in the off…

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