Tag: coronavirus

Coronavirus infections dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not, Post analysis finds

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States with higher vaccination rates now have markedly fewer coronavirus cases, as infections are dropping in places where most residents have been immunized and are rising in many places people have not, a Washington Post analysis has found.

States with lower vaccination also have significantly higher hospitalization rates, The Post found. Poorly vaccinated communities have not been reporting catastrophic conditions. Instead, they are usually seeing new infections holding steady or increasing without overwhelming local hospitals.

As recently as 10 days ago, vaccination rates did not predict a difference in coronavirus cases, but immunization rates have diverged, and case counts in the highly vaccinated states are dropping quickly. Continue reading.

Top CDC official warns US not ready for next pandemic

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The No. 2 official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that without consistent, long-term funding for public health, the U.S. won’t be any better prepared for the next pandemic.

In an interview with The Hill on Wednesday, Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director, said the U.S. was not prepared for COVID-19 due to years of inadequate investment in public health infrastructure.

Emergency funding has helped public health agencies fight back against the coronavirus, Schuchat said, but unless that level of spending can be sustained, the country is in danger of repeating the same mistakes. Continue reading.

Only in our anti-truth hellscape could Anthony Fauci become a supervillain

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Right-wing commentators are pretending that thousands of newly released emails from Anthony S. Fauci represent some kind of smoking gun against the government’s top infectious-disease expert, whom they have recently decided to try to destroy.

I haven’t been nearly as excited by the emails, which are mostly full of mundane correspondence. But there’s at least one line in them that stands out.

“I genuflect to no one but science and always, always speak my mind when it comes to public health,” the normally even-tempered scientist wrote in March of last year, to an epidemiologist who had accused a number of public health officials of appeasing the science-challenged President Donald Trump. Continue reading.

Meet the influencers making millions by dealing doubt about the coronavirus vaccines.

Heather Simpson never thought to question vaccines. Her parents vaccinated her when she was a child, and she got tetanus and flu shots as an adult.

But when she and her husband were thinking about starting a family, she saw an ad for the documentary series “The Truth about Vaccines,” and “fear crept in,” she later wrote.

Simpson paid about $200 for the series, which taught her the tenets of vaccine skepticism.  Continue reading.

Here’s Who Got Rich From Trump’s Disastrous Response To The Pandemic

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Now that we’re all unmasking and the economy seems set to roar into the 2020s, what will we remember about how disastrously, how malignantly, the Trump administration behaved as the pandemic took hold? And will anyone be held to account for it?

The instinct to forget pandemics, as I’ve pointed out when it came to the 1918 “Spanish flu,” has historically been strong indeed. In these years, the urge to forget official malfeasance and move on has, it turns out, been at least as strong. Washington’s failure to investigate and bring to account those who led the nation and ultimately the world into the folly of the Iraq War may be the most egregious recent example of this.

In the end, that’s why I wrote my new book Virus — to memorialize a clear and accessible historical record of the deliberate and deadly decision-making that swept us all into a kind of hell. I had the urge to try to stop what happened to us from being instantly buried in the next round of daily reporting or, as appears likely now, relegated to the occasional voluminous government or foundation report on how to do things better. Continue reading.

Many long-haul COVID-19 patients report improvement after vaccination, surprising experts

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Some plagued by COVID-19 symptoms months later are helped, while others are not 

CHICAGO – Wendy French of northwest suburban Lake in the Hills used to run 10 miles a day several times a week before she caught COVID-19 in September, which left her fatigued and suffering from a variety of symptoms for months after the virus was supposedly gone.

The previously healthy 45-year-old stopped running and even began dreading typical household chores such as doing laundry, because it required standing up for so long that she grew tired.

But after French got her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in mid-April, she described feeling healthy for the first time in more than seven months. The second dose in May brought greater improvement. Continue reading.

We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature.

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Labs like the one in Wuhan are essential to preparing for future pandemics

From the moment the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China, scientists and the broader public have sought answers to some fundamental questions: Where did this virus come from? How did the pandemic start? From the early days, experts have considered two possibilities. Either the virus somehow escaped from a laboratory, perhaps the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or, like countless viruses throughout history, it arrived through zoonotic spillover, jumping from animals to humans.

More than a year later, we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though governments and news organizations have focused more attention recently on the notion that the virus leaked from a lab, it’s unclear that we’ll ever identify a theory that satisfies everyone as to how SARS-CoV-2 emerged. Ironically, given the recent prominence of the lab escape theory, the questions the world wants answered about the virus — and the astonishingly fast development of the vaccines that can quash the pandemic — depend entirely on research conducted in labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and across the world over the past several decades. This fundamental research underpins our ability to prepare for and respond to pandemics. We need to know what’s out there and what kind of viral threats we face. The only way to do that is to go where the viruses are, with our colleagues who are already there.

More than a year later, we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though governments and news organizations have focused more attention recently on the notion that the virus leaked from a lab, it’s unclear that we’ll ever identify a theory that satisfies everyone as to how SARS-CoV-2 emerged. Ironically, given the recent prominence of the lab escape theory, the questions the world wants answered about the virus — and the astonishingly fast development of the vaccines that can quash the pandemic — depend entirely on research conducted in labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and across the world over the past several decades. This fundamental research underpins our ability to prepare for and respond to pandemics. We need to know what’s out there and what kind of viral threats we face. The only way to do that is to go where the viruses are, with our colleagues who are already there. Continue reading.

Why America failed to control the pandemic

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In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright explores the missed opportunities and biggest mistakes.

It’s hard to read Lawrence Wright’s “The Plague Year,” his nonfiction account of how American scientists, doctors, politicians and citizens struggled to confront the coronavirus pandemic, and not think of his April 2020 novel, “The End of October,” which covers, well, much the same thing. In that fictional tale of a deadly virus spreading throughout the globe, the White House oscillates between confusion and indifference, conspiracy theories abound, health officials battle for influence, and economies melt down while self-styled patriots resist lockdowns. Oh, and a hapless president refuses to take responsibility and outsources management of the emergency to the former talk radio host turned vice president — like that would ever happen.

But as I worked my way through “The Plague Year,” an older book of Wright’s came to mind more often: “The Looming Tower,” a masterful journey down the roads that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. There, too, a gathering menace was ignored, experts were sidelined, and action was deferred until an unfathomable calamity was upon us. “The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was that no one took it seriously,” Wright wrote in that 2006 book. “It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” It was a peril that seemed unthinkable, “up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageantry of history.”

“The Plague Year” does not reach the heights of “The Looming Tower” — few books do — but a global pandemic is an even deadlier threat in that savage pageantry of history, one for which the United States could have been far better prepared. Wright’s new book is most effective at detailing the missed opportunities to keep things from going so wrong. “Tens of thousands of people were bound to perish,” he writes. “But perhaps not hundreds of thousands.” This is the story of how we got that extra zero. Continue reading.

Here’s What We Know (And Don’t Know) About Long COVID

While most individuals sickened by COVID-19 will recover, other ‘long-haulers’ may still suffer from symptoms months after their infection.

Even as more people get vaccinated and the U.S. inches back toward normalcy, long COVID isn’t going away anytime soon. The post-COVID condition, recognized by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is defined by a wide-range of symptoms of illness weeks or months after an initial coronavirus infection. In the past year, research has grown in this area and patients with long COVID have formed support groups and lobbied on Capitol Hill for answers and funding for more research.

Here’s what to know:

What is long COVID? 

Long COVID is a condition that occurs when individuals sickened by COVID-19 don’t recover fully after a few weeks or manage to recover, only to have symptoms reappear weeks or months later. It can affect anyone who has had COVID, even if they had mild or no symptoms. Continue reading.

Stimulus Checks Substantially Reduced Hardship, Study Shows

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Researchers found that sharp declines in food shortages, financial instability and anxiety coincided with the two most recent rounds of payments.

WASHINGTON — Julesa Webb resumed an old habit: serving her children three meals a day. Corrine Young paid the water bill and stopped bathing at her neighbor’s apartment. Chenetta Ray cried, thanked Jesus and rushed to spend the money on a medical test to treat her cancer.

In offering most Americans two more rounds of stimulus checks in the past six months, totaling $2,000 a person, the federal government effectively conducted a huge experiment in safety net policy. Supporters said a quick, broad outpouring of cash would ease the economic hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Skeptics called the policy wasteful and expensive.

The aid followed an earlier round of stimulus checks, sent a year ago, and the results are being scrutinized for lessons on how to help the needy in less extraordinary times. Continue reading.