Category: COVID
The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear
The Atlantic/by Ed Yong – Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of “semantics,” but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died […]
Sep 30, 2022
Nature – The Omicron variant has been associated with reduced vaccine effectiveness (VE) against mild disease with rapid waning. Meanwhile Omicron has also been associated with milder disease. Protection against severe disease has been substantially higher than protection against infection with previous variants. We used a test-negative case-control design to estimate VE against hospitalisation with […]
Sep 30, 2022
What are the differences in transmissibility between novel and emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants?
Medical News – Currently, the majority of reporting of secondary attack rates (SAR) in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have defined secondary infection as recent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positivity in a contact who is displaying symptoms. By only including those who are symptomatic while having detectable viral ribonucleic acid (RNA) during sampling, this method undercounts […]
Sep 30, 2022
Two COVID boosters effective against severe Omicron in nursing homes
CIDRAP – A study today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report shows that US nursing home residents who received a second mRNA COVID-19 vaccine booster dose 60 days earlier were 26% protected against Omicron infection, 74% against hospitalization or death, and 90% against death alone. A team led by researchers from the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Providence, Rhode […]
Sep 29, 2022
COVID-19 Cases on the Rise in the UK. Is the US Next?
Newsmax – The recent rise in coronavirus cases in the U.K. isn’t due to a new variant say experts, but rather a signal that the predicted fall surge is upon us. Experts calculated COVID-19 cases would rise in October and continue to increase during the winter as people spend more time indoors. According to the Zoe […]
Sep 29, 2022
New Guidance Focuses on Long COVID in Kids
Med Page Today – When it comes to long COVID in children, physicians should focus on mitigating symptoms and encouraging multidisciplinary rehabilitation designed to improve age-appropriate development, according to new clinical guidance from the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (AAPM&R). Long COVID can present differently in children, so standard practices for managing the […]
Sep 29, 2022
Nature – Understanding the epidemic growth of the novel SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant is critical for public health. We compared the ten-day secondary attack rate (SAR) of the Omicron and Delta variants in households using Norwegian contact tracing data, December 2021 – January 2022. Omicron SAR was higher than Delta, with a relative risk (RR) of […]
Sep 29, 2022
Translational Research and Clinical Interventions – Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused >3.5 million deaths worldwide and affected >160 million people. At least twice as many have been infected but remained asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic. COVID-19 includes central nervous system manifestations mediated by inflammation and cerebrovascular, anoxic, and/or viral neurotoxicity mechanisms. More than one third […]
Sep 29, 2022
Study aims to understand how SARS-CoV-2 affects the brain long-term
Medical News – In addition to the lungs, COVID-19 also affects the central nervous system (CNS) through anoxic, viral neurotoxicity, inflammation, and cerebrovascular mechanisms. As a result, about one-third of COVID-19 patients develop different neurologic problems, such as seizures, loss of sense of smell or taste, and stroke. Related study in Translational Research and Clinical Interventions
Sep 29, 2022
The Lancet – Singapore offered the BNT162b2 vaccine (tozinameran; Pfizer-BioNTech) to adolescents aged 12–17 years in May 18, 2021, and extended booster vaccines to this group in Jan 21, 2022. Literature on the effectiveness of primary series and booster vaccination among adolescents is scarce outside of Europe and North America. We aimed to determine primary […]
Sep 29, 2022