Covid-19 vs. Omicron: a plea for help from President Biden during the White House effort to close the racial gap in vaccinations

By February 2021, he was able to inform the Biden administration of the lack of vaccines at his clinic. His plea for help arrived when the White House tried to narrow the racial gap in vaccinations. “The natural social history of many diseases is that they tend toward inequality, unless you intentionally combat it,” said Dr. Cameron Webb, a pandemic adviser in the Biden administration.

The Trump administration seemed intent on leaving it up to the states. President Biden made closing the gaps a priority. “We built our Covid response with equity at the heart of it,” Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, told me.

A new Covid-19 wave appears to be brewing in Europe as cooler weather arrives, with public health experts warning that vaccine fatigue and confusion over types of shots available will likely limit booster uptake.

The newer Omicron subvariants are gaining ground despite the fact that BA.4/5 is still behind the majority of infections. The World Health Organization said this week hundreds of new forms of Omicron are being tracked by scientists.

WHO data released late on Wednesday showed that cases in the European Union reached 1.5 million last week, up 8% from the prior week, despite a dramatic fall in testing. Case numbers are declining around the world.

In Italy, the week ending October 4th saw a 32% increase in admissions for Covid-19 with symptoms and a 21% rise in intensive care admissions.

Omicron-adapted vaccines in Europe and the lack of public awareness in the aftermath of the recent outbreak of Covid-19 and the influenza pandemic

Omicron-adapted vaccines have begun to be distributed in Europe as of September, with two types of shots addressing the BA.1 and the BA.4/5 subvariants made available alongside existing first-generation vaccines. In Britain, only the BA.1-tailored shots have been given the green light.

European and British officials have endorsed the latest boosters only for a select groups of people, including the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Complicating matters further is the “choice” of vaccine as a booster, which will likely add to confusion, public health experts said.

A professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the lack of major publicity campaigns is likely to reduce the number of people who are willing to take a risk. “So on balance I fear that uptake will be quite a bit lower.”

It has been suggested that a large percentage of the population may have had a Covid episode in recent months.

The number of weekly vaccine doses in the EU were between 1 million and 1.4 million in September, compared with 10 million per week during the year-ago period, according to ECDC data.

“There must be some complacency in that life seems to have gone back to normal – at least with regards Covid and people now have other financial and war-related worries,” said Adam Finn, chair of ETAGE, an expert group advising the WHO on vaccine preventable diseases in Europe.

Italy’s Gimbe science foundation said the government, soon to be replaced after an election, was ill prepared for the autumn-winter season, and highlighted that a publication on the government’s management of the pandemic had been blocked.

British officials last week warned that renewed flu and Covid-19 would cause a lot of strain on the National Health Service.

Every day is different: The morning before the train ride: a new perspective on work safety, health care and the workplace environment in the 21st century

First, a programming note: This is my last newsletter before starting a book leave. I will return in late January. I look forward to reading the writing of the other Times journalists, until then, The Morning is written by them.

A large portion of deaths are preventable with Paxlovid alone, according to the White House Covid response coordinators. daily deaths could fall to fifty per day from 400 per day if every American 50 and over received a course of Paxlovid or a treatment known as monoclonal antibodies from Covid.

The country’s main public health agency acknowledges that it lacks a data infrastructure with clear standards that can accept and integrate information crucial to monitoring and fighting public health threats. This includes information from local and state health agencies and health systems tracking in near real time the actual number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, stratified by vaccination status, age, community and race. If the system is not fixed, public health officials will be blind in the next emergency.

Improving worker safety has been another missed opportunity. Everyone in a workplace gets a bonus if their workmates are feeling sick. This will happen only if the culture around sickness and the provision of paid sick leave for workers in the gig economy change. Paid sick leave is particularly important in the health care, hospitality, public transportation and retail industries, where infections can most easily spread. But many employers still do not provide paid sick and family medical leave, and Congress has refused to pass legislation requiring it, despite the mountain of data on workplace spread from coronavirus and other respiratory infections.

If proactive outreach is done in future emergencies, it will be worth it. If these underserved groups are left out, there will be widening of discrepancies in care and outcomes.

The Seasonal Flu and Respiratory Syncytial Virus: Implications for Children and Adults in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom

The production capacity of domestic companies is yet to be ensured and the supply chain of raw materials for personal protective equipment is much less than pharmaceuticals.

Nor has it fixed the system of clinical research, which proved slow in generating useful results on a range of concerns, such as optimal vaccine schedules and the evaluation of drugs to lessen Covid symptoms and prevent hospitalizations. The reliable clinical results proving the benefits of steroids and the problems with hydroxychloroquine tended to come from Britain and other countries. Yet the National Institutes of Health have not revamped how they organize, fund and reward scientists for participating in large, pragmatic clinical trials, especially but not only in public health emergencies.

The spread of other respiratory illnesses was effectively blunted by restrictions on the spread of COVID-19. The seasonal flu and respiratory syncytial virus, also known as the flu, are dangerous for children and adults, but they are almost gone in 2020 and early 2021. The flu hospitalization rate in the United States is higher this time of year than it has been in the last five years, due in part to the surge of the Respiratory syncytial virus in the Northern Hemisphere. Why exactly are these surges happening now? What about the winters in the future?

Scott Hensley, an immunologist with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, says that the viruses are coming back with a vengeance. “It is possible that this year will be sort of the granddaddy of them all in terms of flu.”

Hensley says that this is because the population “is more immunologically naive than what we would expect in most years”. Normally, children get infected by their second birthday. Now, “you’re going to end up having kids that are three, four years of age right now who have never seen RSV”.

Decreased immunity for older children or adults who have previously been exposed is a problem. In the absence of exposure to a virus, antibody levels decline. In a typical year, “we might get exposed to a small bit of virus and your body fights it off”, says John Tregoning, an immunologist at Imperial College London. But “that kind of asymptomatic boosting maybe hasn’t happened in the last few years”.

There are many researchers that don’t know about seasonal viruses. For example, COVID-19 restrictions seemed to have little impact on one type of seasonal virus, rhinoviruses — which are the most common cause of colds — for reasons that aren’t entirely understood. That might be because of their hardiness, Miller says. They can persist for longer in the environment, because they are less prone to desiccation.

Another open question is how these viruses compete and interfere with one another. A strong innate immune response may be prevented from occurring when there is a single virus. Hensley points out that last year’s first wave of influenza declined soon after the Omicron surge began. Perhaps Omicron infection provided some short-lived protection against flu. People were convinced to mask up due to the Omicron surge.

Can We Live in the Age of the New Millenium? The Case of Covid 19-Death in the United States and a “Pithemic of the Old”

Pitzer expects that next year’s peaks and valleys might look much more like those that occurred before the pandemic. She isn’t placing any bets. She predicts this winter will be the last unusual winter.

That is a very good deal, of course. But it also means that, given the underlying age skew, a twice-boosted 87-year-old shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. The current toll of American deaths is accurately described as an example of a “pithemic of the old.”

One answer is that we don’t want to see those deaths in the news because a baseline of hundreds of deaths a day is a kind of background noise. 300 Americans die from Covid 19- every day at a rough pace of about 100,000 per year, making it the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.

When those diminishing the threat pointed to the disproportionate risks to older people as a reason to not worry aboutlimiting spread, many of us were turned off. The country as a whole may begeist if there is not much concern for the wellbeing of elderly people. The whole thing seemed more taboo to the rest of us than it might have been otherwise, as a result of the comments made by the conservative commentator and the lieutenant governor in Texas.