Kommentar | Surely most medical and dental practices are having to spend more money on PPE, and perhaps having to space out patients more and see fewer patients overall. For those of us who are not in financial difficulty due to the pandemic, I'm not sure we should begrudge them the extra costs, though of course there will always be some people who try to cheat the system. In the US, the news in many states, including here in Texas, is that seniors over 65 are now allowed to be on the list for a first shot of the vaccine, but that many or even most are having a very hard time finding a list to get on. Friends of ours (in their mid-90s, which may have had something to do with it) phoned this afternoon to say that they had managed to sign up on the county health department's website and had gotten an appointment to be vaccinated tomorrow! But when my mom went online soon after that, there was no longer any portal to sign up, and the website was back to saying seniors could join the waiting list, now already over 4000 people, to be notified whenever an appointment is available, which they now think might be Thursday. Our large hospital system had previously announced a wait list on its own website, but it too was not even working today. And my mom's doctor's office, within that system, just keeps saying they don't have anything yet. I guess we should just be thankful that we can afford to stay home and wait. I haven't caught up with the end of the last thread, so I don't know if it had something about the outbreak associated with one or more Swiss ski resorts, but anyway, here are some other recent articles. The one about fever being generally beneficial was the most interesting to me. I've had the feeling for months now that the thermometer test at places like the clinic entrance is about as meaningless as sanitizing surfaces several times an hour, and indeed, a trivial occupation for many employees who could possibly be doing something more useful instead, like airing out rooms (if only there were windows that could open), or ensuring that everyone is masking and distancing. _________________ Quarter of Covid hospital admissions in England aged under 55 NHS boss Sir Simon Stevens reveals figure as he tells MPs the virus is spreading out of controlhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/11...The U.S. will require negative virus tests from international passengers arriving by air. Before boarding their flights, all international passengers headed to the United States will first need to show proof of a negative coronavirus test, according to a new federal policy going into effect on Jan. 26. ... The C.D.C. currently recommends that all air travelers, including those flying within the United States, get tested one to three days before travel, and again three to five days after the trip is complete. Many airlines offer optional testing for passengers, but mandate it only when destinations require them to do so. But last week, a group representing major U.S. airlines backed a policy that would require all passengers to get tested.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/world...The Trump administration calls for wider vaccine eligibility, including people 65 and over. ... The announcement, by Health Secretary Alex M. Azar II and other top federal health officials, came amid continuing complaints about the pace of the vaccine rollout. Mr. Azar warned that states will lose their allocations if they don’t use up doses quickly, and that starting in two weeks, how many each state receives will be based on the size of its population of people 65 and older. ... The new distribution plan ... is a reversal for the administration, which had been holding back roughly half of its vaccine supply — millions of vials — to guarantee that second doses would be available. Mr. Azar said the administration always expected to make the shift when it was confident in the supply chain. ... Health officials in Britain are now allowing intervals between the first and second doses of Pfizer’s vaccines of up to 12 weeks. Last week, the World Health Organization said the injections could be given up to six weeks apart. The agency’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization “considers the administration of both doses within 21 to 28 days to be necessary for optimal protection,” said Saad Omer, a vaccine expert at Yale University who helped draft the WHO’s position on the matter.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/world...Imposing strict measures faster could have saved tens of thousands of lives in Europe, a C.D.C. report says. ... To assess how rigorously countries attempted to control the spread of the virus, the C.D.C. researchers used the Oxford Stringency Index, which includes nine policies thought to prevent the virus’s spread. The index is weighted to account for the strictness of each policy, like closing businesses or limiting the size of gatherings. Stringent measures prevented thousands of deaths, despite the severe costs in unemployment and social isolation, the study concluded. In 26 countries, more than 70,000 deaths might have been averted if the most stringent measures had been implemented when the pandemic began. Most of the preventable deaths were in the United Kingdom, France and Spain.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/world...The worst is yet to come for Britain’s battle with the virus, officials warn. ... More people died in Britain last year than in any year in the past century, surpassing even the toll during the 1918 pandemic, the government’s statistical agency reported on Tuesday. ( https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcom... ) And with around 90,000 more deaths than expected, it was the highest number of excess fatalities recorded since World War II. But as terrible as the toll has been, officials are warning that the worst is yet to come. ... ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/world/euro... ) Even now, mask wearing in Britain is far from universal. It is not required outdoors and is not always enforced indoors. ... Ambulance crews are stretched to the breaking point. Hundreds of police and firefighters have been diverted to their ranks to keep the services running. Exhausted health care workers are struggling to cope with the surge in patients at the same time as they are being asked to help carry out the most ambitious vaccination campaign in the nation’s history.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/world...Brazilian researchers find a Chinese vaccine once hailed as a triumph is far less effective than thought. ... Officials at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo said a trial conducted in Brazil showed that the CoronaVac vaccine, manufactured by Beijing-based Sinovac, had an efficacy rate of just over 50 percent. That rate was far lower than the 78 percent efficacy rate announced last week. Officials have since clarified that the higher figure pertained to the protection the vaccine offered against developing symptoms of Covid-19 significant enough to require medical treatment. While officials had asserted last week that the vaccine provided absolute protection against moderate to severe symptoms, they acknowledged on Tuesday that the data underpinning that claim was not statistically significant. The 50 percent efficacy rate is just over the threshold the World Health Organization and the Food and Drug Administration use to assess the efficacy of vaccines.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/world...A new virus variant is found in Japan. ... Another new coronavirus variant has been detected in four people who traveled to Japan from Brazil. Japan’s health ministry said that the people who arrived this month at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport had tested positive for the coronavirus and that it was a separate variant with similarities to those detected in Britain and South Africa. It is also distinct from another variant recently identified in Brazil, according to experts who have analyzed the data.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/12/world...Why Are We So Afraid of Fevers? Under most circumstances, fever is beneficial, reducing the severity of illness and shortening its length. ... Among the many measures my local Y is using to prevent the spread of Covid-19, instant temperatures are taken with a forehead scanner before people can enter the building. Curious to know how “hot” I was one cold, rainy day, I asked the attendant what it registered: 96.2. The last time my temperature was checked in a medical setting it was 97.5. Whatever happened to 98.6, the degrees Fahrenheit that I and most doctors have long considered normal body temperature? As if reading my mind, Dr. Philippa Gordon, a Brooklyn pediatrician, sent me an article, “People’s Bodies Now Run Cooler Than ‘Normal’ — Even in the Bolivian Amazon,” by two anthropologists, Michael Gurven and Thomas Kraft, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As they wrote in The Conversation, “There is no single universal ‘normal’ body temperature for everyone at all times.” Rather, body temperature varies, not only from one person to another, but also over the course of the day ... , and at different ages — lower for old-timers like me. Aha! Furthermore, researchers who took hundreds of thousands of temperature readings from people in Palo Alto, Calif., found that 97.5 was the new normal, down about a degree from what the German physician Dr. Carl Wunderlich established in 1867 in a study of 25,000 people. (Dr. Wunderlich’s research did find that “normal” body temperature ranged from 97.2 to 99.5.) ... In a review written with two colleagues, Elizabeth A. Repasky and Daniel T. Fisher, Dr. Evans showed that under most circumstances, fever is beneficial, reducing the severity of illness and shortening its length. (She emphasized, however, that patients should follow their doctors’ advice about taking medications to reduce fever.) ... For starters, Dr. Evans said, fever activates innate immunity — the mobilization of white blood cells: neutrophils that patrol the body for pathogens and macrophages that gobble them up. Macrophages, in turn, send out an alarm that help is needed, prompting adaptive immunity — T cells and B cells — into action. These cells initiate a specific response to the invader: the production of antibodies days later. “Treating fever can prolong or worsen illness,” Dr. Paul Offit, vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, stated in “Hippocrates Was Right: Treating Fever Is a Bad Idea,” a fascinating YouTube presentation by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/well/live/...Tribal Elders Are Dying From the Pandemic, Causing a Cultural Crisis for American Indians The virus has killed American Indians at especially high rates, robbing tribes of precious bonds and repositories of language and tradition.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/tribal-... |
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