AP -
December 24, 2020
Millions of Americans are traveling ahead of Christmas and New Year’s, despite pleas from public health experts that they stay home to avoid fueling the raging coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 320,000 nationwide. Many people at airports this week thought long and hard about whether to go somewhere and found a way to rationalize it.
Reuters -
December 24, 2020
President Donald Trump’s threat late Tuesday to veto the $892 billion coronavirus relief bill approved by Congress this week may delay aid for millions of families on the cusp of eviction and about to lose unemployment benefits. … Trump said the bill, which passed Congress Monday night, did not provide enough support for small businesses, and he asked Congress to increase stimulus checks to individuals to $2,000, instead of the “ridiculously low” $600 in the bill.
Kaiser Health News -
December 24, 2020
[Dire] PPE shortages. Limited COVID tests. Sparse tracking of viral spread. Layers of flawed policies handed down by health care executives and politicians, and lax enforcement by government regulators. All of those breakdowns, across cities and states, have contributed to the deaths of more than 2,900 health care workers, a nine-month investigation by over 70 reporters at KHN and The Guardian has found. This number is far higher than that reported by the U.S. government, which does not have a comprehensive national count of health care workers who’ve died of COVID-19.
AP -
December 24, 2020
Two new studies give encouraging evidence that having COVID-19 may offer some protection against future infections. Researchers found that people who made antibodies to the coronavirus were much less likely to test positive again for up to six months and maybe longer. The results bode well for vaccines, which provoke the immune system to make antibodies — substances that attach to a virus and help it be eliminated.
HealthDay -
December 24, 2020
A new study looked at the impact of the pandemic on sleep and mental health among the general population and health care workers by analyzing 55 studies involving nearly 190,000 people worldwide. For the general population, depression grew almost 16%, anxiety was up more than 15%, PTSD grew nearly 22%, psychological distress increased more than 13%, and insomnia grew nearly 24%. But among health care workers, insomnia rates were more than two times higher.
CBS News -
December 24, 2020
A new variant of the coronavirus, which appears to be more transmissible, has been discovered in South Africa and is being blamed for a new surge in COVID-19 cases there. Though it emerged independently, it features a similar mutation to the new variant discovered in the United Kingdom that scientists say is more transmissible, prompting many nations to ban travel from Britain.
Reuters -
December 24, 2020
As of Wednesday morning, only 1 million shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been given, about one-third of the first shipment sent last week. Over 9.5 million doses of vaccines, including Moderna’s, have now been sent to states, according to the CDC. While hospitals have started giving out Moderna’s vaccine, the CDC has not yet reported that data and there may be a lag in reporting shots given of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
AP -
December 23, 2020
The drugmakers said Wednesday that they expect to deliver all the doses by July 31. Pfizer already has a contract to supply the government with 100 million doses of its vaccine, which requires two doses per patient. Under the nearly $2 billion deal announced Wednesday, the companies will deliver at least 70 million of the additional doses by June 30, with the remaining 30 million doses to be delivered no later than July 31. The government also has the option to acquire up to an additional 400 million doses.
CNBC -
December 23, 2020
President Donald Trump, in a stunning Tuesday night tweet, called the $900 billion Covid relief bill passed by Congress an unsuitable “disgrace” and urged lawmakers to make a number of changes to the measure, including bigger direct payments to individuals and families. The president’s tweet, which included a video of him discussing what he considers the bill’s many flaws, came less than 24 hours after the Senate passed the measure.
AP -
December 23, 2020
Final mortality data for this year will not be available for months. But preliminary numbers suggest that the United States is on track to see more than 3.2 million deaths this year, or at least 400,000 more than in 2019. U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted. That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
CNN -
December 23, 2020
The US reported over 195,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Tuesday, putting the seven-day average of daily new cases at just over 215,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. That is only slightly changed from the number of newly infected back on December 10, when the seven-day average of daily new cases reached 212,000, which suggests that new cases may have flattened at a high daily average.
AP -
December 23, 2020
With so many states seeing a flood of coronavirus patients, U.S. hospitals are again worried about finding enough medical workers to meet demand just as infections from the holiday season threaten to add to the burden on American health care. California, which is enduring by far its worst spike in cases and hospitalizations, is reaching out to places like Australia and Taiwan to fill the need for 3,000 temporary medical workers, particularly nurses trained in critical care.
CNN -
December 23, 2020
Worobey and Bedford say they estimate the virus would have arrived in the US in mid-November. Both scientists, as well as others around the world, have scoured genetic sequences of coronavirus in the United States to see if any match up with the UK variant. So far, they haven't found any, but they say that's likely because the US surveillance system isn't catching them. Health officials agree. "You really need to assume that it's here already, and certainly is not the dominant strain, but I would not be surprised at all if it is already here,"[said] Dr. Anthony Fauci…
HealthDay -
December 23, 2020
Pregnant women who are infected with COVID-19 during their third trimester appear unlikely to pass the infection to their fetuses. This study was conducted between April and June 2020 among women who came to one of three Boston area hospitals either for treatment of COVID-19 or for delivery. None of the newborns of the 127 pregnant women, including 64 who had varying levels of illness from the virus, tested positive for the coronavirus.
CNBC -
December 23, 2020
Biden urged Americans to remain “vigilant” over the holidays, adding that Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines likely won’t stop the deaths of “tens of thousands” people from Covid. “Taking the vaccine from a vial into the arm of millions of Americans is one of the biggest operational challenges the United States has ever faced,” he said. “In the meantime, the pandemic rages on. Experts think it could get worse before it gets better,” he added.
CNN -
December 23, 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins received their first doses of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine Tuesday. The shot, which Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, received in the left arm, was administered at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, by Dr. Heike Bailin, chief of the NIH Occupational Medical Services.