The U.S. Army announced COVID-19 vaccination rates and exemption requests for the Total Army as of July 14, 2022.
As the Army accesses and discharges Soldiers and continues to refine data tracking processes, the vaccination percentages will vary slightly.
The Army will publish additional details as they become available.
For additional information on Army vaccination rates, contact the U.S. Army Media Relations Division at usarmy.pentagon.hqda-ocpa.mbx.mrd-press-desk@army.mil.
For queries specific to the Army National Guard, please contact the National Guard Bureau, ng.ncr.ngb-arng.mesg.ngb-media-desk-owner@army.mil.
For queries specific to the U.S. Army Reserve, please contact Mr. John Bradley, john.b.bradley2.civ@army.mil.
The omicron BA.5 sub-variant Is making up most new cases here in New Mexico. This as cases continue to surge across the state. Last November, the first COVID-19 booster shot was approved for the public. Now, eight months later, there's a second booster but it's only available for people over 50 or those who are immunocompromised. So why isn't it available to everyone? Doctors tell KOAT there's a new vaccine just around the corner. One that's created to specifically target omicron variants like BA.5.KOAT medical expert Dr. Barry Ramo said, There are vaccines being developed now that are much more specific for the omicron and the omicron variants. The problem is not going away and the best way to protect yourself has been vaccination.Dr. Meghan Brett from UNMH said, There are vaccines that probably will be available in the very near future that will target multiple strains of COVID-19. Not just the original strain, but also more omicron specific strains that would be added to the COVID vaccines.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was asking anyone under 50 with no underlying conditions to hold off on getting the second COVID-19 booster and wait for those new omicron-specific vaccines. Now that nearly 40 states are projected to see increases in hospitalizations the CDC and Food and Drug Administration are considering making that second booster available to all adults.Brett says we should expect to see those new vaccines this coming fall, in order to try and avoid the winter case surge weve seen for the last two years.
The omicron BA.5 sub-variant Is making up most new cases here in New Mexico. This as cases continue to surge across the state.
Last November, the first COVID-19 booster shot was approved for the public. Now, eight months later, there's a second booster but it's only available for people over 50 or those who are immunocompromised.
So why isn't it available to everyone? Doctors tell KOAT there's a new vaccine just around the corner. One that's created to specifically target omicron variants like BA.5.
KOAT medical expert Dr. Barry Ramo said, There are vaccines being developed now that are much more specific for the omicron and the omicron variants. The problem is not going away and the best way to protect yourself has been vaccination.
Dr. Meghan Brett from UNMH said, There are vaccines that probably will be available in the very near future that will target multiple strains of COVID-19. Not just the original strain, but also more omicron specific strains that would be added to the COVID vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was asking anyone under 50 with no underlying conditions to hold off on getting the second COVID-19 booster and wait for those new omicron-specific vaccines. Now that nearly 40 states are projected to see increases in hospitalizations the CDC and Food and Drug Administration are considering making that second booster available to all adults.
Brett says we should expect to see those new vaccines this coming fall, in order to try and avoid the winter case surge weve seen for the last two years.
CNN
The Biden administration on Friday extended the Covid-19 public health emergency for another three months.
US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra officially renewed the declaration, extending it through October 13, 2022.
The emergency declaration has been in place since January 2020, and the latest renewal comes as the Omicron offshoot BA.5, the most contagious variant yet, continues to stake its claim in the US. Daily case rates, though vastly undercounted, are the highest theyve been in months, as are Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths.
Data published this week by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that more than half of the countrys population lives in a county with a high Covid-19 Community Level, where the health care system is at risk of becoming overburdened and universal indoor masking is recommended.
The Public Health Emergency declaration continues to provide us with tools and authorities needed to respond to the highly transmissible COVID-19 subvariants that are currently circulating around the country, a Biden administration official told CNN. The PHE provides essential capabilities and flexibilities to hospitals to better care for patients, particularly if we were to see a significant increase in hospitalizations in the coming weeks.
Indeed, ensemble forecasts from the CDC published this week do predict that hospitalizations in the US will rise over the next month. Its the first time in weeks that the forecasts have predicted an increase in hospitalizations, instead of a stable outlook.
Without the PHE in place, we would be limited in our ability to provide broad and equitable access to lifesaving treatments through our Test to Treat initiative, for example, which relies on flexibility for telehealth and operations, the official said. Not renewing the PHE would leave us with fewer tools to respond and mean more Americans would get severely ill and end up in the hospital.
The public health emergency declaration allows many Americans to obtain free Covid-19 testing, therapeutic treatment and vaccines. Once it ends, people could face out-of-pocket costs depending on whether they are covered by Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance. But vaccinations would generally continue to be free for those covered by Medicare and private insurance, while state Medicaid programs would determine whether to continue covering vaccinations for their enrollees.
Also, Medicare has relaxed the rules governing telehealth so that many more beneficiaries can access such services during the declaration. Telehealth services are no longer limited just to those living in rural areas, and enrollees can conduct visits at home, rather than having to travel to a health care facility, and they receive a wider array of services via telehealth. These flexibilities will end for most beneficiaries after the emergency expires.
And states are not involuntarily disenrolling residents from Medicaid during the declaration, in exchange for receiving more generous federal matching funds. As many as 14 million people could lose Medicaid coverage after the emergency ends, according to separate projections by Kaiser and the Urban Institute.
Plus, many low-income families are receiving enhanced food stamp benefits thanks to the declaration, though some states have ended their own public health emergencies and stopped the beefed-up allotments.
A separate emergency declaration allows for the emergency use authorization of testing, treatments and vaccines. Its end date will be determined by the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Its end date will be determined by HHS, and the agency has committed to provide at least 60-day notice before any change
In Sherman Oaks, Julia Irzyk tries to gauge how rampant the coronavirus is in her community, turning to a constellation of data points to guide her.
I have very little confidence that I would survive COVID, said Irzyk, who is more vulnerable to the coronavirus because she has lupus and other health conditions.
So Irzyk keeps track of hospitalizations and deaths. She checks data from wastewater monitoring that predicts spikes in the coronavirus. Recently, troubled by what she was seeing in the numbers, she told employees at her talent agency to stop coming to work in the office.
But she puts little stock in one of the simplest numbers regularly shared by health officials: How many COVID-19 cases are being reported.
Those official figures are relatively worthless at this point, said Irzyk, who authored a book on disability and the law. Positive tests are being discovered through home testing and theyre not reported to anyone.
The boom in home testing for the coronavirus has meant that health officials never hear about many COVID cases, deflating official counts.
Federal funding to test uninsured patients also dried up this spring, pinching the availability of free testing for some Americans. California has sought to continue providing testing for uninsured people through its own programs, and in Los Angeles County, the Department of Health Services said the number of its own sites which offer COVID testing without out-of-pocket charges to L.A. County residents has remained stable since the beginning of this year.
But official testing has nonetheless fallen off even as California reckons with the rapid spread of the BA.5 subvariant.
In L.A. County, an average of more than 222,000 tests were being recorded daily in January; in June, that figure had dropped to around 77,000 tests a day. Those figures do not include tests taken at home; the public health department said it currently has no system in place for people to report such results to L.A. County.
At the University of Washington, researchers who test blood to assess the true level of infections have estimated that only 14% of cases are being reported across the United States. Testing has never captured the full spread of the coronavirus, but the figure is much lower than in some earlier points in the pandemic, when more than 40% of cases were once estimated to be detected.
Even the cases that are being detected are not being reported as frequently as they used to be, said Ali H. Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the universitys Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. In many states, many counties, its only once a week.
Between the rise in home testing that goes unreported, budgetary reductions in testing services, and mild or asymptomatic infections going unnoticed, we dont really know how many cases we have, said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Public health officials can still piece together what is happening with other data, but the challenge is that you want your public health systems to develop responses that are based on these sorts of metrics, Dowdy said. As these metrics become less reliable ... youre left with going back to what it was before, which is just kind of a general sense of where things are headed.
As the pandemic has persisted, experts have turned to a range of metrics to assess how the virus is spreading and what toll it is taking. During the Omicron wave this past winter, some health officials argued that the sheer number of cases was less important than how many of them led to severe illness, as reflected in hospitalizations and deaths.
But infections remain an important metric for anyone trying to avoid them. If government officials are trying to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, it makes sense to focus on hospitalizations, Dowdy said.
Gauging personal risk, however, can be very different. Even if hospitalizations are not especially high, for those people who are at risk, those who are older, those who have compromised immune systems, the risk now is very high because of the high level of transmission thats out there, Dowdy said.
L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer. She has said that if current trends of rising hospitalizations continue, the county could reinstate a mask mandate for indoor spaces by the end of July.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
When COVID cases go uncounted, people think that it is safer to do activities that are not as safe to do, for people who are still trying to avoid infection, said Dr. Abraar Karan, a fellow in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine at Stanford University.
As they try to calculate the costs and benefits of different activities, when people dont realize how much spread there is, they dont know what the true potential cost is, Karan said. People now may be doing things that they dont realize are going to put them at high risk of getting infected and infecting others.
Another concern is the risk of long COVID, in which symptoms can persist for months or years even after an initial illness that was relatively mild. Scientists have differing estimates of how common the condition is, but if massive numbers of people are infected, even estimates in the lower range would result in high numbers of patients with enduring symptoms.
Despite concerns about many COVID cases not being reported, L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that because we triangulate data from wastewater, emergency departments and reported test results, we feel confident that we have a decent grasp on the level of spread across the county.
Ferrer has said that if current trends of rising hospitalizations continue, the county could reinstate a mask mandate for indoor spaces by the end of July.
We dont have to count every case to understand whats happening in our communities, said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Whats important is to understand the general trend of how cases are changing.
You have to assume right now that COVID particularly BA.5 is widespread in our communities everywhere. The bottom line is, extensive transmission is going on right now. Osterholm likened it to assessing the speed of a car as it passes. I couldnt tell you the difference between 80 and 120 miles per hour I just know its going really fast.
The virus is spreading rapidly as U.S. residents have expressed decreasing concern about getting seriously ill or infecting others: As of May, the percentage of Americans who said they were concerned about being hospitalized for COVID had fallen to its lowest level since the Pew Research Center began asking the question early in the pandemic. So had the share of people worried about unknowingly infecting someone else.
The fact that we dont have mask mandates also makes people think, Well, its not that serious, because otherwise we would have mask mandates the danger must be less, said Dr. Sherrill Brown, medical director of infection prevention at AltaMed Health Services.
L.A. County public health officials have continued to strongly recommend wearing masks, especially well-fitting respirators such as N95s and KN95s, in indoor settings. But when we made it a strong recommendation, virtually nobody did it, County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said at a meeting this week.
Irzyk said that right now, its not like I could be a lot more cautious than Im being. The 44-year-old is not eating in restaurants or gathering in groups. Her husband gets their groceries by curbside pickup. She hasnt been on an airplane since before the pandemic and cant imagine doing so anytime soon.
Because few other people are wearing masks in her office building, she gets anxious about taking the elevator up to her office, where she still goes twice a week to issue paychecks to her employees. Even a neighbor in the office building who was made aware of her medical condition has stopped bothering to wear a mask around her, she said.
Brilliant people, experts in their fields, are emailing me asking what my dad says they should do on COVID, because they dont trust anybody else, said Irzyk, whose father, Mark Rothstein, is a public health and bioethics expert. We are just doing a terrible job at messaging.
Rothstein, who in the past served as public health ethics editor for the American Journal of Public Health, argued that unless the rate of new infections is slowed, were always going to be on this treadmill of new variants.
And as more cases have gone unreported, its harder for public health officials to make decisions about masking and other protective measures that can be justified with such data, where you can say, Look, weve gone from Point A to Point B and weve crossed a line that is very important, Rothstein said.
Osterholm, in turn, contended that the number of unreported cases has little consequence for whether such government actions are embraced by the public, because the public has come to the conclusion that theyre done with the pandemic, even if the virus isnt done with them.
Karan said that with a constantly evolving pandemic, its hard even for experts to synthesize the many factors that have shifted in assessing the reach and risk of the coronavirus over time, including the emergence of new variants and subvariants. I dont think that people in the general public are going to have any idea how to analyze a lot of this, he said.
Telling people to make these risk assessments is not going to work for many reasons, Karan said, including that theres too much data thats coming out all the time.
Instead, Karan argued that health officials need to be pursuing community mitigation measures such as upgrading ventilation and air filtration in public spaces to reduce the spread of the virus. Individual efforts will only get you so far, he said, when you have something thats spreading this fast.
Patients with asthma hospitalized with COVID-19 in Michigan in 2020 had more severe outcomes after taking certain factors into account, according to a recent study.
What is known and unknown about the relationship between asthma and COVID-19 has been inconsistent during the pandemic. Some prior research has found that individuals with asthma do not have an increased risk for worse COVID-19 outcomes, but a study published this month said that outcomes may appear to be dependent on the type of asthma one has, as well as the factors of sex and age.
The patients with asthma in this single-center study, conducted in Michigan, did have more severe COVID-19, after considering these other factors.
Additional research is needed to fully understand which aspects of the chronic lung disease might be linked with increased risk from the virus, said the authors, who wrote in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology that data suggest that it is premature to conclude that asthma is not associated with an increased risk of poor outcomes with COVID-19.
Their research compared hospitalized patients with COVID-19 (confirmed through polymerase chain reaction testing) with asthma (n = 183) and without asthma (n = 1319).
To identify asthma severity level, the researchers looked at asthma maintenance medications, Global Initiative for Asthma classification, pulmonary function tests, immunoglobulin E level, and the highest historical absolute eosinophil count to determine if the patient had eosinophilic vs non-eosinophilic asthma.
Primary outcomes included death, mechanical ventilation, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and how long the patient was hospitalized in either the ICU or the hospital.
Results were adjusted to include demographics, comorbidities, smoking status, and timing of illness in 2020, with the year split from March, 2020 to June 14, 2020, and from June 15, 2020 to December, 2020.
There were 140 encounters in the first half of the year and 127 encounters in the second half.
The median age of patients with asthma was significantly lower (56 years, P < .001) compared with those without asthma (62 years). In addition, most of the patients with asthma were female (65%) compared with those without asthma (41%, P < .001).
There were 104 patients with mild asthma, 29 patients with moderate asthma, and 49 patients with severe asthma. In addition, just over a third (33%) had eosinophilic asthma and 58% had non-eosinophilic asthma.
Unadjusted analyses showed no difference between patients with asthma and patients without asthma in terms of outcomes. There was no statistically significant difference in looking at inhaled corticosteroid use and eosinophilic phenotype.
However, in adjusted analyses, patients with asthma, when compared with those without asthma, were more likely to have:
Patients with moderate asthma had worse outcomes than those with mild asthma, with higher odds of:
Patients with severe asthma had shorter hospital stays (RR, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.65-1.00; P < .04).
In addition, patients who were female and of older age also tended to have worse outcomes, in line with what is already known about sex disparities in asthma. But the finding is also the opposite of what has been shown when examining COVID-19 illness alone, where being male is a risk factor for more severe disease or death.
However, the authors noted that since the sample size of patients with moderate asthma was smaller, confidence intervals were larger, making the findings more challenging to interpret.
Noting that their findings differ from other research, the authors said prior studies had smaller sample sizes of patients with asthma, and primary outcomes differed. Larger cohort studies did show longer periods of intubation and worse outcomes, they said.
Reference
Ludwig A, Brehm CA, Fung C, et al. Asthma and coronavirus disease 2019related outcomes in hospitalized patients: a single-center experience. Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol. 2022;129(1);79-87. doi:10.1016/j.anai.2022.03.017.
With the coronavirus resurgent and cases and hospitalizations on the rise, Los Angeles is poised to become the first Southern California county to reinstate mandatory public indoor masking.
If the situation sounds familiar, its because it is. Almost exactly one year ago, the county took the same step to combat a surge fueled by the Delta variant of the coronavirus. It was the first, but it wasnt the last. Officials in at least 20 counties including Ventura, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Sacramento and a large swath of the San Francisco Bay Area would eventually follow suit.
Unless conditions improve, Los Angeles County will by the end of the month find itself in an identical position: issuing a face covering order even though no other county currently appears ready to do the same.
But as California grapples with another summertime wave this one driven by the highly infectious family of Omicron subvariants, namely BA.5 will L.A. County prove to be ahead of the curve or, as some critics maintain, behind the times?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor public masking for those 2 and older when a county enters the high COVID-19 community level a designation signifying both that coronavirus transmission is elevated and that the spread is starting to affect hospitals.
L.A. County officially entered the high community level Thursday. Should it remain there for the next two weeks, the county will reissue an indoor mask mandate with an effective date of July 29.
No other California county has publicly tied its placement on the CDCs community level scale to a renewal of masking orders. Along with L.A., 41 other counties are in the high level as of this week.
Most places recommend, but do not require, masking indoors while in public.
We are seeing a summer wave in cases and hospitalizations, and this move to the high transmission level confirms that, Dr. Clayton Chau, director of the OC Health Care Agency, said in a statement. To protect those at high risk, we are recommending that OC residents continue masking in public, indoor settings, especially those who are at high risk or living with loved ones who have comorbidities, are immunocompromised or are prone to getting sick.
Alameda County was the first California county to issue a mandatory indoor masking order following the winter Omicron surge. Issued on June 3, it was rescinded three weeks later on June 25.
L.A. is like no other county in the United States. With some 10 million residents, it is far and away the most populous county in the nation home to more residents than most states.
Overcrowded housing, a risk factor for the spread of the coronavirus, is worse in L.A. County than many other parts of the country, including the Bay Area.
Of all of Southern Californias coastal counties, L.A. has the highest rate of poverty and lowest median household income. People living in lower income areas are more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 than those living in wealthier areas even when vaccination status is the same.
Lower-income people in L.A. County power substantial sectors of the local economy, including food production, hospitality and tourism.
All this means that, when a new wave hits, a place like L.A. County may be hit disproportionately harder than neighboring places.
Families with fewer resources are more likely to have more exposures at work, live in crowded conditions and have one or more chronic health conditions compared to those with more resources, county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said during a briefing Thursday. This places individuals at higher risk of suffering the severe effects from COVID. Since vaccination alone is not sufficient to erase the troubling inequities we see, additional efforts are needed to protect those at greatest risk.
Masking has been the subject of heated debate and at times fervent opposition throughout the pandemic. But officials and experts are largely in agreement that wearing a high-quality, well-fitting face covering provides additional protection especially in indoor or crowded spaces.
There is broad consensus in the scientific community that wearing a high-quality mask in indoor public spaces is an important tool to control the spread of COVID-19. [It] prevents you from getting infected, and it prevents you from spreading it to others, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said during a recent briefing.
Masking, Ferrer said, protects all of us.
When people who are infected wear a mask, they exhale far less virus into the air than infected people who do not mask, she said. Masks also provide protection to the individual thats wearing a mask by filtering virus from the air as theyre breathing. When everyone in the room is masked, safety is enhanced as theres less virus circulating and less likelihood that any virus that is circulating will penetrate the physical barrier.
Ferrer said the rationale for a mask order during a time of high hospitalization rates is similar to the sensible collective actions taken to reduce other public safety risks, such as rules limiting drivers alcohol consumption and requiring seat belts.
The reality is that because were living with a mutating SARS-CoV-2 virus, there remains uncertainty around the trajectory of this pandemic, Ferrer said. We should not settle for the existing high rates of morbidity and mortality that disproportionately affect those most vulnerable.
Although its true that the versions of the coronavirus currently in circulation tend to cause less severe symptoms, theyre not harmless. As Ferrer noted, You cannot predict with any degree of certainty whether, if you get infected, youre going to be one of the luckier ones that ends up with mild illness or one of those that ends up with severe illness.
And just as no one can guarantee they wont suffer long-term risk, they also cant predict the potential health effects should they spread the virus to others especially those at higher risk.
I think we kind of owe it to each other to do whatever we can to reduce that burden, and to really acknowledge that it has disproportionately affected people who are either older, have serious underlying health conditions, or have more exposures, which tends to be people who are our essential workers, Ferrer said.
As of Thursday, L.A. County hospitals were caring for 1,223 coronavirus-positive patients double the number recorded a month ago.
Hospital inpatient units are not reporting being overwhelmed, and the overall patient count remains well shy of the figures reported during the pandemics earlier waves. But other facilities, including emergency departments, urgent care centers and community clinics are telling us that theyre feeling very strapped, Ferrer said.
They have staffing shortages because lots of their staff are sick with COVID and out, and they also have lots of their patients that while they dont need to go to the hospital they do need medical care, and that creates some stress as well.
Vaccinations and anti-COVID drugs have made it less likely that large numbers of patients will need intensive care during this surge, Ferrer said. But, she added, we also have a lot of unknown with BA.5, and anything else that comes our way. Whats going on in our hospitals could change.
Waiting until hospitals are overwhelmed is way too late to try to do much about slowing transmission, she said. The time to slow transmission is actually when you start seeing indicators that youre having more utilization at your hospitals.
Weekly COVID-19 deaths in L.A. County have doubled in the last month, with officials reporting 100 deaths a week. The weekly peak during the initial Omicron surge last fall and winter was more than 500.
The most effective masks are N95, KN95 and KF94 respirators. You should not double-mask with a respirator.
Another type, though with a lower degree of effectiveness, is a surgical mask, also known as medical masks, which are looser fitting and sometimes called blue masks for their tinted color. They can be made more effective by placing a cloth mask over the surgical mask.
This helps hold the edges of the medical mask to your face and creates a better seal, Ferrer said.
When higher-quality masks were in short supply, cloth masks with at least three layers were seen as a better option than thinner cloth masks. But its now clear that even three-layer cloth masks provide minimal protection, according to Ferrer. Bandannas, gators and thin cloth masks are not effective at filtering out the virus.
While [cloth masks are] better than wearing no mask, given that we have a highly transmissible set of variants circulating, upgrading your mask makes a big difference in the level of protection, Ferrer said.
Masks should be worn over both the nose and mouth, and disposable masks and respirators should be thrown away when they become wet or dirty.
For people who cannot wear a mask due to a disability or medical condition, face shields with drapes that go under the chin and are attached at the bottom edge can provide additional protection, Ferrer said.
Research has shown that mouthwash may help to break down the viral envelope around viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. The viral envelope is a protective barrier that surrounds the virus.
However, there is not enough evidence to support that mouthwash is an effective tool against COVID-19, and further research is needed.
Some mouthwash is antiseptic and may kill microorganisms in the mouth. It may also help prevent tooth decay and bad breath, alongside brushing and flossing. People use mouthwash by swishing it in their mouth and gargling with it after brushing their teeth and then spitting it out.
Mouthwash may kill COVID-19 in the mouth temporarily, but the virus will make more copies of itself rapidly. Therefore, it may only offer a temporary solution at best.
This article discusses COVID-19, research about mouthwash and COVID-19, and COVID-19 prevention.
COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Most people who contract COVID-19 experience mild to moderate symptoms and recover without special treatment. However, some people become severely ill and require medical attention. Any person can contract COVID-19 and become seriously ill or die.
The virus can transmit from the nose or mouth of a person with COVID-19 through small particles when they sneeze, cough, breathe, sing, or speak.
Symptoms of COVID-19 include:
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have been more than 550 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 6 million deaths globally. To help prevent the virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that every person aged 6 months and older receive vaccinations.
According to the CDC, more than 222 million people in the United States are fully vaccinated.
Dentists currently use antimicrobial mouthwashes to reduce the number of microorganisms in liquid particles that may escape a persons mouth during procedures. These rinses contain antiseptic chemicals, which include:
Research suggests that using mouthwash may temporarily prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 during dental procedures. However, a person can still exhale the virus from their lungs and nasal cavity.
Emerging studies suggest that although they are not primary targets for infection, the salivary glands and throat are important sites of virus transmission and replication in the early stages of COVID-19. This may mean that using mouthwash could be a helpful tool for preventing the spread of the virus.
However, at this stage, studies are too small and short term for researchers to make conclusive statements, and further research is necessary.
A 2020 study suggested that mouthwashes containing certain ingredients may break down or destroy the SARS-CoV-2 viral lipid envelope, which acts as protection for the virus.
The authors stated that published research supports the theory that oral rinsing helps break down viral envelopes in other viruses, including coronaviruses, and should be researched further in relation to COVID-19.
Another 2020 study found that after swishing and gargling a mouthwash formulation for 60 seconds, 16 out of 33 study participants became Neisseria gonorrhea culture-negative within 5 minutes, compared to 4 of 25 participants who gargled saline.
However, the study was not large enough to provide conclusive evidence and indicated a need for further research.
The authors of a 2021 study suggested that oral rinses containing 0.5% povidone-iodine may interrupt the attachment of SARS-CoV-2 to tissues in the nose, throat, and mouth, and lower viral particles in the saliva.
Although research is promising, recent studies have limitations and are insufficient to prove that mouthwash can act as a preventive measure against COVID-19.
Available, published studies are small, and there are no large-scale clinical studies that provide evidence of mouthwash as a successful measure against COVID-19.
Researchers that suggested mouthwash as a promising measure generally also suggested that further research is needed, and did not offer recommendations for the use of mouthwash as a COVID-19 prevention tool.
While researchers have found evidence that certain mouthwash formulas could successfully destroy the virus, the results were only true for people who had only had the virus for a short while.
While some studies found that mouthwash could create a hostile environment for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, research does not support that it can treat active infections or control the spread of the virus.
Finally, although mouthwash may have an effect on the virus in the mouth and throat, COVID-19 also collects in nasal passages. Even if mouthwash could effectively kill the virus in the throat, it would remain in the nasal passages, which could pass the virus down to the throat.
According to the CDC, to prevent infection and the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, a person should consider:
Research has shown that using certain formulations of mouthwash may help destroy the protective SARS-CoV-2 viral envelope and kill the virus in the throat and mouth. However, current studies have serious limitations.
Publically available studies do not provide large-scale, clinical evidence to conclude the efficacy of mouthwash against COVID-19. Although mouthwash affects the virus in the mouth and throat, it does not affect the virus in other primary spots such as the nasal passages, which may reinfect the throat.
Research does not show that mouthwash can treat active infections or prevent virus transmission.
Therefore, people should continue adhering to current prevention measures, such as vaccination and regular handwashing. They should also continue to follow measures suggested by the CDC to help stop the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
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This is an online survey entitled: "Coverage of COVID-19 Booster (Precautionary) Dose in the Adult Population" being conducted by a group of 4th-year medical students from Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences, Bangalore. We intend to study the public acceptance for the COVID-19 precautionary dose vaccines. The survey will take around 5 to 10 minutes of your time.
The questions are related to the demographics of the respondents and their familiarity with the COVID-19 vaccination.
If you have any queries related to the questionnaire- please feel free to contact the undersigned.
We thank you for your time and cooperation!
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o Uttarakhand
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o Others: Please mention
5. Which city do you live in? (Please mention) *
6. Occupation * (Mark only one oval.)
o Medical student
o Paramedics
o Paramedical student
o Student (engineering, commerce, etc.)
o Business sector
o Agriculture, animals, environmental sector
o IT, civil engineering, automation, telecommunication, aeronautics
o Education (Teacher/Professor)
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o Retired/not currently working (nonmedical professionals)
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o No vaccine taken
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8. Which vaccine have you taken? (Mark only one oval.)
o CoviShield (Oxford AstraZeneca)
o Covaxin
AUSTIN, Texas The number of COVID-19 cases is still climbing across the country as doctors monitor new subvariants spreading in the United States.
In Texas, case numbers are up 21% in the past week and up 79% in a month.
More patients are ending up in hospitals across the state as well. Hospitalizations are up 7% in the past week but have nearly doubled in the last month. However, the numbers are still nowhere near the peaks of previous waves.
Those in the high category include Mason, Gillespie, Blanco, Hays and Caldwell counties. Meanwhile, Travis and Williamson counties, along with others, remain in the "medium" risk level.
Two new omicron subvariants are driving COVID-19 numbers up in recent weeks. TheBA.5 variant accounts for 65% of cases while the BA.4 variant makes up another 16% of cases. The variants are evading antibodies and vaccine protections with experts saying they are some of the most contagious versions to date.
Here's a look at the case numbers in Texas for Saturday, July 16:
