Costa Rica has experienced a deep economic downturn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet continues to welcome those in need of international protection from around the region. Since 2017, the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and other persons of concern mainly from Nicaragua, but also Venezuela and Cuba, among others has increased considerably putting strain on national systems.
Data from two rounds of a phone survey conducted by UNHCR and IPA between March and August 2021 comparable to a similar survey by the World Bank on nationals provides insight on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the health, livelihoods and general vulnerability of these populations who are Persons of Concern (PoC) to UNHCR.
The survey finds that by August 2021 around one in five PoC households has experienced a COVID-19 diagnosis. In addition, 36% of respondents report having been vaccinated, and some 80% believe the vaccines are safe and effective.
The economic impact of the pandemic has been severe for PoC households, with nearly 3 in 4 respondents reporting lower family income in round 1 compared to pre-COVID times. Further, financial insecurity among PoC remains pronounced, with 70% of respondents saying they were forced to deplete assets or rely on others to meet daily needs and half reporting they have no bank or mobile savings accounts.
Food insecurity remains high despite having fallen across survey rounds with 61% of PoC respondents in round 2 reporting an adult skipping a meal in the last week compared to just 12% of nationals in the final round of the World Bank survey. The Nicaraguan population in particular faces high levels of food-related vulnerability as 4 in 10 Nicaraguan respondents report a child going hungry in the past 30 days.
Despite these prevalent needs, food- and cash-based support to PoC fell between March and August 2021. Similarly, requests for government support are less common in round 2, and about 40% of assistance requests are rejected.
The Venezuelan population are notably better off compared to Nicaraguan and Cuban households on nearly all measures, which likely reflects their pre-existing better socioeconomic profile and associated ability to integrate into Costa Rican society.
To GW Community Members:
The George Washington University will update its public health protocols beginningMonday, April 4, 2022. Details for GW community members and visitors are as follows:
We will continue to monitor rates of COVID-19 on our campuses and in the region and may reinstate any such public health requirements as necessary. We believe our COVID-19 vaccine and booster requirement provides strong protection for our community members from severe illness or hospitalization. Thank you for your continued cooperation as we work together to keep one another safe and healthy. We will update our community with any other changes as needed.
A total of three lawsuits have been filed against a Vernon bakery and cafe recently, each relating to what plaintiffs say are issues of managerial indifference around health and safety protocols in the early days of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The plaintiffs blame Vie de France Yamazaki Inc. for employee deaths and long-term COVID-19 illnesses that they say directly stem from mismanagement of health and safety protocols on company property.
The original suit was filed by Ana Eveline Perez on March 25, reports KFI-640. Her suit alleges that she was obese and suffered from allergies and atherosclerosis, which put her at higher risk of death or severe illness from COVID-19 while working at the bakery. Her suit states that she contracted the disease while at work as a result of lax health and safety protocols, and now her entire family suffers from long COVID-19 symptoms.
Alex Hernandez and wife Gracie Hernandez separately filed a wrongful death suit against Vie de France, alleging that Alex Hernandez caught COVID-19 while at the bakery. Hernandez then went on to infect his stepdaughter, 42-year-old Valerie Esquivel, who died in April 2020, the suit alleges. On March 30, Vie de France Yamazaki mechanic Pascual Alvarado Hernandezs widow Maria Martha Alvarado also filed a wrongful death suit, claiming that there were concerns that employees were coughing and clearly sick with a respiratory illness, but not being screened or sent home.
Have a listen to Yuko Kitchen owner Yuko Watanabe on KCRW, where she shares her journey to open her Mid-Wilshire and DTLA restaurants.
Are Los Angeless bagel shops and Jewish delis sharing trade secrets? The Los Angeles Times explores the question of collaboration by chatting with the owners of Wise Sons, Belles Bagels, the Bad Jew, and Wexlers Deli.
Its a big question for any city, let alone LA: What exactly does fine dining mean? Legendary chef Michael Cimarusti and co-owner/general manager Donato Poto talk about their own experiences and shifts over the decades for Zagat.
Slow Bloom Coffee came about after a now-shuttered Redlands coffee chain fired its staff for unionizing. Its a fascinating come-up story one that involves the National Labor Relations Board and ultimately a worker-owned cooperative. Redlands Daily Facts has the full story.
Los Angeles Times reviewer Bill Addison helped connect LAs sushi family tree a bit with his latest piece about Shunji Nakao and his new Santa Monica location for Shunji.
On Instagram, Sunset Beer Co. announced it will close permanently. The 11-year-old business cited landlord problems, namely commercial real estate company Red Car Ltd./Industry Partners.
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Researchers have identified a family of proteins that is significantly elevated in the saliva of patients hospitalized with COVID-19. The proteins, known as ephrin ligands, could potentially serve as a biomarker to help doctors identify patients who are at risk for serious illness.
Ephrins are detectable in saliva samples and could serve as adjunct markers to monitor COVID-19 disease progression. We can collect saliva without harm or discomfort for most patients, which can reveal patient responses to COVID-19 and potentially guide care."
Erika Egal, DVM, PhD, study author, postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Patrice Mimche, PhD, Department of Pathology.University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City
Egal will present the findings at the American Physiological Society annual meeting during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2022 meeting, held in Philadelphia April 25.
For the study, researchers analyzed saliva samples collected from patients admitted to the University of Utah Hospital emergency department with respiratory symptoms. Sixty-seven of the patients tested positive for COVID-19 while 64 patients did not. They found that the presence of ephrin ligands in saliva was strongly associated with the diagnosis of severe COVID-19.
Researchers said the study findings could help shed light on the biological processes involved in severe reactions to COVID-19 infection. Previous studies suggest ephrins play a role in injury and inflammation. The scientists say more research is needed to determine whether ephrin concentrations are linked with a higher likelihood of hospitalization, critical illness or death. In addition, as new viral variants emerge, it can be difficult to tell whether existing COVID-19 tests are able to accurately detect infections involving new variants. Looking for ephrins in saliva could offer a simple, non-invasive way to provide corroborating evidence when there is inconsistency between test results and the clinical picture, Egal said.
"Saliva is packed with information beyond detecting the COVID-19 infection itself," said Mimche. "We demonstrate that immune cells, cytokines and soluble proteins can be reliably measured from saliva samples. Our findings provide a starting point for investigations looking into causal pathways between infection and bad medical outcomes."
The research was overseen by Mimche in collaboration with Theodore Liou, MD and My N. Helms, PhD, from the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Utah Health, as part of a multidisciplinary project to better understand the biology of SARS-CoV-2 and how it causes serious COVID-19 infections.
Egal will present this research from 2:453 p.m., Monday, April 4, in Room 204 B, Pennsylvania Convention Center (abstract) and from 10:15 a.m.12:15 p.m., Tuesday, April 5, in Exhibit/Poster Hall A-B (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to attend the meeting.
SAN DIEGO
Several business leaders and city officials, including three San Diego City Council members, tested positive for COVID-19 shortly after returning from a four-day lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., that was organized by the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, Councilmember Stephen Whitburn and Councilmember Jennifer Campbell all tested positive after returning home March 30.
Chamber officials sent an email to the more than 140 business and civic leaders who made the trip warning them they could be at risk.
It has come to our attention that there have been delegates who have tested positive for COVID since returning home from D.C., the email says. We are letting all delegation trip participants know so that you can take appropriate action, including testing and symptom monitoring, to protect yourself and any close contacts.
In an email Monday afternoon, chamber Chief Executive Jerry Sanders said the chamber maintained strict adherence to all COVID-19 protocols on the trip.
As we adapt to life in a world that includes COVID, this is a reminder of our new reality and it reinforces the importance of vaccines in our ability to resume more regular activities and continue moving forward, Sanders said.
Elo-Rivera said on Twitter that his symptoms have felt like a nasty cold. A spokesperson for Whitburn said he is experiencing mild symptoms. Campbells chief of staff said she is not feeling too great.
The goal of the trip was lobbying federal officials for help with local infrastructure projects, upgrades to the U.S.-Mexico border and economic initiatives.
People who lived in the nations poorest counties have died from COVID-19 at nearly twice the rate of people in wealthier counties, according to a new report released Monday.
And death rates in poor counties compared to those in wealthy ones grew even more sharply over the last year, in a series of successive COVID waves, states the report, produced jointly by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Poor Peoples Campaign.
At a press conference Monday morning the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-leader of the Poor Peoples Campaign, called the findings shameful. The press conference was livestreamed from Washington, D.C.
We cannot say, based on the research, that this is because of individual choices or behaviors, Barber said. COVID-19 did not discriminate, but we did. And our discrimination created terrible blind spots that produced the burden of death on so many families that did not have to experience it.
COVID-19 data doesnt systematically track information about the incomes or occupations of people who have fallen ill or died from the pandemic. The study instead compares the overall wealth or poverty in a county with that countys COVID-19 death rate.
The nations more than 3,000 counties were sorted based on the collective income of each county and sorted from most wealthy to least wealthy into 10 groups of counties relatively equal in size. The counties were compared on the basis of their COVID-19 death rates as well as other demographic information.
Overall, in the poorest counties, where median incomes ranged from $12,000 to $46,000 a year, COVID-19 death rates were more than double those in the wealthiest counties, with median incomes of $90,000 to $142,000 a year, said Alainna Lynch of SDSN.
In setting a threshold for defining who is poor or near-poor, the report uses $28,000 for a single person and $54,000 for a family of four. Those numbers are twice the federal poverty guidelines, which researchers say dont sufficiently measure poverty in the U.S.
What this allows us to see is both the true extent of poverty and economic insecurity, which we dont always see because of those definitions, said Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director for the Poor Peoples Campaign.
When the counties are sorted by the percentage of people whose incomes are below the reports poverty threshold, the least-poor counties, with 8% to 19% of people who had incomes below that cut-off point, had about half the COVID-19 deaths as the poorest counties, where between 42% and 94% of people had incomes below the reports standard.
Marathon County in central Wisconsin falls between those two extremes. The countys median income of $62,000 a year is higher than in many other places, the report observes. At the same time, one in four residents of the county has an income below the reports poverty threshold. The countys COVID-19 death rate is 342 per 100,000 population, according to the report.
At times, our countys rate of hospitalizations and COVID deaths and hospitalization led the state, said Bruce Grau, a coordinator for the North Central Wisconsin chapter of the Poor Peoples Campaign.
Nationwide, death rate gaps were even larger in more recent phases of the pandemic. In the third wave, from late 2020 to early 2021, death rates were four and a half times higher in low-income counties than they were in high-income counties, said Lynch. And death rates were five times higher in low-income counties in the surge of the delta variant, which began in mid-2021, and three times higher during the omicron variants surge in late 2021 and early 2022.
One of the main points in this report is that practices before COVID-19 created the conditions for unequal pandemic outcomes, Lynch said. Well before March 2020, the U.S. was lagging behind other high-income countries around the world when it came to measures of population health such as life expectancy, she added.
Vaccine rates dont explain the difference, said Lynch. There is, however, evidence of racial difference, she added: counties with a larger proportion of people of color had higher death rates, a pattern especially visible in the South and Southwest.
Barber called attention to the reports data showing that, in raw numbers, many more white people have died from COVID-19 than other groups. But the studys data showed that among people of color, a larger percentage died. Both details are important, he said: We have to tell both stories.
The report also adds further impetus for the Poor Peoples Campaign planned June March on Washington to draw attention to the issue of poverty and income inequality in the U.S. Barber renewed the organizations call for President Joe Biden as well as other leaders to meet with the campaign and put addressing poverty and low wealth at the front and center of our nations moral agenda.
The reports findings confirm other research that has shown the link between poverty and COVID-19, says Tiffany Green, a University of Wisconsin economist who researches the impact of race and economics on health.
This is not about individual behavior, Green said in an interview. Its about what kinds of social conditions place people at risk.
Early in the Wisconsin pandemic, outbreaks occurred in the meatpacking industry in Brown County. And because of the way our occupational system is structured, they were disproportionately likely to be Hispanic immigrants, Green says. And they were working under conditions that were not properly regulated, that were not safe, when it comes to trying to prevent COVID.
For people with lower incomes, Theyre more likely to work in these industries that are not protected, she adds. And so its not surprising that these are the folks that would be disproportionately affected.
Thats a central point of the report as well.
Too often, we blame the poor for what are really systemic policy decisions that are outside their hands, decisions that are made for poor communities, but decisions they would never make themselves, said Gupta Barnes, the Poor Peoples Campaign policy director.
She listed the minimum wage, access to health care, paid family leave and child care for workers, and access to enough food and to clean water at work and child care. These are all policy decisions, choices meaning that policymakers decide these questions, not the people whose lives are impacted by those decisions, she said.
And who died in the pandemic was also a policy choice, Gupta Barnes said. It was a choice to not see poverty whether it was white, Black, Latina, native, indigenous, or all of the above. It was a choice to have these death rates, and to not prioritize the poor across race, across geography, in the worst public health crisis in this country.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky announced in an email on Monday that the agency will be revamped.
The CDC has been criticized for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, accused of everything from sending mixed messages to the public about masking and vaccines to delaying the development of COVID-19 tests. In an email sent Monday to all employees obtained by The Washington Post, Walensky wrote it is "time to step back and strategically position CDC to support the future of public health." To start, Walensky has hired a senior federal health official to conduct a one-month review that will "kick off an evaluation of CDC's structure, systems, and processes."
The revamp will focus on "core capabilities," she wrote, including strengthening the country's public health workforce, data modernization, laboratory capacity, and rapid response to disease outbreaks, thePostreports.
In the last year, Walensky said, several employees have shared they "would like to see CDC build on its rich history and modernize for the world around us. I am grateful for your efforts to lean into the hard work of transforming CDC for the better. I look forward to our collective efforts to position CDC, and the public health community, for greatest success in the future."
Walensky also released a statement about the revamp, saying that during the pandemic, the CDC has had to "make decisions so quickly, based on often limited, real-time, and evolving science. ... As we've challenged our state and local partners, we know that now is the time for CDC to integrate the lessons learned into a strategy for the future."
The review will begin on April 11, the Post reports, and will be led by Jim Macrae, associate administrator for primary health care at the Health Resources and Services Administration, which like the CDC is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Read more at The Washington Post.
Corbevax was developed in Houston by Doctors Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi in conjunction with the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
It is being used in India for adults and 12 to 14-year-olds.More than 14 million adolescents in India have been vaccinated.It will also be delivered to Botswana.And Corbevax is being scaled for production in Botswana so it can be delivered in sub-Saharan Africa.Botswana has broken ground on a vaccine facility and hopes to have it up and running by 2026.
Hotez says, "we're hoping our vaccine makes a big difference to address this terrible global equity gap because that's where the variants of concern are arising.Delta arose out of an unvaccinated population in India and Omicron and the BA.2 out of an unvaccinated population in southern Africa.If we're going to halt these new variants of concern we're going to have to vaccinate the entire world and the hope is our vaccine becomes a key technology for that."
Corbevax has been licensed to an entity in Indonesia and Bangladesh and they're talking to other countries. Doctors Hotez and Bottazzi do not hold a patent and will not profit off the vaccine.
Hotez says he got his MD and Ph.D. 40 years ago to make vaccines for poorer countries."To be able to make this contribution now is extraordinarily gratifying."He is also thankful for the corporate and individual donors who helped make Corbevax possible."This would not have happened if we had not come to Texas.As I often like to say, Texas is a hub for science and innovation."
Corbevax is vegan.There are no animal or human cell lines used in the production of the vaccine.It costs about $1.90 a dose and is based on an older vaccine platform.It has not been approved in the United States but Hotez wishes it was."We would love to make this vaccine available in the United States.We are getting emails from people saying they would love to use our technology because it is similar to the Hepatitis B vaccine that they already gave their kids.We just don't have that US partner right now."
Houston Democratic Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher has nominated doctors Hotez and Bottazzi for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their work developing a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine designed to be accessible around the world.
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American attitudes toward scientific expertise have become increasingly contentious in recent years. But many people across the political spectrum still place high levels of trust in their personal physicians. Correspondingly, both popular media and public health officials have encouraged physicians to serve as strong advocates for COVID-19 vaccination.
At the same time, however, there have been several cases of doctors expressing skepticism about vaccines in the media. Though the American Medical Association found that 96% of physicians reported being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in June 2021, some high-profile physicians have spread misinformation about vaccine safety. Some patients have also reported that their personal physicians discouraged them from getting vaccinated on both medical and non-medical grounds.
One conservative group of doctors called the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, which counts Republican Senator and ophthalmologist Rand Paul among its members, offers several examples of how some physicians actively promote vaccine skepticism.
Following the 2015 Disneyland measles outbreak, AAPS shared a press release falsely linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism in children, a claim based on fraudulent research that the scientific community has widely discredited. The group has also taken legal action to encourage parental noncompliance with childhood vaccine mandates, using misinterpreted data to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines are uniquely dangerous compared to other vaccines.
While groups like AAPS do not represent the views of most physicians, these examples raise an important question: Just how prevalent is physician vaccine hesitancy, and why might some physicians hold negative views toward vaccines?
As political science and health policy researchers studying vaccine hesitancy, we wanted to answer this question. Our recent study found that the same factors thought to encourage hesitancy in the general public like having right-leaning political views might also motivate physician opposition to vaccination.
In May 2021, we asked 625 primary care physicians nationwide about their general attitudes toward vaccines and whether they believed vaccines are safe, effective and important. We also asked PCPs how much confidence they had in the safety of the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines, which were each authorized for emergency use in the U.S. at the time. Respondents answered these questions on a scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
We also surveyed potential factors that could influence physician attitudes toward vaccines. These included political ideology, previous infection with COVID-19, religiosity and standard demographics like gender, race, ethnicity and income.
On the surface, our results provide some reassuring news for using physicians as leading vaccine promoters. We found that only 5.2% of PCPs were unvaccinated against COVID at the time of our survey, echoing the findings of the American Medical Associations June 2021 survey. In addition, our results suggest that PCPs views toward vaccines are overwhelmingly positive 88% of physicians agreed or strongly agreed that vaccines in general are safe. Likewise, 90% of physicians agreed that vaccines are effective, and 89% agreed that vaccines are important. When we compared our PCP responses to responses from the general public on the same questions, we found that PCPs are 19% more likely to strongly agree that vaccines are safe and 16% more likely to strongly agree theyre effective.
Digging deeper into the data, however, reveals some troubling trends. Even if most physicians are well-positioned to serve as vaccination advocates, our results still suggest that 10.1% of PCPs do not agree that vaccines in general are safe. Similarly, 9.3% do not agree that all vaccines are effective, and 8.3% do not agree that they are important.
PCP political leanings and previous health experiences may help explain why some hold negative views toward vaccination. We found that politically conservative PCPs and those who previously contracted COVID-19 were 19% less likely to believe that vaccines in general are safe and effective.
We found similar results when examining confidence in the three COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. at the time, a little over six months after the first vaccine was authorized. Approximately 90% of PCPs were either very confident or confident in the safety of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Still, 9.5% and 8.7% lacked confidence in the safety of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, respectively. Only 68% of physicians expressed confidence in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, likely due to reports of its relatively lesser effectiveness at the time.
Our research finds that physician vaccine hesitancy is more prevalent than vaccination campaigns may have assumed. Vaccine hesitancy among physicians is also likely motivated by the same factors that encourage hesitancy in the general public. This potentially poses a problem for vaccination efforts that rely on physicians to promote vaccine uptake.
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Nevertheless, our work offers room for potential optimism and ways to improve vaccine confidence in this group.
Partisanship, for example, plays an important role in shaping vaccine hesitancy. Consequently, tactics shown to improve vaccine attitudes in the general public such as highlighting GOP politicians with more positive views toward vaccination could potentially increase support for vaccination among physicians as well. In our view, studying ways to encourage vaccine enthusiasm among PCPs could help move the needle on vaccine uptake in the U.S.
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More than a quarter of students in Pueblos two public K-12 school districts have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to data compiled by the state.
Just over 27% of students who attend schools in Pueblo School District 60, which covers the city of Pueblo, are fully immunized, data compiled by the Colorado Department of Education and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment show.
Not far behind, the data for Pueblo County School District 70 show 26.8% of its student body has been vaccinated.
Statewide, about 40.5% of students were fully vaccinated as of April 1.
More: Pueblo colleges to require students, staff to be vaccinated, test weekly or seek exemption
Pueblo D60 and Pueblo D70 rank 67th and 71st respectively out of 186 school districts in Colorado for levels of fully vaccinated students.
The Connect Charter School, a Pueblo D70 charter middle school, has the highest percentage of fully vaccinated students of any school in Pueblo County, according to state data. Over 53 percent of Connect students are fully vaccinated.
Centennial High School is the most vaccinated high school in the two districts, with 51.4% of its students fully vaccinated.
Bradford Elementary School and Avondale Elementary School are among the least vaccinated schools in Pueblo County. At Bradford Elementary, 7.4% of students are fully vaccinated. Avondale Elementary's student population is 7.8% fully vaccinated.
Vaccines were authorized for children aged 12 to 18 in May last year, and for five- to 11-year-olds in October 2021.
More: Here's where children's COVID vaccines will roll out in Pueblo
Vaccination rates in Pueblo's schools were calculated by matching student records with Colorado Immunization Information System records.
Nearly 97%of student records were matched by CDPHE withan immunization record, the state health department said.
In addition to being broken down by school district, vaccination rates werealso categorized by individual school and grade levels.
The rates were shared on theCDPHE's online dashboardto try to increase transparency and keepparents, schools, districts and public health officials informed, the CDPHE said.
"(Reporting vaccination data) is especially important for parents of children with weakened immune systems and educators/school staff with immunocompromising conditions who have daily contact with students," according to CDPHE.
More: What about the medically fragile? Pueblo health director concerned by D70 COVID-19 plan
Seven of the 10 most vaccinated schools in Pueblo County are high schools, according to state data.
The ColoradoSchool COVID-19 vaccine data dashboard is updated every Friday.For more information, visit theColoradoSchool COVID-19 vaccine data dashboard.
Pueblo Chieftainreporter James Bartolo can be reached by email at JBartolo@gannett.com
