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The rest of the squad are unaffected, and will continue following Covid guidelines and completing their daily health-checks
Chapman, who was a part of the T20I squad, flew from Napier to Auckland on Saturday and after waking up with symptoms on Sunday, tested positive via a rapid antigen test.
"It's really unfortunate for Mark and we're all really feeling for him at this time," New Zealand's head coach Gary Stead said. "He did the right thing by following the health guidelines and getting tested when he did."
"It's an exciting time for George to be back with the team and he thoroughly deserves his call up following his strong form in the Ford Trophy."
The remainder of the squad are unaffected, and will continue following Covid guidelines and completing their daily health-checks, according to an NZC release.
'Overwhelmed by hate': COVID-19 scientists face an avalanche of abuse, survey shows Science
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) -- After two years of wearing masks and avoiding indoor crowds, navigating the next phase of the pandemic in South Florida can feel especially difficult.
Debra Touhey, of Cooper City, said she isn't ready to let down her guard yet, but she's pushing herself a little.
For the first time in two years, Touhey, 63, ventured back to the movie theater with her 14-year-old son. She sat in the back row and bought the two seats on either side of her family, just to ensure social distancing.
"I'm trying because this might be the new normal," Touhey said.
With omicron in retreat, Floridians are figuring out their new boundaries along with what COVID-19 precautions they will permanently adopt and in which situations they still are not comfortable. In an online Sun Sentinel survey, respondents expressed a range of risk tolerance for travel, as well as activities such as grocery shopping, indoor dining and attending business meetings without a mask.
All around there are signs of life coming back to a pre-coronavirus normal: The plastic barriers at cash registers came down recently at Publix nearly two years after they were installed. Masks are no longer being required at various performance arts venues in South Florida.
"I know a lot of people have stopped wearing their masks," Touhey said. "I still wear my mask almost every time in public and especially indoors. I feel I have to be as careful as can be. As older parents, our situation is unique. I won't deprive my son but we are going to go slowly."
The Florida Department of Health reported the virus is still infecting more than 10,000 people a week in Florida and killing about 1,000 on average. But with the positivity rate less than 3 percent in the state and South Florida counties, many people are beginning to resume their pre-pandemic behaviors.
Hampden Smith, 81, is emerging from a pandemic mindset. He is taking this next phase slowly.
Smith and his wife, of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, are vaccinated and boosted and have resumed going to church.
"It feels great. We really missed it," Smith said. "Most people are keeping a distance. There's not much hugging going on."
Smith, though, isn't ready to take off his mask in church, or Costco and Publix.
"I will probably always be wary of indoor closeness," he said.
Some people say they are struggling with accepting risk.
Robin Gill, of Jupiter, said she is boosted and vaccinated, works from home, and is taking it step by step with resuming activities she did before the pandemic. This week, she ventured to a restaurant for the first time in two years.
"The COVID mindset is a hard one to turn off," she said. "I don't feel like we are far enough out of the pandemic yet."
Dr. Jessica Ruiz, a Broward psychologist, said people are in different stages of gauging what's safe for them.
Ruiz said one of the reasons this phase of the pandemic is so hard to navigate is because some people have had more anxiety and more personal loss over the last two years of battling a disease that transmits invisibly at times. Others are still at high risk for hospitalization.
"We have to remind ourselves, everyone is different," she said.
Increasingly though, as new cases decline, social pressure to shrug off COVID-19 precautions will play a role in what people feel comfortable doing, she said.
"Social pressure is actually very powerful," said Ruiz, chief psychologist at Goodman Jewish Family Services of Broward. "You are much more likely to make decisions and follow through based on what the people around you are doing."
Pamela Jordan, of Boca Raton, said she's cautious but resumed her normal life months ago.
She is not vaccinated, had COVID-19 in December 2021 and has stopped wearing a mask.
"I took it off the second it was no longer mandatory," she said.
Jordan, 52, said she travels, attends parties, goes to the movies, the gym and medical appointments without a mask and with the mindset that she is going to live her best life.
"People are scared and I can't fault them. I just think differently," Jordan said.
Young adults, the demographic in Florida with the highest cumulative number of COVID-19 cases, were the first to return to crowded nightclubs, concerts and weddings.
"My friends and I have for the most part stopped wearing masks," said a 24-year-old from Fort Lauderdale who asked not to be named. "I don't think I should feel guilty about that."
After two years of taking precautions and living with uncertainty about where the pandemic is headed, some people have realized they want to make certain behaviors permanent.
Survey participants told the Sun Sentinel they will continue to have their groceries delivered, participate in doctor's appointments by Zoom, work from home as much as possible -- and even use hand sanitizer more regularly.
Several dozen said they are healthier than before the pandemic and plan to continue those behaviors.
"I went back to running regularly outdoors," said Stanley Eisen, of Pompano Beach. "It helps keep me sane."
(NEXSTAR) With the rise ofthe BA.2 variant of COVID-19, a subvariant of omicron that isalso called stealth omicron, are people who caught the virus in the last wave susceptible again?
Early research indicates its not likely the subvariant will reinfect most people who just caught omicron in this recent wave of cases, but it is possible.
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A study of 2 million people in Denmark conducted between November and February found 187 instances of reinfection. Of those 187 cases, 47 were people who had the BA.1 variant, then caught the BA.2 variant.
According to Healthline, the majority of the people in the study who caught both omicron subvariants were young and unvaccinated. They did not have severe cases.
The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and former Harvard researcher, raised a warning flag on Twitter in February, citing other early studies that showedomicrons protectiveness from reinfection doesnt last long.
Our results suggest that Omicron-induced immunity may not be sufficient to prevent infection from another, more pathogenic variant, should it emerge in the future, he tweeted, quoting thestudy.
It may seem counterintuitive, but people who only had a mild case of omicron the first time around may also be more likely to get it again.
If you had a mild infection, didnt get a very good immune response, and you get exposed again with a big dose of the virus, its definitely possible, Dr. Stanley Weiss, professor at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told Yahoo.
However, because there is so much similarity between the two subvariants of omicron, many people infected in the most recent winter surge could be protected in the short term.
I think [reinfection] is unlikely because there is so much shared similarity [between the two types] that the minor differences are probably not enough to allow it to evade immunity to omicron, said Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, head of Brigham and Womens Hospitals infectious disease division, in an interview withWBTS last month.
As with other variants, any added protection you get from a recent omicron infection also wanes over time. Abouttwo-thirds of those infected with omicronin the U.K. were people who had caught the alpha or delta variant in past COVID waves, a study from Imperial College London found.
I suspect over time, yes, you probably can get reinfected. But we dont have that data yet because omicron has only been around since October/November, John Hopkins Senior Scholar, Dr. Amesh Adalja, toldKHOU.
Protection from the COVID vaccines is more reliable, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. A fully vaccinated person who had a breakthrough infection isbest protected against future infection, a recent CDC study found.
Vaccinated and boosted people were also far less likely to have severe symptoms associated with an omicron infection.
Get more coronavirus news: COVID vaccines, boosters and Safe Travels information
The BA.2 subvariant makes up about 23% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., according to the CDCs last estimate. Epidemiologists point out its presence has been doubling about every week.
A common area at the Rochester Institute of Technology campus in Rochester, N.Y., in January.Credit...Libby March for The New York Times
With the pandemic entering a new phase in the United States marked by fewer precautions and the rise of the even more transmissible Omicron subvariant BA.2, the Biden administration has begun stressing the importance of mitigating the risk of indoor aerosol transmission, the primary driver of the pandemic.
The Environmental Protection Agency recently issued expert guidance to building managers, contractors and business owners, with two pages of recommendations that codify the best practices on ventilation, air filtration and air disinfection from academic experts and federal agencies of the last two years. The agency said that implementation could be underwritten with federal funds from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that President Biden signed into law a year ago.
Dr. Alondra Nelson, chief of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said last week the guidance was part of an initiative called the Clean Air in Buildings Challenge. In a blog post titled, Lets Clear the Air on Covid, she cited the guidance and said, Now, we all need to work collectively to make our friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers aware of what we can do or ask for to make being indoors together safer.
For decades, Americans have demanded that clean water flow from our taps and pollution limits be placed on our smokestacks and tailpipes, she wrote in the post. It is time for healthy and clean indoor air to also become an expectation for us all.
U.S. federal health authorities were initially slow to identify airborne transmission of the virus. It was only in October 2020 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognized that the virus can sometimes be airborne, long after many infectious disease experts warned that the coronavirus traveled aloft in small, airborne particles. Scientists have been calling for a bigger focus on addressing that risk for more than a year.
The initiative is really a big deal said William Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at Penn State University and head of the Epidemic Task Force at the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. Its making the start that is often the most difficult part.
The society, whose roots go back to the dawn of the skyscraper in the late 19th century, is a global nonprofit technical society that, among other things, develops the consensus indoor air quality standards referenced in U.S. building codes.
Dr. Bahnfleths task force was created as the pandemic began sweeping the world in March 2020, and the new federal recommendations track closely with its guidance. He said that the pandemic had given momentum to the long overdue drive to improve the countrys mediocre air quality standards for buildings, noting that the existing standards had failed to protect people from coronavirus infections.
Viruses can travel in a variety of ways. Early in the pandemic, health officials assumed the coronavirus was transmitted primarily through droplets expelled during coughing or sneezing, as is the flu, or perhaps through contact with contaminated surfaces. But many scientists noted mounting evidence that the coronavirus was airborne, spreading in tiny particles adrift in indoor spaces.
Akin to the rating system for high-quality masks, whose high-tech filtering material trap at least 94 to 95 percent of the most risky particles (N95s, KN95s and KF94s), the filters used in building ventilation systems have what is known as a MERV rating. The higher the rating, which runs from 1 to 16, the better the filter is at trapping particles.
The new federal guidelines advise buildings to upgrade to at least a MERV 13 filter, which traps 85 percent or more of risky particles. Before the pandemic, many buildings used MERV 8 filters, which are not designed for infection control.
Long before the pandemic, studies showed that indoor air quality affects the health of students and workers. A Harvard study of more than 3,000 workers showed that sick leave increased by 53 percent among employees in poorly ventilated areas. Improved ventilation has also been associated with better test scores and fewer school absences.
Improving indoor air has benefits beyond Covid-19, Dr. Nelson wrote. It will reduce the risk of getting the flu, a common cold, or other diseases spread by air, and lead to better overall health outcomes.
March 27, 2022
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the amount of the American Rescue Plan that President Biden signed into law last year. It was $1.9 trillion, not $1.9 billion.
FILE PHOTO: 89-year-old Yodit Ben Ari receives a fourth dose of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine following a vaccination party after Israel approved a second booster shot for the immunocompromised, people over 60 years and medical staff in a retirement home in Netanya, Israel January 5, 2022. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
For Immediate ReleaseMarch 25, 2022
The United States Government today, announced plans to provide $1.5 million in urgent COVID-19 assistance through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for countries including Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, The Bahamas, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.
This assistance will be focused on helping countries with vaccine deployment and readiness, and includes efforts to address vaccine hesitancy and combat vaccine mis- and dis-information. The additional support will assist with community vaccination campaigns and engagement activities, strengthen the cold chain environment, train healthcare workers, and develop regional and country specific campaigns to increase vaccine uptake.
Activities will be implemented through local, regional, and international organizations such as the local Ministries of Health, local non-governmental organizations, the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), UNICEF, and the USAID Country Health Information Systems and Data Use (CHISU) project implemented by JSI Research and Training Institute, Inc.
U.S. Ambassador to Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, Linda Taglialatela, remarked, Through this funding, the United States is extending a helping hand to countries to aid in health and economic recovery from the devastation of COVID-19.
USAID Regional Representative for the Eastern and Southern Caribbean, Clinton. D. White, noted, The funding will fill key gaps to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine uptake, and strengthen countries preparedness for future pandemic threats.
This additional assistance builds on previous COVID-19 support provided to Caribbean countries. USAID has provided nearly $63 million in COVID-19 assistance to the Caribbean to address the health, humanitarian, and economic impacts of COVID-19.This includes more than $7 million specifically for the Eastern and Southern Caribbean region since the beginning of the pandemic.
USAIDs COVID-19 assistance to Caribbean countries has allowed for the procurement of more than 7,000 test kits and more than 3,000 pieces of protective gear for health workers. Through the United States Governments assistance, these countries have also received ambulances and vehicles for patient transport. In addition, communications campaigns to promote health and safety have reached more than 1.2 million people. Finally, the funds have facilitated the provision of psychosocial support for more than 95,000 parents and caregivers, as well as assisted with the installation of more than 300 handwashing stations across the Caribbean.
Diseases know no borders. The United States Government is committed to partnering with our Caribbean neighbors, partners, and friends to end the COVID-19 pandemic, save lives, and stop the threat of dangerous new variants.
-End-
By U.S. Embassy Bridgetown | 25 March, 2022 | Topics: News, Press Releases
(Precision Vaccinations)
New York-basedPfizer Inc. recentlyannounced today that it had initiated a Phase 2/3 study, EPIC-PEDS, to evaluate the safety, pharmacokinetics, and efficacy of PAXLOVIDin non-hospitalized, symptomatic, pediatric participants with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 who are at risk of progression to severe disease.
The Phase 2/3 trial is an open-label, multi-center, single-arm study in approximately 140 participants under 18 years of age.
"Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 11 million children under the age of 18 in the U.S.alone have tested positive for COVID-19, representing nearly 18% of reported cases and leading to more than 100,000 hospital admissions," commentedMikael Dolsten, Chief Scientific Officer and President, Worldwide Research, Development and Medical, Pfizer, in a press release issued on March 9, 2022.
"There is a significant unmet need for outpatient treatments that can be taken by children and adolescents to help prevent progression to severe illness, including hospitalization or death."
"PAXLOVID is already authorized or approved in many countries worldwide, with more than 1.5 million treatment courses delivered thus far and 30 million expected by July (2022) to help combat this devastating disease."
This clinical trial is essential as the SARS-CoV-2 virus variant known as BA.2 continues to spread in the U.S.
The U.S. HHS/ASPR confirmed on March 25, 2022, that based onin vitro assay data, these products (Paxlovid) are likely to retain activity against the BA.2 variant.
Additional COVID-19 oral treatment news is posted at PrecisionVaccinations.com/antivirals.
Note: This news article integrated and edited information for clarity and was manually curated for mobile readers.
File photo of a vaccination clinic in Fulton March 2021 - Judy Grandy, director of environmental health for the Oswego County Health Department, is pictured talking with a patient. Photo courtesy of Sonia Robinson.
OSWEGO COUNTY The Oswego County Health Department continues to offer COVID-19 vaccines for county residents at weekly vaccination clinics, with Wednesday walk-in clinics starting April 6.
Following more than a year of holding vaccination clinics in locations throughout the county, the health department is transitioning to include the COVID-19 vaccine as part of weekly vaccine clinics offered at the Nick Sterio Public Health Clinic in Oswego. Anyone seeking the COVID-19 vaccine, or other general immunizations, can call the Oswego County Health Department at 315-349-3547 or schedule a COVID-19 vaccine online.
COVID-19 vaccines are also available at medical provider offices and local pharmacies.
To view a list of upcoming clinics and schedule an appointment, go to health.oswegocounty.com/vaccines and scroll down to the calendar to click on the date and dose needed.
The following upcoming clinics are scheduled:
Tuesday, March 2912:30-3:30 p.m. Nick Sterio Public Health Clinic, 70 Bunner St., OswegoGeneral childhood and adult immunizations, including COVID-19 vaccines. Appointments are required.
Wednesday, March 303:30-4:30 p.m. Nick Sterio Public Health Clinic, 70 Bunner St., OswegoAnyone aged 12 and older can receive a first, second or booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Anyone aged 18 and older can receive a Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine or booster dose. Appointments are required.
Tuesday, April 512:30-3:30 p.m. Nick Sterio Public Health Clinic, 70 Bunner St., OswegoGeneral childhood and adult immunizations, including COVID-19 vaccines. Appointments are required.
Starting April 6, the Oswego County Health Department will hold walk-in clinics each Wednesday at the Nick Sterio Public Health Clinic, from 9-11 a.m. and 1-3 p.m. Attendees aged 5 and older can receive age-appropriate recommended doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and anyone aged 18 and older can receive recommended doses of the Modern or Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
At-home COVID-19 test kits will be distributed to individuals who are vaccinated at upcoming clinics. Test kits will be distributed while supplies last.
Face masks are required at all health care settings regulated by the state Department of Health, including the Oswego County Health Department and any vaccination site.
For more information, go to the Oswego County Health Departments COVID-19 page at health.oswegocounty.com/covid-19 or call the COVID-19 hotline at 315-349-3330.
Residents should contact their medical providers directly for personal medical advice related to COVID-19 vaccinations, booster shots or treatments.
Under New York State Public Health Law, the Oswego County Health Department is the local public health authority regarding the COVID-19 pandemic response within the County of Oswego. The Oswego County Health Department works closely with New York State Department of Health regarding COVID-19 monitoring, response and reporting.
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A little more than 200 people remain hospitalized with COVID-19 in Wisconsin. This is the lowest number of patients since July, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association.
The seven-day average of daily cases declined to 315 cases a day, which is the lowest level of cases since July, according to the state Department of Health Services.
The state continues to administer more than 2,000 vaccine doses a day. However, the seven-day average of daily vaccine doses continues to decline.
Track COVID and the vaccine in Wisconsin: See the latest data on cases, deaths and administered doses
State and private labs regularly do further tests on a portion of positive COVID-19 samples to find the prevalence of different variants of the virus. The numbers below are just a fraction of the total number of variant cases.
Omicronvariant was identified in more than 99% of tests sequenced during the week starting Feb. 20.Deltawas identified in less than 1% of tests sequenced.
Contact Drake Bentley at (414) 391-5647 orDBentley1@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DrakeBentleyMJS.
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