Breakthrough infections are an increasing part of a prolonged COVID-19 pandemic wave in Minnesota, according to new data released Friday, but people who are unvaccinated still face the biggest risk and take up more hospital beds.
Detailed breakthrough data showed that fully vaccinated Minnesotans made up 197 of the 483 deaths from Sept. 5-Oct. 9 and 1,082 of the 3,492 COVID-19 hospitalizations. With 41% of the COVID-19 deaths in that time among the vaccinated, that is an increase from 29% over the previous four months.
The trend underscores the waning immunity in Minnesotans who received COVID-19 vaccine six or more months ago with the majority of breakthrough deaths being in the elderly and people with underlying health conditions who were prioritized for the first doses of vaccine.
"It's fair to say we are kind of in a perfect storm moment," said Kris Ehresmann, state infectious disease director. "We have delta as the dominant strain, so that certainly has changed the landscape since we first identified it in Minnesota in June. Then you do have the impact of waning immunity."
Boosters are recommended for all recipients of Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine and for recipients of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine who are seniors or younger adults with health problems or workplace risks for viral exposure.
Minnesota has released the date of every COVID-19 positive test, hospital admission and death, but hesitated to provide similar details with breakthrough infections for fear they would be misconstrued and undercut vaccination progress.
More than 3.7 million people in Minnesota have received at least first doses of COVID-19 vaccine, or 66% of the population, leaving 2million unvaccinated people. That includes about 500,000 children 5-11 who became eligible for pediatric COVID-19 vaccine doses last week, as well as children younger than 5 who aren't eligible.
Unvaccinated people make up 33% of the population but 63% of the coronavirus infections Sept. 5-Oct. 9, according to new state data. Seniors were 17 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and 19 times more likely to die of the infectious disease in September if they weren't vaccinated, Ehresmann said.
Hospital leaders implored unvaccinated people to seek COVID-19 vaccine and adults to seek boosters as recommended to address a worsening bed crisis.
COVID-19 hospitalizations increased to 1,245 on Thursday and combined with non-COVID cases to fill 8,219 inpatient beds in Minnesota. While Minnesota reached a single-day record of 1,864 COVID-19 hospitalizations last Nov. 29 before a vaccine was available there were only 6,991 total patients admitted on that date.
"We're above 100%," said Dr. Mark Sannes, who is leading the COVID-19 response for HealthPartners, which includes Regions Hospital in St. Paul and Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park. "We have patients who are admitted to the hospital and have no bed who are boarded in our emergency center. We're having to manage them entirely in our emergency department."
One-third of the 447 COVID-19 patients admitted to HealthPartners hospitals in Minnesota and western Wisconsin over the past 30 days have been vaccinated. Among the 48 patients who needed ventilators to maintain adequate oxygen intake, 13 were vaccinated.
"The message cannot be that the vaccine is not working, because that is false," Sannes said. "This vaccine is keeping people out of the hospital."
Minnesota has the sixth-highest rate of new coronavirus infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state on Friday reported a 9.5% COVID-19 test positivity rate, another 4,849 coronavirus infections and 28 deaths. The state's pandemic totals are 841,625 infections and 8,996 deaths.
A few other states are providing breakthrough infections by date, and all of them are showing higher rates in the unvaccinated. California reported 245 COVID-19 deaths among vaccinated people in October and 1,271 deaths among the unvaccinated.
Breakthrough cases are a problem with any vaccine and infectious disease, but studies continue to show the COVID-19 vaccine remains highly protective against severe illness and death, Ehresmann said. Breakthrough infections are rising in long-term care facilities, but the death rates are not as severe as they were in previous pandemic waves.
"If my dream came true and 100% of Minnesotans were vaccinated, then all of our cases would be vaccine breakthroughs," she said. "No vaccine is 100%."
Minnesota's vaccinated population is at risk from waning immunity because it includes people who are older and have underlying health problems or high-risk jobs for viral exposure. Ehresmann said that makes the elevated rates of COVID-19 death and hospitalization more troubling in a younger and healthier unvaccinated population.
Vaccines take a couple of weeks to produce strong immune responses, so shots won't have an immediate impact on the current "COVID blizzard" of infections, Ehresmann said. She encouraged people to wear masks, practice social distancing and seek routine testing as they return to more indoor activities and plan for holiday gatherings.
Jeremy Olson 612-673-7744
A vaccination center worker inoculates a woman with the Biontech vaccine against Covid-19 in Lower Saxony. Moritz Frankenber/dpa/picture alliance via Getty I hide caption
A vaccination center worker inoculates a woman with the Biontech vaccine against Covid-19 in Lower Saxony.
Another wave of COVID-19 is sweeping across Europe, setting new records in some countries.
Records for daily infections have been shattered in recent days in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. While deaths from COVID-19 are way down from last year in many European countries, Russia with barely a third of its population vaccinated has seen a steady two-month surge and now leads the world in total coronavirus deaths for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
The Netherlands' government announced Friday the country will return to a partial lockdown starting Saturday in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus cases.
The World Health Organization's COVID-19 report for the week ending Nov. 7 showed that Europe, including Russia, was the only region with a rise in deaths from the virus, up 10%. Overall, new coronavirus cases were on the decline in most of the world, but were up 7% in Europe and 3% in Africa.
Last week, the WHO's director for Europe, Dr. Hans Kluge, said the region "is back at the epicenter of the pandemic where we were one year ago."
A virologist at Warwick Medical School in the U.K., Lawrence Young, told Reuters that the latest surge is yet another hard lesson for Europe. "If there's one thing to learn from this it's not to take your eye off the ball," he said.
Vaccine hesitancy, waning immunity among the already inoculated and relaxed restrictions are all considered factors in the new wave, according to Reuters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed the surge in new cases and deaths in there squarely on hesitancy, saying he can't understand why Russians are reluctant to get the country's Sputnik V vaccine.
In Germany, where cases on Thursday surged to a new record of more than 50,000, the country's health minister, Jens Spahn, has said his country must do "everything necessary" to break the latest wave of the disease, Deutsche Welle reported.
"The situation is serious and I recommend that everyone takes it as such," he said. Spahn and the head of Germany's Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, Lothar Wieler, warned that intensive care units across the country were under severe strain from COVID-19 patients, particularly in the states of Saxony, Thuringia and Bavaria.
Spahn said free COVID-19 tests will be offered again starting Saturday.
Olaf Scholz, likely to succeed Angela Merkel as Germany's next chancellor, has called on people either to be vaccinated, recovered or have negative tests to go to work and for stricter rules to enter restaurants and cinemas.
Nearly a third of Germany's population is not yet fully vaccinated, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
By contrast, Portugal and Spain where new cases have been minimal top the European vaccination statistics, with rates in excess of 80%. Infections are also low in France, which has kept restrictions in place since summer, including a requirement to show a vaccine passport to do nearly everything.
Austria which has a vaccination rate similar to Germany's and has also posted record infections in the past week appears to be days away from imposing a lockdown for anyone who is not fully inoculated.
Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg has called a national lockdown for the unvaccinated "probably inevitable," adding that two-thirds of the population should not have to suffer because the other third refused to be vaccinated.
If the federal government approves, Upper Austria will impose restrictions on the unvaccinated beginning Monday. Salzburg is considering similar measures.
Schallenberg said the unvaccinated face an "uncomfortable" winter and Christmas.
In the Netherlands, a three-week partial lockdown was announced Friday, Reuters reported.
During a news conference Friday, caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the country will return to a partial lockdown starting Saturday ordering all bars and restaurants to close at 8 p.m. and sporting events to be held without audiences.
Dutch government officials also recommended that no more than four visitors be allowed in people's homes.
Denmark, which has also seen a recent upswing in cases, this week ordered its people to present a pass in the form of a smartphone app when they enter bars, restaurants and other public places. It is also considering fast-track legislation to require a digital "corona pass" for employers, according to Reuters.
While the United Kingdom saw a similar increase in cases last month, there are signs of a leveling off since then.
NPR's Jonathan Franklin contributed to this report.
Hungry deer feasts on Halloween jack-o'-lanterns
A home security camera captured a deer enjoying a late night snack, digging into a Halloween pumpkin sitting on a porch.
USA TODAY, Storyful
A few Oklahoma deer have recently tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies, a state wildlife official said Friday.
"We really don't know howthey got it," said Dallas Barber, big game biologist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. "A small percentage (of blood tests) did come back positive just for antibodies, meaning they were exposed at some point intime."
But wildlife experts say there is such a low risk of humans catching the coronavirus from a deerthat there is no reason for alarm.
"It's an exceedingly low likelihood that would be a transmission route," said Dwayne Elmore, OSU Extension wildlife specialist.
Elmore has received dozens of inquiries on the topic since NPR published a story Wednesday about the coronavirus being widely spread through deer populations in the United States.
A recent survey of white-tailed deer in the Northeast and Midwestfoundthat 40% of them had antibodies against the coronavirus, according to the NPR report.
'I thought I was going to have a heart attack': How Edmond hunter killed possible Oklahoma state record deer
Elmore said there is no evidence that deer cantransmit the coronavirus to humans.
"The strains that have been detected in deer matchhumans, which indicatesthat it does appear it went from humans to deer,but that doesn't necessarily mean it will go back the other way, but we can't rule thatout," Elmore said.
Even if a deer could transmit the coronavirus to a human, it is much more likely that a person would catch the virus fromclose contact with another person, rather than from a deer walking through aneighborhood, he said.
Oklahoma's most popular hunting season, the deer gun season,opensNov. 20. Both Barber and Elmore recommend hunters take the same precautions when handling a deer carcass they would normally, such as wearing gloves.
Deer in Iowa appear to be catching COVID-19 from humans.Could it happen in other states?
"Wear gloves, don't touch your face, and throw the gloves away," Elmore said.
Wearing gloves always has been a standard health precaution suggested for hunters who are field dressing a deer, even before the coronavirus.
Because the coronavirus triggers a respiratory tract infection, catching it from adeer which is not breathing is highly unlikely, Elmore said.
"The small chance, the way you might could get it from a harvested deer, is if you put your hand in the respiratory tract or on their mouth and then touched your mouth," he said. "Don't ever do that."
Wearing a mask would provide an extra level of precaution for a hunter, he said.
"You could wear a mask while you are handlinga deer, but without the deer respiring there is not likely to be even small droplets circulating," Elmore said.
Elmore said he wasn't surprised to learn the coronavirus has now beenfound in Oklahoma deer because of the high rate of infection in other states.
The fact it is now widespread in deer herds across the country is just more evidence thatthe coronavirus probably willnever be eradicated, he said.
"It's going to gofrom an epidemic, which we have now, to an endemic disease, meaning it's always with us," Elmore said. "However, most epidemiologistshave already said we were there.
"They didn't think we were evergetting rid of this. It's already in cats and dogs and ferrets andprimates and, of course, humans all over the world.
"I think for a long time most disease specialists were leaning toward 'we are going to be stuck with this thing.'Adding it to deer just increases the likelihood of that being the case."
Good evening. Im Karen Kaplan, and its Friday, Nov. 12. Heres the latest on whats happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
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Last week, as my colleague Melissa Healy covered a meeting of the expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about vaccines, she caught a brief exchange that pricked up her ears.
It began when Dr. Oliver Brooks, a panel member and chief medical officer of Watts Healthcare in Los Angeles, invited CDC representatives to discuss how rolling out Pfizer and BioNTechs new kid-friendly COVID-19 vaccine to children ages 5 to 11 could bring the country closer to its herd-immunity goal.
At first, Brooks was met with an awkward silence. Then, Dr. Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDCs COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force, spoke up.
Thinking that well be able to achieve some kind of threshold where therell be no more transmission of infections may not be possible, Jones told the CDC panel. The widespread phenomenon of waning immunity among people who survived coronavirus infections as well as those whove been vaccinated has made the adoption of a clear herd-immunity goal very complicated, he added.
Since the pandemics early days, weve been working toward the collective goal of reaching herd immunity. Experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted that once 70% to 85% of the population was vaccinated against COVID-19, the virus would run out of potential hosts to infect and the outbreak would sputter to an end.
Even at the low end of that range, that target has been elusive. As of Friday, only 58.7% of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to the CDCs COVID Data Tracker.
That percentage is sure to rise, but its value will fall.
For starters, the target that was set in the 70%-to-85% range was based in part on the transmissibility of the coronavirus. That ability to jump from person to person has escalated dramatically in the last year, thanks to the rise of the Alpha and Delta variants.
Meanwhile, the protection provided by vaccination or past infection is turning out to be less durable than previously expected. That also affects the accuracy of herd-immunity estimates.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and its repeatedly challenged us, Dr. John Brooks, chief medical officer for the CDCs COVID-19 response, told Healy when she called to follow up on Jones comments. Its impossible to predict what herd immunity will be in a new pathogen until you reach herd immunity.
Thats why the CDC is shifting its focus away from a specific vaccination target that, when met, would presage the end of the pandemic. Instead, officials intend to redefine success in terms of new infections and deaths. (The particular goals havent been selected.)
Dr. Oliver Brooks, center, observes a COVID-19 screening station outside the Watts Health Center in Los Angeles. He fears that without a target for reaching herd immunity, it will be more difficult to motivate people to get vaccinated.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
Oliver Brooks, the advisory panel member from Watts, said he could understand where the CDC was coming from. But hes nonetheless concerned that backing off a specific target for herd immunity will cause the nations immunization effort to lose some much-needed steam.
Plus, he said, if health officials stop focusing on the herd, Americans may lose sight of the fact that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 isnt just a way to protect yourself but also a means for protecting the community around you.
Theres some risk involved in changing the goal posts, because it could feed into the idea that the CDCs pronouncements on COVID-19 arent all that credible. The agency has already taken fire for its about-faces on the value of masks and how readily the virus spreads in the air.
Unfortunately, thats just how science works.
We want clean, easy answers, and sometimes they exist, John Brooks said. But on this is one, were still learning.
California cases and deaths as of 4:40 p.m. Friday:
Track Californias coronavirus spread and vaccination efforts including the latest numbers and how they break down with our graphics.
What does it take to encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19? People like Father Francisco Valdovinos.
Valdovinos was a Catholic priest at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mecca, Calif. During the few years he served the congregation in the Coachella Valley, he organized literacy and legal classes for his working-class parishioners and pressed politicians to improve services for the community.
But the 58-year-old immigrant from Mexico really leaned in when the pandemic arrived. He gave out tens of thousands of face masks, celebrated Mass with social distancing, and used the parish as a coronavirus testing site. He encouraged people to take COVID-19 seriously. And even before the first shots were available, he urged people to get vaccinated.
Valdovinos himself never got that chance. He came down with COVID-19 in December and died in January.
At the time, residents of Mecca promised to honor Valdovinos by getting the vaccine. And as my colleague Gustavo Arellano writes, they sure did.
As of Friday, 54.1% of Riverside County residents are fully vaccinated. But in the 92254 ZIP Code that includes Mecca, that figure is 72%, The Times tracker shows.
Thats high enough to put Mecca in the top quartile of California ZIP Codes for which vaccination rates are available, according to data from the states Department of Public Health.
An undated photo of Father Francisco Valdovinos with two of his parishioners.
(Trinity Missions)
When Father Valdovinos died, he awakened the consciousness of the people in our community to go out there and get the shot, Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella) told Arellano. For their health, yes, but also out of respect for his life.
Maria Machuca, a longtime community organizer, added that getting the shots was a way of securing Valdovinos legacy.
He was just building momentum, Machuca said. Its just a big loss we dont know what he couldve done. So we need to continue what he did.
See the latest on Californias vaccination progress with our tracker.
Whats on your wish list for the holidays? Maybe you havent made up your mind yet, but the state of California has and it wants you to get a booster shot.
Health officials are hoping to head off a second fall-and-winter COVID-19 surge by encouraging as many booster-eligible adults to get an extra dose as soon as possible. So far, only 14% of fully vaccinated adults here have done so, including 34% of fully vaccinated senior citizens.
The CDC says adults are eligible for a booster shot if they got their Johnson & Johnson shot at least two months ago or if they got their second Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot at least six months ago and face an increased risk of severe COVID-19 due to age, health status, living conditions or job requirements.
But state and local officials are urging pharmacies, medical centers and vaccine administrators to take a more expansive view. As long as people have met the time requirement, they should not be turned away, according to Dr. Tmas Aragn, the state health officer and public health director.
The CDC recently expanded its list of underlying medical conditions that would qualify someone for a booster. Its now so broad that pretty much everybody is eligible, said Dr. Sara Cody, the health officer for Santa Clara County. We really encourage everyone to get out and get their booster shot.
Back to your holiday wish list: Odds are good that youll be visiting a mall at some point in the coming weeks. The city of Los Angeles wants to make that easier by dropping shopping centers from the list of places that require proof of vaccination to serve people indoors.
The City Council voted 10-0 Friday to request new language for the vaccine ordinance that went into effect Monday. Tweaks suggested by the city attorney will have to be approved in another vote.
Council members didnt say what prompted their request. In earlier debates, there were questions about who would be responsible for enforcing the vaccine-verification rule, since there are so many ways for customers to enter a mall.
Elsewhere in the U.S., a federal judge in Austin has cleared the way for Texas schools to institute mask mandates if they so choose.
The judge ruled Wednesday that Gov. Greg Abbotts controversial ban on mask mandates violated a federal law that protects disabled students who want access to public education. That means the Texas attorney general cant sue school districts for requiring masks in the name of student safety. Fifteen such suits have been filed so far.
Globally, the World Health Organization reported that COVID-19 deaths in the Americas declined by 14% over the last week, and new cases fell by 5%. In Southeast Asia and Africa, deaths fell even more by about one-third.
In Europe, on the other hand, COVID-19 deaths increased by 10% over the last week. New coronavirus cases there also rose by 7%, making Europe the only region in the world where both numbers grew, according to the WHO. It was the sixth-straight week that cases and deaths were up across the continent.
The situation has officials turning to measures that are sure to be unpopular. In some parts of Austria, for instance, people who are unvaccinated will soon be asked to stay home unless they have an essential reason to leave, like going to work or the grocery store. And in the Netherlands, it looks like bars and restaurants will be asked to close early for the next three weeks. Sporting events will ban spectators, too.
Things are especially dire in Eastern Europe, where vaccination rates are generally low. As in the U.S., the people who are becoming seriously ill and dying tend to be ones who have eschewed the vaccine.
Theres another similarity with the U.S.: Breakthrough infections and other signs of waning vaccine immunity are providing ammunition to vaccine resisters.
The situation in Europe is worth watching, since surges there are often followed by surges here. And this time around, the vaccination rate in the U.S. is lower than in Western Europe.
Todays question comes from readers who want to know: Does the Biden administrations new vaccine mandate apply to me?
That depends on if you are employed, whom you work for and how many co-workers you have.
First, a little background. Last week, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration released its long-awaited rules for implementing Bidens vaccine mandate for private employers. The tens of millions of Americans who are subject to the rules have until Jan. 4 to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or else submit to weekly coronavirus testing.
The OSHA rules are separate from an earlier vaccine mandate that covers workers employed by the federal government or one of its contractors. The new rules are also distinct from a vaccine mandate that applies to roughly 17 million people who work at hospitals, outpatient clinics, nursing homes and other facilities that treat Medicare and Medicaid patients.
The new vaccine mandate covers workers whose employers are under OSHAs jurisdiction a broad category that includes almost all private-sector organizations in the U.S., including Puerto Rico and several other U.S. territories. (Exempted from OSHAs scrutiny are people who are self-employed, people who work on their own family farms, and people whose job-safety risks are regulated by another part of the federal government.)
To be subject to the vaccine mandate, your employer must have at least 100 employees. OSHA doesnt care whether those workers are in the same place or spread out among multiple facilities. Also, for this math, part-time and seasonal employees count the same as regular full-time employees.
There are a few exceptions. The mandate does not apply to people who work outdoors all of the time. (If you ride to your job site with co-workers in a company vehicle, that counts as working indoors and the vaccine mandate covers you. However, if you only come indoors to use a restroom, it doesnt.)
If you work from home exclusively, the mandate does not apply to you. Ditto if you are the only one in your workplace and dont interact with customers or colleagues. But youll still count toward toward the 100-employee threshold.
Workers may request an exemption to the vaccine mandate on medical or religious grounds, and employers will have to take reasonable steps to accommodate valid requests and let people get weekly coronavirus testing instead. But if its not possible to work around someones unvaccinated status, failure to get the shots can cost them their jobs.
Not surprisingly, the vaccine mandate has its critics. More than half of the states have challenged the rules in court, and on Saturday, the federal appeals court based in New Orleans granted an emergency stay. Officials in the Biden administration say theyre confident theyll prevail, in part because federal safety rules take precedence over state ones.
In fact, OSHA is already looking into the feasibility of extending the vaccine mandate to companies with fewer than 100 employees.
We want to hear from you. Email us your coronavirus questions, and well do our best to answer them. Wondering if your questions already been answered? Check out our archive here.
MaKensi Kastl greets boyfriend Thierry Coudassot upon his arrival from France at a Newark, N.J., airport on Monday. The couple hadnt seen each other in person for over a year due to pandemic travel restrictions.
(Seth Wenig / Associated Press)
Its been a week for emotional reunions now that the U.S. has lifted the COVID-19 travel restrictions that were in place for more than 20 months.
The rules came down early in the pandemic to keep the coronavirus out of the country. Unfortunately, that kept loved ones out of the country, too. U.S. citizens and permanent residents could return from trips abroad, but foreign citizens were forced to play a waiting game.
That meant this was the week for long-separated spouses to make their way back into each others arms, and for grandparents to embrace toddler grandchildren theyd never met.
Im going to jump into his arms, kiss him, touch him, said Gaye Camara, who lives in France and was making her way through Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to visit her New York-based husband, whom shed last seen in January of 2020.
Dual U.S.-Canadian citizen Traysi Spring and her American husband, Tom Bakken, welcome people heading into Blaine, Wash., from Canada on Monday. The U.S. reopened its land borders to nonessential travel after almost 20 months of COVID-19 restrictions.
(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)
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Practice social distancing using these tips, and wear a mask or two.
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HOULTON, Maine Just three months into the 2021-22 school year, most Aroostook County schools have already exceeded the total number of positive cases of COVID-19 experienced in their districts for all of last year, in one district nearly five times more.
My thoughts on the data reflect, without question, the veracity of the delta COVID-19 strain and its causation to continued spread throughout our communities, SAD 70 Superintendent Stephen Fitzpatrick said.
The use of mandatory versus optional face coverings has only slightly decreased the percentage of positive cases.
The dramatic increase in the total number of cases is something school districts throughout the state are seeing. But school officials hope that the measures put in place, including pool testing, will help keep students safe and in school.
Two school districts SAD 70 in Hodgdon and RSU 89 in Stacyville (Katahdin) are the only public schools in northern Maine that have an optional mask policy for students and staff. And while the percentage of positive cases at both of those schools is higher than neighboring districts, it is not noticeably higher as one might expect.
Hodgdon has recorded 37 positive COVID-19 cases in the district, or roughly 7.64 percent of its population, as of Wednesday. Seven of those cases are in staff, with the remaining 30 among the student population. There are 486 students in the two schools in SAD 70, with more than 100 staff.
A total of 260 students or staff (53.72 percent) have been required to be quarantined from school at various times. The district had 12 active cases Friday.
Based on the current trend, Fitzpatrick said that he hopes the numbers will eventually plateau.
I believe as more people choose to avoid quarantine through pool testing and detection of the virus at an earlier stage, combined with both vaccination and natural building of immunity through contracting this virus, will result in a slowing of this specific strain in community spread, he said. My concern would be the potential next variant or strain. This pandemic has taken its toll both in our schools as well as communities, state and nation.
Katahdin has reported 26 positive cases, or roughly 9.19 percent of its population of 283 students.
In comparison, RSU 29 in Houlton, where theres a mandatorymask policy, has experienced 90 positive cases or roughly 6.7 percent of its population of 1,347 students. A total of 743 students or staff (55 percent) have been asked to quarantine at one point this school year.
That total number of cases is almost five times the number for all of the 2020-21 school year.
I do not have exact numbers for last year, but my best estimate would be 20 cases overall, said Holly Hodgkin, RSU 29 director of nursing. We did not see our first case until right before Thanksgiving last year. Our numbers are much higher this year, and we are also seeing community spread.
The number of students who have been asked to quarantine could have been much higher if the district was not doing mandatory masks and pool testing of students, Hodgkin said. But pool testing is optional, and the number of students participating is low.
Since the beginning of this school year, we have had 355 students that were able to remain in school due to that exception, Hodgdkin said. We have already surpassed our total cases from last year. I spoke with a CDC worker yesterday and she told me that what the RSU 29 district is seeing is common among many schools throughout the state this year.
In RSU 50 (Southern Aroostook), a total of 20 cases (5.8 percent) have been reported, with 135 students having to be isolated or quarantined at some point in time. There are 343 students in the entire school district.
We have more positive cases this year than all of last year, RSU 50 Superintendent and Principal Jon Porter said. Required masking, our pooled testing program, social distancing measures and our parents cooperation with following the COVID-19 daily screener has helped keep our numbers down. We have been very fortunate to continue with in-person instruction.
Two of The Countys larger school districts SAD 1 in Presque Isle and RSU 39 in Caribou have experienced even higher numbers of COVID-19 cases, despite having mandatory mask policies.
Caribou Superintendent Tim Doak said his district has experienced 90 total COVID-19 cases (7.8 percent of its population). Of that figure, 82 cases were students, and eight were staff members.
Doak said the numbers were absolutely much worse than last year, as the district only had 28 total cases for all of 2020-21.
In neighboring SAD 1, the results are not as dramatic. The district has reported 53 positive cases (3.1 percent) so far, which is about the same number for the entire school year in 2020-21, Superintendent Ben Greenlaw said.
It seems strange to say, but we didnt even have our first case of COVID in the district during the 2020-2021 school year until Dec. 3, he said. My thoughts on the data is that the delta variant of the coronavirus has proven to be highly contagious and has impacted the students, staff and families in our district much more significantly this year as compared to last year.
He said they are not seeing the virus spread in the schools and that all but a few of their cases are from students and staff bringing COVID-19 in from the greater community.
Greenlaw said he believes this trend is due to the many mitigation strategies that are in place in SAD 1, including indoor mask wearing, pooled testing, social distancing, contact tracing and regular hand washing.
I cant project what our case numbers will be in the coming weeks and months, but I am hopeful that with students aged 5-11 now eligible for the COVID vaccination, we will see a reduction of cases in our schools due to a higher percentage of our school population being fully vaccinated, Greenlaw said.
More articles from the BDN
Weve done as much as we can, and its time for the next generation, new blood, Melillo, 71, said, standing next to Priam and pointing across a field. As an example, there are 12 acres over there, a beautiful, flat field. Its growing hay and weeds. It could grow more vines. It could grow marijuana.
I dont want to sound like Im entering some sort of spy movie, but I dont know what to do, said the 33-year-old researcher. I want to fade back into obscurity.
But first, shed like your attention.
On Tuesday HarperCollins will publish Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, which Chan co-wrote with science writer Matt Ridley, a Conservative member of the UK House of Lords. Building on her paper, which appeared online in May 2020 but hasnt been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal, the book asserts that a growing body of circumstantial evidence supports her hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China.
The book doesnt explicitly blame a lab leak for the pandemic, but Viral does say that scenario has evolved from a conspiracy theory to just barely a possibility, to a plausible hypothesis worthy of a credible investigation. She cites, among other things, the similarity between the new coronavirus and another virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The prevailing view has been that the illness resulted from natural spillover from animals to humans, although no one knows for sure. An investigation by US intelligence agencies this year was inconclusive, which the White House blamed on a lack of cooperation by the Chinese government. The World Health Organization last month announced that a group of international scientists will try again.
Chan says she was reluctant to write the book when Ridley, a veteran journalist who contends the dangers of global warming are exaggerated, approached her last year about collaborating. She says she finally signed a book deal because news reports and posts on Twitter which she uses prolifically to advance her theory and spar with opponents cannot tell the complex story of COVID-19s origins.
It has to be summed up in a book, she said. I hope it will be a bestseller.
She acknowledged that writing and promoting a book seems a bad way to achieve anonymity.
To her critics and there are plenty shes motivated less by the pursuit of knowledge than of riches and notoriety.
In my opinion, she is an intellectually dishonest, manipulative conspiracist with very little subject matter expertise who has offered nothing of value to the search for the origins of COVID-19 and has compensated for her mediocrity by pursuing personal profit, Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said in an e-mail. Her supposed scientific contribution, including this book, is a scam disguised as an honest quest for the truth.
Rasmussen has skewered Chan on Twitter, noting that the Broad researcher is not a virologist or epidemiologist specialists with expertise in viruses and the spread of disease. Chan is a molecular biologist who focuses on gene therapy and cell engineering.
Chan has repeatedly fired back at critics, tweeting in October 2020 that scientists who obscure the origins of the pandemic have a hand in the deaths of millions of people.
Other scientists, however, say Chan deserves credit for challenging the view that the virus almost certainly moved to humans from bats through an intermediary host animal.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, called her courageous. In March, he signed an open letter along with Chan and other scientists published in the Wall Street Journal and the French publication Le Monde calling for an international forensic investigation of COVIDs origins.
In an interview, Ebright said Chan questioned a false narrative that scientists had ruled out the possibility the virus came from a lab and is putting her reputation and career on the line.
But in an example of the controversys many layers, Ebright said the central argument for a lab leak that Chan made in the 2020 paper wasnt all that compelling. She was right to say the virus could have come from a lab, he says, but for the wrong reasons. Still, Ebright credits her and other scientists with prodding US intelligence agencies to conduct a 90-day inquiry earlier this year into the pandemics origins, although the findings were inconclusive.
At first glance, Chan seems an unlikely figure to provoke an international uproar among seasoned virologists, government officials in multiple countries, and Internet sleuths hunting for evidence of suspicious illnesses in China.
A Canadian citizen who was born in Vancouver and grew up in Singapore, she is a junior scientist who arrived at the Broad in 2018. Chan says she did all her COVID research in her spare time. During interviews, she seemed alternately wounded and amused by the criticism hurled by veteran scientists, exclaiming ouch! and holy cow! when a reporter read aloud Rasmussens scathing e-mail.
Chan works in the field of gene therapy, which involves altering or inserting genes inside human cells to treat diseases. Scientists sometimes use modified viruses to deliver a new gene into the cell, but several experts said that background would not give Chan a deep understanding of coronaviruses.
Its like the difference between a car salesman and a car mechanic, said Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University who believes its far more likely that the coronavirus naturally spread from animals to humans like many other so-called zoonotic viruses. Its a different body of knowledge.
Chan dismisses such criticism, saying her knowledge of how viruses can be genetically modified is relevant and that virologists should be embarrassed for not taking the possibility of a lab leak more seriously.
By her account, Chan began researching that scenario early last year as a result of encouraging reports that the new coronavirus appeared to be mutating very slowly, improving the prospects for developing medicines and vaccines to target it.
As she worked on her laptop at her kitchen counter in Cambridge during the 2020 lockdown, Chan said, she wondered whether the relatively stable virus had somehow pre-adapted to infect humans before the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Could it have adapted to humans while being studied in a lab and then accidentally escaped?
At the time, many experts theorized the virus likely spread from an animal to humans at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, given that two-thirds of the initial 41 people hospitalized with COVID-related pneumonia in early 2020 had direct exposure to the market. Chan had her doubts.
She contacted Shing Hei Zhan, a friend and bioinformatics expert from her days at the University of British Columbia. Together, they began a genetic analysis, comparing the evolution of the new coronavirus with the SARS-CoV virus that caused a far smaller outbreak that began in China in 2002 and disappeared two years later.
In the paper that the two friends wrote with Ben Deverman, Chans boss at the Broad, they concluded that by the time the new coronavirus emerged in December 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission so that it resembled the earlier SARS virus during the latter phase of that outbreak.
They also couldnt rule out that it had come from a lab, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, about 8 miles from the market. The institute acknowledged in early 2020 that it had a virus in its database with a genome sequence that was 96.2 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2, but it dismissed the idea of a leak as a conspiracy theory.
The paper appeared at a time when the politics surrounding the genesis of the pandemic were fraught. President Trump called the coronavirus the Chinese virus. Critics accused him of stirring anti-Asian hatred. The study Chan coauthored swiftly made headlines. Coronavirus did NOT come from animals in Wuhan market, The Daily Mail on Sunday in Britain trumpeted.
The state-backed Chinese newspaper Global Times attacked Chan, saying her filthy behavior and lack of basic academic ethics have also aroused the disgust of many international experts, according to an account she translated for the Globe. Chan said she was accused of being a race traitor because of her Chinese heritage. She said she also received some quite terrifying e-mails and that Broad security guards were put on alert.
Fearing she had committed career suicide, Chan said she apologized to Deverman. He told her he still believed in what I wrote in the study, she recalled.
Deverman, who directs a vector engineering group at the Broad, declined to discuss his communications with Chan but called her fearless. He said he, too, was surprised by the blowback. To him, the study simply reported that no scenarios for COVIDs origin could be ruled out based on known scientific evidence.
Chan shows no signs of retreat in Viral. Indeed, she expands on her arguments and credits Internet detectives who combed online records for gathering important evidence. They include a group of activists called DRASTIC, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, which formed on Twitter and has pushed the lab leak theory.
Among the key evidence she cites is the virus that the Wuhan institute collected in 2013 in Yunnan province that shares 96.2 percent of the genomic identity of the virus that causes COVID. Researchers obtained the virus, known as RaTG13, a year after six workers at a bat-infested copper mine in the province fell ill with severe pneumonia caused by a SARS-like coronavirus. Three of the workers died. In September 2019, she writes, the institute took its pathogen database offline while studying that virus and eight similar ones.
The Wuhan institute has conducted experiments on coronaviruses. But Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese virologist at the lab, has repeatedly denied it was the source of SARS-CoV-2, telling The New York Times in June, How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?
Chan raises the possibility in her book that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon being developed in a lab, but then brushes that aside as a distraction. She writes, If the virus came from a laboratory, it is much more likely that it was a leak from experiments designed to understand viruses that pose potential pandemic threats.
Other scientists say theres a world of difference between two viruses that are 96.2 percent genetically identical.
Its not that close, said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. He noted that researchers recently discovered a virus in bats in Laos that is even more similar to SARS-CoV-2, as reported in September in Nature. The science has moved on, he said.
Worobey signed a second letter with 17 other scientists, including Chan and Deverman, that was published in Science in May that called for further investigation of COVIDs origins. Since then, he has grown more convinced that the virus jumped from animals to humans naturally, he said, most likely spreading from bats to raccoon dogs that researchers found were sold at the market.
Ridley, the coauthor of Viral, says Chan has played a crucial role in the debate. They talked on video calls for months and rewrote each others drafts, he said, but met in person for the first time on Wednesday in Kendall Square. Standing outside the Area Four pizzeria, they opened a box containing the first US edition of their book.
Ridley says he plans to donate half of his advance to charities. Chan says she will donate half of everything she makes on the book. Neither would say how much money they have received.
I felt very strongly about not profiteering, Chan said. It was never about the money for me. ... Its not like I can retire.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.saltzman@globe.com.
A Valley woman recently lost her mom and dad to the coronavirus.
"The doctors told me it's gotten really bad," said Vanessa Esparza.
According to Esparza, her mom, Veronica, and dad, Victor, had been married for more than 28 years when the couple was diagnosed with COVID.
She said they started showing symptoms like coughing and losing their taste. Eventually, they were hospitalized and passed away within six hours of each other.
Esparza said her dad didn't know how to live without her mom.
"They were the true definition of love and loyalty," she said.
Esparza told ABC15 her family wasn't vaccinated but she and her brother got the shot after seeing their parents get sick.
She said the family took COVID seriously but hadn't decided if they were going to get the vaccine until it was too late.
"I mean we believed in it. We always believed in it," she said.
"Especially my dad. We always took precautions -- wore masks everywhere -- but we never took action into getting vaccinated," Esparza added.
Esparza said she regretted not getting the shot sooner.
"We were so indecisive. We kept on pushing it...we'll go tomorrow, we'll go next week," she said.
In Arizona, about 60% of eligible people are vaccinated.
Meantime, the state is seeing a surge in cases and hospitalizations.
There have also been more than 100 new deaths in the past two days.
Esparza is urging people thinking about getting vaccinated to consider getting the shot.
"I wouldn't want anyone to be in the position I'm in," she said.
"You don't do anything about it until you're in that position. It shouldn't have to get to that point," she added.
The family is currently accepting donations to help pay for the funerals for Victor and Veronica. For more information, click here.
On a recent episode of his podcast, Rick Wiles, a pastor and self-described citizen reporter, endorsed a conspiracy theory: that Covid-19 vaccines were the product of a global coup dtat by the most evil cabal of people in the history of mankind.
Its an egg that hatches into a synthetic parasite and grows inside your body, Mr. Wiles said on his Oct. 13 episode. This is like a sci-fi nightmare, and its happening in front of us.
Mr. Wiles belongs to a group of hosts who have made false or misleading statements about Covid-19 and effective treatments for it. Like many of them, he has access to much of his listening audience because his show appears on a platform provided by a large media corporation.
Mr. Wiless podcast is available through iHeart Media, an audio company based in San Antonio that says it reaches nine out of 10 Americans each month. Spotify and Apple are other major companies that provide significant audio platforms for hosts who have shared similar views with their listeners about Covid-19 and vaccination efforts, or have had guests on their shows who promoted such notions.
Scientific studies have shown that vaccines will protect people against the coronavirus for long periods and have significantly reduced the spread of Covid-19. As the global death toll related to Covid-19 exceeds five million and at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans are not fully vaccinated iHeart, Spotify, Apple and many smaller audio companies have done little to rein in what radio hosts and podcasters say about the virus and vaccination efforts.
Theres really no curb on it, said Jason Loviglio, an associate professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Theres no real mechanism to push back, other than advertisers boycotting and corporate executives saying we need a culture change.
Audio industry executives appear less likely than their counterparts in social media to try to check dangerous speech. TruNews, a conservative Christian media outlet founded by Mr. Wiles, who used the phrase Jew coup to describe efforts to impeach former President Donald J. Trump, has been banned by YouTube. His podcast remains available on iHeart.
Asked about his false statements concerning Covid-19 vaccines, Mr. Wiles described pandemic mitigation efforts as global communism. If the Needle Nazis win, freedom is over for generations, maybe forever, he said in an email.
The reach of radio shows and podcasts is great, especially among young people: A recent survey from the National Research Group, a consulting firm, found that 60 percent of listeners under 40 get their news primarily through audio, a type of media they say they trust more than print or video.
People develop really close relationships with podcasts, said Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at Columbia Universitys Knight First Amendment Institute. Its a parasocial medium. Theres something about voice that humans really relate to.
Marc Bernier, a talk radio host in Daytona Beach, Fla., whose show is available for download or streaming on iHearts and Apples digital platforms, was among the talk radio hosts who died of Covid-19 complications after expressing anti-vaccination views on their programs. The deaths made national news and set off a cascade of commentary on social media. What drew less attention was the industry that helped give them an audience.
On a June episode, Mr. Bernier said, after referring to unvaccinated people: Im one of them. Judge me if you want. The next month, he cited an unfounded claim that 45,000 people have died from taking the vaccine. In his final Twitter post, on July 30, Mr. Bernier accused the government of acting like Nazis for encouraging Covid-19 vaccines.
Jimmy DeYoung Sr., whose program was available on iHeart, Apple and Spotify, died of Covid-19 complications after making his show a venue for false or misleading statements about vaccines. One of his frequent guests was Sam Rohrer, a former Pennsylvania state representative who likened the promotion of Covid-19 vaccines to Nazi tactics and made a sweeping false statement. This is not a vaccine, by definition, Mr. Rohrer said on an April episode. It is a permanent altering of my immune system, which God created to handle the kinds of things that are coming that way. Mr. DeYoung thanked his guest for his insight. Mr. DeYoung died four months later.
Buck Sexton, the host of a program syndicated by Premiere Networks, an iHeart subsidiary, recently floated the theory that mass Covid-19 vaccinations could speed the viruss mutation into more dangerous strains. He made this suggestion while appearing on another Premiere Networks program, The Jesse Kelly Show.
Nov. 13, 2021, 11:22 p.m. ET
The theory appears to have its roots in a 2015 paper about vaccines for a chicken ailment called Mareks disease. Its author, Andrew Read, a professor of biology and entomology at Penn State University, has said his research has been misinterpreted by anti-vaccine activists. He added that Covid-19 vaccines have been found to reduce transmissions substantially, whereas chickens inoculated with the Mareks disease vaccine were still able to transmit the disease. Mr. Sexton did not reply to a request for comment.
Were seeing lots of public radio stations doing amazing local work to spread good health information, Mr. Loviglio, the media professor, said. On the other side, youre seeing mostly the AM radio dial and their podcast counterparts being the Wild West of the airwaves.
iHeart which owns more than 860 radio stations, publishes more than 600 podcasts and operates a vast online archive of audio programs has rules for the podcasters on its platform prohibiting them from making statements that incite hate, promote Nazi propaganda or are defamatory. It would not say whether it has a policy concerning false statements on Covid-19 or vaccination efforts.
Apples content guidelines for podcasts prohibit content that may lead to harmful or dangerous outcomes, or content that is obscene or gratuitous. Apple did not reply to requests for comment for this article.
Spotify, which says its podcast platform has 299 million monthly listeners, prohibits hate speech in its guidelines. In a response to inquiries, the company said in a written statement that it also prohibits content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive content about Covid-19, which may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health. The company added that it had removed content that violated its policies. But the episode with Mr. DeYoungs conversation with Mr. Rohrer was still available via Spotify.
Dawn Ostroff, Spotifys content and advertising business officer, said at a conference last month that the company was making very aggressive moves to invest more in content moderation. Theres a difference between the content that we make and the content that we license and the content thats on the platform, she said, but our policies are the same no matter what type of content is on our platform. We will not allow any content that infringes or that in any way is inaccurate.
The audio industry has not drawn the same scrutiny as large social media companies, whose executives have been questioned in congressional hearings about the platforms role in spreading false or misleading information.
The social media giants have made efforts over the last year to stop the flow of false reports related to the pandemic. In September, YouTube said it was banning the accounts of several prominent anti-vaccine activists. It also removes or de-emphasizes content it deems to be misinformation or close to it. Late last year, Twitter announced that it would remove posts and ads with false claims about coronavirus vaccines. Facebook followed suit in February, saying it would remove false claims about vaccines generally.
Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, a media professor at the University of Florida, said that podcasts may be more effective in spreading false information than social media. People who go to podcasts have much more active engagement, she said. Its not like, Oh, I went on Facebook and I scrolled through and saw this misinformation. Its more likely that youre engaged, youre interested in this host, you actively seek this person out and listen to what he or she has to say.
Audio media has grown more popular during the pandemic, according to the iHeart chief executive Robert W. Pittman, a former head of MTV and AOL. At a recent media industry conference, he noted a change in listening habits over the last 20 months: The consumer before the pandemic, because of social and a lot of other things, was feeling disconnected, and they value media that feels like a companion. There are two of those: radio, and now theres podcasting.
The Federal Communications Commission, which grants licenses to companies using the public airwaves, has oversight over radio operators, but not podcasts or online audio, which do not make use of the public airwaves.
The F.C.C. is barred from violating American citizens right to free speech. When it takes action against a media company over programming, it is typically in response to complaints about content considered obscene or indecent, as when it fined a Virginia television station in 2015 for a newscast that included a segment on a pornographic film star.
In a statement, an F.C.C. spokesman said the agency reviews all complaints and determines what is actionable under the Constitution and the law. It added that the main responsibility for what goes on the air lies with radio station owners, saying that broadcast licensees have a duty to act in the public interest.
The world of talk radio and podcasting is huge, and anti-vaccine sentiment is a small part of it. iHeart offers an educational podcast series about Covid-19 vaccines, and Spotify created a hub for podcasts about Covid-19 from news outlets including ABC and Bloomberg.
There has been at least one turnaround among hosts once skeptical of the pandemic and efforts to counter it. Bill Cunningham, who has a radio show in Cincinnati that is syndicated by iHearts Premiere Networks and available on Apple, spent the early part of the pandemic claiming that Covid-19 was overhyped. He revised his view on the air this year, describing his decision to get vaccinated and encouraging his listeners to do the same.
Recently, he expressed his eagerness to get a booster shot and mentioned that he had picked up a new nickname: The Vaxxinator.
Pittsburgh-based Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious diseases expert and critical care and emergency medicine physician, wrote in a opinion piece this week that it is impossible to eliminate or eradicate covid-19.
This is not possible with an efficiently spreading respiratory virus that has an animal reservoir and can spread from person to person with mild or no symptoms, Adalja wrote in the New York Daily News piece. The goal, which has not often been articulated forcefully or clearly enough, has always been to tame the virus, rendering it unable to threaten us and critically, our hospitals, in the manner it once could in 2020 and early 2021.
Adalja wrote that he believes it is time to break away from an abstinence only approach.
We must break away from that and develop ways for communities and institutions to provide off-ramps from masking, physical distancing and aggressive testing of asymptomatic fully vaccinated people, he wrote. Even though we have better tools to continue to decouple most cases from hospitalization, there will always be a baseline number of covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and death. I anticipate that COVID-19 may ebb and flow with local outbreaks and seasonality. We will be living with this virus there is no covid zero but we will be able to alter the outcomes of these cases with the new tools available to us.
Adalja, a Butler native and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, has emerged as one of the most recognizable national experts on the pandemic. Since Americans first began hearing about coronavirus a year ago, Adalja has become a go-to guy for much of the national media, appearing regularly on CNN, MSNBC and Fox as well as showing up on CBS, NPR and in The New York Times among many other outlets, including the Tribune-Review.
Now, hes calling on the country and world to rethink mitigation measures.
Covid-19 will always be an illness that one wants to avoid through reasonable steps, but it will eventually become something that cannot kill at the rate it once did, cannot inundate a hospital the way it once did and cannot scare us the way it once did. Rather than clinging to our fear, we should welcome the arrival of that day.
Read the entire piece here.
Paul Guggenheimer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Paul at 724-226-7706 or pguggenheimer@triblive.com.
