Karen Mahoney and her new husband, Brian Ray, told CNN they met 35 years ago over a love of skiing, and when they finally got engaged in March, the ski instructors didn't want to wait to get married. But Mahoney said there was really only one thing that mattered to her: having her parents and 96-year-old grandmother at the wedding.
"She's my only living grandparent, the only grandparent I've ever known, so it was very important for me for her to be there to watch the happiest day of my life," Mahoney said. "The most important part of the day for us was the promises we told to each other, and we wanted my parents and grandmother to witness that."
Mahoney said the couple has a friend who works for border patrol who had arranged for her to meet her family at the closed border previously, including when Ray asked her father, Paul, for her hand in marriage. So they asked the friend for help in making it work again.
He explained all the rules, including making sure they stayed on their given sides and did not exchange anything, and informed the patrol on duty as to what was going on if they saw the ceremony on the cameras in the area. They met up at the border outside Burke, New York, the day before their planned wedding on September 25.
The border crossing more resembles a meadow with a marker showing the country names. There were no gates or fences in the way. Mahoney's parents stood on their Canadian side and the couple, their wedding party and their officiant stood on the other.
They went through the whole wedding, all but signing the marriage certificate, which they reserved for the big wedding the next day at Mahoney's home in Cadyville, New York.
Ray and Mahoney said the experience was emotional.
"The minister asked them if they (my parents) acknowledge that Brian was vowing to love me the rest of our lives, and did they accept him into the Mahoney clan, and they responded, 'We do' and that was extremely emotional," Mahoney said.
"I cried," Ray said. "It was good for me, because I knew how much it meant to her to have her parents and her grandmother here and see us exchanging vows."
The couple met in 1985 when Ray taught Mahoney to ski. They remained friends through the years even after they both married other people and each had two boys. About 10 years ago, Ray was the one to teach Mahoney's boys how to ski.
After each was married for 19 years, they each divorced and were brought together by a Facebook post in which Mahoney was selling a beloved vehicle. Ray knew she loved the car and they got to talking about it, and the rest was history.
They dated for a year, and in March, Ray used their love of skiing to propose on top of a mountain in Vermont.
"Just an epic day of skiing and bluebird sky. It just was absolutely perfect," Mahoney said.
"Forever and a day and then some. That's our thing," Ray said.
Correction: A previous version of this story used the incorrect call letters for CNN affiliate WPTZ.
The previous all-time high was recorded four days ago, on September 24, when 828 deaths were registered.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov acknowledged the country's regions had seen an increase in coronavirus cases while speaking to journalists on Tuesday.
The head of Russia's public health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, Anna Popova, said last week it was hard to determine when cases would slow, with less than 50 million Russians having received a first dose of a vaccine.
"We have, let us say, 110-115 million adults. Of them, some 47 million have received one dose. This is less than a half [of Russia's adult population] ... so we have no grounds to say today that [infections] will stop," state news agency TASS quoted Popova as saying.
Russia is one of the countries worst affected by the pandemic, reporting the seventh highest number of cases globally, according to John Hopkins University data. It is currently battling a devastating third wave of infections.
In total, it has registered 7,464,708 cases across the country, while the total number of coronavirus-related deaths since the beginning of the pandemic now stands at 205,531, according to official figures.
It is struggling with persistently low vaccination rates -- a problem caused by high levels of hesitancy among its population. Just over a quarter of Russians have received the shot, compared to more than a half in the United States and two thirds in the United Kingdom, according Our World in Data.
In a bid to try and bolster vaccination numbers, Moscow authorities in June ordered that at least 60% of service industries staff -- spanning everything from catering to housing to transport -- had to get at least one shot by mid-July. Peskov said at the time that while vaccination was voluntary, workers were at risk of losing their jobs if they declined a shot.
Putin told a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization via video link that "several dozen people" from his entourage had contracted the virus.
Peskov previously said that the Russian president had tested negative for coronavirus and was "absolutely healthy."
September 29, 2021 | Austin, Texas | Press Release
Governor Greg Abbott today announced that the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), in partnership with local officials, launched a new COVID-19 therapeutic infusion center in College Station. The infusion center opens to the public tomorrow and has been provided with monoclonal antibodies to treat outpatient cases of COVID-19 with a doctors referral. This treatment is available at no cost to the patient. Local partners include Brazos County, the City of College Station, the City of Bryan, and St. Joseph Health Hospital.This facility in Brazos County will ensure Texans in the Bryan-College Station region who test positive for COVID-19 have access to this free and effective treatment," said Governor Abbott. "Thank you to our local government partners and St. Joseph Health Hospital for working with us to open this new infusion center."Governor Abbott, TDEM, and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) have established and expanded antibody infusion centers in communities across the state over the past several months. COVID-19 antibody infusion treatment can prevent a patient's condition from worsening and requiring hospital care. These facilities also help increase bed capacity in hospitals so that resources are available for the most ill patients. The State deployed similar measures beginning in November 2020 to communities across Texas.These state-sponsored infusion centers are in addition to the infusion treatment centers provided by more than 200 private health providers across the state.Antibody infusion centers are currently operating in the following communities, with more in the planning stages: Amarillo (TDEM) Austin (DSHS) Beaumont (TDEM) College Station (TDEM) Corpus Christi (DSHS) Edinburg (TDEM) Fort Worth (DSHS) Harlingen (TDEM) Houston (DSHS) Laredo (DSHS) Livingston (TDEM) Lubbock (TDEM) McKinney (TDEM) Nacogdoches (TDEM) Nash (TDEM) Odessa (TDEM) San Antonio (DSHS) Seguin (TDEM) Tyler (TDEM) The Woodlands (DSHS) Victoria (TDEM) Waco (TDEM)The treatment is free and available to Texans who test positive for COVID-19 and have a referral from a doctor. Texans can visit meds.tdem.texas.gov to find a therapeutic provider.
APPLETON - In a 20-11 vote Tuesday night, the Outagamie County Boardvoted to require county employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to receive additional paidtime off if theycontract the virus.
This policy change now offers an additional 80 hours, or two weeks, of paid time off only to fully vaccinated employees. That means if two employees test positive for COVID-19 and both, hypothetically speaking, have five days of paid timeoff remaining, the employee who is not vaccinated will use their own PTO hours while at home recovering.
In contrast, an employee with five days of PTO remaining who tests positive will dip into the additional two weeks of PTO now available to vaccinated employees rather than using any of their five PTO days.
"We take COVID very seriously," Outagamie County Executive Thomas Nelson told The Post-Crescent Tuesday."We want to align incentives with folks taking appropriate cautions to limit the spread of COVID, and to keep themselves safe as well."
Currently about 53% of county residents eligible for the vaccine have been fully vaccinated, according to Outagamie County vaccination data.
The county first began offering theemergency time offin March of 2020 via an executive order issued by Nelson. Last year, the county funded emergency paid leave by using federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act funds.
CARES Act funds must be used by the end of the year, prompting the county to look for another funding source. A likely alternative are ARPA The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funds.ARPA funds are the latest in a series of COVID-19-related relief and economic stimulus legislation passed by Congress.
Prior to the County Boardmeeting and approving the paid leave plan Tuesday night, the county'sLegislative/Audit and Human Resources Committee met and unanimously approved the proposal.
Cindy Fallona, a member of that committee said she fully supports the move.
We cannot at this point force people to have a vaccination, but if one chooses not to do that in the face of medical evidence then there have to be some consequences, and these are pretty stark consequences," Fallona said during the committee meeting.
Board member Christine Lamers said she doesn't want county employees to have separate COVID-19leave benefits. She said vaccinated people can still get sick and spread the virus to unvaccinated people.
"I don't think there's aneed to incentivize any more," Lamers said during the board meeting prior to voting against the leave policy. "There's food, money, gift cards.If people haven't taken some form of incentive, at this point I don't think there's anything out there that they will take."
Cathy Spears, chair of the human resources committee,said she does not see this new approach as punitive but rather a good way of utilizing federal money correctly.
She said rather than having federal aid money for COVID-19 paying for someone who has not been vaccinated to be on leave, themoney can instead be spent on another program that helps promote health, such as purchasing more personal protective equipment (PPE).
I dont see this as a punitive thing, Spears said during a committee meeting Tuesday night prior to the full Outagamie County Board meeting. I see this as a smart financial move by the county.
Supervisor Ronald Klemp said while he believes everyone should get vaccinated, he doesn't want to pressure others to do so.
"I don't want to force somebodyto do something that is against their conscience or their belief or whatever it is," Klemp said."Ifthey get COVID,now they're not eligible, even though they're working hard every day through the pandemic."
Joseph Guidote, corporation council for Outagamie County, said there are some built-in exemptions.
"I did want to point out that the executive order does have an exemption for an employee with a valid medical reason not to take the vaccine, orhas a valid religious conviction for not taking his vaccine," Guidote said.
Curt Konetzke, vice chair of the human resources committee, asked Lisa Lux, the countys human resources director, if she had heard anything positive or negative from employment groups or county departments.
Lux said she had not personally heard anything from anyone. She added there have been discussions in terms of what this means for unvaccinated employees.
Our goal with this is really to incentivize employees to get the vaccine, Lux told committee members. The sooner we are able to make those things happen the sooner we can get back to normal operationally.
Board members who voted against the policy include:Dominic Renteria, Christine Lamers, Jason Wegand, Kelly Schroeder, Mike Thomas, Ronald Klemp, Eric Davidson, Bob Buchman, Dennis Clegg, Debbie Vander Heiden and Daniel Rettler.Five board members were not present for the vote.
RELATED:Outagamie County Board approves supervisory districts maps, keeps number of districts at 36 but borders still could change
RELATED:Vice-chairman Travis Thyssen to step down from Outagamie County Board on Tuesday
Contact Roshaun Higgins at 920-205-1154or rhiggins@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @row_yr_boat.
"Everyone has their own choice to do what they feel is right for themselves and their family and things of that nature," James said during the Los Angeles Lakers media day in El Segundo, California. "I know that I was very skepticism (sic) about it all. But after doing my research and things of that nature, I felt like it was best suited for not only me but my family and my friends. That's why I decided to do it."
Children in Delaware account for more cases of COVID-19 than any other age group this week.
"For the first time, we are seeing that the 5-to-17 age range has the highest case rate statewide," Dr. Karyl Rattay, director of the state's Division of Public Health said.
Rattay admitted, that's in part, because more testing is happening in Delaware's schools through a partnership with testing agent Quidel.
"So we're catching and finding more cases in our schoolers, earlier, which is very helpful for the spread," she said.
Children under 12 are not eligible for vaccination. It's unclear how many of the children, who represent new cases of COVID are symptomatic.
"We are definitely seeing higher levels of cases, where we have lower vaccination rates, like in the rest of the country.
A close second behind pediatric cases of COVID are young adults ages 18 to 34, which has been a challenging age to target for vaccination. That age group is just 50% fully vaccinated.
"Typically, almost every week for the past year, it's been our 18 to 34 year olds who have the highest case rates, and this age group still has higher case rates," she said.
The Delta variant, which has been more contagious than other variant strains so far, accounts for 99% of variant strains sampled in Delaware right now, according to DPH data.
While the entire state is seeing elevated levels of COVID-19, Rattay singled out certain areas of concern.
"Some of our hottest spots right now include large areas of Sussex and western and southern Kent County as well as the city of Wilmington," she said. "Our highest rates do correlate with the areas where we have the lowest vaccination."
According to data presented on September 28, 2021 Delaware has 456 new cases of COVID-19 on a seven-day moving average compared to just 20 cases in June. The state's test positivity rate stands at 7.3% with testing rates up 2.2% from the week prior.
"We do expect that trend to continue," she said as many workplaces, including state government, have or soon will require regular COVID-19 testing for unvaccinated workers.
Hospitalizations total 215 with 38 critically ill, according to the DPH data. While that's far lower than the high of 476 hospitalizations Delaware saw in January, Gov. John Carney cautioned:
"Hospitals are more fully engaged with elective surgeries...so the hospitals have encountered challenges. Hospitals in the lower part of our state in Kent and Sussex County have stopped elective surgeries and other provisions, which is not a good thing, because they have more people in the hospital with COVID19 than they can accommodate those surgeries," said Carney.
Despite case rates and hospitalizations far higher than they were in June, Rattay noted cases are starting to level off.
"Last week, our case rate increased less than 1% from the previous week, which is great because when we last had our press briefing in August, the case rates had increased almost 80% over the previous week. Positivity, hospitalization, and death rates have also decreased statewide," she said.
Carney continues to push the vaccine with DPH focusing on those who are vaccine hesitant.
'The bottom line is...if we're going to beat COVID-19 we've got to get more people vaccinated. It's really that simple," he said.
Indiana man wound up in hospital, wants everyone to get COVID vaccine
Mark Green, a COVID-19 patient regrets not getting vaccinated on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, at Hancock Regional Hospital, Greenfield Ind.
Michelle Pemberton, Indianapolis Star
INDIANAPOLIS When Mark Green,who has an underlying lung condition,left his appointment with pulmonologist Robert Klinestiver in July, the physician hoped he had convinced his patient to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
But Green, like so many in Indiana, had doubts, deep ones, about the vaccine, so strong that even an extensive talk with his doctor could not allay his fears.
When Green and Klinestiver next met about two months later, Green lay in bed in a critical care unit, battling a severe case of COVID. The 58-year-old New Palestine, Indiana, man greeted his physician wanly and sheepishly.
By this point, Green has no doubts about the vaccine.
Pausing to take deep breaths from the high flow oxygen device to which he was tethered, Green said he would like to tell everyone to "just go get the vaccine."
He said there's no reason to hesitate.
I didn't take the vaccine myself because I was scared, the unknown, what would happen two or three years down the road, Green said. Once I got sick, I kind of realized, it didnt matter what happens down the road. It matters what happens now. … You got to weigh the here and now or maybe never.
Before, Green said he was worried about the one little dose of vaccine. Over the past 11 days in the hospital, though, he has had what he describes as pounds of medicine pumped into him to keep him alive. And, he said, hes concluded that even if there are no guarantees that nothing will go wrong with the vaccine, its better to be vaccinated now and worry later.
On Friday, as Green's wife, Amy, and a nurse kept watchful eyes on the machine pinging out his heart rate and oxygen saturation level, Green recorded a video with IndyStar in the hopes that he could change at least one persons mind about the vaccine.
Green has heard ofother patients with his condition in the hospital hooked up to a ventilator and he's hopeful that won't happen to him.
The next few days could prove critical ones for Green, Klinestiver said. Some patients in his condition take a turn for the worse. Others continue to go in the right direction and eventually make it home.
Only time will tell.
Both Mark and Amy Green were againsttaking the vaccine. Amy still isn't sure.
They were worried about the unknown.
They discussed the pros and cons at length. They did not doubt COVID-19 was real; they know people who had been sickened by it, includingMark Greens 88-year-old mother.
Health officials have said repeatedly the vaccine is safe and effective, preventing people from developing severe cases of COVID-19 and dying.
But for every argument the Greens heard in favor of the vaccine, it seemed, there was one against. Itsdevelopment and approval just seemed rushed, Mark and Amy agreed. People had politicized it, and their politics fall on the Republican side of things. Not one doctor could promise him beyond a shadow of a doubt that problems with the vaccine would not arise in the future.
The Greens aren't alone in that thinking, despite the repeated efforts of both public and health officials.
Too often, Klinestiver says, his patients say politely "no thanks"when he tries to convince them to take the vaccine. While Klinestiver says he can understand much of this reluctance, he also knows the flip side of the vaccine: That hospitals have been filling up with COVID-19 patients, sometimes leaving little to no room for others to receive care.
And, almost all of these COVID-19 patients, particularly the very sick, have a singular thing in common: They were not vaccinated.
Thatfrustrates him.
COVID-19: Current pandemic has killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu
When the pandemic first hit, most of the sickest patients were elderly. Now Klinestiver said, the hospital is full of people in their 50s and 40s. Some in their 30s have even died.
Thats the salt in this wound, you know, he said. Its so hard to watch a person in their prime of their lives die.
The Greens had heard all these arguments, but nothing swayed them. Most people they know are not vaccinated. No one in their direct family Mark, Amy, their five adult children is vaccinated.
Marks 88-year-old mother had planned to get vaccinated, but four days before her appointment, she fell and broke her hip, setting off a cascade of health problems, including her own bout with COVID-19 while in rehab.
She recovered.
Neither Mark nor Amy think of themselves as being anti-vaccine. They just had qualms about this particular vaccine, many of which from the outside seem to be largely driven by false information.
The amount of conflicting information made it political, said Amy, who adds she has had flu and pneumonia shots in the past. With this vaccine, however, she said, she felt like the government and officials were shoving it down peoples throats and not giving individuals a choice in whether or not they wanted it.
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Everythingchanged when Mark got the virus.
At first, he thought he had picked up a bad stomach virus that was going around. A few days later, though, a COVID-19 test revealed he was positive, and after four days, the virus settled in his chests and lungs.
Two weekends ago, their doctor told Amy she should plan tobring Mark to the hospitalSept. 13.
But that Sunday night, Mark was having too much trouble breathing, and the pulse oximeter they were using to track his progress showed his oxygen levels had dipped dangerously low. Amy didnt wait. Nor did Mark protest.
I just got to the point I didnt care, he said.
As of Friday, Mark had spent a week and a half in the hospital, and even under a best case scenario, he still has a long haul in front of him.
Things could go either way for Mark. He might need that ventilator. He could also recover without it.
Before he can be discharged from the hospital, he will need to be weaned off his current high doses of oxygen, Klinestiver said. He will still be on oxygen when he leaves, just far less than what hes on now. He will need to work on his legs, which have become debilitated during his illness.
Full recovery, if it comes, could take months, said Klinestiver, who had another patient in his 40s, perfectly healthy who ran every day. That patient spent two or three weeks in the hospital on high doses of oxygen, teetering on requiring a ventilator. He avoided that but spent six months on oxygen and only now is beginning to start running again.
Green accepts the path forward is a long one.
Now,he plans to do his part to persuade others not to wind up where he has been for the past 10 days. He thinks it's crazy the vaccine has been politicized.
Im not pro-vaccine. Im pro-health, he said. The vaccine is what makes you healthy. You get the vaccine, its going to make you healthy, keep you healthy and not let this happen to you.
FollowShari Rudavsky on Twitter: @srudavsky.
The World Health Organization is reviving its stalled investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus as agency officials warn that time is running out to determine how the pandemic that has killed more than 4.7 million people world-wide began.
A new team of about 20 scientistsincluding specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from natureis being assembled with a mandate to hunt for new evidence in China and elsewhere.
With more than 18 months of the pandemic in the rearview mirror, researchers have been steadily gathering new and important insights into the effects of COVID-19 on the body and brain. These findings are raising concerns about the long-term impacts that the coronavirus might have on biological processes such as aging.
As a cognitive neuroscientist, my past research has focused on understanding how normal brain changes related to aging affect peoples ability to think and move particularly in middle age and beyond. But as more evidence came in showing that COVID-19 could affect the body and brain for months or longer following infection, my research team became interested in exploring how it might also impact the natural process of aging.
In August 2021, a preliminary but large-scale study investigating brain changes in people who had experienced COVID-19 drew a great deal of attention within the neuroscience community.
In that study, researchers relied on an existing database called the UK Biobank, which contains brain imaging data from over 45,000 people in the U.K. going back to 2014. This means crucially that there was baseline data and brain imaging of all of those people from before the pandemic.
The research team analyzed the brain imaging data and then brought back those who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 for additional brain scans. They compared people who had experienced COVID-19 to participants who had not, carefully matching the groups based on age, sex, baseline test date and study location, as well as common risk factors for disease, such as health variables and socioeconomic status.
The team found marked differences in gray matter which is made up of the cell bodies of neurons that process information in the brain between those who had been infected with COVID-19 and those who had not. Specifically, the thickness of the gray matter tissue in brain regions known as the frontal and temporal lobes was reduced in the COVID-19 group, differing from the typical patterns seen in the group that hadnt experienced COVID-19.
In the general population, it is normal to see some change in gray matter volume or thickness over time as people age, but the changes were larger than normal in those who had been infected with COVID-19.
Interestingly, when the researchers separated the individuals who had severe enough illness to require hospitalization, the results were the same as for those who had experienced milder COVID-19. That is, people who had been infected with COVID-19 showed a loss of brain volume even when the disease was not severe enough to require hospitalization.
Finally, researchers also investigated changes in performance on cognitive tasks and found that those who had contracted COVID-19 were slower in processing information, relative to those who had not.
While we have to be careful interpreting these findings as they await formal peer review, the large sample, pre- and post-illness data in the same people and careful matching with people who had not had COVID-19 have made this preliminary work particularly valuable.
Early on in the pandemic, one of the most common reports from those infected with COVID-19 was the loss of sense of taste and smell.
Strikingly, the brain regions that the U.K. researchers found to be impacted by COVID-19 are all linked to the olfactory bulb, a structure near the front of the brain that passes signals about smells from the nose to other brain regions. The olfactory bulb has connections to regions of the temporal lobe. We often talk about the temporal lobe in the context of aging and Alzheimers disease because it is where the hippocampus is located. The hippocampus is likely to play a key role in aging, given its involvement in memory and cognitive processes.
The sense of smell is also important to Alzheimers research, as some data has suggested that those at risk for the disease have a reduced sense of smell. While it is far too early to draw any conclusions about the long-term impacts of these COVID-related changes, investigating possible connections between COVID-19-related brain changes and memory is of great interest particularly given the regions implicated and their importance in memory and Alzheimers disease.
These new findings bring about important yet unanswered questions: What do these brain changes following COVID-19 mean for the process and pace of aging? And, over time does the brain recover to some extent from viral infection?
These are active and open areas of research, some of which we are beginning to do in my own laboratory in conjunction with our ongoing work investigating brain aging.
Our labs work demonstrates that as people age, the brain thinks and processes information differently. In addition, weve observed changes over time in how peoples bodies move and how people learn new motor skills. Several decades of work have demonstrated that older adults have a harder time processing and manipulating information such as updating a mental grocery list but they typically maintain their knowledge of facts and vocabulary. With respect to motor skills, we know that older adults still learn, but they do so more slowly then young adults.
When it comes to brain structure, we typically see a decrease in the size of the brain in adults over age 65. This decrease is not just localized to one area. Differences can be seen across many regions of the brain. There is also typically an increase in cerebrospinal fluid that fills space due to the loss of brain tissue. In addition, white matter, the insulation on axons long cables that carry electrical impulses between nerve cells is also less intact in older adults.
As life expectancy has increased in the past decades, more individuals are reaching older age. While the goal is for all to live long and healthy lives, even in the best-case scenario where one ages without disease or disability, older adulthood brings on changes in how we think and move.
Learning how all of these puzzle pieces fit together will help us unravel the mysteries of aging so that we can help improve quality of life and function for aging individuals. And now, in the context of COVID-19, it will help us understand the degree to which the brain may recover after illness as well.
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New Jersey will pay unemployed residents a bonus when they return to the workforce.
The goal of the Return and Earn program is to help employers fill jobs while assisting unemployed people, state officials said Monday.
Employers may receive up to $10,000 in wage subsidies to hire and train new employees for up to six months. Workers will receive a $500 bonus in their first paycheck, in addition to other incentives that employers may offer.
