July 20 (Reuters) - Two-thirds of India's population have antibodies against the coronavirus, according to data released on Tuesday from a survey of 29,000 people across the nation conducted in June and July.
The fourth national blood serum survey which tests for antibodies, known as a sero survey, included 8,691 children aged 6-17 years for the first time. Half of them were seropositive.
The survey showed 67.6% of adults were seropositive, while more than 62% of adults were unvaccinated. As of July, just over 8% of eligible adult Indians had received two vaccine doses.
About 400 million of India's 1.4 billion people did not have antibodies, the survey showed.
India's daily cases have fallen to four-month lows after a second-wave that crippled the healthcare system. But experts have warned the authorities against swiftly reopening cities and voiced concerns about overcrowding at tourist sites.
"The second wave is still persisting. The danger of new outbreaks is very much there," Vinod Kumar Paul, a top government adviser, told a news conference.
"One out of three, wherever you are, ... is still vulnerable and therefore the pandemic is no way over," he said.
The study also surveyed 7,252 healthcare workers and found 85% had antibodies, with one in 10 unvaccinated.
Last month, data showed at least half of under-18s in India's financial capital of Mumbai were exposed to COVID-19 and had antibodies against it. read more
Some experts have said a third wave could hit children. Mumbai has joined other cities in building huge paediatric wards in preparation.
Reporting by Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru and Neha Arora in New Delhi; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Edmund Blair
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
In a statement on Sunday, the South African Football Association confirmed that three people associated with the mens Olympic soccer team had tested positive: one official and two players, Thabiso Monyane and Kamohelo Mahlatsi. It was unclear whether those were the cases reported by Olympic officials, who did not disclose any names or nationalities.
In addition, the British Olympics Association confirmed on Sunday that six British track and field athletes and two staff members are in quarantine at the teams preparation camp after being identified as close contacts of an individual who tested positive on their flight to Japan. The group all tested negative at the airport and have continued to test negative upon arrival into the country, the association said.
Summer Olympics Essentials
Olympic officials defended their safety protocols on Sunday, saying a strict testing regimen minimized the risk of outbreaks. At a news conference, Pierre Ducrey, operations director for the Olympic Games, said that since July 1, more than 18,000 participants had arrived in Japan from overseas and more than 30,000 tests had been conducted.
This is probably the most controlled population at this point in time anywhere in the world, he said.
Tokyo is now under its fourth state of emergency since the pandemic began, with this one set to last until after the Games end on Aug. 8. The city is seeing its highest case numbers in months, reporting more than 1,000 new cases for a fifth consecutive day on Sunday.
New precautionary measures continue to be announced in the days leading up to the Games. They include changes to the medal ceremony, announced last week, that require athletes to place their gold, silver or bronze medals around their own necks rather than accept them from presenters.
The podium will also be larger this year to ensure social distancing among medalists. Olympic officials had previously announced that masks would be mandatory for both medalists and presenters.
Some athletes have decided to stay away from the Games. They include two Australians: the tennis player Nick Kyrgios, who cited misgivings about the lack of spectators, and the basketball player Liz Cambage, who said she worried about the effect that being confined to the Olympic bubble would have on her mental health.
A vaccination drive-thru has been set up to fast-track the countrys second phase vaccination rollout. The Gauteng Provincial Government has increased the number of vaccination sites from 28 to 63 in the provinces five regions.
This will ensure that more people over the age of 60 years and older receive the two-dose Pfizer vaccine.
Primary Healthcare worker, Sithiba Matheza, says the drive-thru vaccination site is a first of its kind.
Despite some teething problems, it was off to a good start since it went operational on Monday.
We can say the people are appreciating this project, we are still having a little bit of challenges. The first challenge is with the IT, the routers, the tablets we dont have network. We as nurses are not trained with IT issues we take care of the sick. But now you have to do the gadget thing as well and also give an injection, says Matheza.
Ekurhuleni Health District Manager, Mbangiseni Magoro, says the drive-thru vaccination site is a way of adding more sites to reach as many people as possible.
This facility that we are in is quite large, It has three entrances, and we are only using one at the moment. We will expand and open two more entrances so we can vaccinate more people. So that we can be able to reach capacity of 1 200 vaccinations per day in this facility, that is the plan, explains Magoro.
While some were happy to finally get their shots, others were frustrated by the delays caused by the technical glitches.
We sitting here for two hours already and thats a little bit long, what about all these tents standing here doing nothing. I am not very happy with it, said one elderly.
Infographic of recent COVID-19 cases in South Africa:
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Theres no sugarcoating things at this stage. Gauteng is in trouble. Premier David Makhura has suggested that the province will look to return to a harder form of lockdown in the immediate future, as GP becomes the site of the most active COVID-19 cases in South Africa. A total of 244 people have died, and over 40 000 people have been infected as more hot-spots continue to spring-up.
The grim reality of the situation was laid bare on Thursday afternoon. Makhura warned locals that they are now in the eye of the storm, as cases continue to surge in the north-east. He warned that the provincial government was worried about what lies ahead, suggesting the peak of infections may only come in September.
Prof. Bruce Mellado of Wits University was also in attendance, and he brought some very stark data to proceedings. Numbers for General ward, hospitalised and high care patients have all soared since the beginning of June and there are hot-spots cropping up all over Gauteng.
Mellados map shows the worst-affected areas within the province. Johannesburg is the only red-spot to mention, indicating the severity of the situation in this metro. Soweto, Boksburg, and Tembisa are also experiencing some concerning spikes. Meanwhile, outliers like Carletonville and Pretoria are battling to contain the virus:
The model, created by Mellado and his team at Wits, also looks at cluster outbreaks within Johannesburg. Most parts of the city have experienced hyper-local transmissions, particularly in the southern suburbs. These are truly terrifying visuals, which no doubt strengthen Makhuras calls for tighter lockdown restrictions.
Graves being prepared at the Honingnestkrans cemetery, north of Pretoria, on 8 July 2020, during a visit by Gauteng health MEC Bandile Masuku.
Photo: Alex Mitchley/News24
Burial sites around Gauteng have started preparing graves and assessing its capacity, in order to make provisions for any outcome as Covid-19 cases in the province increase sharply.
Gauteng's Health MEC, Dr Bandile Masuku, visited the Honingnestkrans cemetery north of Pretoria on Wednesday, to assess the state of readiness should the burial site be needed.
City of Tshwane operations chief James Murphy told Masuku the Honingnestkrans cemetery has space for 24 000 single graves on the 30 hectare plot of land.
Murphy further explained that single graves were currently being marked out and dug up, but that if the need arose, mass graves would also be created.
ALSO READ |Family buries stranger after Covid-19 body mix-up
Tshwane has 14 burial sites available with a capacity of around 250 000 graves.
While Murphy was briefing Masuku on the numbers, in the background, an excavator was already at work, digging six-foot deep graves.
The MEC said, admittedly, it was an uncomfortable subject to speak about, but that the Gauteng Department of Health had to assess the state of readiness of cemeteries.
"We had to come and deal with the unfortunate and uncomfortable subject of death and also to see our preparedness as a province to see how we will be able to cater in an event that we will be having a whole lot of people who will be passing on in a short space of time," Masuku said.
"We will be going to other parts of the province to make sure that this part of the health system is ready for any eventuality."
Looking at possible mortality figures, Masuku said working on an assumption that 1% of the six million people expected to be infected in the province, that would amount to 60 000 Covid-19 related deaths in Gauteng.
"We are working around those figures and it's something we are prepared for."
But there was still a good opportunity to manage how the Covid-19 peak affected residents of the province, said the MEC.
"We are not here to pass panic, but it's also to ascertain from our side that the logistics are in place."
The preparation of cemeteries also takes into account the non-Covid-19 fatalities that would ordinarily be registered throughout the year.
Covid-19 has added a burden to these numbers, Masuku pointed out.
As of 7 July, a total of 71 488 confirmed cases have been recorded in Gauteng, with 21 414 recoveries. For three consecutive days Gauteng registered the highest number of deaths of all nine provinces.
The death toll currently stands at 478.
Of the total number of confirmed cases in the province, Johannesburg had recorded 33 750 Covid-19 cases, Ekurhuleni, 15 807 and Tshwane, 11 481.
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Of the 8,787 people who have died in Texas due to COVID-19 since early February, at least 43 were fully vaccinated, the Texas Department of State Health Services said.
That means 99.5% of people who died due to COVID-19 in Texas from Feb. 8 to July 14 were unvaccinated, while 0.5% were the result of breakthrough infections, which DSHS defines as people who contracted the virus two weeks after being fully vaccinated.
All people 12 and older are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine in Texas. Children ages 12-17 can get the Pfizer vaccine, but COVID-19 vaccines are not mandatory for Texas students.
State and local health officials say that vaccine supply is healthy enough to meet demand across much of Texas. Most chain pharmacies and many independent ones have a ready supply of the vaccine, which is administered free and mainly on a walk-in basis. Many private doctors' offices also have it. And you can check current lists of large vaccine hubs that are still operating here.Public health departments also have vaccines. You can register with the Texas Public Health Vaccine Scheduler either And businesses or civic organizations can set up their vaccine clinics to offer it to employers, visitors, customers or members.
Yes. Medical experts recommend that people who have had COVID-19 should still get the vaccine. If someones treatment included monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma, they should talk to their doctor before scheduling a vaccine appointment. The CDC recommends that people who received those treatments should wait 90 days before getting the vaccine.
Yes. Health experts and public officials widely agree that the vaccine is safe. The three currently approved vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson reported their vaccines are 95%, 94% and 72% effective, respectively, at protecting people from serious illness. While no vaccine is without side effects, clinical trials for Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson show serious reactions are rare.
The agency did not release details about the 43 deaths and noted that these are preliminary numbers, which could change because each case must be confirmed through public health investigations. Statewide, more than 50,000 people have died of COVID-19 since March 2020, but the rate of deaths has slowed dramatically since vaccines became widely available in April.
Dr. David Lakey, the chief medical officer of the University of Texas System, said people succumbing to the coronavirus despite being vaccinated was not unexpected.
No vaccine is 100%, said Lakey, who is also a member of the Texas Medical Associations COVID-19 task force. And weve known for a long while that the vaccines arent 100%, but theyre really really good at preventing severe disease and hospitalizations. There will always be some individuals that will succumb to the illness in the absence of full herd immunity.
He added that 0.5% is a very low number of individuals in a state of 30 million. In the grand perspective of everything, thats not a large number that would call into question at all the use of this vaccine.
COVID-19 cases have been surging in Texas and nationally mostly among unvaccinated people as the highly contagious delta variant has become dominant. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 88% effective against symptomatic cases of the delta variant and 96% effective against hospitalizations, according to Yale Medicine. Researchers are still studying the efficacy of the Moderna vaccine against the delta variant but believe it may work similarly to Pfizer.
As of Monday, 42.8% of Texans have been fully vaccinated; the state continues to lag behind the national vaccination rate of 48.8%, according to the Mayo Clinic.
DSHS doesnt track the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations among vaccinated people statewide because hospitals are not required to report that information to the state. Travis Countys health authority, Dr. Desmar Walkes, told county commissioners and Austin City Council members in a Tuesday meeting that almost all new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the area have been among unvaccinated people.
Its not surprising that we have [increasing COVID-19] cases, Lakey said. This delta variant spreads very rapidly among individuals, and theres only some of these individuals who have been vaccinated, and a small number of those will have severe disease. But the vast majority of the people that have severe disease will be the unvaccinated individuals.
Disclosure: The Texas Medical Association and the University of Texas System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
SINGAPORE England has removed nearly all coronavirus restrictions. Germany is allowing vaccinated people to travel without quarantines. Outdoor mask mandates are mostly gone in Italy. Shopping malls remain open in Singapore.
Eighteen months after the coronavirus first emerged, governments in Asia, Europe and the Americas are encouraging people to return to their daily rhythms and transition to a new normal in which subways, offices, restaurants and airports are once again full. Increasingly, the mantra is the same: We have to learn to live with the virus.
Yet scientists warn that the pandemic exit strategies may be premature. The emergence of more transmissible variants means that even wealthy nations with abundant vaccines, including the United States, remain vulnerable. Places like Australia, which shut down its border, are learning that they cannot keep the virus out.
So rather than abandon their road maps, officials are beginning to accept that rolling lockdowns and restrictions are a necessary part of recovery. People are being encouraged to shift their pandemic perspective and focus on avoiding severe illness and death instead of infections, which are harder to avoid. And countries with zero-Covid ambitions are rethinking those policies.
You need to tell people: Were going to get a lot of cases, said Dale Fisher, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore who heads the National Infection Prevention and Control Committee of Singapores Health Ministry. And thats part of the plan we have to let it go.
For months, many residents in Singapore, the small Southeast Asian city-state, pored over the details of each new Covid case. There was a palpable sense of dread when infections reached double digits for the first time. And with borders closed, there was also a feeling of defeat, since even the most diligent measures were not enough to prevent infection.
Our people are battle weary, a group of Singapore ministers wrote in an opinion essay in the Straits Times newspaper in June. All are asking: When and how will the pandemic end?
Officials in Singapore announced plans to gradually ease restrictions and chart a path to the other side of the pandemic. The plans included switching to monitoring the number of people who fall very ill, how many require intensive care and how many need to be intubated, instead of infections.
Those measures are already being put to the test.
Outbreaks have spread through several karaoke lounges and a large fishery port, and on Tuesday Singapore announced a tightening of measures, including banning all dine-in service. The trade minister, Gan Kim Yong, said the country was still on the right track, comparing the latest restrictions to roadblocks toward the final goal.
Singapore has fully vaccinated 49 percent of its population and has cited Israel, which is further ahead at 58 percent, as a model. Israel has pivoted to focusing on severe illness, a tactic that officials have called soft suppression. It is also facing its own sharp rise in cases, up from single digits a month ago to hundreds of new cases a day. The country recently reimposed an indoor mask mandate.
Its important, but its quite annoying, said Danny Levy, 56, an Israeli civil servant who was waiting to see a movie at a cinema complex in Jerusalem last week. Mr. Levy said that he would wear his mask inside the theater, but that he found it frustrating that restrictions were being reimposed while new virus variants were entering the country because of weak testing and supervision of incoming travelers.
Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said that countries taking shortcuts on their way to reopening were putting unvaccinated people at risk and gambling with lives.
At this point in time, I actually find it quite surprising that governments would necessarily decide they know enough about how this virus will behave in populations to choose, Yes, we are going to live with it, said Mr. Baker, who helped devise New Zealands Covid elimination strategy.
New Zealanders seem to have accepted the possibility of longer-term restrictions. In a recent government-commissioned survey of more than 1,800 people, 90 percent of respondents said they did not expect life to return to normal after they were vaccinated, partly because of the lingering questions about the virus.
Scientists still do not fully understand long Covid the long-term symptoms that hundreds of thousands of previously infected patients are still grappling with. They say that Covid-19 should not be treated like the flu, because it is far more dangerous. They are also uncertain about the duration of immunity provided by vaccines and how well they protect against the variants.
Much of the developing world is also still facing rising infections, giving the virus a greater opportunity to rapidly replicate, which then increases the risks of more mutations and spread. Only 1 percent of people in low-income countries have received a vaccine dose, according to the Our World in Data project.
In the United States, where the state and local governments do much of the decision-making, conditions vary widely from place to place. States like California and New York have high vaccination rates but require unvaccinated people to wear masks indoors, while others, like Alabama and Idaho, have low vaccination rates but no mask mandates. Some schools and universities plan to require on-campus students to be vaccinated, but several states have prohibited public institutions from imposing such restrictions.
In Australia, several state lawmakers suggested this month that the country had reached a fork in the road at which it needed to decide between persistent restrictions and learning to live with infections. They said that Australia might need to follow much of the world and give up on its Covid-zero approach.
Gladys Berejiklian, the leader of the Australian state of New South Wales, immediately knocked the proposal down. No state or nation or any country on the planet can live with the Delta variant when our vaccination rates are so low, she said. Only about 11 percent of Australians over age 16 are fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison also backed away from calls for a shift in the countrys Covid protocols. After announcing a four-phase plan for returning to regular life on July 2, he has insisted that the strength of the Delta variant requires an indefinite postponement.
In places where vaccine shots have been widely available for months, such as Europe, countries have bet big on their inoculation programs as a ticket out of the pandemic and the key to keeping hospitalizations and deaths low.
Germans who have been fully immunized in the past six months can dine indoors in restaurants without showing proof of a negative rapid test. They are allowed to meet up in private without any limits and to travel without a 14-day quarantine.
In Italy, masks are required only when entering stores or crowded spaces, but many people continue to wear them, even if only as a chin guard. My daughters chide me they say Ive been vaccinated and dont need to wear a mask, but I got used to it, said Marina Castro, who lives in Rome.
England, which has vaccinated nearly all of its most vulnerable residents, has taken the most drastic approach. On Monday, the country eliminated virtually all Covid-19 restrictions despite the rise of Delta-variant infections, particularly among young people.
On Freedom Day, as the tabloids called it, pubs, restaurants and nightclubs flung their doors wide open. Curbs on gatherings and mask requirements were also lifted. People were seen dining al fresco and sunbathing, cheek to jowl.
In the absence of most rules, the government is urging people to use personal responsibility to maintain safety. Sajid Javid, Britains health secretary who tested positive for the coronavirus last week said last month that the country needed to learn to live with the virus. That is despite polls suggesting that the English public prefers a more gradual approach to reopening.
Officials in Singapore, which reported a year-high 182 locally transmitted infections on Tuesday, say the number of cases is likely to rise in the coming days. The outbreak appears to have delayed but not scuttled plans for a phased reopening.
You give people a sense of progression, Ong Ye Kung, Singapores health minister, said this month, rather than waiting for that big day when everything opens and then you go crazy.
Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave from Sydney, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Melissa Eddy from Berlin, Natasha Frost from Auckland, New Zealand, Benjamin Mueller from London and Richard Prez-Pea from New York.
A Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is administered at a mobile clinic in Los Angeles county, which has pockets of vaccine hesitancy.
By Rachel FrittsJul. 21, 2021 , 11:00 AM
In many U.S. regions, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has caused the COVID-19 pandemic to surge once again. Last weeks 7-day average of daily new cases increased by nearly 70%, to more than 26,000; hospitalizations have jumped by more than one-third, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Part of the reason is that less than half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated. Some scientists and physicians worry vaccine hesitancy is fueled by the fact that shots available in the United Statesmade by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson (J&J)have been authorized on an emergency basis but have yet to be fully approved. Antivaccine activists, talk show hosts, and far-right politicians have made the vaccines experimental nature a talking point.
Full approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could help win over skeptics, says Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Diego. It means something to people for it to be approved, she says. It just seems like the simplest, easiest thing we could be doing right now.
Pfizer and Moderna have both applied for full FDA approval for their jabs, but it could be months away. Heres where things stand.
All three vaccines have been given an emergency use authorization (EUA), which FDA offers during crises as a quick way to give people access to potentially lifesaving medicines. In the past, EUAs have typically been used for drugs during very catastrophic, immediate circumstances, like an anthrax attack, says Jesse Goodman, a former chief scientist at FDA whos now at Georgetown University. The COVID-19 pandemic marks the first time EUAs have been granted for new vaccines.
To receive an EUA, vaccine manufacturers had to follow a special set of guidelines that asked for safety and efficacy data from clinical trials involving tens of thousands of participants, as well as information on vaccines quality and consistency. Pfizer and Moderna both received an EUA in December 2020; J&Js came in February. Based on the real-world data they have collected since then, Pfizer applied to FDA for full approval in early May, and Moderna on 1 June. J&J is expected to follow soon.
Its one of scale. FDA will review much more data, covering a longer period of time, before granting full approval. Its not a huge difference, but it is a real difference, Goodman says. The agency will analyze additional clinical trial data and consider real-world data on effectiveness and safety. It will inspect manufacturing facilities and make sure quality control is very strict. Its an exhaustive review, Goodman says.
FDA is already familiar with much of the data, however, for instance on the very rare side effects caused by the J&J and Pfizer vaccines that didnt show up in clinical trials.
On 16 July, FDA accepted Pfizers application under priority reviewmeaning it will move faster than during standard reviews, which typically take at least 10 months; the agency now has until January 2022 to review the materials. That seems like a long time, but last week an FDA official told CNN that the decision is likely to come within 2 months. The review has been ongoing, is among the highest priorities of the agency, and the agency intends to complete the review far in advance of the [January] Date, an FDA press officer confirmed to Science in a statement.
FDA has not formally accepted Modernas application, possibly because the company has not yet submitted all the required materials.
Full approval could help overcome vaccine hesitancy, Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Times. Some people who understand that the E in EUA stands for emergency are waiting for full FDA approval before they receive a shot, he wrote.
I think its fair to say that any number of us who are clinical infectious disease doctors and in public health are frankly a little surprised at how long the process is taking, says William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
I want [FDA] to be careful. I also want them to move it along, Schaffner says. Frankly, Id like them to work on the weekends. The people who are vaccinating are working on the weekends. The virus is working on the weekends.
About 30% of unvaccinated people say they were waiting for vaccines to receive full approval, according to a survey of 1888 adults conducted in June by the Kaiser Family Foundation. But the report cautions that for many people, FDA approval is likely a proxy for general safety concerns. Not everyone now focused on approval may actually get a vaccine, especially if they perceive the approval process as rushed or politically motivated.
For the people who are really dead set against getting the vaccine at this point, I dont know that the FDA giving it full approval is going to make a huge difference, says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease doctor at the Medical University of South Carolina who says many of her patients are wary of COVID-19 shots.
But full approval may sway some people. For example, for members of groups that have been treated poorly by the health care system, signing a consent form to get vaccinateda requirement for vaccines with an EUAmay be a psychological barrier, Gandhi says: Signing a consent that says experimental and the phrase experimental brings up issues of experimentation on Black and brown communities.
More than 500 U.S. universities and some high-profile hospitals have already issued vaccine mandates, meaning staff and students must be vaccinated.
But many schools and hospitals are hesitant to ask their employees to take what is technically still an experimental product and are holding out for full approval; so is the U.S. military. Some states, including those with some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, such as Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, have gone so far as to ban mandates in schools and colleges until vaccines are fully approved. (Conversely, a judge this week upheld Indiana Universitys vaccine mandate after it was challenged by a group of eight students.) Once a vaccine is approved, I think it will be on firmer foundation for organizations and businesses to mandate it, Goodman says.
In Francewhere vaccine hesitancy is also running highmore than 1 million people signed up for a vaccine after President Emmanuel Macron announced on 12 July that vaccination would become mandatory for health care workers and health passes would be required to enter malls, bars, restaurants, and other public places. But those measures proved controversial as well: Tens of thousands took to French streets on Saturday in protest.
Perhaps, but the agency does not want to rush. Any vaccine approval without completion of the high-quality review and evaluation that Americans expect the agency to perform would undermine the F.D.A.s statutory responsibilities, affect public trust in the agency and do little to help combat vaccine hesitancy, FDAs Peter Marks wrote in The New York Times in response to Topols plea for speed.
Any claims that this is taking a long time [are] almost like saying you dont want FDA to do the normal, complete job that it does, Goodman says. Regulatory rigor is especially important for messenger RNA vaccines, which use an entirely new technology, he adds.
Every expert Science talked to had the same message: The data amassed so far show the vaccines given an EUA in the United States are very safe and very effective. It was really incredible to see how well these vaccines worked in the clinical trials, Gandhi says.
The vaccines are such a gift, says Cody Meissner, a pediatrician at Tufts Childrens Hospital specializing in infectious diseases and a member of FDAs vaccine advisory committee. Every adult should get this vaccine.
Louisiana has recorded the third-highest day of new COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic.
A total of 5,388 cases were reported to the Louisiana Department of Health between July 20 and July 21. The total number of cases in the state is now 506,882.
Nearly all, 99 percent, were collected between July 13 and July 20, meaning the cases represent the current surge of COVID-19 sweeping the state, driven at least in part by the more contagious Delta variant.
The majority of cases were among people 18 to 39 years old.
Hospitalizations also jumped in the state to 844, up 65 in a day. Another 9 people with COVID-19 are on ventilators, bringing that total to 64. Through April, May and June, hospitalizations had hovered at around 300, before rising sharply since the beginning of July.
The figures are only the latest in a near-daily barrage of bad news from the health department as it tracks this fourth wave of the pandemic in Louisiana.
Baton Rouge General Hospital reported its own worrying figures today. The hospital now has 54 COVID patients, up 21 from Monday. It said 40 percent are under 50 years old, and the average stay in hospital for patients in their 20s is nine days.
Of those patients, 95 percent were unvaccinated.
Louisiana remains one of the lowest-vaccinated states in the country, with only about 50 percent of adults at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19.
The City and Borough of Juneau Emergency Operations Center reports 29 new residents identified with COVID-19 in Juneau for July 20 and July 21. Public Health attributes seven to community spread, 12 to secondary transmission, two to out-of-state travel, and eight are under investigation. The cluster associated with the American Cruise Line ship Constellation remains at 16 12 have recovered, and four active are isolating in Juneau.
Cumulatively, Juneau has had1,458 residents test positive for COVID-19 and 186 nonresidents. There are 67 active cases in Juneau and 1,572 individuals have recovered. All individuals with active cases of COVID-19 are in isolation.
Statewide, the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services reports472 new people identified with COVID-19 in the past two days 435 are residents and 37 are nonresidents. The state also reports one death a female resident of Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area in her 70s bringing the total number of resident deaths to 375. Alaska has had 70,328 cumulative resident cases of COVID-19 and a total of 3,046 nonresidents.
