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Experts are now saying people who have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 may need a booster shot in nine to 12 months.
Originally, they said it would be at the one-year mark, but Dr. Jill Roberts with the University of South Florida said once youve made it to a year after being fully vaccinated, you can run the risk of getting COVID-19 at that point as the antibodies from the vaccine wear off.
You need to protect yourself from that loss of antibodies and the booster shot will also stop people from getting infected by variants of the virus.
A variant results because a virus when it replicates, it makes mistakes. So the type of virus that coronavirus is, it makes a lot of mistakes and when it replicates itself, it doesnt do it perfectly and the result is a mutation or a variant, Roberts said.
She said this shot will continue to stop mutations and the booster will better protect people, and vaccines can also be updated to target any new variants.
Doctors in Texas reported seeing a number of patients who had COVID-19 symptoms but those patients did not have COVID-19.
Per KBTX, doctors said there has been an increase in upper and lower respiratory illnesses in recent weeks as mask mandates have lifted and restrictions have been eased in businesses and retail locations.
Doctors said they werent surprised by this happening, either.
Back in April 2020, National Jewish Health released a breakdown of the differences between colds, influenza and COVID-19, showing some similar symptoms and some slight differences.
There are also some cases where people have been feeling allergy symptoms, which are also close to COVID-19. Dr. Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, senior director of infection prevention at the Johns Hopkins Health Systems in Baltimore, Maryland, said back in fall 2020 that you cant escape seasonal illnesses.
In Utah, cases of the respiratory syncytial virus and the flu are down because of the coronavirus pandemic, as the Deseret News reported. A lot of this has been attributed to face masks and pandemic health measures.
Indias giant outsourcing firms are facing a two-front challenge: protecting the health of millions of employees as the nation suffers the worlds worst Covid-19 crisis, and ensuring that their work continues as usual for the big Western companies on their client lists.
Companies like Infosys Ltd. , Wipro Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. , known as TCS, have built up armies of workers who serve global clients like Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc.s Citibank and Vanguard Group, doing everything from running call centers to writing computer code. The companies, along with Western tech businesses with large India-based staffs, are dealing with absences of sick workers, trying to help stricken employees find oxygen and getting vaccine shots for others at a time when such resources are scarce.
I dont think anyone can downplay the challenge, said Sandip Patel, International Business Machines Corp.s managing director for India. IBM is working to vaccinate its 100,000-plus staff in India, and providing them with services such as medically supervised quarantining in hotels.
What were going through right now has no management or operational playbook, Mr. Patel said.
India has logged more than 25 million Covid-19 infections and over 280,000 deaths; months earlier, it appeared the nation had contained a first surge of the virus.
BOSTON Today, the Baker-Polito Administration announced that the Commonwealth is on track to meet the goal of vaccinating 4.1 million residents by the first week of June and all remaining COVID-19 restrictions will be lifted effective May 29.
The Commonwealths face covering order will also be rescinded on May 29. The Department of Public Health will issue a new face covering advisory consistent with the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions updated guidance. Face coverings will still be mandatory for all individuals on public and private transportation systems (including rideshares, livery, taxi, ferries, MBTA, Commuter Rail and transportation stations), in healthcare facilities and in other settings hosting vulnerable populations, such as congregate care settings.
Governor Charlie Baker will end the State of Emergency June 15.
The Administration also announced updates that will be effective May 18 to revise face covering requirements for youth and amateur sports and other guidance relating to childcare programs and K-12 schools. The Administration will release updated guidance for summer camps effective May 29.
The Administration is able to take these steps to reopen the Commonwealths economy because Massachusetts is on track to meet the goal set in December to fully vaccinate over 4 million individuals by the first week of June. The Commonwealth leads the nation in vaccinating residents, with 75% of adults receiving at least one dose. To date, over 4 million residents have received a first dose, with 3.2 million fully vaccinated.
New cases have dropped by 89% since January 8. COVID hospitalizations are down 88% since January 1 and the positive test rate is down by 88% from peaking at 8.7% on January 1 to 1% today.
Effective May 29
Effective May 29, all industries will be permitted to open. With the exception of remaining face-covering requirements for public and private transportation systems and facilities housing vulnerable populations, all industry restrictions will be lifted, and capacity will increase to 100% for all industries. The gathering limit will be rescinded.
All industries will be encouraged to follow CDC guidance for cleaning and hygiene protocols.
On May 18, 2020, the Administration published the reopening phases, which called for ending restrictions when vaccines became widely available. Today, there are over 975 locations for Massachusetts residents to access vaccines without delay.
Face Covering Guidance
In line with updated CDC face covering guidance, the Administration will rescind the current face covering order and issue a new face covering advisory effective May 29.
Non-vaccinated individuals are advised to continue wearing face masks and to continue distancing in most settings. The advisory will also recommend fully vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear a face covering or social distance indoors or outdoors except for in certain situations.
Face coverings will still be required for all individuals on public and private transportation (including rideshares, livery, taxi, ferries, MBTA, Commuter Rail and transportation stations), healthcare facilities and providers, congregate care settings and health and rehabilitative day services.
Face coverings will also remain required indoors for staff and students of K-12 schools and early education providers.
Link to mask guidance
Youth and Amateur Sports Face Covering Guidance
Effective May 18, the youth and amateur sports guidance will be updated to no longer require face coverings for youth athletes 18 and under while playing outdoor sports. Effective May 29, all youth and amateur sports restrictions will be lifted.
Link to youth sports guidance
K-12, Early Education and Summer Camp Guidance
Effective May 18, guidance from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Early Education and Care will be updated to no longer require masks for outdoor activities like recess and to allow for the sharing of objects in classrooms, in both K-12 and childcare settings. This guidance will remain in effect beyond May 29.
The Administration will release updated guidance for summer camps, effective May 29, which will include no longer requiring masks for outdoor activities.
Link to DESE guidance
Link to EEC guidance
State of Emergency Order
Governor Baker will end the State of Emergency June 15, and the Administration will work with legislative and municipal partners during this period in order to manage an orderly transition from emergency measures adopted by executive order and special legislation during the period of the State of Emergency.
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For more than 400 colleges and universities, it is being billed as the ticket to a normal year on campus: Require all students to be vaccinated for the coronavirus before they can matriculate next fall.
From just one university in March, to a dozen by the first week of April, the trickle has become a tide over the past month depending on just where students are attending school.
In a divided nation, college vaccine mandates are mostly following familiar fault lines. As of this weekend, only 34 roughly 8 percent are in states that voted for Donald J. Trump, according to a tracker created by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nine of those were added on Friday, when Indiana University and its satellite campuses became rare public universities in a Republican-controlled state to mandate vaccines. Though the 400 campuses are only about 10 percent of the nations roughly 4,000 colleges and universities, experts say the political gap is likely to persist.
With many colleges facing falling enrollments and financial pressure, the decision whether to require vaccinations can have huge consequences. Particularly in Republican-controlled states, college presidents are weighing a delicate equation part safety, part politics, part peer pressure and part economic self-interest.
On weekly conference calls with presidents of other colleges, the subject has become a frequent topic of discussion, said Katie Conboy, the president of Saint Marys College, a private, all-womens college near South Bend, Ind.
College presidents, worried that students might respond to a mandate by enrolling someplace else without one, described a feeling of safety in numbers.
People are waiting for a tipping point, Dr. Conboy said. Theyre not saying, Were going to be out on the leading edge of this, but we are watching and waiting and hoping it will make sense for us.
A total of 15 conservative-led states, including Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Mississippi and Alabama, do not have a single university that has announced a vaccine requirement.
A mandate is seen as the easiest step to protecting students, and for many colleges, the decision is an easy one especially since many already require other immunizations for the flu or measles, mumps and rubella.
Because the Food and Drug Administration has authorized only the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, many universities have added a caveat to try to protect themselves from liability. Their mandates are contingent on one of the vaccines obtaining final regulatory approval, but they would allow students to return to campus after receiving any of them.
The vaccine is one of the best things we can do to help us get back to normal life, said Michael V. Drake, a physician and the president of the University of California system.
At the University of Idaho in one of the nations most conservative states, it is also an easy choice not to have mandatory vaccinations. Not a single college in the state has announced a vaccine requirement, and the immunization rate there is among the lowest in the country.
We definitely have political ramifications of things we do as a public institution, and we want to be good partners with our State Legislature and with our Board of Education, said Jodi Walker, a spokeswoman for the University of Idaho.
Public universities and to a lesser extent, private ones in conservative states are feeling the squeeze from all sides, say college officials and experts on academia.
Desperate to reopen successfully, college presidents want as many students as possible to be vaccinated but worry about facing a backlash from conservative state governments. They fear losing funding at a time when many universities have seen a dip in tuition revenue, as well as running afoul of state politicians, whose good will and budget largess they rely on.
May 23, 2021, 3:32 p.m. ET
If you are a public college president, getting on the wrong side of a governor or state legislature can be a career-ending action, said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education.
Even so, Michael A. McRobbie, the president of Indiana University, whose flagship campus is in Bloomington, said he did not feel pressure to decide either way.
Less than 50 percent of the university population has been vaccinated, he said. The medical advisers who were involved in this dont see how we can return to a normal state of affairs without the mandate.
Long before any university had announced its plans for the fall, Nancy Cantor, the chancellor of Rutgerss campus in Newark, remembers getting a weekend call from the universitys chief operating officer, who wanted to know if she would support a vaccine requirement.
One of the first things I thought was, Oh, thank goodness, Dr. Cantor said. We wanted to put our arms around our students.
On March 25, Rutgers became the first major university in the country to announce a mandate, according to university leaders and the tracker.
As a public university, however, requiring immunization was tricky because none of the three vaccines has yet received full licensure.
The Rutgers policy allows some wiggle room, with students able to apply for a religious or medical exemption, a move copied across the country. And vaccination is only required for students, not staff members, a reflection of the legal difficulty of imposing it on employees. Now, about one-third of colleges that have announced a mandate are applying it to both students and employees.
Some university presidents have cited the lack of F.D.A. approval which Rutgers did not include as a prerequisite for its mandate as a compelling reason not to make vaccines mandatory.
I think that those that are in the blue states are not following the law, said Tommy G. Thompson, the University of Wisconsin systems interim president, who previously served in George W. Bushs cabinet as secretary of health and human services, which includes the F.D.A. All those individuals that have mandated it are really on thin ice.
Along with needing to be on the right side of the law, universities are very aware of being on the right side of state politics.
In Florida and Texas, the governors have issued executive orders prohibiting businesses from requiring customers to provide proof of immunization. Whether the same rules apply to schools is not always clear, but the signals from state government are hard to miss.
One of the first colleges in the country to adopt a vaccine mandate was Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern University, which issued its announcement a week after Rutgers on April 2. That same day, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the order, cutting off state grants and contracts to local businesses that required customers to provide proof of vaccination.
A month later, the university did a U-turn, rescinding the mandate, presumably because it was seen as conflicting with the new law.
The universitys flip-flop has served as a cautionary tale to other colleges in Republican-led states. In Florida there are currently no campuses that require a vaccine. In Texas, there are only two, both of them private.
But some college presidents in conservative states who have broken with the pack and mandated vaccination are pointing to the particular vulnerabilities of their student bodies.
We are a historically Black college that represents a segment of the population that has been disproportionately affected by this, said Michael J. Sorrell, the president of Paul Quinn College, a private institution in Dallas. Our reality is a very different reality.
Tom Stritikus, president of Fort Lewis College in the mountains of rural Colorado, described how representatives of the nearby Southern Ute Indian Tribe approached the campus to arrange the vaccination of their members who are enrolled at the university. Then, in an effort to create a protective bubble around those students, the tribes medical team went one step further and offered vaccinations to the students roommates and professors.
Seeing that kind of commitment made it easy to announce the requirement for the campus as a whole: Any political blowback we would get, we think its worth it, he said.
For the most part, the colleges choosing to enforce vaccine mandates in states that voted for Mr. Trump are private, name-brand schools not worried about meeting enrollment targets. The list reads like a roster of the most prestigious universities in those states: Tulane University in Louisiana, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Duke and Wake Forest Universities in North Carolina.
Most others are still trying to figure out what is best for their students and what is best for them.
Ronald S. Rochon, president of the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, said many of his students were local in a county where only 38 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated. The university has seen a 2 percent drop in enrollment during the pandemic, he said.
That number tells me something significant about my community, he said of the vaccination rate. Enrollment does not drive all decisions, but I need to be mindful of that element.
Regarding a vaccine mandate, he said there was still time: I have not ruled it out, and I have not ruled it in.
Jack Begg contributed research.
As of May 13, the coronavirus had infected more than 3.9 million children and sent more than 16,000 to hospitals, more than are hospitalized for flu in an average year, according to data collected by the American Academy of Pediatrics. About 300 children have died of COVID-19 in the United States, making it one of the top 10 causes of death in children since the pandemic began.
She is 31 years old, a pet sitter and former fitness teacher who once ran a half marathon. She was, by most measures, healthy.
When Aguilar got Covid-19 she lost her sense of taste, had mild fevers and muscle weakness. She could barely keep anything down yet gained about 30 pounds. Later, she developed pelvic pain, cystic acne, breast tenderness, headaches, brain fog and extreme fatigue.
It has been months since then, but she says the low energy, chronic pain and brain fog -- long-haul Covid-19 symptoms -- remain and she can't even go for a 15-minute walk without needing a break. She's also now dealing with insulin resistance and taking several medications to keep that and her hormone levels under some control. Her doctor told her she'll likely be dealing with this fallout of Covid-19 for the rest of her life.
More than a year into the pandemic, one study has found that some women are at higher risk for Covid-19 compared to others in their age and sex groups. These women, often young and otherwise healthy like Aguilar, have an underlying condition that isn't mentioned on any Covid-19 comorbidity list: polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS.
"PCOS is completely underestimated in its impact. It's sort of seen as some reproductive issue that is not clinically relevant. But this is completely wrong ... Patients need to be seen as a high-risk population," said Dr. Wiebke Arlt, director of the Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Despite how common PCOS is, as well as the serious complications it can come with, health experts say the condition has long been overlooked, misunderstood and under-researched, leaving patients to advocate for themselves or even educate practitioners to get treatment. And with very little research looking at whether women with PCOS are at higher risk for more severe Covid-19 or long-term symptoms, some fear the same is happening with public health policy around the pandemic.
"My advice would be to include women with PCOS as ... potentially a high-risk group," said Dr. Katherine Sherif, chief of Women's Health at Jefferson University's Department of Medicine and a leading PCOS expert. But she warned: "We're working in a very large system that is full of silos. Nobody's going to jump up and say, 'Oh, well, don't forget about PCOS.'"
"If Anthony Fauci said, 'you need to look at the high-risk groups like PCOS,' people might pay more attention," she said.
Part of the reason PCOS flies under the radar in general and with regards to Covid-19, according to Arlt and Sherif, is because it is often dismissed as a women's health issue -- an obstacle of the ovary. Over the past year, we've learned about numerous preexisting health conditions that put a person at higher risk for severe Covid-19 illness, but PCOS isn't one of them.
For Arlt, who co-authored the first major study published in February in the European Journal of Endocrinology, the name PCOS is a misnomer. It is not a disorder of the ovary, Arlt said, but a "lifelong metabolic disease" and should be treated as such when assessing Covid-19 vulnerability.
"The higher the metabolic risk is, the higher the risk is to catch Covid-19," Arlt said. "People looked at obesity and Type 2 diabetes and hypertension and heart disease, but they have not looked at PCOS systematically before we did. Because they just don't consider this a metabolic risk factor. That's something that we would like to change."
'Something in PCOS is actually driving this'
Arlt and researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom found that women with PCOS had a 51 percent higher chance of confirmed or suspected Covid-19 infection than women without. Using primary care records from January to June 2020, they identified more than 21,000 PCOS patients and a control group of more than 78,000 without, matched for age and location.
Researchers then "wanted to understand if the increased incidence of Covid-19 was only because of PCOS, or was it also because of the underlying risk factors that women with PCOS have?" lead author Anuradhaa Subramanian told CNN. In other words, if a woman has PCOS and Type 2 Diabetes, which one is putting her at increased risk for Covid-19?
Subramanian says the results didn't surprise her. However, "it gave us more confidence... that it's not just about the risk factors associated with PCOS, but something in PCOS is actually driving this," she said.
But because the data was pulled from primary healthcare databases, researchers couldn't look at whether patients with PCOS had more severe or long-term Covid-19 symptoms. What's more, PCOS is not a one-size-fits-all disorder and Covid-19 may or may not have a different impact or risk level depending on the person. There are many questions we don't have definitive answers to yet, says Dr. Anuja Dokras, director of the Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Center at Penn Medicine.
"We need to get this information now that (Covid-19 has) lasted a full year," said Dokras. "It's affecting so many people that it would be good to look back at this literature and just sort it out because these are confounding factors."
Searching for answers
So far, whether people with PCOS have more severe complications from Covid-19 is anecdotal, leaving some women with only speculation about how Covid-19 affects PCOS.
In Aguilar's case, she was diagnosed with PCOS after she was exposed to Covid-19, despite likely having it for years but not recognizing the symptoms. "I had some of these underlying symptoms, my body was able to just manage them to a point for most of my life, and then contracting Covid really just wiped out all of my body's defenses and ability to regulate anything," she said her doctor told her.
But she still doesn't know why or whether her symptoms will ever improve.
Kris Nealon has also spent much of the past year looking for answers.
She was diagnosed with PCOS at age 12, and the disorder has left her struggling with her weight and insulin resistance. These factors, she says, made her concerned that she could have severe Covid-19 symptoms and maybe even require hospitalization. So last summer she did what most have done during the pandemic: She Googled it. She recalled searching "'should I be concerned...insulin resistance COVID?' or 'PCOS COVID?'"
Nealon didn't find answers. She got Covid-19 in October and says her symptoms were mild. But when that turned into muscle and joint pain, extreme fatigue, depression, insomnia and brain fog, she did what was recommended: Talk to her doctor.
In Nealon's case, she spoke to several. Having lived with PCOS more than half her life, she was aware of the complications and wanted to know how this could impact her long-term Covid-19 symptoms.
She says the primary doctor for her long-term symptoms said her only Covid-19 comorbidity was her weight.
"He's been nice and understanding but ... you can see him be like, 'Lady problems, don't worry about it. This is your lungs,'" she said. She told him that PCOS is linked to anxiety and depression and asked if that could be related to Covid-19 fatigue and insomnia. She also asked about her heart, explaining that PCOS and Covid-19 can cause complications.
But aside from suggesting that losing weight might help, Nealon recalled her doctor saying "it had nothing to do with PCOS. He's like, 'no, that's your ovaries and stuff.'"
After Covid-19, Nealon also noticed her PCOS symptoms "went crazy." She says she had extreme pain in her lower abdomen. An ultrasound showed her fallopian tubes "suddenly looked very concerning" and she had an ovarian cyst burst.
She went to her gynecologist, the doctor who first diagnosed her with PCOS, and asked, "Does this have anything to do with (that) I just had Covid?"
She says her doctor told her: "No, there's no literature about that."
And there wasn't. Weeks after Nealon tested positive, Allison Roach and Chitra Gotluru, two medical students at Florida International University, finished their journal article exploring the potentially higher risk women with PCOS have for Covid-19-related morbidity. No data set of patients with both diagnoses existed, they said.
Risk 'obvious but not proven'
People with PCOS often have higher levels of and sensitivity to androgens, male sex hormones. This could "potentially directly affect the susceptibility to COVID-19," Roach and Gotluru wrote. Androgens work as a "gateway," in very simple terms, to let in Covid-19, Roach says.
What's more, it is common for people with PCOS to have chronic inflammation -- an immune system that is in a near-constant state of fighting off harm. Impaired insulin regulation and obesity can lead to a toxic buildup of fatty acid in tissue, known as lipotoxicity, potentially damaging organs.
This can also trigger the secretion of immune-signaling cells called cytokines. While cytokines are a vital part of the body's immune response, too much can cause what's known as a cytokine storm. Adding a Covid-19 infection to that can cause further cytokine secretion, potentially triggering one of these storms and causing the immune system to attack the body's cells, not just the pathogen. And there is research that suggests this can occur "whether you are overweight or not," Gotluru told CNN.
For Jefferson University's Sherif, the risk of more severe Covid-19 symptoms for PCOS patients is "obvious but not proven." Obvious because "If testosterone increases inflammation, and if ... men who are in the hospital with Covid complications and have high testosterone levels, it makes sense that it would put women with PCOS more at risk."
This is not proven, she says, because so little research exists.
Drawing from her own research about PCOS and heart disease, Sherif said, "What's important for people to understand is that this is independent of obesity."
"It's the high insulin and high testosterone that confer their risk for a greater risk for Covid compared to weight matched controls," she said. "So, you have two women who are 100 kilograms. The one with PCOS is more likely to become diabetic or have sleep apnea, or to be sick from Covid."
Without that data, some doctors and researchers say this is something patients with PCOS should be aware of, but not to panic. If you do get Covid-19, it's important to tell your doctor you have PCOS and any medications you're taking, Gotluru says.
"Let your provider know ... that there is research out there that is worrisome about PCOS and you'd like to be careful," she said.
In the meantime, women like Aguilar and Nealon are still searching for answers. Nealon says her doctors still haven't made a connection between the fallout of Covid-19 and her PCOS. She isn't surprised.
"That's what it's like, just with PCOS, let alone adding Covid in," Nealon said. "You go to a doctor with a list of symptoms, and you either get 'you're fat' or 'you're overthinking things.'"
Aguilar says that constantly having to educate people in her life has been exhausting on top of her two new diagnoses.
"A lot of people like to talk about the survival rate is so high and the death rate is so low, but what they're not taking into account is the degree that lives are changing because of illnesses that are popping up from this, or just the long-haul symptoms that are so debilitating," Aguilar said. "It's hard to overcome."
India reported 4,454 new Covid-19 fatalities on Monday, bringing the country's death toll to 303,720, according to the Indian Ministry of Health.
India is the third country to report more than 300,000 deaths from the virus, after Brazil and the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The health ministry also reported 222,315 new coronavirus infections, marking the fourth consecutive day that the number of cases reported in the country have declined.
However, Monday's death count is the highest daily death toll reported since May 19.
India has reported a total of 26,752,447 cases of coronavirus, according to the Indian Ministry of Health on Monday. At least 196,051,962 doses of Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered since January 16.
In the capital region of Delhi, supplies of the Covaxin vaccine may have already run out, Atishi Marlena, a senior member of the local government tweeted Sunday.
According to the Delhi governments vaccination bulletin on Sunday evening, 1,530 doses of Covaxin vaccines were available in the territory.
The Delhi government on Sunday halted vaccinations for those between the ages of 18 and 44 due to a shortage of vaccines.
The Ministry of Health said states will be provided 40,650 vaccine doses over the next three days.
A woman holds a small bottle labeled with a "Coronavirus COVID-19 Vaccine" sticker and a medical syringe in front of displayed Novavax logo in this illustration taken, October 30, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Novavax Inc (NVAX.O) said on Saturday it has signed an agreement with South Korea's SK Bioscience Co Ltd (302440.KS) and the government to expand its production of vaccines, including the U.S. drug developer's protein-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
The latest agreement is in addition to an existing manufacturing and licensing deal, intended to provide wider access to NVX-CoV2373 in South Korea and globally, Novavax said in a press release .
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
3 nursing managers at Holmes Regional Medical Center share painful tales of caring for vulnerable COVID-19 patients. Their message? Get vaccinated. Florida Today
Another 411 Brevard County residents have been vaccinated against theCOVID-19 virus, Florida Department of Health data showed Sunday.One additional death due to COVID was also reported.
Nurse Kaitlyn Shew inoculates a Carnival Liberty cruise ship worker with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at Cruise Terminal 6.(Photo: MALCOLM DENEMARK/FLORIDA TODAY)
As of Sunday,268,852residents, or about 44%,have received at least one dose of a vaccine.Of that sum, 221,256 residents, or 36%,have completed all recommended doses oftheir versions of the vaccine. According to the DOH, Brevard's population is 611,202 people.
More: Holmes nurses: Younger COVID-19 patients 'feeling a lot of regret' for not getting vaccine
More: 'COVID-19 learning gap' sets some students back, but efforts underway to catch kids up
The county added 19 new COVID-19 cases Sunday and one new death to its cumulative totalssince the pandemic began in March 2020.
A total of 42,661cases have now been confirmed in the county. Of those, 41,919 wereFlorida residents and 742 werenot. The death toll was listed at 890 on Sunday.
Atotal of 2,424residents in Brevard havebeen hospitalizedsince the pandemic began.
On Sunday, Brevard had 43patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in its seven major hospitals, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration,
Of a total capacity of 1,291staffed hospital beds, 24% (396) were available in those hospitals Sunday.Of the 184 total adult ICU bed capacity, 18% (39) were available.
At least 417Brevarddeaths were residents or staff of long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes.
The DOHadded 2,054new cases to Florida's statewide total Sunday, pushing the number of cumulative cases to 2,310,335 since the beginning of the pandemic. Of those, 2,367,144 were Florida residents and 43,191 were not.
By Saturday, Florida hadvaccinated 10,005, 987 people, administeringall recommended doses of a vaccine to 7,965,477 of them.
Of the Florida residents tested Sunday, 50,442 tested negative, for adaily positivityrate of 3.91%, the states Sunday reports show. Health experts say a sustained rate of 5% or below is needed to declare the virus under control.
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