Michigan reported 3,623 new coronavirus cases and 101 additional deaths on Thursday, April 29.
The deaths include 78 that occurred prior to the last 24 hours and were identified by the state health department during a vital records review. These reviews happen three times per week.
The state is averaging 3,989 new COVID-19 cases per day and 62 new deaths per day over the last week. This is the 11th straight day where the seven-day case average decreased and is the first time the average has been under 4,000 since March 27.
Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 837,514 reported coronavirus cases and 17,576 deaths.
Additionally, the state has reported 95,090 probable cases and 1,141 probable deaths, in which a physician and/or antigen test ruled it COVID-19 but no confirmatory PCR test was done.
(The above chart shows Michigans 7-day rolling average of new confirmed coronavirus cases. You can put your cursor over a bar to see the number.)
Seventy-five of Michigans 83 counties reported new cases on Thursday. Wayne County led in new cases with 666, with the next closest being Oakland with 370.
Other top reporting counties included Macomb with 305, Kent with 292, Genesee with 143, Muskegon with 129, Ottawa with 96, Saginaw with 93, Kalamazoo with 68 and Ingham with 65.
Thirty counties reported new deaths led by Macomb with 31 and Wayne County with 25. The next leading counties for new deaths is nine for Oakland, six in Genesee, four in Saginaw, three in Allegan and two each for Kent, Kalamazoo, Ingham, Jackson, St. Clair, Lapeer and Wexford.
The following counties reported one death each: Ottawa, Livingston, Washtenaw, Berrien, Montcalm, Monroe, Isabella, Van Buren, Gladwin, Cass, Hillsdale, Osceola, Baraga, Mackinac, Dickinson, Alcona and Charlevoix.
(The above chart shows Michigans 7-day rolling average of deaths involving confirmed coronavirus cases. You can put your cursor over a bar to see the number.)
Hospitals statewide were treating 3,392 patients with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, including 54 children and 852 total patients in the ICU. The totals are a slight dip from 3,976 hospitalizations last Thursday, April 22, when 895 were ICU patients.
Of the 49,751 diagnostic tests processed on Wednesday, 10.4% came back positive for SARS-CoV-2. The average positivity rate over the last seven days is 11.4%.
Case reporting
First is a chart showing new cases reported to the state each day for the past 30 days. This is based on when a confirmed coronavirus test is reported to the state, which means the patient first became sick days before.
You can call up a chart for any county, and you can put your cursor over a bar to see the date and number of cases.
(In a few instances, a county reported a negative number (decline) in daily new cases, following a retroactive reclassification by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. In those instances, we subtracted cases from the prior date and put 0 in the reported date.)
The next chart below shows new cases for the past 30 days based on onset of symptoms. In this chart, numbers for the most recent days are incomplete because of the lag time between people getting sick and getting a confirmed coronavirus test result, which can take up to a week or more.
You can call up a chart for any county, and you can put your cursor over a bar to see the date and number of cases.
For more statewide data, visit MLives coronavirus data page, here.
To find a testing site near you, check out the states online test finder, here, send an email to COVID19@michigan.gov, or call 888-535-6136 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays.
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Tokyo Games Delivery Officer Hidemasa Nakamura holds a sample of an updated version of the playbook during a news briefing on Wednesday. Franck Robichon/Getty Images hide caption
Tokyo Games Delivery Officer Hidemasa Nakamura holds a sample of an updated version of the playbook during a news briefing on Wednesday.
The organizers of Japan's Summer Olympics, due to start just weeks from now, say they will administer daily coronavirus tests to athletes and will decide in June on what is a safe number of spectators.
At a virtual meeting on Wednesday, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach and representatives of the other organizers discussed measures to keep the coronavirus in check during the games, which begin July 23.
"The IOC is fully committed to the successful and safe delivery of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020," Bach said in his opening remarks.
He said organizers will "strictly enforce" the restrictions, according to Kyodo News, which said that the revised rules are part of the newest version of the organizers' "playbook."
The games already delayed by a year due to the pandemic are set to go ahead despite reluctance among the Japanese public. Recent opinion polls have shown that more than half are not in favor of hosting the games this year.
Japan has had relatively few coronavirus infections to date around 600,000, with around 10,000 deaths.
Even so, despite securing the largest number of doses of any country in Asia and having among the best health care systems in the world, Japan has struggled to vaccinate its 126 million people. It has one of the lowest vaccination rates among wealthy countries, with less than 2% of its population fully inoculated against COVID-19. That figure is far lower than the U.S. (29.1%) and also lags behind most of Asia.
By the end of the month, Japan will have imported 17 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a schedule from the Cabinet Office that was cited by Reuters.
Tokyo on Wednesday confirmed 925 infections its largest single-day figure since the end of January. Osaka, the country's third-most populous prefecture, reported 1,260 cases on Wednesday, Japan Times reports.
If the coronavirus-containing solution is heated to around 72 degrees Celsius for about half a second, it can reduce the titer, or quantity of the virus in the solution, by 100,000 times.
Matthew Linguist/Texas A&M Engineering
Arum Han, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and his collaborators have designed an experimental system that shows exposure of coronavirus to a very high temperature, even if applied for less than a second, can be sufficient to neutralize the virus so that it can no longer infect another human host.
Applying heat to neutralize COVID-19 has been demonstrated before, but in previous studies temperatures were applied from anywhere from one to 20 minutes. This length of time is not a practical solution, as applying heat for a long period of time is both difficult and costly. Han and his team have now demonstrated that heat treatment for less than a second completely inactivates the coronavirus providing a possible solution to mitigating the ongoing spread of COVID-19, particularly through long-range airborne transmission.
The Medistar Corporation approached leadership and researchers from the College of Engineering in the spring of 2020 to collaborate and explore the possibility of applying heat for a short amount of time to kill COVID-19. Soon after, Han and his team got to work, and built a system to investigate the feasibility of such a procedure.
Their process works by heating one section of a stainless-steel tube, through which the coronavirus-containing solution is run, to a high temperature and then cooling the section immediately afterward. This experimental setup allows the coronavirus running through the tube to be heated only for a very short period of time. Through this rapid thermal process, the team found the virus to be completely neutralized in a significantly shorter time than previously thought possible. Their initial results were released within two months of proof-of-concept experiments.
Han said if the solution is heated to nearly 72 degrees Celsius for about half a second, it can reduce the virus titer, or quantity of the virus in the solution, by 100,000 times which is sufficient to neutralize the virus and prevent transmission.
In their future work, the investigators will build a microfluidic-scale testing chip that will allow them to heat-treat viruses for even shorter periods of time.
Matthew Linguist/Texas A&M Engineering
The potential impact is huge, Han said. I was curious of how high of temperatures we can apply in how short of a time frame and to see whether we can indeed heat-inactivate the coronavirus with only a very short time. And, whether such a temperature-based coronavirus neutralization strategy would work or not from a practical standpoint. The biggest driver was, Can we do something that can mitigate the situation with the coronavirus?
Their research was featured on thecover of theMayissue of the journalBiotechnology and Bioengineering.
Not only is this sub-second heat treatment a more efficient and practical solution to stopping the spread of COVID-19 through the air, but it also allows for the implementation of this method in existing systems, such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.
It also can lead to potential applications with other viruses, such as the influenza virus, that are also spread through the air. Han and his collaborators expect that this heat-inactivation method can be broadly applied and have a true global impact.
Influenza is less dangerous but still proves deadly each year, so if this can lead to the development of an air purification system, that would be a huge deal, not just with the coronavirus, but for other airborne viruses in general, Han said.
In their future work, the investigators will build a microfluidic-scale testing chip that will allow them to heat-treat viruses for much shorter periods of time, for example, tens of milliseconds, with the hope of identifying a temperature that will allow the virus to be inactivated even with such a short exposure time.
The lead authors of the work are electrical engineering postdoctoral researchers, Yuqian Jiang and Han Zhang. Other collaborators on this project are Professor Julian L. Leibowitz, and Associate Professor Paul de Figueiredo from the College of Medicine; biomedical postdoctoral researcher Jose A. Wippold; Jyotsana Gupta, associate research scientist in microbial pathogenesis and immunology; and Jing Dai, electrical engineering assistant research scientist.
This work has been supported by grants from Medistar Corporation. Several research personnel on the project team were also supported by grants from the National Institutes of Healths National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
When it became clear early in the pandemic that it was safer to be outdoors than in, the creators of Big Shot, a new Disney+ series being made with John Stamos, started rewriting scenes so they could be shot outside. Then new guidance emerged, which underscored that loading a cast and crew into buses and dispatching them to sites all over Los Angeles posed its own risks. So they rewrote their scripts again so scenes could be shot on sets.
As the surging virus made in-person work risky, many actors sought jobs on animated shows they could voice from home. But work-from-home acting posed challenges, even for seasoned veterans: Members of The Simpsons cast recorded episodes from inside closets, under blankets and makeshift studios fashioned from pillow forts and dog beds.
And when the long-running police procedural Law & Order: SVU resumed shooting in New York this fall, it too changed with the times. Air filters would blast on set up until the moment someone yelled Action! There were fewer scenes shot on location, fewer costume changes, and fewer extras, since each one had to be tested for the coronavirus.
It has been a year of struggle and experimentation for the television industry, which has had to learn on the fly while trying to create new diversions for an unusually captive home audience. The work has not been without risk: After TV production restarted over the summer, it had to be halted at times when stars fell ill or the virus ran rampant; in Los Angeles there have been 23 outbreaks at television and film production sites since July, leading to 187 cases, according to county health data provided to The New York Times.
Now the unions representing cast and crew members have been in negotiations with the major studios to extend the return-to-work agreement they reached in September establishing safety protocols. Industry insiders said that they believe the current agreement, which expires as the end of the month, would simply be extended with changes on the margins in the short-term. But they also said that as the share of vaccinated Americans increases, studios could eventually require workers to get vaccinated, and seek to significantly lower the amount of required testing for some workers who are currently tested at least three times a week. Other aspects of the agreement could be overhauled as well.
But some changes could outlast the pandemic. Just as the nature of schooling and office work has been transformed as millions have learned to function remotely, television has adapted as well, with showrunners, actors and crews all forced to innovate, tweak and change.
The pandemic accelerated our use of technology in a productive way and made things more efficient, said Jaime Dvila, the president of Campanario Entertainment in Los Angeles, which produced the Netflix show, Selena: The Series. Rather than visiting the set in person, Mr. Dvila said that he ended up watching much of the production live through an online video setup something that he realized will now let him more easily oversee multiple projects. Technology allows me not to have to be there, he said.
For much of the year, when theaters were closed and live performances banned, television was the only game in town for actors struggling to find work.
Law & Order: SVU has been appearing as a credit in stage actors Playbill biographies for many years, but once Broadway shut down it became an even more integral part of their work diet in part because flying in stars was complicated by quarantine rules, and in part out of a conscious effort to help the New York theater community.
When everything shut down, we were all like, What are we going to do? said Adriane Lenox, a Tony Award winner who played a judge on SVU just months after testing positive for the virus early in the pandemic. Ms. Lenox, like many other actors, said she had to go on unemployment at one point and that she had tried to make ends meet by looking for jobs such as dog walking on websites like ZipRecruiter.
She was one of more than 100 local stage actors who were featured on the show this year, according to Warren Leight, its showrunner.
I just made the call early on: Lets make this the year where the first pool of actors we go to is the Broadway actors, the off-Broadway actors, he said. It really does seem like the right thing to do. Logistically, its easier to hire locally.
April 30, 2021, 12:50 p.m. ET
The effects of the pandemic have been felt most acutely in the cities like Los Angeles and New York, where, at least in prepandemic times, roughly two thirds of the countrys film, television and theatrical jobs were located. In New York City, for instance, officials have estimated that employment in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector fell by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020.
But there are signs of a rebound. By the end of last year, television shoot days in Los Angeles had recovered to roughly 62 percent of what they had been in 2019, according to FilmLA, the official film office for the city and county of Los Angeles. After taking a hiatus during the winter as an outbreak hobbled California, TV production in the city is approaching normal, prepandemic levels, FilmLA reported last week, even as other sectors of the entertainment industry lag behind.
In New York, officials said that about 40 television shows were either in production or about to begin shooting again similar to where things stood before the March 2020 shutdown.
And in Georgia, which has become the nations third largest production hub, officials have said that the industry appears to be bouncing back from a pandemic decline that saw spending on film and television projects in the state drop from roughly $2.9 billion in the 2019 fiscal year to $2.2 billion in the 2020 fiscal year.
Still, production in the pandemic has come with higher costs. Television producers said that they have had to test several times each week, hire orange-vested Covid officers and bring on extra cleaning companies all of which have ballooned budgets by as much as 15 percent. Eric Tomosunas, the head of Swirl Film, based in Atlanta, estimated that his company has administered close to 20,000 PCR tests since July.
Even with the safety protocols, there have been outbreaks at properties owned by CBS, NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros., Netflix and various other companies. (Los Angeles County defines an outbreak at a nonresidential setting as three or more laboratory-confirmed cases; the biggest outbreak it reported at a studio involved 26 cases on a Lionsgate production that was being shot at CBS Studio Center last December.)
But spokespeople for many of the networks and production companies say that they have taken extraordinary steps to keep their workers safe. Data from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers obtained by The New York Times showed that from September 2020 to the end of February, studios identified 1,884 cases after conducting more than 930,000 tests. There have not been any coronavirus outbreaks at a set or studio in Los Angeles County since February, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Health said.
SAG-AFTRA, the television and film actors union, has worked with the Directors Guild, the Teamsters, other groups, and employers to establish safety protocols. The agreement, which could soon be extended, paved the way for many members to get back to work, with some pauses, as when SAG-AFTRA called for a temporary hold on in-person production in Southern California this winter when a surge threatened to overwhelm Los Angeles hospitals. (Unions have sometimes struggled to find a balance between keeping workers safe and helping them earn a living: some members of Actors Equity, which represents theater actors and stage managers, have complained that the unions safety rules have made it too hard to find work.)
David White, the national executive director and chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, said he believed they had found a safe way forward. I feel like it was the right thing to do to press ahead, and I feel like this is a dramatic success story, he said.
Much like companies grappling with questions about what the return to the office should look like, television executives are now having to decide which innovations of the pandemic are worth holding onto. Should they allow voice actors to keep working from home? Does a pitch meeting or even an audition absolutely have to be in person?
American Idol is now in its 19th season, and for 18 of them, ecstatic young singers have burst out of a studios swinging doors and melted into the arms of their loved ones after being told the magic words: Youre going to Hollywood!
But for this socially-distant era, the shows engineers developed a new wrinkle: an enormous screen where contestants can see their parents, their friends, or their co-workers reacting to their shifting fortunes.
I find that we have more tears and emotion from that screen than ever we did with people standing outside the door, said Trish Kinane, the shows executive producer. So were going to keep that.
Alain Delaqurire contributed research.
About one in ten Americans are not showing up for their second dose.
SAN ANTONIO Coronavirus vaccination numbers have come down considerably across the country. We know many have decided not to get the vaccine at all, but there is a new problem emerging where those who got the first dose of a vaccine are skipping the second one.
Two studies conducted by Oxford University found that protection from getting only one dose of a two dose vaccine only lasts about ten weeks. And with close to one out of every ten people not going back for their second dose, and many not getting vaccinated at all, that doesn't bode well for this pandemic.
"We need as many people to get vaccinated as possible. Right, to prevent these endemic kind of waves where we see more people know the surge and it comes down a little bit then another surge," said Dr. Jason Bowling, an Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases at UT Health San Antonio.
And getting that second dose after the first is imperative.
"There's data now showing that it doesn't last as long," Dr. Bowling said. "You want the protection to last as long as possible. The other factor is that with these variants that are starting to circulate, and we're learning more about, some of them can decrease how effective the vaccine works."
A Kaiser Family Foundation report found that as of last week close to 42 percent of Americans have had at least one dose of a vaccine, and that only 35 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, or about 27 percent of the population. And with 20 percent of the U.S. considered 'vaccine hesitant' warned the U.S. is nearing a tipping point.
"Do yourself a favor, get the full protection right. To protect yourself and your family," Dr. Bowling said.
Invisibly used Realtime Research to poll 1258 people. They found parents ages 18 to 24 are the most likely to get their kids vaccinated, and found a whopping 47 percent said they would not get their kids a COVID vaccine.
"One of the issues is that a lot of the vaccines to date so far has been in these large mass vaccine hubs. But if we can transition this to physician offices, that might help so that people can talk to their provider about it," Dr. Bowling added.
He also said that for those who are fully vaccinated the jury is still out on when it will be time for a booster. But clinical trials have shown the vaccine is still about 90 percent effective after six months.
A cancer patient in Louisville, Kentucky, receives a dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
By Jennifer Couzin-FrankelApr. 27, 2021 , 4:25 PM
Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
For Eva Schrezenmeier, a nephrologist at Charit University Hospital in Berlin, the news was sobering: Among 40 patients with transplanted kidneys at her hospital whod been vaccinated against COVID-19, only one was churning out the antibodies that would likely protect him from the disease. Because transplant patients take powerful drugs to suppress the immune system so it doesnt attack a donated organ, her team expected diminished responses to a vaccine. But Schrezenmeier, who posted a preprint describing her study last week, hadnt anticipated just how badly the vaccine might falter in her patients.
Her finding is at the grim extreme of research on how well COVID-19 vaccines work in the many millions of people whose immune systems are suppressed by drugs or disease. In many, the vaccines do seem to maintain their potency. But in othersparticularly organ transplant recipients and those taking certain immune-dampening medicationseffectiveness is less assured or even absent. To learn more, researchers are launching larger studies, seeking more clarity and ways to help patients whose weakened immune systems make protection against COVID-19 all the more urgent. There is a lot of confusion and fear among patients, says Alfred Kim, a rheumatologist at Washington University in St. Louis who cares for people with the autoimmune disease lupus and strongly urges vaccinationfor them.
One source of complexity: The dozens of different medications taken by people with cancer, autoimmune or other immunologic disease, or an organ transplant. Each can gum up different gears in the immune systems intricate machinery. The ailment makes a difference, too. Solid tumors such as colon cancer dont usually interfere with the immune system (although chemotherapy does). But autoimmune diseases or blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma can themselves deplete or disrupt certain types of immune cells.
Past research already suggested vaccines can falter in some immune-suppressed patients. Kim says flu and pneumococcal vaccines dont always work as well in people on some common immune suppressants, like methotrexate, which treats cancer and autoimmune diseases. Anda 2012 studyfound that just 44% of cancer patients in treatment produced antibodies to influenza after one dose of flu vaccine; most were first vaccinated 1 week after chemotherapy. The researchers recommended two doses after finding that a second dose boosted the number to 73%.
When they started to parse blood samples after COVID-19 vaccination, scientists were unsure how people with immune suppression would respond to the vaccines. Gauging protection is also a challenge: The vaccines are designed to propel production of antibodies, but scientists dont know what levels are needed to guard against COVID-19. Antibodies are easier to measure than T cell responses, but those, too, play an important role in protection from disease.
Still, in a research setting, the hunt for antibodies can yield important clues. In December 2020, transplant surgeons DorrySegev and Jacqueline Garonzik Wang at Johns Hopkins University put out a call on social media for organ recipients willing to participate in a COVID-19 vaccine study. We had 1000 enrolled in the first week, Segev says. In March, the research team published details inJAMAof participantsimmune responses to the first doseof the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The results foreshadowed Schrezenmeiers: Among 436 people whod had liver, heart, kidney, and other organ transplants, just 17% had detectable antibodies.
Outcomes varied based on which medications the volunteers were taking, however. Only 9% of those on a class of drugs that includes the immunosuppressant mycophenolate had some antibodies, compared with about 40% in those not taking drugs in that category. Mycophenolate inhibits production of both B cells, which generate antibodies, and T cells, which help marshal B cells to do their job.
Segev says he and his colleagues are close to sharing results from his cohorts second vaccine dose, which show some improvement. Still, hes surprised that these organ transplant patients seem to respond even less well to COVID-19 vaccines than to flu vaccines. To learn more, he is studying their T cell, B cell, and other immune responses. Were starting to try to say, What is going on here? Why is it so bad?
Although Segev worries about the roughly 500,000 transplant patients in the United States, he suspects the picture is much brighter for the 11 million people with autoimmune diseases, who tend to take different combinations of immune treatments or get by on lower doses. Last week, a paper inGastroenterologyreported that48 people with either Crohn disease or ulcerative colitis, nearly all on immune-targeting medication, responded well to vaccination. Of the 26 whom the researchers followed through both vaccine doses, all produced antibodies, 22 at high levels.
But another study, of133 people with various autoimmune diseases, suggested two types of medication can act as a sledgehammer against vaccine response. The work, posted as a preprint this month by Kim, rheumatologist Mary Nakamura at the University of California, San Francisco, and their colleagues, showed that on average, subjects churned out roughly one-third as many antibodies as healthy vaccinated peoplea difference that doesnt strongly concern Kim. But people on therapies that destroy B cells, like rituximab, and the powerful steroid prednisone had far lower levels. Bigger studies of these patients are getting underway, including one announced last week by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In cancer patients, vaccine response likely depends at least partly on timing, because cycles of chemotherapy alternately squash immune cells and allow them to rebound, says Giuseppe Curigliano, an oncologist at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. He reported last year that cancer patients on chemotherapyproduced abundant antibodiesafter a bout of COVID-19, leaving him optimistic that vaccines will work well for them. His center waits a couple of weeks after a chemotherapy cycle to offer a COVID-19 shot. Similarly, a U.K. study showed that, although many patients in treatment for solid tumors had a paltry response to the first vaccine dose compared with healthy volunteers, they appearedwell-protected after the second. The researchers write that the results highlight risks of delaying vaccine doses in cancer patients, contrary to the countrys practice across its population.
Theres nagging concern, though, when it comes to people with blood cancers. Ghady Haidar, a transplant infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, haspreliminary results from patients with leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myelomasuggesting a sizable fraction arent producing antibodies after vaccination, particularly those with a form of chronic leukemia. Perhaps, he says, this occurs because patients have defects in circulating white blood cells.
Physicians like Haidar say patients often ask whether to stop taking immune-suppressing medications before getting vaccinated, prompting tough choices. No one should be stealth discontinuing meds so that they can respond to vaccines, he says. For some patients, skipping treatment can be dangerous, but doctors can sometimes delay an infusion of a therapy known to make a vaccines job tougher.
For patients who dont appear protected by standard vaccinations, extra doses may help. Some organ recipients already get extra doses of hepatitis B vaccine, and this month, France recommended that they receive a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Christophe Legendre, a nephrologist at Necker Hospital in Paris, is planning antibody tests to see how well the approach works in transplant patients. Other researchers say labmade monoclonal antibodies might bolster protection for patients who still dont respond. (Although clinical trials have shown the monoclonal antibodiescan prevent infection, so far they are only authorized for treating early-stage COVID-19.)
In Berlin, Schrezenmeier is planning to offer the AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson vaccines to some patients already vaccinated with another COVID-19 vaccine. Will mixing vaccines enhance their effectiveness? I dont know, she admits. But she imagines that giving the immune system two different jolts might sometimes make a difference. The lone kidney transplant volunteer in her study who produced antibodies after vaccination had already survived COVID-19which may have helped kick-start an immune response against it.
Shoshannah Buxbaum, 30, said she felt pain in every single one of her joints the day after she got her second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
"I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my mom and I just can't keep my head up," she told Insider about 22 hours after her shot.
Buxbaum also felt nauseous and tired the day after her second dose, and a lifetime of chronic hip pain may have exacerbated her joint pain post-vaccine. She told Insider she took to her bed for the rest of the day. By the next morning, she had fully recovered.
Young adults have gotten a reputation for being relatively symptom-less throughout the pandemic. They're more likely to have asymptomatic infections, which can drive case rates up for the rest of the population.
But when it comes to vaccine reactions, young people are just as likely if not more so to experience side effects compared to older adults. Insider spoke with people in their teens, 20s and 30s about how they felt post-vaccine.
People in their 20s and 30s may have more intenseside effects compared to older folks. That's because our immune systems gradually deteriorate with age, experts previously told Insider.
"Younger individuals have a much more vigorous immune response, so it should make sense that they would also have more side effects," Dr. Vivek Cherian, an internal-medicine physician in Baltimore, told Insider's Aria Bendix.
However, that's not to say the severity of your side effects correlates with the strength of your immune system. Elderly people have reported flu-like reactions similar to those experienced by young adults, and many young people only have mild arm pain after their shots.
Kelly Carton, 27, experienced a couple days of arm tenderness after her first Pfizer shot. Carton's reaction is typical of what many people experience after their first dose of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
Rachel Flannery, also 27, experienced a similar reaction: two days of a sore arm after her first Pfizer shot.
Rachel Greenspan, a 24-year-old digital culture reporter at Insider, got Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. After her first shot, Greenspan said, she had a bit of nausea and fatigue along with arm pain.
Mia de Graaf, 29, senior health editor at Insider, barely experienced any side effects until a week after her first Moderna shot, when she got so-called "Moderna arm" a slightly hot, red patch at the injection site, which faded within two days.
Most people will experience a more severe reaction after the second shot in Pfizer trials, about twice as many participants developed chills and joint pain after their second dose than after their first. In Moderna's trial, roughly five times as many participants developed chills after their second dose as did after their first.
The day after Flannery's second Pfizer shot, she had aches and pains. She told Insider she had "terrible joint and bone pain, dizziness, headache, and arm pain" that came on about 16 hours after the injection.
Greenspan felt like "every muscle in my body was sore" about three hours after getting her second Moderna shot. Twelve hours after the injection, she woke up with a fever, chills, nausea, and a pounding headache none of which surprised her after hearing about reactions her friends had.
But she was caught off guard when she vomited the next morning.
"That's when I knew I needed the day off," she said.
Some people who got the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine reported reactions after the sole shot.
Christian Mendonca, 34, previously told Insiderhe felt tired, cold, and ran a fever for 12 hours after getting his J&J vaccine.
Manny Fidel, 29, a columnist and editor at Insider, also felt feverish the night of his J&J shot, although he didn't check his temperature. He said he started feeling ill around 7pm and was bedridden for 18 hours with aches, chills, nausea, and a racing heart rate.
Chloe Kathuria, 18, told Insider she had a particularly unpleasant reaction to the J&J shot. She was up all night feeling freezing cold, and her shivers made her muscle aches even worse. She ran a fever for two days, but the soreness in her arm and body lasted a week,
Kathuria, like many others who experience side effects, took a day off from class after getting her shot. Her reaction was on the more severe end of the spectrum but getting vaccinated was still worth it.
"Two days of a fever is better than having the coronavirus and being hospitalized," she told Insider.
While Kathuria didn't expect to feel so ill after her shot, others braced themselves for side effects. Jes Adams, 35, previously told Insider she has some preexisting medical conditions and a history of reacting strongly to vaccinations.
Adams said she spent much of the day after her second Moderna shot bedridden with dizziness and vomiting. Luckily, she had planned ahead to take the day off and recovered quickly.
MIAMI (CBSMiami)
The owners of an expensive Miami private school dont want their teachers and employees getting the COVID-19 vaccine, citing a debunked anti-vaccination theory.
CBS News obtained a copy of an email sent by the Centner Academy to its parents on Monday that reads, in part:
Until further notice, we ask any employee who has not yet taken the experimental COVID-19 injection, to wait until the end of the school year. We also recommended that all faculty and staff hold off on taking the injection until there is further research available on whether this experimental drug is impacting unvaccinated individuals. It is our policy, to the extent possible, not to employ anyone who has taken the experimental COVID-19 injection until further information is known.
The school, which charges almost $30,000 a year per student, is run by Leila and David Centner. Its a fairly new school, which just opened in September of 2020 and was featured in CBS4 Miami Proud segment in October of 2020.
The email appears to be tying employment to the vaccine, threatening legal action would be taken if staff lied about getting the vaccine.
Which made CBS4s Keith Jones wonder, is this even legal?
This is a private school. Its not a public school. So generally a private employer in Florida can fire someone for any reason or no reason at all, said employment lawyer Carter Sox with Gallup Auerbach.
Sox said firing someone for getting the vaccine is legal in this case. But there appears to be some recourse if fired personnel want to fight it.
If a teacher says they have a medical condition, and it discriminates against their right to get the vaccine, Sox said.
As the email began to make nationwide headlines, the United Teachers of Dade released a statement, which read, in part:
As shamefully seen by the actions of the illegally run and uncertified Centner Academy, these schools not only teach misinformation and peddle propaganda, they punish teachers who try to protect themselves and their families. We are horrified by the unsafe conditions and labor violations that colleagues at schools such as this one have to endure due to lack of union representation and contract rights.
CBS4 News has been told one teacher has already resigned, but its not clear if it was in direct result of this policy.
In the meantime, teachers are concerned and so are medical experts, like FIUs infectious disease specialist Dr. Aileen Marty.
Marty said the Centners are promoting a debunked theory that states people who are vaccinated can spread a different type of disease to individuals standing near them.
It shows me that the author has a very primitive understanding of what a vaccine is and really no understanding of the scientific process, she said.
The email goes on to list many unknown variables for their decision and states:
Tens of thousands of women all over the world have recently been reporting adverse reproductive issues from being in close proximity with those who have received any one of the COVID-19 injections.
They also claim, No one knows exactly what may be causing these irregularities, but it appears that those who have received the injections may be transmitting something from their bodies to those with whom they come in contact.
Their email cites no scientific evidence or authority for this.
Marty told CBS4 that this is heartbreaking, and she is devastated because she says there is no basis in science for any of the misinformation that the school is putting out. She also noted that its particularly egregious, that you have a school designed to educate kids promoting this sort of false and misleading information about the vaccine.
CBS4 News reached out requesting an interview with someone from the school, but they simply sent an email reiterating what was in the email sent to the parents, which stated:
Were doing what we think is in the best interest of the children because children shouldnt be around teachers who are vaccinated.
