ITHACA, N.Y. Cornell University has changed it's COVID-19 "alert level" to yellow today after 74 positive cases have been identified throughout the student body in the last week. The "yellow" alert signifies a "low to moderate risk" for increased transmission. The last time the alert was raised was early February after a cluster of cases was discovered amongst students.
According to a statement from the university, "the increase in cases is primarily related to a lack of adherence to public health measures, including mask wearing and physical distancing, as well as student gatherings and travel outside of the region."
In a letter to the campus community, Cornell President Martha Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff identified that the majority of cases have been linked to first-year students living on North Campus, Greek-life organizations, athletic teams, on- and off-campus parties and again, travel outside of the Ithaca area. The two went on to warn of repercussions should the trend in increased cases continue.
"If current trends were to continue, we would soon be forced to move to Alert Level Orange and all in-person gatherings could be prohibited; gyms and recreation centers could close; all courses could move to fully online instruction; and students could be required to stay in their rooms or apartments, except to get food or go for testing," the letter states. "After that, the only remaining recourse would be to send all students back to their permanent homes an action that no one wants to see happen."
Students are required, as part of the school's return to campus plan, to sign a "behavioral compact" promising to not engage in COVID unsafe activities or behaviors. It is unclear whether any punitive action has been taken against students in this latest cluster who have broken it.
Moreover, the letter from administrators has accused students of not only refusing to comply with the compact, but also with contact tracing providing no or false information on potential close contacts of infected individuals.
"These students may think they are protecting their friends by not identifying them as contacts, but they are, in fact, putting themselves and others at risk, including the most vulnerable among us," Pollack and Kotlikoff's letter states. "Remember: health conditions of immunocompromised individuals are not always visible. Cooperating with contact tracing makes the whole community, including your friends and loved ones, safer."
In response to the most recent uptick in infections, public health officials at the university are taking the opportunity to remind students of the following safety precautions:
For more information related to prevention and care, visit Cornell's COVID-19 website.The website also includes the university's COVID-19 tracking dashboard, which is updated Monday-Friday to include information about testing and positive cases within the campus community.
Michigans seven-day average of new COVID-17 cases is going up a steep pace. So is the positivity rate.
Hospitalizations for coronavirus also are beginning to climb.
In fact, coronavirus transmission in Michigan is growing faster than anywhere else in the country.
Pandemic isnt over, Michigan officials warn, as COVID-19 numbers surge
Whats up with that?
Heres a look at the factor cited by experts.
1. Spread of COVID-19 variants.
Perhaps the biggest driver of the increases are the emergence of the new COVID-19 variants, which are more contagious than the dominant strain of coronavirus.
Along with Florida, Michigan has one of the highest numbers of identified cases of the B.1.1.7 strain that first emerged in the United Kingdom. That variant has been identified in 725 cases in 31 Michigan counties.
Just a reminder, this variant is more transmissible, so someone who is infected of COVID-19 will transmit that virus more easily to to others, Dr. Sarah Lyon-Callo, director of the MDHHS Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health, said in a March 17 press briefing.
2. Easing of restrictions on restaurants, gyms and movie theaters in recent weeks.
Among the 50 states, Michigan had among the lowest transmission rates through January and most of February, and experts say a big reason for that was more restrictions.
Whitmer eased restrictions on gyms and movie theaters in January and allowed restaurants to resume in-person dining on Feb. 1. The coronavirus case numbers and positivity rate started rising about the third week of February.
Lifting of restaurant restrictions typically results in a rise in case rates, concluded a recent by the federal Centers for Disease Control. Thats because coronavirus spreads most easily in indoor settings where people arent wearing masks.
3. Resumption of high school sports and other extracurricular activities.
Lyon-Callo said the number of outbreaks related to schools -- particularly high schools -- has jumped up, but most of that involves extracurricular activities vs. exposure in the classroom.
The classroom environment itself has not been a strong signal for outbreaks, she said. It tends to be more the activities associated with schools, including sports but not only sports.
The states latest report school-related outbreaks listed 53 new clusters in K-12 schools, infecting 253 students and staff. That compares to 17 new clusters infecting 68 people listed in the Feb. 15 report.
4. People are leaving their homes more.
The Michigan Department of Transportation and companies that analyze cellphone data are seeing increases in mobility, Lyon-Callo said.
That data suggests the percentage of time people are spending at home has decreased, and mobility is now near pre-pandemic levels, she said.
.That is showing return towards baseline mobility patterns, particularly for non-essential visits, Lyon-Callo said.
5. Lack of testing.
Lyon-Callo and other public-health official continue to express concern that more people arent getting tested for coronavirus.
We have plateaued in terms of the number of diagnostic tests performed in the state each day, Lyon-Callo said. Its important that we increase our testing rate, particularly as cases are increasing. Thats important for public health response, in terms of ensuring that we identify cases so we can conduct contact tracing and understand where outbreaks are occurring.
6. COVID fatigue.
Another major factor is COVID fatigue, said Dr. Liam Sullivan, an infectious disease specialist for Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids.
I think people are just really, really tired of COVID-19 right now, and theyre especially tired of the COVID-related guidelines and restrictions, Sullivan said. Theres a segment of the population whos saying, I dont care any more and others who are just not paying as much attention to what theyre doing, intentional or unintentional.
If you have this combination of people who stop taking the proper precautions and these variants circulating that are clearly more contagious, that is a recipe for another surge in infections, Sullivan added.
The good news, Lyon-Callo and others say, is that case increases are concentrated for now among those age 50 and younger.
Those who are 10 to 19 have the highest case rate, and their case rate is increasing faster than that of other age groups, she said.
Thats significant because younger people are much, much more likely to have mild cases of coronavirus, she said. Its also significant that cases are not increasing among those age 70 and older, a group much more at risk of hospitalization or death if they catch the virus.
Were delighted to see that (case rates among senior citizens) are not increasing, and that I think shows a positive impact of the vaccination efforts, Lyon-Callo said.
More than 60% of Michigan residents age 65 and older have gotten at least one dose of COVID vaccine.
Read more on MLive:
Michigans coronavirus numbers are going up, but will vaccinations blunt the impact?
COVID brides and industry professionals consider how the pandemic could change future weddings
COVID-19 pandemic still teaching Michigan schools lessons a year later
9 things we got totally wrong about COVID-19 a year ago
Starting next week, Caltrain will offer free train rides to and from COVID-19 vaccination sites for people living or working in San Francisco, Santa Clara or San Mateo counties.
The agency said that fare payment to vaccination sites will not be required until further notice, starting Monday, March 22.
Passengers who wish to ride free must notify a conductor when they board the train and show proof of the vaccine appointment or a vaccination card.
"By offering free rides to and from vaccinations, we hope to remove cost barriers so that everyone across the three counties we serve has access to the vaccine," Michelle Bouchard, Caltrain chief operating officer of rail, said.
Caltrain joins other regional transit systems like AC Transit, BART, SamTrans and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) in offering free rides to vaccination sites as part of the Bay Area Healthy Transit Plan.
For a full list of agencies offering free rides to vaccination sites, click here.
Passengers on Caltrain must adhere to safety precautions such as wearing a face covering and social distancing while riding the train or at stations.
I know people are tired of the pandemic, I see a light at the end of the tunnel, but were just not quite there yet. We are still vaccinating a lot of people in South Carolina, but we dont have the supply yet, Eckard said. All of the things mean we need to continue being very vigilant, wear our masks, dont do sleep overs, try to be careful about how close you are to other people, and if we do that, well continue to see our numbers decrease.
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said lingering effects he has felt after experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 last year are not painful, theyre just weird.
In a call with reporters Friday, Kaine described initially not feeling as if he had been infected with the virus but instead experienced a blizzard of allergic reactions when he and his wife, Anne Holton, Virginias former secretary of education, first began feeling symptoms last March.
The two-term senator and Holton did not get tested, citing the national testing shortage at the time, but later said they tested positive for coronavirus antibodies in May 2020.
Kaine said during that time last year he developed a rash that would appear and go away after roughly 15 minutes. On Friday, he explained the rash has been replaced with a tingling sensation he feels on parts of his body multiple times a day.
The Democratic senator stressed any lingering symptoms hes feeling are not debilitating and probably neurological, likening it to how some patients, including Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, have reported losing their sense of smell or taste after contracting the virus.
Im going to state at the outset. My lingering effects are things Im experiencing, not things Im suffering, Kaine told 8News on Friday. Theyre not debilitating, they dont keep me from work.
Kaine noted several people who have had the virus are dealing with far more serious health concerns, including chronic respiratory and heart issues. He said this highlights the lasting health risks COVID-19 poises and the need to address the impact it will have even after people are vaccinated.
And for many people its getting in their way in a significant degree and we have to both do the research through the NIH to kind of figure out the long effect, but we also have to have a health care system that can deal with people who have consequences that are significant, Kaine added.
Kaine initially shared his experience during Thursdays Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing with the nations top federal officials on the pandemic.
A study found two cases of coronavirus co-infection, but the frequency and health impacts of double infections are still unknown.
New COVID-19 strains have emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, including those first identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. Now, several media outlets are reporting that people can contract more than one coronavirus variant at the same time. The reports cite a Brazilian study posted in January.
Is it possible to be infected with two variants of COVID-19 at the same time, and what does that mean for the severity of symptoms? Thats what people are trying to figure out.
THE QUESTION
Can you contract more than one strain of COVID-19 at the same time?
WHY WE ARE VERIFYING
The claim comes from a Brazilian study in which scientists found two instances of COVID-19 co-infection among samples taken from people in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Both people recovered. The study was published as a pre-print article and has not been peer reviewed.
THE ANSWER
Yes, it is possible to contract more than one strain of COVID-19 simultaneously. But according to Dr. Saralyn Mark and the CDC, health officials dont know yet whether double infection could impact vaccine efficacy or severe coronavirus disease. In addition, there are no widespread reports of co-infection.
WHAT WE FOUND
Dr. Saralyn Mark, former senior medical advisor at the White House and current lead COVID-19 spokesperson for the American Medical Womens Association, said that while having more than one COVID-19 strain at the same time is a possibility, the effect on vaccine efficacy or severe disease is yet to be known.
Theres even some thought that perhaps a hybrid strain could be emerging from these variants, but we dont know yet the implications of that, or if they make the virus more transmissible, lethal or less susceptible to vaccines and treatment, she said.
Dr. Mark explained that if weve learned something this year, its that anything is possible with the novel coronavirus and the best way to prevent contracting it is to follow current public health guidelines.
As the virus moves from one individual to another, it finds a potential opportunity to mutate. So we need to be on guard, she said.
According to the CDC, viruses constantly change through mutation, and not all variants can be harmful or consistent. Sometimes they disappear, the website said.
The CDC also clarifies that studies so far suggest these COVID-19 variants are recognized by vaccine antibodies but more testing is underway to determine any resistance to treatment or detection by available tests.
Dr. Mark emphasized that people should not be alarmed by these new strains, but continue to follow public health protocols and get a vaccine as soon as it is offered to them.
Small, dark purple spots show inflammatory cells invading the heart of a patient who died of COVID-19.
By Emma YasinskiMar. 17, 2021 , 12:00 AM
Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Three-quarters of people who died of COVID-19 harbored the SARS-CoV-2 virus in their hearts, according to the most detailed study of cardiac tissue to date. Those people were also more likely than patients without cardiac invasion to experience abnormal heart rhythms before they died. The study offers insight into how the disease may damage the heartand how certain treatments may help.
The finding paints a really nice picture of the connection between the virus and heart problems, says Joseph Maleszewski, a cardiovascular pathologist at the Mayo Clinic who was not involved with the study.
Scientists have ample evidence of heart damage in COVID-19 patients. Some people, for example, show elevated levels of troponins, molecules released in the blood when the heart is injured. Others have experienced inflammation of the sac surrounding the heartand inflammation of the heart itself. But its been unclear whether these problems were caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus attacking the heart directly, or the damage is due to an overactive immune response.
Part of the problem is that previous studies are mixed about whether SARS-CoV-2 can invade heart tissue. Many that havent found the virus use real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), says James Stone, a cardiovascular pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. RT-PCR works by detecting viral RNA in tissue, then making many DNA copies of it. Once theres enough DNA, a molecule called a fluorescent tag can stick to it and shine to reveal its presence. But Stone says that heart tissue is often processed and preserved using chemicals like paraffin, which can break down the RNA and prevent detection to begin with.
So he and his team used another approach: in situ hybridization and NanoString transcriptomic profiling. Like RT-PCR, these techniques use special molecules to attach to and detect pieces of viral RNA, but they do so without having to make DNA copies first. The approach can identify viral RNA even after its broken into smaller pieces. The scientists also analyzed about 1000 pieces of heart tissuemore than 20 samples from each of the 41 patients they looked at. Thats double the number of samples per patient in most studies, Stone says.
SARS-CoV-2 was present in 30 of the hearts, the team reports today in Modern Pathology. And only those patients experienced new atrial fibrillations, fast and irregular heart rhythms, or early or extra heartbeats, compared with the other patients in the studya correlation Stone calls pretty phenomenal.
Still, its unclear whether the virus attacked the heart directly in these cases. Most of the infected cardiac cells were immune cells, which SARS-CoV-2 could have invaded elsewhere in the body before they traveled to the heart. Its also unclear whether the virusrather than the immune cells themselvesis causing the problems.
Regardless, the study may help explain why the steroid dexamethasone is so helpful to some patients. The drug was one of the first found to prevent deaths from severe COVID-19. It reduces inflammation, so it may have curbed the presence of SARS-CoV-2harboring immune cells in the heart, Stone says. Only 50% of the patients treated with dexamethasone had the virus in their hearts, compared with 90% of patients who were not on the drug.
But compared with large clinical trials, the number of patients in this new study is small, making it impossible to say that one drug protects the heart better than another, says Nicholas Hendren, a cardiology fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Still, Maleszewski says the new findings are a call to action. Scientists need to probe more cardiac tissue, he argues, not just to see how COVID-19 kills patients, but to figure out how it hurts the hearts of those that survive. The disease may, for example, create scar tissue that can cause cardiac problems down the line. Were starting to understand what COVID-19 does to patients when they have it, he says. Whats not clear is what happens later on.
This is the final article in a three-part series on Oregons COVID-19 response, as we enter the pandemics second year. Part one looks at the double-edged sword of Oregons COVID-19 success. Part two asks if Oregons COVID-19 pivot was enough to address racial inequities.
COVID-19 vaccine distribution in Oregon is generally on the upswing, and the state plans to extend eligibility to the next large chunk of Oregonians at the end of March. In addition, state officials announced this week that Oregon will follow the Biden administrations timeline and open vaccination eligibility to all Oregonians by May 1.
This expedited schedule points to growing confidence in the federal governments ability to deliver more vaccines. It indicates that well be able to vaccinate people more quickly.
The faster we vaccinate, the faster we start to approach herd immunity and some sense of day-to-day normalcy.
But it also means were likely going to hit to a point of inflection earlier one that would surely warm the cockles of 19th century British economist Alfred Marshalls heart. Its the point at which the supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses is greater than the demand even though not everyone is vaccinated.
At that point (and ideally before) the state will have to shift gears and try to convince those who are hesitant to sign up for their shots.
Total weekly vaccine doses earmarked for Oregon by the federal government
There had been some reservations on the part of Oregon officials to go along with the new federal vaccination timeline because of lingering uncertainty about vaccine supply.
While generally increasing over the past few months, vaccine allocations to Oregon by the federal government have been inconsistent. Things peaked at about 210,000 doses at the beginning of March, when the Johnson & Johnson vaccine first shipped to states, but since then allocations have been around 10,000-25,000 doses lower per week.
Its not like theres vaccine sitting there that could have gone out. Were basically chewing through that vaccine within the week that we get it, said Oregon Health Authority director Patrick Allen.
Allen told OPB this week he expects the number of doses delivered to the state to double by May 1.
Right now were kind of stuck with a strategy thats lets put 15,000 doses in one place, he said. Its a lot better to put 15 doses in a thousand places so that people have ready access to multiple choices in their own neighborhood.
He said that will start happening as more vaccine doses arrive.
Oregon is currently vaccinating people at the 36th-slowest rate in the country, but Allen says the state has plenty of capacity to vaccinate more people. The problem remains the supply from the federal government. Oregon ranks 34th by population in doses delivered to the state.
We have the capacity to do at least 300,000 first doses a week. Right now were receiving about 150,000 first doses a week, and thats increasing toward 200,000. So we have ample capacity to be able to get shots in peoples arms, Allen said.
As of Wednesday, just over half a million Oregonians had been fully vaccinated.
Total doses delivered to each state per 1,000 population
If the target plan to open vaccinations to all Oregonians sticks, May and June are going to be an all-out vaccine blitz.
But probably sometime in July or August the rush of willing vaccinatees will start to trickle off. And at that point Oregon will be faced with what could be the next big vaccine obstacle: not enough arms for all the available doses of vaccine.
Thats exactly whats in the future. Right now, demand exceeds supply. But whenever that changes and there is less demand than there is supply, then vaccine hesitancy can be the real issue, said Creighton University sociologist Kevin Estep, who studies public health issues, including vaccine refusal.
Polling over the last year in the United States suggests a large portion of the population is unlikely to get vaccinated for COVID-19. That number is nearly 25% of adults according to a new poll out this month from Monmouth University.
Because kids and teens under the age of 16 havent been approved for the vaccines yet, Oregon is going to need more than 90% of its adults to become immune to COVID-19 to achieve herd immunity and perhaps an even higher percentage considering the new variants, which can be more contagious. We will have some buffer because of people who have natural immunity from catching and surviving COVID-19, but not nearly as much as other states that have had much higher case rates. The rest will need to be vaccinated.
Vaccine hesitancy for COVID-19 is a new kind of phenomenon different in many ways from vaccine refusal connected to other diseases. Although there is some overlap, this isnt your typical anti-vaccine crowd.
The categories of people the surveys are telling us that are most hesitant about COVID vaccines are not really the same demographic that are hesitant about other vaccines, Estep said. These people have been vaccinated. They received many other vaccinations. Theyre not against vaccination. They may even get the flu vaccine.
The Monmouth Poll suggests Republicans are far more likely 36% versus 6% for Democrats to say they dont want the vaccine. And 14% of people of color say they wont get vaccinated against coronavirus.
About 18% of Oregonians are registered Republicans. About 25% are people of color, who have been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic compared to white Oregonians. On top of this, Oregon has the reputation of being a hotbed of anti-vaccine sentiment.
The vaccine hesitant group is humongous, right? And so theres plenty of room to do good work, good public or health communication work, Estep said.
A sizable chunk of these groups will need to be convinced to get vaccinated if the state wants to lift social distancing restrictions and mask mandates without putting people at risk.
There will be many competing forces at work this summer as Oregon reaches that supply and demand inflection point. One will be the powerful lure and social pressure to get back to normal after more than a year of pandemic. Estep says this will pull against the hesitancy so many Americans feel when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Which way the tug of war goes? I think we dont have enough information to tell yet.
Many hospitals, including Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., reported reaching capacity in their ICUs during the winter surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. These conditions, according to research, may have led to more deaths. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption
Many hospitals, including Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, Calif., reported reaching capacity in their ICUs during the winter surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. These conditions, according to research, may have led to more deaths.
Health care systems endured a stress test like no other over the past year as COVID-19 patients filled up hospital beds and intensive care units. Health care workers pleaded with the public to "flatten the curve," yet each surge in 2020 was worse than the next.
Now two recent studies quantify the consequences of flooding hospitals with COVID-19 patients and add urgency to continued efforts to keep cases and hospitalizations down.
The research, from both the United States and the United Kingdom, shows that when ICUs fill up, COVID-19 patients' chances of dying from the disease rise dramatically despite improvements in treatment and care developed since last spring.
In the first study, published in JAMA, researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs found a patient's chance of dying of COVID-19 nearly doubled if hospitalized when ICUs were busiest compared to times with fewer patients.
"We normally don't think about outcomes based on how many other people are sick," says Dr. Lewis Rubinson, chief medical officer at Morristown Medical Center, who wrote an editorial accompanying the JAMA study. "This reinforces that one of the best ways to improve survival is to reduce the overall pace of people coming into the ICU."
The study measured the mortality rate of more than 8,500 veterans at 88 VA hospitals between March and November.
As ICU demand increased, the mortality rate went up a trend that was consistent at different times in the pandemic.
The study doesn't delve into why more people died when the ICU was busiest, but Rubinson says the association is at the very least a warning that letting hospitals get overloaded is perilous.
Critical care is labor intensive and hospitals took extraordinary steps during waves of COVID-19. Many created makeshift ICUs or relied on nurses caring for more patients in a shift than normal.
"Did care change?" asks Rubinson. "That's really the question. This study doesn't show that. It suggests that may be going on."
Rubinson says it makes sense that a resource mismatch can lead to worse outcomes, but other factors may have influenced mortality, as well. For example, the hospital may have placed sicker patients in the ICU when the demand was highest.
"A hospital is not a factory"
In the U.K., a group of researchers also discovered the risk of dying during a surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations rises incrementally as more patients are placed on ventilators in the ICU.
Once ICU occupancy hit 85% a benchmark set by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine the chance of dying was close to 20% higher compared to the baseline, when occupancy was between 45% and 85%.
"This risk doesn't occur above a specific threshold, but rather appears linear," the study's authors conclude in a paper released as a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed.
In the most extreme scenario, a patient admitted to an ICU where 99% of the beds are occupied has almost twice the risk of dying as a similar patient would when treated in an empty ICU.
That jump in mortality is based on data from the first wave of COVID-19 patients. The researchers ran their analysis using data from the fall surge in the U.K and found the trend held true: Mortality increased by about 70% when outcomes from the second wave were included in a second study also in preprint, says Dr. Bilal Mateen, one of the co-authors.
"It's madness," says Mateen, a clinical data science fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in the U.K. "We walked in expecting to see something. I don't think we expected the association to be that large."
Overall, in the second study, Mateen and his team analyzed nationwide data from more than 6,600 patients who were placed on mechanical ventilators (life support) from April to December.
The change in risk of dying can also be thought of in terms of age, which is a key predictor of survival with COVID-19.
For example, a 40-year-old admitted to an ICU with more than 85% occupancy essentially has the mortality risk of a 45-year-old. In contrast, a 40-year-old patient can actually mirror the survival of someone nine years younger when the ICU has low occupancy.
"This is something that is across all ages, across every demographic," says Harrison Wilde, who co-authored the report with Mateen.
"A hospital is not a factory and should not be operating at maximum capacity," he adds.
As with the VA study, the U.K. research can't directly pinpoint what led more patients to die when ICUs were full, but Mateen says the findings reflect the reality of how care changes when a hospital is overloaded.
"You have a finite set of resources that you can only slice into so small a piece before patients' care is going to be relatively compromised," says Mateen. "In the U.K., we've always known that quality of care starts to take a nosedive when you get above [85% occupancy]."
He suspects that expanding nurse-to-patient ratios and pulling in staff who are not trained in critical care could be key to why patients fared worse during the busiest times.
"I think the weight of evidence has gotten to the point where you can't really ignore the fact that as the hospital gets more full, something's going wrong," he says. "I would rather not do the experiments to find out why."
Slowing improvement in survival
After the initial spring surge last year, clinicians gained a better grasp on how to treat COVID-19 and the chance of hospitalized patients surviving improved. One study showed that hospitalized patients' mortality rates dropped from about 25% to under 8%.
It's a trend that holds true even when adjusting for characteristics like age and underlying health conditions, says Dr. Leora Horwitz, who has researched COVID-19 hospitalizations and was not involved in either the VA or U.K. study.
"Some of that is decreased volume, but some of it is also that we learned how to manage these patients and learned fast," says Horwitz, director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science at NYU Langone Health.
Horwitz says there's no question hospital strain contributes to worse outcomes, but it's difficult to disentangle that from other forces that have also affected mortality during the pandemic.
While it appears the U.S. has turned a corner in the pandemic, the growing threat of new, more contagious coronavirus variants could spark another surge in hospitalizations, especially as more states remove mask mandates and social distancing requirements.
"We should keep doing everything possible to keep people out of hospitals, which means we should take the vaccine as soon as it's available, we should mask and we should social distance," she says.
"The bottom line is that having really crowded hospitals is bad for your health."
The following is information about the City of San Joss response to slow and reduce the spread of COVID-19 and support our most at-risk communities.
SOURCE:City of San JosEmergency Operations Center
Contact:Carolina Camarena/Colin Heyne, City of San Jos Media Line: 408-535-7777City of San Jos Customer Contact Center: 3-1-1 or 408-535-3500
Email: News/Media: EOC_PIO@sanjoseca.govResidents: 311@sanjoseca.govBusinesses: covid19sjbusiness@sanjoseca.govNon-Profits: covid19sjcbo@sanjoseca.gov
Updates on City of San Jos Services and/or Operations
If you are a member of one of the groups below, you may be able to make your vaccine appointment through your healthcare provider. Note: Your provider may or may not yet be vaccinating all eligible groups, depending on their supply of vaccine.
As of March 15, the following people will be eligible to receive vaccines in Santa Clara County:
Esta informacin est disponible en espaol enwww.sanjoseca.gov.
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www.sanjoseca.gov
A persons risk for COVID-19 is not related to race, ethnicity or culture. City employees must abide by the Discrimination and Harassment policy, and treat colleagues and members of the public with courtesy and respect. Discrimination and/or Harassment of any kind is a violation of the policies and will not be tolerated.
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