Masks, constant hand washing, and isolation are the main messages to stay safe against COVID-19 in 2020, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham declared a state of emergency four years agoThe life of healthcare workers instantly changed.It meant even more precautions, dorms at UNM converted into places for healthcare workers to stay. So they didn't have to go home to their families if they were worried. We created a lot of ways to have clothing when you got here that you could leave when you left or do showers, Kate Becker, the CEO at the University of New Mexico Hospital, said.As the virus became a global pandemic, hospitals were over capacity by at least 150%.We had people literally everywhere. We turned clinics into patient spaces. We turned conference rooms into patient rooms. We had patients everywhere, Becker said.After COVID-19 drive-thru testing vaccines and return for normalcy. Hospitals like UNM are dealing with more illnesses due to delayed care for things like cancer screenings. The need for higher levels of care persists even though the COVID part has slowed, Becker said.It has even changed the way some hospitals are built. We didn't have enough rooms to keep patients isolated where the air pressure was such that the virus was not going back and forth, Becker said. She added, We had not collectively experienced a pandemic in 100-plus years and we didn't know the number of people we needed to accommodate.
Masks, constant hand washing, and isolation are the main messages to stay safe against COVID-19 in 2020, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham declared a state of emergency four years ago
The life of healthcare workers instantly changed.
It meant even more precautions, dorms at UNM converted into places for healthcare workers to stay.
So they didn't have to go home to their families if they were worried. We created a lot of ways to have clothing when you got here that you could leave when you left or do showers, Kate Becker, the CEO at the University of New Mexico Hospital, said.
As the virus became a global pandemic, hospitals were over capacity by at least 150%.
We had people literally everywhere. We turned clinics into patient spaces. We turned conference rooms into patient rooms. We had patients everywhere, Becker said.
After COVID-19 drive-thru testing vaccines and return for normalcy.
Hospitals like UNM are dealing with more illnesses due to delayed care for things like cancer screenings.
The need for higher levels of care persists even though the COVID part has slowed, Becker said.
It has even changed the way some hospitals are built.
We didn't have enough rooms to keep patients isolated where the air pressure was such that the virus was not going back and forth, Becker said.
She added, We had not collectively experienced a pandemic in 100-plus years and we didn't know the number of people we needed to accommodate.
Bitcoin (BTC) is up nearly 2,000% versus its COVID-19 lows on the fourth anniversary of its crash to $3,600.
On March 12, 2018, BTC price action began a plunge to levels never seen again as risk assets dived worldwide.
Bitcoin hodlers have much to celebrate with BTC/USD above $70,000, but some are commemorating a grim reminder of worse times.
Exactly four years ago, the COVID-19 cross-market crash wrought havoc across risk assets and beyond, sending Bitcoin tumbling more than 50% in a single day.
As coronavirus was just beginning to spark lockdowns and other knee-jerk moves from governments, markets felt a keen sense of the economic upheaval to come.
Beginning March 12 at $7,960, BTC/USD finished at $4,830, going on to bottom at $3,860 the following day, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.
Its comeback was arguably just as impressive just one-and-a-half months later, $10,000 had reappeared.
Everyone who bought the dip is up 1,700% since, crypto journalist Pete Rizzo wrote in part of a dedicated post on X.
Those who decided to go all in on that day are not the only COVID-19 success stories when it comes to diversifying into BTC.
United States citizens who used their first stimulus check, worth $1,200 and delivered in April 2020, to buy Bitcoin are now sitting on $12,930, per data from monitoring resource BitcoinStimulus.
A 100% stimulus deployment, originally worth $3,200, is now worth 400% more.
Perusing other data, analyst Joe Consorti noted that overall BTC balances on exchanges peaked following the March 2020 crash.
Related:Bitcoin has 6 months until ETF liquidity crisis New analysis
From then on, the tally on exchanges tracked by on-chain analytics firm Glassnode began a broad downtrend one which continues to this day.
It has since dropped from 17.6% of supply to 11.6% and is still falling fast, Consorti wrote in part of accompanying X comments last week.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
These are the faces of people who lost their lives to COVID-19: parents, pastors, doctors, teachers, firefighters people from every age group and all walks of life.
Monday marks four years since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. Almost 1.2 million people in the U.S. have lost their lives to the virus.
For many families, the pandemic wounds are still raw, four years later.
"We need to acknowledge COVID. We lost over a million people," said Anne Starkweather. Her husband, Chad Capule, was one of them.
He died in March 2020, and four years on, she's still processing the grief and trauma.
"It still makes me sick to this day that he's not here. I will never be the same," she said.
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Capule, an IT manager from Cheverly, Maryland, got sick while traveling to a Wisconsin hospital to set up their new computer system. Three weeks later, he died there, alone in the ICU.
His wife and sisters never got the chance to say goodbye in person.
"I feel robbed and a bit angry and jealous that we could not do that," said one of his sisters, Angie Fontanilla.
His wife told us: "That breaks my heart whenever I think about it. Him being there alone and dying alone, with no one to hold his hand, no one to tell him it was OK."
It's a sentiment echoed by so many who weren't allowed inside hospitals and were forced to hold funerals virtually, for fear of spreading the virus.
"That uncertainty translated into isolation, that they could not be with their loved one as they lay dying," said Sarah Wagner, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University. "They couldn't be there to hold a hand, to press a cheek. They couldn't say those words, a final goodbye. Or if they did, they had to do so mediated by technology."
"Often people are left in the very space where their loved one had sat next to them," Wagner said. "Same bed, same room, same kitchen. They're not there, but they're also not able to bring in family and friends to kind of get through that period."
Wagner and and fellow GW anthropology professor Roy Richard Grinker are members of a research team called Rituals in the Making, which is focused on COVID death, mourning and memorialization.
Over the past four years, theyve found that silence about COVID hurts people who are still grieving.
"When there is this enveloping silence around 1,200,000 deaths, and we don't talk about it that silence doesn't make it easier for the people who are grieving, right? This mourning process is truncated," Wagner said. "The grief is being compounded."
To honor the victims and acknowledge the grief, memorials have popped up, both big and small, including a powerful public art installation outside RFK Stadium in fall 2020, and another on the National Mall the following year displaying thousands of personalized flags.
Those temporary memorials provided safe places for people to mourn and the nation to reflect.
"I was on the mall with all the flags in the wind and the sun and all these people everywhere," Grinker recalled. "And I said, 'What would a support group look like for you to help you mourn the loss of your loved one?' And she looked around and said, 'This. This is a support group for that.'"
Suzanne Firstenberg is the artist behind the moving displays titled "In America: Remember," capturing a sobering snapshot in time.
"That's one of the things about grief in America," she said. 'We have no idea who's grieving near us. One in three people experienced a COVID death of a relative, a friend, a coworker."
Fontanilla told us: "It was helpful for us, for me, in the healing process to see that we were not alone."
"So It felt like a sense of community with these other people that had also suffered," Starkweather said.
"So you had people who came and they, for the first time, felt as if, through that installation, that their loss was being recognized," Wagner said.
"It felt like the funeral they never had, or that was like a proxy gravesite that they could go to," she said.
And the work isn't over.
Firstenberg still has the 20,000 personalized flags from the 'In America' exhibition. She's working with the team at GW on the painstaking task of archiving every single one and creating a database that researchers and relatives will be able to access.
For mourners, it's a start, with an end goal of someday having a more permanent memorial for future generations to remember.
"9/11 changed the country. COVID changed the country," Fontanilla said. "It would be good to have something that people can go to, and to remember that, and to tell future generations that, 'Hey, [this is] something important and something to learn from.'"
Firstenberg has blank white flags at her Bethesda art studio, where people can go to fill them out and honor loved ones who died of COVID-19. She says any new flags will be archived and saved into the database they're building.
A team of faculty and researchers across the country, including faculty at the University of Wisconsin, joined forces on a study aiming to uncover critical considerations for families of children with developmental disabilities during public health emergencies.
In a study published last month titled Economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on families of children with autism researchers analyzed how families of children with developmental disabilities, including autism, faced significant economic disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic, using data from the Study to Explore Early Development, a case control study designed for young children with developmental disorders.
Lead author of the study and UW doctoral candidate Olivia Pokoski said after enrolling a group of eligible participants in SEED, the researchers catalyzed their research using the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The researchers hypothesized families of children with autism and other developmental disorders would face increased disparities in parental employment, child care and household income, resulting in economic impacts, Pokoski said.
Researchers also hypothesized minorities and families of low socioeconomic status would face more economic impacts. After processing and analyzing the data, both hypotheses were proven true, Pokoski said.
Recent UW study finds air sampling as emerging technology for tracking viral illnessesThe University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health recently expanded its Oregon Child Absenteeism Due to Respiratory Disease Read
Previous research reveals families of children with developmental disabilities are at higher risk for system-wide changes, but this study is one of the earliest to test these risks during the COVID-19 pandemic, pediatrician and UW professor Dr. Walton Schalick said. Above all, it takes a multidisciplinary approach, which effectively and accurately frames the familys circumstances, Schalick said.
People and families with disabilities have disproportionate needs beyond their typical circumstance and that doesnt include socioeconomic status, race, gender, education or anything else, Schalick said. This study begins to tease out all of those factors.
The study investigates the relationship between socioeconomic status and disability as two different analytic principles, while considering the subgroups within those populations, Schalick said.
According to the study, families of children with autism faced many setbacks during COVID-19. Based on their models, parents of children with autism had lower chances of returning to remote work during the pandemic in comparison to families of neurotypical children.
Varying economic disparities experienced by families with lower socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic minority groups were exacerbated during the public health emergency, the study stated.
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There are many different scenarios where a family with developmental disabilities can experience disadvantages that hinder access to necessary care and resources, Schalick said. Factors like lower household incomes, socioeconomic disparities in minority families, work schedule changes and other factors increased adverse effects on families and their children, the study found.
Because families and individuals with disabilities are even more dependent on support from other adults, staffing shortages have a profound domino effect, Schalick said. If its harder for the care worker to get to the house or they themselves get COVID-19 and cant come, the ripple effects are profound.
This nation-wide research reveals unique characteristics of each state, reflecting how some states responded more robustly to the questionnaires than others, according to the study. These are critical considerations because they reveal how to approach disparities across varying regions, Schalick said.
The study was supported by the Waisman Center, the center for UWs research on developmental disabilities and neurodegenerative diseases. In partnership with UW Health, the Waisman Center provides many resources for children with autism or other developmental disabilities and conducts critical research, according to the Waisman Center website.
The Waisman Center here on campus has been working really hard to fight for equitable research, Pokoski said. They do a lot of research for families of children with disabilities.
Further research is needed to help existing and future studies draw a better understanding of how to support families in future public health emergencies, Pokoski said.
This research contributes toward support strategies that can improve the quality of life for both the child and their family members and catalyze change in the future.
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These types of studies are important because they can provide the scientific evidence to policymakers to support stronger policy efforts and potentially get more funding for families with disabilities in the future, especially in public health emergencies, Pokoski said.
Aside from COVID-19, children with autism or other developmental disabilities have differential experiences in public health emergencies. These experiences are underrepresented in most research, Schalick said.
Pokoski and her team reveal an effective approach toward researching and understanding the root of the issue, without placing wrongful blame on family members or situational factors, Schalick said.
So once you begin to think, Heres the state-of-the-art way to treat an issue, then you figure out how to get that idea into practice, Schalick said.
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A study by KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and National University Hospital (NUH) has revealed that COVID-19 transmission from mothers to their newborns is low. The study has been published in Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore.
The study involving 371 women, who had COVID-19 infection during pregnancy, and their newborns found that only four infants or 1.1% of the babies were diagnosed with COVID-19 after birth, of which three (1.1%) were from mothers who were COVID-19 vaccinated and one infant (1.3%) was from a mother who was not vaccinated.
Senior Author of the study, Dr. Yeo Kee Thai, Senior Consultant, Department of Neonatology, KKH said, "Our study assures expectant parents and health care professionals that COVID-19 transmission from mother to baby is extremely low. In comparison to international reports, the incidence of transmission is also at a much lower rate. This is likely attributed to the higher vaccination rate among our pregnant population, which also explains the comparatively lower occurrence of moderate to severe symptoms and a lesser need for interventions in vaccinated pregnant women who were infected with COVID-19.
Vaccinated pregnant women infected with COVID-19 were found to have milder disease effects (1.8% moderate/severe disease vs. 8% moderate/severe disease) and were less likely to require intensive care as compared to unvaccinated pregnant women who were infected (1.4% vs. 8%). Among the group, one of the unvaccinated pregnant patient who was infected with COVID-19 had required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) support.
The study also found that pregnant women infected with the omicron variant had milder symptoms (98.3% vs. 92.3%), and were less likely to require intensive care (1.0% vs. 9.0%), or need mechanical ventilation (0.3% vs. 3.8%) as compared to those infected with non-omicron variants.
Newborns of pregnant women infected with the omicron variant were also less likely to require intensive care (3.8% vs. 14.1%).
This study is part of KKH's ongoing efforts to build evidence-based perspectives for the limited studies on COVID-19 in Singapore and Asia. The study took place from December 2019 to February 2022, covering the period from when the virus was first identified to the emergence of the omicron variant in late 2021. Based on timing of the infections and the reported circulating variants, the identified variants were Wild-type (2.2%), Alpha (0.8%), Delta (18.1%) and omicron (79.9%).
The research participants were categorized into two groupsvaccinated and unvaccinatedas COVID-19 vaccination was made available to pregnant women in June 2021. Among the 353 pregnant women who provided their COVID-19 vaccination status, 278 (78.8%) had received one or more dose before or during their pregnancy and 75 (21.2%) were unvaccinated.
Dr. Yeo added, "As we appreciate these encouraging findings, pregnant women remain a vulnerable group susceptible to severe outcomes from SARS-CoV-2. Hence, it is crucial that our pregnant women keep up to date with their COVID-19 vaccination, to keep their families safe."
While this study was not designed to focus on the effects of maternal COVID-19 vaccination in newborns, other studies including an earlier KKH-led study revealed that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was found to be up to 44.4% effective in protecting infants against SARS-CoV-2 infection up to six months after birth.
More information: Alicia May Lim et al, Perinatal outcomes of pregnancies affected by COVID-19 in Singapore: A cohort study, Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore (2024). DOI: 10.47102/annals-acadmedsg.2023278
The COVID-19 virus can persist in the blood and tissue of patients for more than a year after the acute phase of the illness has ended, according to new research from UC San Francisco that offers potential clues to why some people develop long COVID.
The scientists found pieces of SARS-CoV-2, referred to as COVID antigens, lingering in the blood up to 14 months after infection and for more than two years in tissue samples from people who had COVID.
These two studies provide some of the strongest evidence so far that COVID antigens can persist in some people, even though we think they have normal immune responses, said Michael Peluso, MD, an infectious disease researcher in the UCSF School of Medicine, who led both studies.
The findings were presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), which was held March 3 to 6, 2024, in Denver.
Early in the pandemic, COVID-19 was thought to be a transient illness. But a growing number of patients, even those who had previously been healthy, continued having symptoms, such as, brain fog, digestive problems and vascular issues, for months or even years.
The researchers looked at blood samples from 171 people who had been infected with COVID. Using an ultra-sensitive test for the COVID spike protein, which helps the virus break into human cells, the scientists found the virus was still present up to 14 months later in some people.
Among those who were hospitalized for COVID, the likelihood of detecting the COVID antigens was about twice as high as it was for those who were not. It was also higher for those who reported being sicker but were not hospitalized.
As a clinician, these associations convince me that we are on to something, because it makes sense that someone who had been sicker with COVID would have more antigen that can stick around, Peluso said.
Since the virus is believed to persist in the tissue reservoirs, the scientists turned to UCSFs Long COVID Tissue Bank, which contains samples donated by patients with and without long COVID.
They detected portions of viral RNA for up to two years after infection, although there was no evidence that the person had become reinfected. They found it in the connective tissue where immune cells are located, suggesting that the viral fragments were causing the immune system to attack. In some of the samples, the researchers found that the virus could be active.
Peluso said more research is needed to determine whether the persistence of these fragments drives long COVID and such associated risks as heart attack and stroke.
But, based on these findings, Pelusos team at UCSF is involved in multiple clinical trials that are testing whether monoclonal antibodies or antiviral drugs can remove the virus and improve the health of people with long COVID.
There is a lot more work to be done, but I feel like we are making progress in really understanding the long-term consequences of this infection, Peluso said.
Authors: Additional UCSF co-authors include Sarah Goldberg, MAS, Brian H. LaFranchi, Scott Lu, MD, Thomas Dalhuisen, MS, Badri Viswanathan, Ma Somsouk, MD, MAS, J.D. Kelly, MD, Steven G. Deeks, MD, Zoltan Laszik, MD, PhD, Jeffrey Martin, MD, MPH, and Timothy J. Henrich, MD.
Funding: The studies were supported by funding from the PolyBio Research Foundation to support UCSFs Long-Term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus (LIINC) Clinical Core and a Merck Investigator Studies Program Grant. The National Institute of Healths National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases also provided funding (3R01AI1411003-03S1, R01AI158013 and K23AI134327, K23AI157875 and K24AI145806). Additional support came from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital Department of Medicine and Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine.
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Four years ago today, society began to shut down.
Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid or the coronavirus, then the more popular term to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office address about Covid, Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he had the virus and the N.B.A. announced it had canceled the rest of its season.
It was a Wednesday, and thousands of schools would shut by the end of the week. Workplaces closed, too. People washed their hands frequently and touched elbows instead of shaking hands (although the C.D.C. continued to discourage widespread mask wearing for several more weeks).
The worst pandemic in a century had begun.
Today, on the unofficial fourth anniversary, Ill update you on where things stand.
Covids confirmed death toll more than seven million people worldwide is horrific on its own, and the true toll is much worse. The Economist magazine keeps a running estimate of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths above what was expected from pre-Covid trends. The global total is approaching 30 million.
This number includes both confirmed Covid deaths and undiagnosed ones, which have been common in poorer countries. It includes deaths caused by pandemic disruptions, such as missed doctor appointments that might have prevented other diseases. The isolation of the pandemic also caused a surge of social ills in the U.S., including increases in deaths from alcohol, drugs, vehicle crashes and murders.
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