Category: Covid-19

After 26 months of playing what I came to regard as viral dodgeball, this Sunday I tested positive for Covid-19. That is noteworthy only to my family and employer. But it's part of a larger pattern of the pandemic in America now.

People like me are getting infected even though they are at some level vaccinated and boosted. In my case, I have received two vaccines and two boosters all of them Pfizer. My most recent booster was administered May 9.

I tested positive 13 days later.

My positive test, of course, plunged me into isolation. An entire week of work assignments and there were more than a few disappeared. My podcast, "The Takeout," has not failed to produce an original show each week in its history (dating back to January 2017). We scrubbed the in-person show we had planned and booked Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser.

"You're the personification of this," Dr. Fauci told me Thursday, referring to rising infection rates more than 100,000 cases per week nationally for the first time since February. "This is a highly transmissible virus. And it is very likely that if you were not vaccinated and double-boosted, then you would have had a much more severe outcome than you have right now. And you and I, I think very unlikely, Major, we'd be speaking to each other right now."

Fauci could see me via Zoom. I looked and sounded well enough for an interview. My symptoms were fatigue, headache, low-level fever and night sweats. Fatigue was my first, most noticeable symptom. I felt it Saturday afternoon as I tried to play golf. I was winded in an utterly unfamiliar way. It's a common symptom, Fauci told me.

My symptoms have been manageable. I've had worse. I've had pneumonia and double pneumonia, and both were much worse.

And yet, even with four doses of vaccine in my system, Covid still felt like real sickness. To Fauci's point, I thought about how much worse things might have been had I not been vaxxed and boosted.

Fauci asked me if I had sought any antiviral therapy. My primary-care physician prescribed Paxlovid. I began a five-day regimen Tuesday evening and felt noticeably better Wednesday morning.

That was the right course of action, Fauci told me, and he said that taking Paxlovid as soon as possible after testing positive is also something the government is trying to get the general public to do and physicians treating SARS-Co-V-2 patients to do.

Fauci praised Paxlovid as "an anti-viral drug that has a very good capability to the tune of almost 90% of preventing people from requiring hospitalizations and going on to severe disease."

As it happened, that very day the federal government was ramping up availability of Paxlovid.

"We are doubling the number of sites that have packs of it available from 20,000 to 40,000. Just today we've announced the first of the federally supported test and treat sites are opening up in Rhode Island, soon to be followed by Minnesota, New York and other locations."

Three Paxlovid tablets, twice a day, gave me no side effects, outside of a faint metallic taste.

"It blocks the replication of the virus," Fauci said. "When you block the replication of the virus, you essentially interfere with the kind of effects that you experience the chills, the fatigue, the headache, the feeling that you were very much under the weather."

Most U.S. Covid cases now (at least 58%) are linked to the BA 2.1.2.1 variant of SARS-Co-V-2. This mutation, Fauci said, echoing my own doctor, is more of an upper respiratory virus. The majority of protection afforded by vaccines and boosters is related to lower-respiratory illness.

"The one thing that has held strong is protection against systemic disease, particularly lung disease," Fauci said. "However, the upper airway has become a vulnerable target."

As such, Fauci repeated the current CDC advice on wearing masks in places where "you are having an upsurge of cases," which is to don them indoors while in large groups.

I asked Fauci if the country was experiencing its fifth Covid wave.

"We are certainly having a number of cases that have increased," Fauci said, noting the U.S. is still way down from its harrowing peak of 900,000 cases a day, along with tens of thousands of hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. "The daily average is now over 100,000 a day. Should we be calling that a wave? I'm not so sure. I think it's a bit of semantics. I think we should say we are seeing an increase of infection. That's the sobering news."

But Fauci also pointed to promising signs.

"The somewhat encouraging news is that the parts of the country that had increases earlier are starting to plateau and come down. That's New York City particularly. That's the Chicago area. That's the Washington, D.C., area."

According to available data, an unvaccinated person is 68 times more likely to die from Covid than a vaccinated person.

"If you look at hospitalizations among individuals who are unvaccinated, compared to the hospitalizations and deaths among those who are vaccinated and boosted, the curves are separated by a large amount," Fauci said.

"The likelihood of getting into trouble is multi-fold more if you're unvaccinated compared to vaccinated."

I reminded Fauci I was boosted (my second) on May 9 and still tested positive within two weeks.

"Vaccines are not necessarily geared at...giving you sterilized immunity or preventing even the slightest bit of infection," Fauci said. "That's the point. The main purpose is to prevent you from getting ill. Prevent you from being in the hospital. Preventing you from dying. So I don't want to be making any predictions of what might have happened, but it is entirely conceivable that, given the fact that you had some significant symptoms, even though you were vaccinated, you could have gotten into some serious trouble had you not been vaccinated."

Fauci brought up the rough political climate when I asked him it if was wise, as some have suggested, for insurers to increase premiums for those who chose not to receive Covid vaccinations, much as is already done with premiums for those who smoke.

"I prefer not to," Fauci said, "because through no fault of your own, the people who inappropriately and incorrectly say I'm encroaching upon one's freedom will jump all over that and that will just give them some legs on something that is distracting from what we are really want, which is to get people vaccinated."

In that light, I asked Fauci if he would stay in his White House post if Republicans take control of Congress in the mid-term elections. Several Republicans have suggested they would investigate Fauci's actions during the pandemic.

"I don't know," Fauci said. "I haven't given that a thought. Right now, I'm focusing on getting us through this increase that we're in now. That's what I worry about when I go to be at night. I don't worry about what I'm going to be doing six months from now."

I asked if he feared Republicans' investigations or requests for documents.

"Absolutely not at all," Fauci said. I have nothing to hide. There's nothing to be afraid of. I'm an open book."

Executive producer: Arden Farhi

Producers: Jamie Benson, Jacob Rosen, Sara Cook and Eleanor Watson

CBSN Production: Eric SoussaninShow email:TakeoutPodcast@cbsnews.comTwitter:@TakeoutPodcastInstagram:@TakeoutPodcastFacebook:Facebook.com/TakeoutPodcast

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For the first time during the pandemic, I tested positive for COVID-19. So, Dr. Fauci and I had a chat - CBS News

Steroids, or corticosteroids, are a group of medications that resemble a hormone in your body called cortisol. They reduce inflammation and are used to treat a wide range of conditions, including:

Regularly taking steroids can weaken your immune system and increase your risk of developing COVID-19 or more severe illness.

Corticosteroids are different than anabolic steroids, which are drugs that replicate the hormone testosterone. Although anabolic steroids do have legitimate medical uses, people often use them recreationally to build muscle and improve sports performance.

The use of anabolic steroids has also been linked to poorer COVID-19 outcomes.

Keep reading to learn how steroids work and how they affect your immune system.

Corticosteroids are human-made drugs that replicate the hormone cortisol. Your adrenal glands, located at the top of your kidneys, produce cortisol.

Corticosteroids are among the most widely prescribed drugs worldwide. Nearly 1 percent of the global population uses long-term corticosteroid therapy as treatment.

Among the conditions they treat include:

Corticosteroids reduce inflammation in your body by binding to receptors that suppress your immune systems activity.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long-term steroid use can compromise your immune system and make you more likely to get sick from COVID-19 or other respiratory diseases.

Long-term (or chronic) corticosteroid use is associated with:

In a previous study from 2020, researchers found that taking over 10 milligrams of the steroid prednisone per day was associated with a 2.05 times higher chance of hospitalization in people with rheumatoid arthritis.

Some steroids can potentially cause the antiviral drug remdesivir to be removed from the body more quickly. This makes the drug less effective at treating COVID-19.

Athletes and bodybuilders widely abuse anabolic steroids to improve appearance or performance. The use of anabolic steroids can alter the immune system and increase the risk of infection.

A 2022 study found that current anabolic steroid use is a risk factor for COVID-19 severity.

In the study, current steroid use was associated with five times a greater chance of contracting COVID-19. Current anabolic steroid use was also associated with a higher chance of developing moderate to severe COVID-19.

If you have a medical condition that increases your chances of getting very sick with COVID-19, the CDC recommends talking to a healthcare professional about how to best protect yourself.

Doctors decide whether to continue corticosteroid treatment on a case-by-case basis. Your doctor can give you the best idea about whether you should stop taking steroids or lower your dosage. Up to 90 percent of people who take steroids longer than 60 days develop side effects.

You can also protect yourself by making sure your COVID-19 vaccines are up to date. You may be eligible for additional boosters if youre considered immunosuppressed.

Other ways you can protect yourself include:

Here are some of the frequently asked questions people have about steroids and COVID-19.

Oral or injected steroids are more likely to cause side effects such as immunosuppression than inhaled steroids or topical steroids. Side effects tend to increase with the dose and the longer you take them.

Inhaled steroids generally cause fewer and milder side effects than oral corticosteroids.

According to a 2022 study, theres ongoing discussion on whether steroids decrease vaccine efficiency despite no direct evidence that they do.

In a 2021 review of studies, five out of six studies found evidence of successful vaccination in people taking steroids.

They concluded that based on the current evidence, its reasonable to delay steroid injections for chronic pain for 1 to 2 weeks after vaccination, and to delay vaccination for 2 weeks after procedures involving steroids.

According to the National Institutes of Healths COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines, multiple high-quality studies suggest that corticosteroid therapy improves outcomes in people with COVID-19 who require oxygen therapy. This may be because they reduce the inflammatory reaction that leads to lung injury and dysfunction.

The most widely studied corticosteroid for treating COVID-19 is dexamethasone. Researchers have also studied other steroids like hydrocortisone and methylprednisolone, but evidence to back the use of these medications isnt as strong.

A 2022 study linked steroids to better outcomes in younger people but not older people.

Some studies have found evidence that steroids increase the risk of COVID-19-associated pulmonary aspergilloses (CAPA) in intensive care patients. CAPA is a fungal infection of the lungs that can increase the risk of mortality.

Steroids treat a wide variety of conditions. They work by reducing inflammation and suppressing your immune system. Taking steroids, especially in high doses, may make you more prone to COVID-19 infection.

Your doctor can best advise you on whether you should lower or reduce your dose. You can also reduce your chances of getting COVID-19 by taking preventive measures like washing your hands regularly and staying up to date with your vaccines.

Read more from the original source:

Steroids and COVID-19: Risks, Interactions, Prevention, and More - Healthline

COVID-19 cases back on the rise in US after new subvariants appear

COVID-19 infections have spiked over the past month due to new and more infectious subvariants, waning vaccines, and fewer people wearing masks.

Damien Henderson, USA TODAY

COVID-19 infections rose sharply again last week throughout Tennessee and Davidson County, continuing an upward trend that has been ongoing for the last two months or so, according to state Department of Health data.

Notably, statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations are now starting to quickly rise again after remaining relatively flat for months. As of May 21, there were 270 such hospitalizations a 44% increase from the previous week's 187 cases.

The seven-day average for infections throughout the state was 1,288, up from the prior week's 944 average. About six weeks ago, the average was 192.

In Davidson County, the seven-day average was 206.7 as of Saturday, up from 169.6 the week prior.

Another COVID surge coming?: COVID-19 is waning in Tennessee, but is another surge on the horizon? Public health experts weigh in

Fauci on the pandemic's future: Q&A: Anthony Fauci on mask mandates and whether the pandemic is finally nearing an end

The statewide average test-positivity rate (the rate of people who get tested and are positive for COVID-19) last week also signaled an increased spread of the novel coronavirus.

As of May 21, the rate was 13.52%, up from the prior week's 10.87%. In Davidson County, the rate was 20.1%, up from 17.1% the prior week.

Higher test-positivity rates in a given community suggest that COVID-19 is spreading widely, public health officials say. Generally speaking, the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health considers rates above 5% as "too high."

State public health agencies have counted more than 2.05 million cases of COVID-19 in Tennessee since the start of the pandemic. Of those, 26,372 have died as a result of the novel coronavirus.

About54.7% of Tennesseans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19,according tothe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national average is 66.6%.

Frank Gluck is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at fgluck@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at@FrankGluck.

Want to read more stories like this? A subscription to one of ourTennessee publicationsgets you unlimited access to all the latest political news,plus newsletters, a personalized mobile experience, and the ability to tap into stories, photos and videos from throughout the USA TODAY Network's daily sites.

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Tennessee COVID-19 cases increase, driving higher hospitalizations - Tennessean

By Becky Sullivan, Michaeleen Doucleff

The recent headlines about a sudden emergence of an unusual disease, spreading case by case across countries and continents may, for some, evoke memories of early 2020.

But monkeypox is no COVID-19 in a good way.

Health officials worldwide have turned their attention toa new outbreak of monkeypox, a virus normally found in central and west Africa that has appeared across Europe and the U.S. in recent weeks even in people who have not traveled to Africa at all.

But experts say that, while it's important for public health officials to be on the lookout for monkeypox, the virus is extremely unlikely to spin out into an uncontrolled worldwide pandemic in the same way that COVID-19 did.

"Let's just say right off the top that monkeypox and COVID are not the same disease," said Dr. Rosamund Lewis, head of Smallpox Secretariat at the World Health Organization, at a public Q&A session on Monday.

For starters, monkeypox spreads much less easily than COVID-19. Scientists have been studying monkeypox since it was first discovered in humans more than 50 years ago. And its similarities to smallpox mean it can be combated in many of the same ways.

As a result, scientists are already familiar with how monkeypox spreads, how it presents, and how to treat and contain it giving health authorities a much bigger head start on containing it.

Here are some of the other ways the public health approach to monkeypox is different from COVID-19:

Monkeypox typically requires very close contact to spread most often skin-to-skin contact, or prolonged physical contact with clothes or bedding that was used by an infected person.

By contrast, COVID-19 spreads quickly and easily. Coronavirus can spread simply by talking with another person, or sharing a room, or in rare cases, being inside a room that an infected person had previously been in.

"Transmission is really happening from close physical contact, skin-to-skin contact. It's quite different from COVID in that sense," said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the WHO.

The classic symptom of monkeypox is a rash that often begins on the face, then spreads to a person's limbs or other parts of the body.

"The incubation from time of exposure to appearance of lesions is anywhere between five days to about 21 days, so can be quite long," said Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious disease physician and virologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

The current outbreak has seen some different patterns, experts say particularly, that the rash begins in the genital area first, and may not spread across the body.

Either way, experts say, it is typically through physical contact of that rash that the virus spreads.

"It's not a situation where if you're passing someone in the grocery store, they're going to be at risk for monkeypox," said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,in a briefing Monday.

The people most likely to be at risk are close personal contacts of an infected person, such as household members or health care workers who may have treated them, she said.

"We've seen over the years that often the best way to deal with cases is to keep those who are sick isolated so that they can't spread the virus to close family members and loved ones, and to follow up proactively with those that a patient has contact with so they can watch for symptoms," McQuiston said.

With this version of virus, people generally recover in two to four weeks, scientists find, and the death rate is less than 1%.

One factor that helped COVID-19 spread rapidly across the globe was the fact that it is very contagious.That's even more true of the variants that have emerged in the past year.

Epidemiologists point to a disease's R0 value the average number of people you'd expect an infected person to pass the disease along to.

For a disease outbreak to grow, the R0 must be higher than 1. For the original version of COVID-19,the number was somewhere between 2 and 3. For the omicron variant, that number is about 8,a recent study found.

Although the recent spread of monkeypox cases is alarming, the virus is far less contagious than COVID-19, according to Jo Walker, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health.

"Most estimates from earlier outbreaks have had an R0 of less than one. With that, you can have clusters of cases, even outbreaks, but they will eventually die out on their own," they said. "It could spread between humans, but not very efficiently in a way that could sustain itself onward without constantly being reintroduced from animal populations."

That's a big reason that public health authorities, including the WHO, are expressing confidence that cases of monkeypox will not suddenly skyrocket. "This is a containable situation," Van Kerkhove said Monday at the public session.

Monkeypox and smallpox are both members of the Orthopox family of viruses.Smallpox, which once killed millions of people every year, was eradicated in 1980 by a successful worldwide campaign of vaccines.

The smallpox vaccine is about 85% effective against monkeypox, the WHO says,although that effectiveness wanes over time.

"These viruses are closely related to each other, and now we have the benefit of all those years of research and diagnostics and treatments and in vaccines that will be brought to bear upon the situation now," said Lewis of the WHO.

Some countries, including the U.S., have held smallpox vaccines in strategic reserve in case the virus ever reemerged. Now, those can be used to contain a monkeypox outbreak.

The FDA has two vaccines already approved for use against smallpox.

One,a two-dose vaccine called Jynneos, is also approved for use against monkeypox. About a thousand doses are available in theStrategic National Stockpile, the CDC says, and the company will provide more in the coming months.

"We have already worked to secure sufficient supply of effective treatments and vaccines to prevent those exposed from contracting monkeypox and treating people who've been affected," said Dr. Raj Panjabi of the White House pandemic office,in an interview with NPR.

Continued here:

Monkeypox isn't like COVID-19 and that's a good thing - Capital Public Radio News

The Department of Health reports more than 29,000 new cases last week and 249 deaths related to the coronavirus over the last seven days.

Get COVID-19 information from the U.S. Governmentat covid.gov

View the CDC COVID data trackerhere.

Watch more stories about the coronavirus pandemic on WNEP's YouTube page.

Excerpt from:

Here is the weekly state update on COVID-19 numbers for Wednesday, May 25 - WNEP Scranton/Wilkes-Barre

On March11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19a pandemic. Underlining the seriousness of the situation, most countries shut their schools for months to minimize the spread of the coronavirus and to prevent hospital overcrowding. Two years later, students and teachers are returning to in-person education with some trepidation about the spread of coronavirus variants.

Educators, policymakers, parents, and students have worried about the impact of school closures on learning and socialization. World Bank Group President David Malpass said that the pandemic has brought about the largest loss of human capital in living memory and the worst education crisis in a century. Unfortunately, this large human capital loss could translate into large labor market impacts in the future.

In many ways, the labor market impacts will be unseen. None of the currently affected students will look at their paystubs in the future and see a pandemic tax reduction. No national income account will reflect the size of the loss, even while it quietly accumulates over time. Yet the loss will be no less real for being unseen. French economist, politician, and journalist Frdric Bastiat believed that it was ones social responsibility to point out the unseen losses in public policy debates.

Fulfilling our social responsibility by measuring the future unseen impact of the pandemic-related school closures is not easy. Some of the main measurement difficulties come from the time lags between education shocks and their consequencesan issue identified by Alfred Marshall as long ago as 1890. The results of the education decisions today, whether made by policymakers or families, are by their nature properly measurable only after a long time, at which point often very little can be done to correct past mistakes. In other words, one needs to either be very patient or have an ingenious research design to measure the impacts.

Researchers often use models with a small number of variables to quantify the likely impact of COVID-19-related school closures on peoples future incomes. This top-down approach usually builds on informed assumptions about average lost years of schooling due to the pandemic, estimated returns to schooling, and other parameters, such as the mitigation effects of remote schooling. The approach reduces a complex world to rather simple aggregate models. But the complex features are often unknowable, making the top-down approach the best possible option for simulating future impacts of a shock (two examples of studies using this approach: one; two).

The key problem with the top-down approach is that it ignores bottom-up feedback effects: the mitigation factors that parents and students adopt when schools close. Even under normal conditions, families play a big role in educating children. But under extraordinary conditions like those of the pandemic, family arrangements tend to increase in importance. For example, mentoring by family members, private tutoring arrangements, and extracurricular online courses likely played an important, even though unknown, mitigating role during the pandemic.

A new World Bank paper uses a past episode of school closurein Kuwait during the Gulf War (when Iraq invaded Kuwait)to estimate the long-term impact of the current pandemic shock on affected students who will end up working in Kuwaits civil service, the main employment choice for Kuwaiti nationals. The school closure due to the Gulf War is analytically useful because it happened almost30years ago, so all the bottom-up feedback effects on labor market outcomes have already been exhausted. This past closure also bears many similarities with the current pandemic-related school disruption, allowing us to estimate the lost salaries resulting from the pandemic-related education shock.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait and started the Gulf War, schools closed for the1990/91school year. As a result, many students in Kuwait lost access to formal schooling and only some students who emigrated could continue their education abroad. The following school year, when schools opened, was used to restore damaged school infrastructure and accelerate schooling to allow students to catch up. Nevertheless, the disruption led to lower attainment in terms of average years of schooling. The reduced attainment translated into long-run wage losses for affected Kuwaiti students.

The paper estimates that boys in elementary school during the pandemic-related school closures could face a salary loss of more than $2,600 per year, and girls could lose more than $1,500 per year (Figure 1). Over their working lives, the average present value of lifetime income reduction could be more than $40,000 for the boys and almost $21,000 for the girls. These are large losses. For context, civil service monthly salaries in 2019 imply average annual salaries of $62,000 for Kuwaiti men and $47,000 for Kuwaiti women.

Unfortunately, the findings are both reassuring and disturbing. They are reassuring because the order of magnitude of the estimated income losses is in line with the top-down studies. Disturbingly, however, the predicted losses are likely to be large and long-lasting, which places tremendous pressure on policymakers who struggle to contain the virus and grow their economies.

Continue reading here:

Seen and unseen effects of COVID-19 school disruptions - Brookings Institution

The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019. It has now been over two years since the beginning of the outbreak connected to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.

Since then, many COVID-19 survivors have reported lingering health issues or symptoms that suddenly appear months and even a year after the initial infection. It is important to note that these patients experienced COVID-19 before vaccines were developed against SARS-CoV-2.

A recent study looked into the current conditions of COVID-19 patients from Wuhan two years later.

Of the people researchers assessed for the study, half reported having at least one long COVID symptom two years after acute infection.

The study was published in THE LANCET Respiratory Medicine.

Dr. David F. Putrino, associate professor of rehabilitation and human performance at Mount Sinai, New York, who was not involved in the study, told Medical News Today:

We are incredibly concerned by this. Although new variants and vaccination appear to have reduced the risk of long COVID overall, there is still a relatively large proportion of individuals experiencing long COVID symptoms after an acute infection, and we are incredibly concerned this will culminate in a mass-disabling event.

[I]f we allow COVID-19 to spread at its current rate, it is becoming increasingly likely that we are going to have a severe, mass-disabling event on our hands. Dr. David F. Putrino

The new study, led by Professor Bin Cao of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing, China, is the first to report on the health of people who had acute SARS-CoV-2 infection two years ago before vaccines were developed.

The 2,469 participants in the study had all been discharged from Jin Yin-tan Hospital between January 7 and May 29, 2020. 1,119 of them chose to continue undergoing hospital evaluations and interviews two years after infection.

This is surprising, and there arent other studies out there yet that can look two years out from acute illness, Dr. James R. Heath, president and professor at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, WA, who was also not involved in the study, told MNT.

There have been reports going out to perhaps six months or even a year, I think, but largely on mild infections, he said.

At six months after acute infection, 68% of participants reported symptoms of long COVID, and by two years, that number had dropped to 55%.

However, the studys authors write that long COVID symptoms at two years were related to decreased quality of life, lower exercise capacity, abnormal mental health, and increased use of healthcare after discharge.

The most common long COVID symptoms after two years were muscle weakness or fatigue, and sleep difficulties, both reported by 31% of participants.

We already know that long COVID, in its various manifestations, is a major issue, said Dr. Heath, especially in patients who experienced severe illness, but also in patients that experienced only mild infections For those patients, the chronic symptoms appear to dissipate more quickly.

This is incredibly troubling when we consider that long COVID affects not only hospitalized patients, but also non-hospitalized patients (who were not studied here). This study [s]hould serve as a reminder that death is not the only serious consequence of an acute COVID-19 infection. Dr. David F. Putrino

After two years, 89% of participants had returned to their original work.

Dr. Angela Cheung, a professor at the University of Toronto, who was also not involved in the study, addressed what the future may hold for people who experienced COVID-19.

Long-term sequelae of COVID-19 (long COVID) may be dependent on a number of factors: treatments that patients got when they were acutely ill, number and type of vaccinations they received prior to contracting COVID-19, dose of the virus, host response, as well as the variant (e.g., Omicron vs. Delta), she said.

Thus, said Dr. Cheung, it is difficult to predict the medical future of COVID-19 survivors. The current numbers are huge, but I am hoping that with time and treatment, they will fall.

Dr. Heath said that as scientists understanding of long COVID rapidly expands, such findings will almost certainly lead to treatments.

However, it is going to take a few years to test those treatments in appropriate double-blind placebo-controlled trials, and there are likely multiple disease etiologies, implying multiple treatments will be needed, he added.

See the article here:

COVID-19: 55% of early pandemic survivors still symptomatic 2 years on - Medical News Today

Stay up to date on vaccinations and wear a mask. Those are the key messages from local and state health officials ahead of Memorial Day weekend.

COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise in Washington, and Yakima County has recently started to see an uptick. That rise is concerning with mask requirements reduced and large gatherings on the horizon, said health officer Dr. Neil Barg with the Yakima Health District.

As people gear up for parties and barbecues indoors or outdoors, they should take extra care to keep themselves and others safe, Barg said.

People will be gathering in large groups, so I expect things will go up in June, Barg said. This has happened every time theres been a big holiday.

State Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah said spread across the state will happen, but the severity of the increase depends on peoples behaviors.

We really have an opportunity to get ahead of this and prevent it, Shah said.

Preventive measures include staying up to date with vaccines and getting a booster dose, wearing masks while indoors or in close quarters, getting tested, and staying home if symptoms develop or if test results are positive.

COVID-19 levels remain low in Yakima County, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention measurement that comes from case counts and hospital data, but cases and hospitalizations are on the rise.

The health district reported 220 new cases for the week of May 13-20, up from 139 the previous week. In early April, total weekly case counts dipped below 50.

The health district is releasing weekly data each Friday.

Barg said the strain going around is omicron BA.2, or stealth omicron. It is more contagious than the original omicron but comes with less severe illness, he said.

It does appear initially, like omicron, that its less serious, Barg said. But if it develops into many, many, many people becoming infected, like with the first strain of omicron, we still could have a strain on the hospital system and health care workers.

Health district data showed six people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Yakima County as of Friday. Barg said that number had increased to 10 people hospitalized as of Tuesday, but none of the individuals were in the ICU or on a ventilator.

So far, the number of people seriously ill has not increased, he said.

No COVID-19 deaths have been reported so far this month. Barg said that its still early, but that piece of information may point to the BA.2 variant being less severe.

Well probably see deaths at some point, but the slower they come on the less severe the entire outbreak will be, he said.

Kristin Travis, a community outreach doula, holds a home COVID-19 test kit Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022, while picking up supplies at Open Arms Perinatal Services before going out to visit some of her clients in Seattle.

Barg said Yakima County is lagging behind other communities in the state when it comes to cases.

Were a little bit behind Seattle all the time, but Seattles not seeing an explosion of cases, Barg said. Theyre just higher than we are now.

The 7-day case rate in Washington was 245 cases per 100,000 for the week beginning May 7, according to the state dashboard. Thats compared to a 7-day case rate of 58 cases per 100,000 in Yakima County during the same week, the state dashboard said.

Health secretary Shah said increases are happening particularly in western Washington, but its just a matter of time until those increases reach other communities.

Really, its a matter of spread happening, and it is hard to predict in which direction it will go, Shah said. I will tell you that youll start to see increases in communities throughout Washington.

State board of health member Dr. Bob Lutz said trends in the western part of the state often predate trends in the eastern side, but not always.

I think we just have to be sensitive to the fact that, yes, cases are rising on the west side (and) were seeing the rise on the east side, not to the same degree, Lutz said, but it really does come down to how much risk and the environments in which people find themselves.

Masks are strongly recommended for people in riskier environments, he said, and people should also make sure they are up to date on vaccines.

Though cases are increasing, Barg said it is hard to predict what the next several weeks will look like in Yakima County. The first omicron variant increased slowly in the beginning, too, he said, and then it bumped up quickly.

We dont know whats going to happen in the next four to six weeks, so we hope its just a slow rise and then it goes down again. But its too early to predict that, he said.

Vaccines prevent serious illness, Barg said. He also recommended people stay up to date on their vaccine series.

In Yakima County, 59% of the total population has completed a primary vaccine series, and for the population 5 and older, about 64% have completed the primary series. About 45% of the eligible population has received a booster dose, according to the state dashboard.

At the state level, 68% of the total population has completed a primary vaccine series and about 58% of those eligible have received a booster.

Barg encouraged people who are eligible to get the second booster shot. That dose is available for people 50 years of age and older, some immunocompromised people age 12 or older, and people age 18 or older who received a primary vaccine and booster dose of the J&J vaccine.

It seems to protect people better than just the one booster, Barg said.

He also said people who have already had omicron are well protected against the BA2 variant. People are even better protected if they have had omicron and are up to date on vaccinations, he said.

A list of upcoming community vaccine clinics is available at YakimaVaccines.org.

Yakima County residents can still order free, rapid home tests to be delivered to their door from either the federal government at COVIDtests.gov or the state DOH at sayyeshometest.org. For the federal program, people can also call 1-800-232-0233 for help placing an order.

Additional information on at-home testing is available on the health district website.

I think thats working really well for a lot of folks because its really not an uncomfortable test and it takes 15 minutes to get the answer, Barg said about at-home testing.

Free COVID-19 testing is also available at the Yakima Valley College community testing site at 810 S. 14th Ave in Yakima, or at various clinics and pharmacies throughout the county. The community site is open 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

People in high risk groups who test positive for COVID should talk to their doctors about getting a prescription for Paxlovid, Barg said.

He said the antiviral drug is available in Yakima County for people who qualify. It must be taken within five days after a positive test.

It really reduces the risk of hospitalization and severe illness in people that fall into the (high) risk group, Barg said. If you do get treated, you should not think that youre not contagious right away.

People should continue to follow the CDC isolation and mask guidelines after testing positive and taking Paxlovid, he said.

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COVID-19 cases on the uptick in Yakima County - Yakima Herald-Republic

While a cough, fever and fatigue are often signs of COVID-19,Arizonans experiencing those symptomsright now mayactually havethe flu.

Arizona is in the midst of an unusually late spike in flu cases, and it's not too late to get a flu vaccine,Carla Berg, Deputy Director for Public Health Services at the Arizona Department of Health Services, said in a May 19blog post.

The increase in flu cases comes at a time when COVID-19 cases have also been risingin Arizona.

Dr. Robert Porter, an emergency medicine physician at Banner Ironwood Medical Center, told The Arizona Republic that Banner Health isseeing an increase in patients with the flu, many of whom believe they have COVID-19.

If you have flu-like symptoms and are worried it could be COVID-19, Porter suggeststaking an at-home COVID-19 test, as the symptoms are quite similar and there isn't a reliable way to distinguish between them based on symptoms alone. However, he said the home care for both illnesses is largely the same.

Unless you get extremely sick and have difficulty breathing and are not able to keep fluids down, then most of the stuff is symptom relief at home, Porter said.

If you feel dehydrated or are getting more sick and not able to drink and eat, then those are reasons to come in and get evaluated or go see your primary care physician. Depending on how sick you are, you can go to your primary doctor, urgent care or an emergency room.

Anyone who has not had the vaccine needs to hurry up because supplies are expiring, Chandler family physician Dr. Andrew Carroll told The Republic.

Many doctors offices may no longer have the flu vaccine this late in the season, he said.

State health department spokesperson Steve Elliott told The Republic in an email that the vaccine will expire at the end of June, which means there is still time for people to benefit from it. People should check pharmacies or other providers if their doctor doesnt have it, he said. However, it is better for people to get the flu vaccine at the start of each flu season, Elliott wrote.

For anyone who can't find a flu vaccine, Carroll advisestaking other precautions like wearing an N95 or KN95 mask indoors to avoid both the flu and COVID-19, rates of which have been increasing in recent weeks.

"If you wash your hands, hand sanitize and you mask, you're providing a decent layer of protection, and that's the best thing to do at this time," he said. "If you are going to the grocery store or a sports event or an airplane, you really should be wearing a mask."

Flu cases usually spike around December and January, but Arizona isexperiencing an unusualsecond spike, ADHS data shows, though overall flu cases have been lower than usual this season. A similar trend is happening in other states, Bergs post says.

A reduction in COVID-19 mitigation measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing may be one reason for the recent uptick in flu cases, Berg wrote.

COVID-19 and influenza share many of the same signs and symptoms, Berg wrote.Both can result in severe illness and complications, especially for older adults, people with certain underlying medical conditions, and pregnant women.

Getting vaccinated is the best way to protect against the flu, Berg wrote. In addition, she wrote, she advises other ways to protect oneself:

Republic reporter Stephanie Innescontributed to this article.

Christina van Waasbergen is a journalism student at Northwestern University and an intern covering health care at The Arizona Republic. Reach her at cvanwaasbergen@arizonarepublic.com.

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Arizonans with COVID-19 symptoms may actually have the flu - The Arizona Republic

WEDNESDAY 5/25/2022 1:52 p.m.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services has reported 1,463,401 total positive coronavirus test results in the state and 12,986 total COVID-19 deaths.

The number of known cases per variant is no longer tracked as The Wisconsin Department of Health Services has updated its website, deleting that section.

Unable to view the tables below?Click here.

The DHS announced an attempt to verify and ensure statistics are accurate, some numbers may be subject to change. The DHS is combing through current and past data to ensure accuracy.

Wisconsins hospitals are reporting, that the 7-day moving average of COVID-19 patients hospitalized was 319 patients. Of those,39 are in an ICU. ICU patients made up 11.3%of hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reports that 9,515,134 vaccine doses and 2,033,629 booster doses have been administered in Wisconsin as of May 25.

Unable to view the tables below?Click here.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is using a new module to measure COVID-19 activity levels. They are now using the Center for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) COVID-19 Community Levels. The map is measured by the impact of COVID-19 illness on health and health care systems in the communities.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 18 counties in Wisconsin are experiencing high COVID-19 community levels. Marinette County is the only one in northeast Wisconsin.

34 counties in Wisconsin are experiencing medium COVID-19 community levels, including Brown, Door, Fond du Lac, Green Lake, Shawano, Sheboygan, Waushara, and Winnebago County in northeast Wisconsin.

Every other county in Wisconsin is experiencing low COVID-19 community levels.

For more information on how the data is collected, visit the CDCs COVID-19 Community Levels data page.

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Wisconsin adds over 1,750 new cases of COVID-19, totaling up to over 1.46M - WeAreGreenBay.com