Viral Health News

3 things to know: Vaccination trend line hits another new high Completed vaccinations set to eclipse total confirmed COVID-19 cases Hospitalizations, new cases and death counts stay modest Gov. Tim Walz is expected to speak at 2 p.m. on the arrival of a supply of Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Updated 1 p.m. Vaccination acceleration may finally be here. The Health Department on Wednesday reported about 32,000 new vaccinations in Minnesota, nearly twice the number from last Wednesday. The seven-day trend is running at nearly 39,000 shots daily now, the highest since vaccinations began in late December. State public health leaders have said for weeks that they’d be ready to ramp up when they got more supply. With the federal government now promising enough vaccine to inoculate every adul...

Over the last year, researchers have continued to study risk factors for COVID-19. One of them? Blood type. According to a number of studies there is one blood type in particular that seems to be more protective when it comes to the virus, and people with it, are less prone to severe infection and even death. Read on to learn about the latest major study linking blood type to COVID risk—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had Coronavirus. ShutterstockA study published in late 2020 in Annals of Internal Medicine, revealed that people with type O or Rh−negative blood may be at slightly lower risk from COVID-19. 225,000 people who were tested for the virus were invol...

In between school and other commitments, cousins Jaqueline Teague, 16, and Amelie Beck, 14, spend their time trying to register seniors in Kentucky for the COVID-19 vaccine. It all started after something of an ordeal trying to sign up their grandparents -- and then their grandparents' friends needed help, too.  So the Louisville, Kentucky, high schoolers set up an email address and phone number, and then a Facebook page, figuring this issue was more widespread. They're calling it VaxConnect Ky. "People are calling us and they only have landlines, and they don't have internet or a computer or an email," Beck says. "That's more common than I realized."  As of this writing, Beck and Teague had gotten about 700 people either scheduled or vaccinated and had another 900 emails and 700 phon...

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By Julie Steenhuysen, Kate Kelland CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chris Murray, a University of Washington disease expert whose projections on COVID-19 infections and deaths are closely followed worldwide, is changing his assumptions about the course of the pandemic. FILE PHOTO: A healthcare worker draws the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine from a vial at Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center in Glendale, California, U.S., December 17, 2020. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File PhotoMurray had until recently been hopeful that the discovery of several effective vaccines could help countries achieve herd immunity, or nearly eliminate transmission through a combination of inoculation and previous infection. But in the last month, data from a vaccine trial in South Africa showed n...

Facebook Share Twitter Share As a 72-year-old Oregon resident, I became eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine on Feb. 22 along with thousands of people in my age group. Since then, I have spent many hours trying to obtain an appointment for the vaccine on the Oregon Health Authority website. The website is broken, as has been confirmed by The Oregonian/OregonLive (“COVID vaccine appointments open to Oregonians 65 and older Monday: Tips and troubleshooting,” Feb. 28) and other news outlets. In spite of this system failure, the governor and other public health leaders announced that Oregonians 45 and older with underlying conditions can get the COVID-19 vaccine on March 29. Is it too much to ask that before the vaccine is opened to additional groups, the system the state uses to m...

Abstract A novel SARS-CoV-2 variant, VOC 202012/01 (lineage B.1.1.7), emerged in southeast England in November 2020 and is rapidly spreading toward fixation. Using a variety of statistical and dynamic modelling approaches, we estimate that this variant has a 43–90% (range of 95% credible intervals 38–130%) higher reproduction number than preexisting variants. A fitted two-strain dynamic transmission model shows that VOC 202012/01 will lead to large resurgences of COVID-19 cases. Without stringent control measures, including limited closure of educational institutions and a greatly accelerated vaccine roll-out, COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths across England in 2021 will exceed those in 2020. Concerningly, VOC 202012/01 has spread globally and exhibits a similar transmission increase ...

Iowa has surpassed 5,500 COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The state lists 4,933 deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause and 568 list it as a contributing factor.The Iowa Department of Public Health reported 703 new positive COVID-19 tests and three additional deaths Wednesday. At 10 a.m., the health department reported 364,893 total positive tests, 317,737 total recoveries and 5,501 total deaths since the pandemic began. Twenty-four hours earlier, the health department reported 364,190 total positive tests and 5,498 total deaths.State data shows 723,262 vaccine doses have been administered in Iowa, with 186,759 individuals receiving both doses. The first doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have arrived in Iowa. Find out how you can get vaccinated in Iowa h...

As vaccines are distributed around the world, an effective end to the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be on the horizon. There’s a new vaccine from Johnson & Johnson now being delivered, with supplies soon to be boosted by a deal with the pharmaceuticals giant Merck. President Biden now says the United States will have enough doses for every American by the end of May. But still, many still want to know why there aren’t more shots to go around right now. Here’s part of the answer: We’re still racing to make a special type of lipid, a relatively unknown but critical component of the vaccines being manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. These vaccines use messenger RNA, the genetic component commonly known as mRNA that instructs ce...

The recent declines in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are showing signs of stalling, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned on Wednesday, adding that the country is at a "critical nexus" in the pandemic. "We knew this would happen as variants emerged and reached more people in more communities, but we can still reduce their impact," Walensky said. The U.S. is currently seeing a seven-day average of 66,010 new coronavirus cases, marking an increase of 3.5% from the week prior, while deaths also increased 2.2% from the previous week’s average. KROGER TO CONTINUE REQUIRING MASKS AT US SUPERMARKETS DESPITE TEXAS, MISSISSIPPI LIFTING MANDATES "Today we are at a critical nexus in the pandemic, so much can turn in the next few weeks," Wal...