Month: August 2020

MONTPELIER, Vermont (AP) — Public health officials in Vermont said the state is considering becoming the second state to mandate flu shots as a way to ease the burden of influenza amid the coronavirus pandemic. Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said Friday the rate of flu in the state needs to be as low as possible to avoid a situation he called a “twindemic.” He said last year less than 43% of children age 5 to 12 received the flu vaccine. “Our primary focus will be to increase the rate of vaccination, especially among children and teens,” Levine said. “We can and must do better.” Levine said a decision has not been reached about whether to require universal flu vaccines for all students. Massachusetts authorities recently made a move to require flu shots for school. Officials in ...

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have confirmed the first instance of a patient being reinfected with coronavirus a second time, suggesting that immunity to the virus may be short-lived. The patient, a 33-year-old man, tested positive for the virus in March and then again in August after returning to Hong Kong from a trip to Spain. But it’s not all bad news; this man’s case demonstrates that the immune response, while not able to completely ward off a second infection, may be robust enough to prevent less serious illness the second time around.    Almost since the beginning of the pandemic, stories have been popping up in the United States, China, and South Korea from doctors claiming their patients had again tested positive for the virus after recovering. These accounts were a...

Just as schools are reopening across the country, a new study is detailing how kids who have the coronavirus but don’t show symptoms can still spread the infection for weeks. Two Washington-based scientists made the discovery by analyzing South Korean kids who had been hospitalized because they tested positive for COVID-19 — even though roughly four out of 10 had either no symptoms or only mild ones, German news outlet DW reported. Roberta L. DeBiasi and Meghan Delaney analyzed the cases of 91 kids in 22 hospitals across South Korea because doctors there — unlike in the US — don’t release patients until they are fully recovered. The team found roughly a fifth of the kids never had symptoms; another fifth at first showed no symptoms, then developed mild ones; and three-fifths...

A recent CDC report revealed how four summer camps in Maine were able to operate while successfully limiting COVID-19 transmission.  Jack Hodgson, a former director at a non-profit New Jersey summer camp, now a postgraduate researcher at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, says this is encouraging news — but there are several caveats. Not every camp will have the infrastructure and resources in place to pull off what occurred in Maine. The "culture of compliance" was a major reason for the Maine camps' success — and that will be difficult to achieve on most college campuses, not to mention within the rest of the country. To keep students and faculty safe, colleges must meet high standards of safety; right now, camps are showing ...

The scary thing finally happened: someone caught the coronavirus twice and got sicker the second time around. A 25-year-old man in Nevada got COVID-19 in March, got better in April, and got sick again in May. He had worse symptoms on the second bout, bad enough that he had to be hospitalized. Three other cases of confirmed reinfection were also reported this week: one in Hong Kong (the first documented case) and two in Europe. These don’t necessarily make me any more worried about our vaccine prospects, though, and they don’t mean the pandemic will go on forever. We have four documented cases of reinfection. But that’s out of the 24 million cases of this disease so far, and rare shit happens. Most experts expected that we’d see at least a few. For months, there have been occa...

An indoor wedding and reception in Maine earlier this month has been linked to at least 123 coronavirus cases. The Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC) said the wedding has led to COVID-19 outbreaks at both a jail and a nursing home.  The Maine CDC confirmed to CBS News on Saturday that the number of positive cases associated with the event has again climbed, to 123.  The number of cases at York County Jail in Alfred has risen by 36 since Thursday, for a total of 54 cases — 35 inmates and 19 staff. The number of cases at Maple Crest Rehabilitation Center remains nine.  The wedding has been linked to one death last week from the virus.  Big Moose Inn had its lodging and dining license re-instated on Friday after a temporary suspension earlier this week, the ...