Month: August 2020

Vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez on Friday predicted the coronavirus will continue to plague the United States “for years and years, even after vaccines are out and we get people vaccinated.” Hotez, the director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that COVID-19 in the U.S. was “still spiraling out of control,” noting recent forecasts that 300,000 people could die from the disease by December. The virus has now killed more than 160,000 people nationwide. Hotez, who has long rejected and contested the anti-vaccine movement, noted how Russian intelligence officers have reportedly been part of a disinformation campaign to sow doubt about vaccines in development for the virus. Anti-science campaigners were fueling further deaths...

Just how contagious is someone who has contracted COVID-19 — yet displays no symptoms — and what makes them asymptomatic while other people suffer so terribly with the disease? This study, published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine this week, provides one theory for the first question. It isolated 303 patients with COVID-19 in a treatment center in South Korea. Of those, 110 (36%) were asymptomatic and 21 (19%) developed symptoms during isolation. “The potential for transmission from asymptomatic people has been cited as an important factor in controlling the spread of COVID-19, but there is limited information about the clinical course and viral loads of asymptomatic people with SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the researchers wrote. What they found: “Many individuals with ...

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Russ soon got another call: James, a 65-year-old inmate with diabetes and HIV, had tested positive for the virus himself. Within days, he was rushed to a hospital as his oxygen levels plummeted. A few weeks later, after his condition deteriorated and he was placed on a ventilator, he was dead. Five Seagoville inmates told CNN in phone interviews from behind bars that they feared for their lives as the virus rushed through the Dallas-area prison, and that the crowded conditions made it all but impossible for them to stay socially distanced. "It came through here so fast that it's out of control," said Bobby Williams, an immunocompromised inmate who has about three years left on a more than two-decade drug sentence. He said he came down with severe pneumonia after contracting Covid-19 in J...

As people get used to living with coronavirus, social distancing and mask protocols are also easing. America’s COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. could reach nearly 300,000 by Dec. 1, but consistent mask-wearing beginning today could save approximately 70,000 lives, according to new projections based on current fatality and infection rates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (HME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine. “It appears that people are wearing masks and socially distancing more frequently as infections increase, then after a while as infections drop, people let their guard down and stop taking these measures to protect themselves and others which, of course, leads to more infections,” HME director Christopher Murra...