Month: January 2021

The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 11 new coronavirus-related deaths on Tuesday as the state topped 30,000 total cases of the virus.A total of 449 Mainers with COVID-19 have now died. Cumberland County reported four new deaths. Penobscot County reported three new deaths. Androscoggin, Oxford, Somerset and York counties each reported one new death.The Maine CDC reported 715 new cases, bringing the total since the beginning of the pandemic to 30,326.MAINE CORONAVIRUS DATA: Deaths: 449 Total cases: 30,326 Confirmed cases: 25,163 Probable cases: 5,163 Cumulative positivity rate: 2.78% 14-day positivity rate: 5.9% Currently hospitalized: 203 Patients in intensive care: 68 Patients on ventilators: 27Ge...

News 12 StaffJan 12, 2021, 1:16pm EST Updated on:Jan 12, 2021, 1:16pm EST New York State is gearing up to open a drive-through COVID19 vaccination center at Jones Beach. The center is expected to open on Thursday and will be open every day thereafter. People were allowed to start making appointments for the location on Monday, but because there are now millions more people eligible to get the vaccine it has been difficult to obtain one. The state website crashed, and the state Hotline was overloaded. Donna Schaffer, of Dix Hills, told News 12 on Monday she couldn't get an appointment for her 96-year-old mother. Schaffer says that this morning, after four of them spent 24 hours trying to get an appointment, they were finally able to get her mother an appointment at Jones Beach f...

The Trump administration is releasing second doses of coronavirus vaccines that had been held back for booster shots and is urging states to administer the vaccine to anyone over age 65 and people with pre-existing health conditions, a shift from its earlier guidance to prioritize doses for health-care workers. “First, we have already made available every dose of vaccine. So we had been holding back second doses as a safety stop,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Tuesday. “We now believe that our manufacturing is predictable enough that we can ensure second doses are available to people from ongoing production. So everything is now available to our states and our health-care providers.” Department of Health...

Other experts said this scenario was not just plausible but likely. “The overall intellectual construct of the paper I fully agree with,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego. If the vaccines prevent people from transmitting the virus, “then it becomes a lot more like the measles scenario, where you vaccinate everybody, including kids, and you really don’t see the virus infecting people anymore,” Dr. Crotty said. It is more plausible that the vaccines will prevent illness — but not necessarily infection and transmission, he added. And that means the coronavirus will continue to circulate. “It’s unlikely that the vaccines we have right now are going to provide sterilizing immunity,” the kind needed to prevent infection, said Jennifer Gommer...

The country recorded the highest infection rate in the world last week, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication based at the University of Oxford. In the seven days leading up to January 10, Ireland reported around 1,323 Covid-19 cases per one million people, the statistics showed, more than any other country over the same period. On Friday, it recorded the highest daily increase in infections since the beginning of the pandemic with 8,248 new cases, according to a statement from the Irish health department. "The alarming level of disease is unprecedented in terms of our experience of the levels of Covid-19 in the community," warned Professor Philip Nolan, a member of Ireland's National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET). "We are seeing numbers of cases per day...