Month: April 2021

Refinery29 9 Common Vaccine Myths, Debunked Reading, PA – April 1: A detail photo of glass vials of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. At the Olivet Boys and Girls Club Pendora site in Reading, Pennsylvania where the club was running a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in conjunction with The Forge and pharmacist Eric Esterbrook from the West Reading Drug Store giving doses of the Moderna vaccine Thursday afternoon April 1, 2021. (Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images) If you’ve spent as much time scrolling through the dark, foreboding trenches of social media as I have, you may be aware that (gasp!) not everything you’ll read there is totally accurate. And in the age of COVID-19, many of the false claims being disseminated through social media, in forwarded email chains, and eve...

Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor-based health system, announced Thursday it is postponing some surgical procedures because of the crush of COVID-19 patients filling its emergency rooms and hospital beds.  "Similar to many health systems across the state and metro region, Michigan Medicine has experienced record high emergency room and admission volumes for both COVID and non-COVID care this week resulting in extremely high hospital occupancy," Michigan Medicine spokeswoman Mary Masson told the Free Press in statement Thursday afternoon.  "Due to rising occupancy and forecasts for continued high demand for emergency care and admissions, Michigan Medicine has had to make the difficult decision to reschedule a small number of scheduled surgeries late this week and ne...

But how much exactly should we worry, given that so many in this state have already been vaccinated or are on the cusp of eligibility? The truth is, it’s hard to tell, even for the experts. For now, the best we can do is assess the data we have on the variants. Here’s a quick look at some of what we know. ---- First, let’s look at the number of cases of coronavirus involving the variants in Massachusetts detected so far. The CDC and state say 977 cases of the British variant, 82 cases of the Brazilian variant, and 12 cases of the South African variant have been found. The numbers have been growing since the state’s first case, a British variant, was announced on Jan. 17. The British variant totals are the fourth highest in the United States, while the Brazilian variant totals are the sec...

A massive study conducted during the pandemic estimates 1 in 3 COVID-19 survivors were diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition within six months of infection. The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet Psychiatry, used more than 230,000 electronic health records of COVID-19 patients mostly in the U.S. looking at 14 different brain and mental health disorders. Thirty-four percent of survivors were diagnosed with at least one of these conditions, with 13% of these people being their first recorded neurological or psychiatric diagnosis. Mental health diagnoses were most common among patients, with 17% diagnosed with anxiety and 14% diagnosed with a mood disorder. Although neurological diagnoses were more uncommon, they were more prevalent in patients ...