Month: May 2021

That’s the number of lives that Peter Graven, the top data scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, says Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is saving by shutting down indoor dining at restaurants and bars on April 30. More than 700 hospitalizations for COVID-19 will also be prevented, Graven said at a press conference with Brown on Friday. “As your governor, I chose to save lives,” said Brown. That number depends on Oregonians heeding the warning from health experts and a Democratic governor that Oregon is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases and is again in a high-risk scenario. Whether that will happen is uncertain: Hospitality lobbyists and elected officials, many of them Republicans, are coordinating opposition to new restrictions. ...

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that anxiety is to blame for a series of adverse effects from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, rather than the shot itself. From April 7 to 9, the CDC received reports of “clusters of anxiety-related events” after patients received the J&J vaccine, including hyperventilation, low blood pressure, headaches, difficulty breathing, lightheadedness, nausea, and fainting, among others, at five mass vaccination sites. At four of those sites, administrators temporarily suspended offering coronavirus vaccines due to the high relative frequency of patients fainting — 8.2 people per 100,000, according to the CDC. For comparison, 0.05 people per 100,000 faint after receiving an influenza vaccine. After conducti...

Researchers from the Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created a new gene-editing tool that can enable scientists to perform millions of genetic experiments simultaneously. They're calling it the Retron Library Recombineering (RLR) technique, and it uses segments of bacterial DNA called retrons that can produce fragments of single-stranded DNA.  When it comes to gene editing, CRISPR-Cas9 is probably the most well-known technique these days. It's been making waves in the science world in the past few years, giving researchers the tool they need to be able to easily alter DNA sequences. It's more accurate than previously used techniques, and it has a wide variety of potential applications, including life-saving treatments for various illnesses.  However...

Now, over a year since the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are starting to look forward to a reduced spread of the virus. With the rollout of several effective vaccines and the enforcement of safety measures such as travel bans and quarantine, coronavirus cases are reducing in some parts of the world.   Will it be possible to eliminate COVID-19 at some point in the future, or will it always remain endemic in some regions? We asked eight experts in epidemiology whether COVID-19 will become endemic – 75 percent said 'yes'. What does endemic mean? Endemic "means that there are always people who are infected, who pass infection to somebody else and then recover. Over a long time, each person infects on average one other person, so that...

“We’re definitely seeing a decline in the past week or so,” said Dr. Alastair Bell, chief medical officer at Boston Medical Center, where the number of first doses dipped to about 800 a day last week from about 1,500 the previous week at its South End hospital and five satellite sites in Boston neighborhoods. Some vaccination sites in Central and Western Massachusetts have seen demand decline just as dramatically. “It’s fallen off a cliff,” said Aaron Michelucci, senior director of pharmacy services at Baystate Health in Springfield, who oversees Holyoke and Greenfield sites where the number of shots totaled 600 on Wednesday, down from 1,096 a week earlier. “Appointments had been filling within minutes, but we just opened up a week’s worth and they’re not going fast.” The new landscape i...

Oregon officials announced another 794 confirmed and presumed cases of the coronavirus in Oregon on Saturday, as well as three new deaths. The latest numbers come after Gov. Kate Brown on Friday defended her decision to enact “extreme risk” COVID-19 restrictions across 15 counties -- encompassing nearly 70% of Oregon’s population -- saying acting now will end up preventing more misery as a fourth surge batters the state. “I was presented with data showing two paths that Oregon could take: One in which we took no additional action and stood by while more people die from this disease,” Brown said during a live-streamed news conference Friday. “Or another that required a temporary tightening of restrictions for certain counties but could save hundreds of lives and prevent as many as 450 h...