Month: June 2021

The report “drives home the point that long Covid can affect nearly every organ system,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of the research and development service at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, who was not involved in the new study. “Some of these manifestations are chronic conditions that will last a lifetime and will forever scar some individuals and families,” added Dr. Al-Aly, who was an author of a large study published in April of lingering symptoms in Covid patients in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system. In the new study, the most common issue for which patients sought medical care was pain — including nerve inflammation and aches and pains associated with nerves and muscles — which was reported by more than 5 percent of patients or nearly 100,000 people, more tha...

Vermont has the highest percentage of its population fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine distribution and administration data tracker. The CDC's data tracker compiles data from healthcare facilities and public health authorities. It updates daily to report the total number of people in each state who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The numbers reported by the CDC may vary from the numbers published on individual states' public health websites, as there may be reporting lags between the states and the CDC.  As of 6 a.m. EDT June 14, a total of 144,919,339 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 43.7 percent of the country's population, according to the CDC's data. Below are the states and Washington, D.C., ranked by the percentage...

When did the coronavirus arrive in the United States? The first infection was confirmed on Jan. 21, 2020, in a resident of Washington State who had recently returned from Wuhan, China. Soon after, experts concluded that the virus had been in the country for weeks. A study published on Tuesday offers new evidence: Based on an analysis of blood tests, scientists identified seven people in five states who may have been infected well before the first confirmed cases in those states. The results suggest that the virus may have been circulating in Illinois, for example, as early as Dec. 24, 2019, although the first case in that state was confirmed a month later. But the new study is flawed, some experts said: It did not adequately address the possibility that the antibodies were to coronavirus...

The National Institutes of Health said Tuesday morning that testing of samples from an ongoing study of Americans show a very limited number of cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in five U.S. states as early as Jan. 7, 2020. Why it matters: Calling it another "piece of the puzzle" of when and how the coronavirus pandemic began, the NIH researchers say this offers more evidence that the virus was in the U.S. at the end of December. The latest: Researchers for the long-term project All of Us, which was created to reach out to underrepresented communities and build a diverse health database, tested 24,079 blood samples that had been gathered in 50 states before the pandemic shut down face-to-face services on March 18, 2020. They found antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in nine samples, confirmed via two s...

Exposure to the rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the common cold, can protect against infection by the virus which causes COVID-19, Yale researchers have found. In a new study, the researchers found that the common respiratory virus jump-starts the activity of interferon-stimulated genes, early-response molecules in the immune system which can halt replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus within airway tissues infected with the cold. Triggering these defenses early in the course of COVID-19 infection holds promise to prevent or treat the infection, said Ellen Foxman, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study. One way to do this is by treating patients with interferons, an immune system protein wh...