Month: July 2021

CNN —   A Covid-19 outbreak stemming from a Texas church summer camp has grown to about 160 cases, including infections of the highly contagious Delta variant, the Galveston County local health authority said. More than 450 people attended the camp for sixth through 12th graders in late June, hosted by Clear Creek Community Church. The camp took place at Tejas Camp & Retreat in Giddings, Texas. Of the roughly 160 people infected, six (about 3.7%) had been vaccinated, said Dr. Philip Keiser, the Galveston County local health authority. Samples from some of the infections are being tested to see whether they were caused by the Delta strain – which is now the dominant variant in the US, acc...

Here are some significant developments: Sydney’s lockdown has been extended by a week to July 16, New South Wales state officials confirmed. Australia’s largest city is struggling to stamp out a small outbreak of the delta variant, but only about 8 percent of the country has been fully inoculated. Singapore will not include people inoculated with the Sinovac shot in its national vaccine count. The city-state has not approved the Chinese-developed shot for its vaccination program, though some private clinics are allowed to administer Sinovac doses. The United States is dispatching 2 million Moderna vaccine doses to Vietnam, the White House said. The Southeast Asian country had been a coronavirus containment success, but its vaccination rollout has been slow, and a wave of infections start...

The new and highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus may have sparked the recent outbreak of 125-plus cases of COVID-19 linked to a Houston-area youth church camp, and a Texas virologist says the breakout should be a wake-up call for communities. "Clearly, COVID is not over," said Dr. Benjamin Neuman, a virologist and professor at Texas A&M University. "COVID isn't ever gone until it's completely gone," Neuman said. "And I think we've made the mistake of assuming that the virus would go away or assuming that the virus wouldn't affect children ... We keep stumbling into the same mistakes over and over, and that is not a way out of COVID-19." The Galveston County church camp took place in June with more than 450 adults and youth in attendance, according to the Houston Chroni...

Four cases of “Delta Plus” a new and potentially more dangerous variant have been discovered in Israel, The Jerusalem Post confirmed. Delta Plus is a variant of the Delta strain - which is already known to be 50% more infectious than the previous Alpha (British) variant and is responsible for the majority of new cases in the country - with an additional mutation (#417). “If the original strain was contagious after spending 15 minutes near a sick person, now it is theoretically even less,” Prof. Cyrille Cohen, head of the immunology lab at Bar-Ilan University, told the Post.  The Delta Plus could be even more contagious than its Delta predecessor, he said. Though he said that it is still unclear whether the variant causes more serious disease or evades the vaccines mor...