Month: July 2021

Dozens of coronavirus cases have been linked to a Texas church summer camp, including six considered breakthrough cases and three samples that came back positive for the Delta variant. Clear Creek Community Church said the outbreak has infected over 125 campers and adults, with the first positive test reported on June 27.  The Galveston County Health District, which said 57 cases are linked to camp and over 90 others, including some involving non-Galveston County residents, have been self-reported, added that at least 10 involve youth younger than 12 years old.  "The Delta variant is highly contagious, more so than other strains," Dr. Philip Keiser, Galveston County local health authority, said in a news release posted Tuesday. "I cannot stress enough – there is no reason to not get v...

Moderna gave its mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine to the first set of volunteers in a clinical trial, the pharmaceutical company announced today. The start of the trial marks the next stage of the company’s work on this type of vaccine technology after the overwhelming success of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was built using the same strategy. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines were still largely experimental, even as they were heralded as the future of vaccine development. People who get an mRNA vaccine are injected with tiny snippets of genetic material from the target virus. Their cells use that genetic information to build bits of the virus, which the body’s immune system learns to fight against. The high efficacy of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfize...

As the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus spreads around the world and within the United States, some in the U.S. are pushing to bring back health measures from the peak of the pandemic, like mask-wearing, even for vaccinated people.  No jurisdiction has reinstituted a mask requirement or other similar mandate yet, and officials in some states have said the evidence currently suggests doing so is unnecessary. But other jurisdictions are raising the alarm that the Delta variant, which was first discovered in India, could require a retreat to pandemic health measures. And some individuals are explicitly calling for mask mandates.  "With increase circulation of the highly transmissible Delta variant, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health… strongly recommends everyone, regard...

At Cheyenne Regional Medical Center in Wyoming, health workers didn’t need genomic sequencing to tell them the highly contagious Delta variant had arrived. Younger patients started coming in about two months ago with symptoms of Covid-19. Many progressed from mild illness to respiratory distress more quickly than patients treated earlier in the pandemic, said Sodienye Tetenta, a critical-care physician at the hospital. Nearly all were unvaccinated. “We could see that this was not the Covid of last year,” Dr. Tetenta said. The Delta variant is hardening a divide between people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and those who aren’t, prompting hospitals to brace for new case surges and health authorities to redouble vaccination efforts. N...

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Medics in a pneumonia ward in the Philippines. Ezra Acayan | Getty Images News | Getty Images LONDON — Mass vaccination campaigns are being rolled out across the developed world, but many countries are still contending with surges in coronavirus infections and new strains, such as the highly infectious delta variant. And now health experts are warning the public that there could be a very difficult flu season ahead too. "There is a lot of uncertainty about the 2021-2022 influenza season," epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas Covid-19 Modeling Consortium, told CNBC. "As with Covid, when somebody recovers from a seasonal influenza infection, they retain some level of immunity that protects them against future infection, at ...

The surge of Covid-19 cases is so high in the city of Springfield, Missouri, that the CoxHealth hospital system began transferring patients infected with the virus to other facilities to provide better staffing. At Cox South, a Springfield hospital, 12 Covid-19 patients were transferred to other facilities in the region between Friday and Monday morning. Over the past week, the Missouri Covid-19 caseload came in second highest in the country, with 15.5 new cases per 100,000 people daily, or 108 cases per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data published Sunday. Arkansas claimed the highest rate at 15.7 new cases per 100,000 people each day, the data shows. "We've seen this in Arkansas, Missouri, Wyoming ... those are the places where we're going to see more hospi...