Month: August 2021

A female in her 60s from Bernalillo County. The individual was hospitalized and had underlying conditions. A male in his 30s from Eddy County. The individual was hospitalized. A male in his 50s from Eddy County. The individual was hospitalized and had underlying conditions. A female in her 60s from Eddy County. The individual was hospitalized and had underlying conditions. A female in her 80s from Lincoln County. The individual was hospitalized and had underlying conditions. A male in his 60s from San Juan County. The individual was hospitalized and had underlying conditions. A male in his 80s from San Juan County. The individual was hospitalized and had underlying conditions. The number of deaths of New Mexico residen...

Bore yourself to sleep. For some of our readers, the most effective sleep aid at 3 a.m. is a boring book or pleasant sound. Several told us that these distractions stop them from thinking about the state of the world and getting agitated. Karen Sandness in Minneapolis said that anytime she wakes up in the middle of the night she grabs a nonfiction book, “preferably a difficult and detailed one.” With the right book, she said, “there’s none of the ‘I can’t wait to see what happens next’ problem. The book will fall out of my hands and onto my face after a couple of pages.” Don’t always listen to sleep experts. A few of the methods we heard about might raise some eyebrows among sleep experts. Susan L. Paul, a retired nurse in Asheville, N.C., told us that when she finds herself awake in the ...

Health care workers transporting a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck on April 8, 2020, during the initial wave of the pandemic in Brooklyn, New York.Photo: David Dee Delgado (Getty Images) An influential forecast from researchers at the University of Washington predicts that many more Americans will die from covid-19 in the months ahead. They forecast that around 100,000 people in the U.S. will die from the pandemic between now and the start of December 2021. Yet they also argue that widespread mask use could curb those deaths by nearly half. The numbers come from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), one of the longest-running forecasters during the pandemic, as part of their latest briefing released on August 25. In their most likely scenario, they estimate ...

Newly released data confirms that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are both associated with rare heart problems, and that this side effect is most common after the second shot in adolescent boys and young men. Still, the benefits of vaccination continued to outweigh the risks, scientists said. The side effects tend to be mild, temporary, and uncommon. For every million doses of the second shot given to 12- to 39-year-olds, there were 14 to 20 extra cases of the heart problems, according to the new data, which was presented Monday at a meeting of an independent advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The data suggest an association of myocarditis with mRNA vaccination in adolescents and young adults,” Dr. Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford and cha...

Disrupted sleep is common in late life, the study authors wrote, and associated with changes in cognitive function -- the mental capacity for learning, thinking, reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, remembering and paying attention. Age-related changes in sleep have also been linked with early signs of Alzheimer's disease, depression and cardiovascular disease, so the authors investigated possible associations between self-reported sleep duration, demographic and lifestyle factors, subjective and objective cognitive function, and participants' levels of beta amyloid. Those in the study who reported short sleep duration -- defined in the study as six hours or less -- had elevated levels of beta amyloid, which "greatly increases" risk for dementia, said the study's lead aut...