Author:

Amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, county health officers across the San Francisco Bay Area issued a statement Friday, recommending that people take safety precautions including wearing masks in indoor public places, testing and keeping up with vaccinations. Health officers issued the recommendation as opposed to a mandate (as they have done in past surges) because while cases are skyrocketing, hospitalizations remain relatively low. The region is well protected from serious illness and death due to immunity from vaccinations and past infection, more so than it was before the emergence of the omicron variant. “I think we’re recognizing that there’s something in between a mandate and a world where nobody is covering their faces,” Marin County Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis told ...

UPDATE: Some N.J. school districts resume mask requirements as COVID cases rise Masks are now recommended for indoor public places and on public transportation in nine New Jersey counties for the first time since federal COVID-19 risk guidelines were updated in February. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention elevated the nine counties in the state to “high” transmission risk for COVID-19 as cases continue to steadily increase. New Jersey reported 5,309 confirmed positive tests on Friday, the first time more than 5,000 cases have been reported since late January during the winter omicron wave. The counties ranked as “high” risk include Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Gloucester, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean and Sussex, according to the CDC’s metrics. Eleven counties ...

Medical research Two US patients recover from intractable infections, giving hope for treatments beyond antibiotics Two US patients have recovered from intractable infections after being treated with a pioneering therapy involving genetically engineered bacteria-killing viruses.The cases raise hopes that so-called phage therapy could be used more widely to combat the global crisis of drug-resistant infections. One of the patients, Jarrod Johnson, a 26-year-old man with cystic fibrosis, was approaching death after suffering a chronic lung infection that resisted treatment by antibiotics for six years. After being given the phage therapy, his infection cleared allowing him to receive a lung transplant and resume an active life. “I am so grateful for the effort, persistence and creativity o...

More than half of all Michiganians live in counties where they should mask up indoors following a spike in COVID-19 cases, according to recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Across the state, 16 counties — including Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and many others near heavily-populated Metro Detroit — are now in "high" community levels, a CDC classification to show where COVID cases and hospitalizations have risen to the point that people are recommended to wear masks indoors. The city of Detroit is also at a high level, the city health department said. Last week, only one county was considered to be at a high community level: Grand Traverse in the northern lower peninsula. Nearly every county spent most of April in the "low" category. Another 28 counties are conside...

CNN  —  The day they wheeled 2-year-old Baelyn Schwab into surgery to get a new liver, her skin was orange, and she was delirious. “Her eyes didn’t look like they were attached to her head anymore,” her mom, Kelsea Schwab, told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “They were just rolling all over. “She would still ask for bananas and ask for juice and ask for snuggles, kind of like she’s still there, but not really,” she said. Seemingly out of nowhere, Baelyn’s liver had become so damaged that it could no longer clean ammonia out of her blood. She’s part of a nationwide investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...