Daily Archives: June 30, 2021

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 181.8 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths stands at more than 3.93 million. More than 3 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.

Officials in Australia have extended COVID-19 restrictions - including lockdowns and social distancing. Four major cities are already under a hard lockdown.

Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine has shown a promising response to the Delta variant in a lab study, with a modest decrease in response compared to the original strain.

Romania has agreed to sell 1.17 million excess doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to Denmark, the Danish health ministry said on Tuesday.

Ireland has lifted restrictions on giving the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to adults aged under 50 and also closed the recommended gap between doses from 8 to 4 weeks.

Greece will allow people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 inside restaurants without masks, the government announced yesterday.

India has reported 45,951 new daily COVID-19 cases, according to health ministry data.

Members of the US military who were vaccinated against COVID-19 showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation - although the condition was still very rare - a study released yesterday showed.

Oxygen prices in Jakarta have more than doubled, with warnings of shortages, as Indonesia's capital fights a surge in COVID-19 cases.

International tourism arrivals are set to stagnate this year, except in some Western markets, a new report from UNCTAD and the UN's World Tourism Organization has said.

The decline, caused by COVID-19, is set to cause between $1.7 and $2.4 trillion in losses this year, with the report also warning that the sector is not expected to rebound fully until 2023.

International arrivals fell more than 70% from pre-pandemic levels last year, causing $2.4 trillion in losses in 2020.

Numbers of international tourists plunged last year.

Image: UNCTAD

"In international tourism we are at levels of 30 years ago, so basically we are in the '80s... Many livelihoods are really at threat," said Zoritsa Urosevic, Geneva representative of the Madrid-based UNWTO.

The Biden Administration has announced plans to donate 2 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to Peru.

"The United States is donating 2 million Pfizer vaccine doses to Peru as a part of our ongoing solidarity with the people of Peru as they recover from this devastating pandemic," State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter said.

The US will also ship 2.5 million doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Pakistan, White House Press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Meanwhile, 2.5 million doses of the Moderna jab will also be shipped to Bangladesh.

As part of work identifying promising technology use cases to combat COVID, The Boston Consulting Group recently used contextual AI to analyze more than 150 million English language media articles from 30 countries published between December 2019 to May 2020.

The result is a compendium of hundreds of technology use cases. It more than triples the number of solutions, providing better visibility into the diverse uses of technology for the COVID-19 response.

To see a full list of 200+ exciting technology use cases during COVID please follow this link.

Written by

Joe Myers, Writer, Formative Content

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Excerpt from:

COVID-19: What you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic on 30 June - World Economic Forum

Christine Lentz, a Morrison & Foerster summer associate in our San Diego office,contributed to the writing of this article.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 spurred rapid medical and technological innovation, leading to new medicines and devices designed in response to the virus. Under the traditional U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process, approval for these products could take months, if not yearstime many Americans did not have. Fortunately, the FDA had a secret weapon in the fight against COVID-19: emergency use authorizations (EUAs). In April 2020, we reported on the FDAs use of EUAs in the early months of the pandemic. Now, over one year later, we revisit the topic of EUAs to highlight the role they have played in pandemic responsiveness and explain what to expect going forward.

Congress first established the FDAs power to issue EUAs through the Project Bioshield Act of 2004. Generally speaking, EUAs enable the FDA to authorize unapproved products (or unapproved uses of approved products) for temporary use as emergency medical countermeasures against threats to public health and safety. From 2004 until recently, the FDA seldom issued EUAs; across the Zika, Ebola, MERS Coronavirus, H1N1/Swine flu, and Anthrax crises, the FDA issued EUAs for only a few dozen products combined.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, led to the issuance of over 600 EUAs, including authorizations for three vaccines and ten drug and biological therapeutic products, as well as a wide range of personal protective equipment, in vitro diagnostics, ventilators, and more. Among these authorizations, the FDA responded to the testing and supply shortages prevalent at the start of the pandemic by issuing several umbrella EUAs for larger categories of devicese.g., Surgical Masks and Independently Validated Serology Tests for SARS-CoV-2which allowed those products on the market without individual review.

Several treatments for mild-to-moderate COVID-19 were authorized for emergency use, such as Gileads remdesivir, GlaxoSmithKlines Sotrovimab, Eli Lillys Bamlanivimab and Etesevimab, and Regenerons REGEN-COV (Casirivimab and Imdevimab). In addition, Fresenius Kabi received an EUA for its Propoven 2% Emulsion IV, which maintains sedation in patients requiring mechanical ventilation in an intensive care setting. Baxter Healthcare received authorization for its REGIOCIT replacement solutionfor adults treated with continuous renal replacement therapy in a critical care setting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

EUAs remain in effect until the circumstances justifying the authorization of emergency use during the pandemic end, the FDA revokes the EUA to protect public health or safety, or the FDA approves a marketing application for the product/use. To determine whether products temporarily authorized under EUAs remain necessary, the FDA periodically reviews the circumstances and appropriateness of existing authorizations, particularly the status of product approval. If the sponsor is not actively working toward approval, licensure, or clearance, the FDA may consider terminating the EUA. If an EUA remains in effect for more than one year, the FDA must provide the sponsor with a written explanation of obstacles to approval and specific actions to overcome them.[1]

During the current pandemic, the FDA has revoked, for a variety of reasons, three of its umbrella EUAs and several individual EUAs. One typical explanation for revocation is that when the FDA approves a product, it renders any prior EUA redundant. For example, the FDA revoked the corresponding EUA upon approving Gileads Veklury (remdesivir) for use in adults and certain pediatric patients.

Other times, however, the FDA revokes EUAs after learning that products are not completely effective or safe for use. Recent EUA revocations include reported adverse effects (Chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate); poor clinical performance (Chembios DPP COVID-19 IgM/IgG System); decreased effectiveness (Autobios Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Rapid Test; NovaSteriliss Nova2200 for Decontaminating Compatible N95 Respirators); increased viral variant resistance (Eli Lillys Bamlanivimab); and/or excessive risk-benefit ratio.

As the pandemic has evolved, so have public health needs and FDA priorities, which in turn have resulted in the discontinuation and de-prioritization of EUA application review for certain COVID-19 products.

For example, according to recent guidance (May 2021), the FDA may decline to review or process new EUA requests for COVID-19 vaccines, unless those developers have previously engaged with the Agency on the development of their manufacturing process and clinical trials program. If a developer has already received feedback from the FDA, its EUA request is more likely to contain comprehensive data and information that meet authorization issuance requirements, whereas quality and data in new applications may prove difficult to verify.

In addition to de-prioritizing new COVID-19 vaccine EUA submissions, the FDA no longer reviews requests nor adds new respirator models to the umbrella emergency use authorizations for Non-NIOSH-Approved Disposable Filtering Facepiece Respirators Manufactured in China (as of Oct. 15, 2020) orImported, Non-NIOSH-Approved Disposable Filtering Facepiece Respirators (as of Mar. 24, 2021). Respirator manufacturers who are not listed under the existing EUAs may submit a separate EUA request; however, the FDA does not encourage such submissions, as there is decreased demand for those devices.

Given the countrys continued recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, we can likely expect additional classes of products to become deprioritized or ineligible for EUA. For example, as the proportion of vaccinated citizens increases and hospitalization rates decrease, many of the medical devices the country had scrambled to make available over a year ago will become less critical.

Companies with current EUAs or those considering applying for emergency use of their products should consult legal counsel to ensure continuity of product marketing and commercialization when the COVID-19 public health emergency is ended and/or EUAs are no longer effective.

Unless FDA announces a transitional policy for EUAs, manufacturers should assume they will need to receive full approval or clearance from the FDA to continue marketing their products after the public health emergency ends. For example, several Zika- and Ebola-related tests with emergency use authorizations received market clearance before the declared end of their respective emergencies. In October 2020, the FDA approved Inmazeb, the first treatment for Ebola Virus in the United States. To date, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have submitted BLAs for their mRNA vaccines, along with requests for Priority Review to accelerate the approval process, while simultaneously expanding their EUAs.

The FDA encourages sponsors of EUA products to follow up EUA issuance with an appropriate approval, biologics license application (BLA), or device premarket submissionsuch as 510(k), De Novo Classification Request, or Premarket Approvalso that authorized products can remain on the market with minimal interruption once the EUA is no longer in effect. The FDA further expects sponsors to include a plan for safety follow-up in their EUA requests, which will inform benefit-risk determinations in support of EUA continuation.

The FDA also expects manufacturers who receive an EUA to continue their clinical trials to obtain additional safety and effectiveness information and pursue approval. Once enough data is available, EUA holders should consider submitting applications for FDA approval, as the process can take several months. Legal counsel can assist sponsors in navigating applications to accelerate the approval process, e.g., for Fast Track, Priority Review, or Material Threat Medical Countermeasure Priority Review Vouchers. Although the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) must provide sufficient advance notice to allow for the disposition of an unapproved product, and of any other provided information/labeling related to an unapproved use before an EUA declaration terminates, this can unnecessarily disrupt the commercialization of your COVID-19 products.

[1] 21 U.S.C. 360bbb-3.

[View source.]

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EUAs And The FDAS Fight Against COVID-19: An Evolving Landscape - JD Supra

The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. has been defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions muddled messaging about how to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. But did it have to be that way? FiveThirtyEights Maggie Koerth went in search of the answer to that question and found that the CDCs impulse toward caution was always going to make it hard to combat COVID-19. Politics certainly didnt help, either.

You can find a lightly edited version of the transcript of the episode and listen to it below.

Dr. Anne Schuchat: Everything we look at with this virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: We really dont have what we need, but were still going full blast by drawing money from other areas When the president asked for $1.9 billion, we needed $1.9 billion.

Maggie Koerth: That was Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director at the CDC, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose voice you probably recognized. You might have thought they were talking about COVID-19, but they werent. They were talking about Zika.

Dr. Margaret Chan: The experts agree that a causal relationship between the Zika infection during pregnancy and microcephaly is strongly suspected though not yet scientifically proven.

Dr. Sonja Rasmussen: The first suspicion that Zika was linked to birth defects was seen in Brazil, when doctors started seeing that there was a large number of babies being born with severe microcephaly, which is an abnormally small head. And in April, CDC confirmed that Zika is a cause of microcephaly and other birth defects.

Maggie Koerth: Thats Dr. Sonja Rasmussen speaking about the Zika virus back in 2016. She served in different leadership roles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, and co-authored the paper that unambiguously identified Zika as a cause of birth defects.

Dr. Sonja Rasmussen: It was the biggest thing I had ever done, Id never said anything was definite. I was always waffling And suddenly here I was saying something was definitely causing birth defects. And I do remember, truly, that day feeling like I was jumping off the high dive, you know, like, headfirst? We wanted so badly for people to always trust us.

Maggie Koerth: When peoples lives are at stake, when theyre scared and confused about a new disease, they need a trusted source of information. In the U.S., thats the CDC. Yet even when it seemed obvious that Zika was causing birth defects, the CDC delayed giving a definitive answer. When it finally did, it was criticized for moving too slow by some and too fast by others.

Weve seen the same trends with COVID-19. The CDC waffled on whether we could stop wearing masks once wed been vaccinated, whether the disease was airborne, and who should have access to testing. The agency wants to be certain, so it typically waits for a critical mass of scientific evidence before making declarative statements. That takes time. Yet the communication to the public in this pandemic seemed to be worse than normal, and resulted in a huge loss of public trust.

Over the past month, I spoke to nearly a dozen scientists who all agreed the CDC could have done better. But the root causes of the CDCs shortcomings will be hard to fix.

Im Maggie Koerth, filling in for Anna Rothschild, and this is PODCAST-19 from FiveThirtyEight.

Dr. William Schaffner was an epidemic intelligence service officer at the CDC, and now, as the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, he works with the CDCs Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He told me that for every public health issue

Dr. William Schaffner: There are economic, social and cultural dimensions to them, which obviously involve the political leadership. You cant do public health, at any time, without recognizing that public policy involves partnership in some form with the political structure that exists at that time. Its like being a tightrope walker.

Maggie Koerth: Back in 1976, the government had to decide who to vaccinate against a potentially looming swine flu pandemic. Some experts thought the threat of the pandemic was low, but the CDC believed the risks were high and they advocated for a mass-vaccination campaign which was, of course, expensive.

Gil Eyal: The campaign that was trying to balance the risk calculations.

Maggie Koerth: Gil Eyal is a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

Gil Eyal: You know, trying to balance the fear that this could be really catastrophic, with the worry that, you know, that its going to be one of those cases where you cry wolf.

Maggie Koerth: At the time, President Ford was running for election and didnt want to be responsible for a pandemic. So, he went with the CDCs recommendation: The campaign vaccinated 45 million people in 10 weeks. However, this particular flu strain turned out to have a low transmission rate, and the pandemic never happened. In that case, the political calculus backfired, and the CDC bore the cost of reduced public trust. Thats exactly what Dr. Fauci hoped wouldnt happen with this pandemic. Here he is speaking at the Aspen Institute in February of 2020.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Is there a risk that this is going to turn into a global pandemic? Absolutely, yes. There is. And thats why we always follow, At present, the risk is really relatively low. But we are taking this very seriously. And the situation could change. What would it be if we got up and said, OK, hi. We really, really got a big risk of getting completely wiped out and then nothing happens, then your credibility is gone.

Maggie Koerth: Now, Dr. Fauci is not part of the CDC, but his comments highlight the social and political consequences of being overly aggressive. And the fear of doing that is a perennial problem for the CDC.

In this pandemic, the agency faced an even bigger issue: political interference. Leaked documents from September 2020 revealed that Health and Human Services officials appointed by then-President Trump had attempted to modify some of the CDCs COVID reports because the information didnt agree with Trumps views of the pandemic or his plans for dealing with it. Administration officials wanted the report to include the number of deaths from other causes like suicides and heart attacks in order to downplay the number of deaths from COVID. Separately, the White House was pressuring the CDC to limit press conferences and essentially excluded the agency from its own briefings.

Maggie Koerth: At the same time, experts told me that the Trump-era CDC wasnt working with outside experts like it had in the past. Usually, the executive branch helped the CDC and other agencies work together to build whats called a Team B outside experts who were brought in to critique CDC research and analysis and offer alternative perspectives. The experts I spoke to didnt know why those groups werent formed but said it had a major impact on the quality of our response. For example, if the CDC had collaborated better with health care facilities, that would have made the rollout of certain treatments easier for the neediest patients to get.

Multiple experts told me that due to political interference, the CDC found itself isolated from the rest of the scientific community and from the public. Nobody could talk to the CDC and the CDC wasnt talking to anyone else, either.

Dr. Richard Besser: So without CDC, it created space for a lot more voices. And social media provides just a major outlet for people to be able to communicate.

Maggie Koerth: Dr. Richard Besser served as acting director of the CDC during the H1N1 pandemic back in 2009. But social media has changed a lot since then.

Dr. Richard Besser: And you have people with hundreds of thousands of followers who have driven a lot of the conversation. What you have is, I think, social media amplifying the divide between those who, who support a public health approach and those who support a more political approach. By that I mean, really, viewing public health as the enemy of the economic recovery and the health of the nation.

Maggie Koerth: Some experts think that this politicization wasnt just divisive it also hurt the quality of our scientific research. Dr. Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco. His work has focused on how medical norms change in response to new evidence. He said social media raised the stakes of COVID decision-making. For example, masking became a political, almost moral issue. So much so that we didnt appropriately research the nuances of when masking works the best.

Dr. Vinay Prasad: No scientist would, would claim that its a binary thing, masks always work perfectly, you know, or they never work at all. The truth might be something in between, which is maybe below a certain age, the person is not able to wear it with enough adherence, that there is some diminishing returns. Maybe it works when the case rates are 10 per 100,000, but in 1 per 100,000 maybe it doesnt work. You know, maybe theres some interaction between the prevalence of the virus. You know, after this whole pandemic, I dont think we will know anything more about it than in the beginning. And I think thats quite tragic.

Maggie Koerth: Again, this murky space where we dont have extensive peer-reviewed scientific evidence isnt where the CDC thrives. Heres Dr. Besser.

Dr. Richard Besser: Because if you dont have the science, it can be hard to tell people what they want to know, which is well, How risky is this behavior? How risky is it for somebody to not wear a mask if theyve been fully vaccinated? CDC wanted to make sure that the vaccines were really effective against the variants and that there was room in hospitals in case they called it wrong. Well, if youre waiting on studies for that, and wanting those studies to be really high-quality science, its going to take you a while to get that guidance. When new guidance would come forward, it seemed like it had dropped from the sky. Because we hadnt been brought along the journey. We hadnt seen what the agency was learning.

Maggie Koerth: Without understanding where the CDCs most recent masking guidance came from that vaccinated people can drop masks indoors many felt blindsided by that change. And without knowing the why of CDC decisions, it made it hard for us to trust the agency from the beginning.

So, what does all this mean for the future of the CDC? And for us? Are we better-positioned for the next pandemic? Most of the researchers I spoke to didnt really think so.

Dr. Schaffner thinks for there to be real reform, the CDC needs external advice.

Dr. William Schaffner: I would prefer to include some people from the outside, to do an after-action report. I dont think the CDC is very good at this. If youre not really looking hard for problems, you wont find them. If you dont find anything, you wont be able to address them.

Maggie Koerth: But Eyal thinks our current collective experience will improve our reactions to future CDC guidance.

Gil Eyal: You know, if this thing happens a year or two or three years from now, the U.S. population will be in some sense similar to the Chinese population.

Maggie Koerth: Eyal said China was able to react the way it did to COVID-19 because they went through SARS.

Gil Eyal: And SARS was this trauma that was imprinted. However polarized we are right now, I wouldnt exclude the possibility that the next time around, people will act on the memory on the memory of, you know, what happened.

Maggie Koerth: But that works only if we are taking the time now to notice what went wrong and make sure that that, too, is part of our collective memory.

Thats it for this episode of PODCAST-19. Im Maggie Koerth. Our producer is Sinduja Srinivasan. Chadwick Matlin is our executive producer. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Originally posted here:

How The CDCs Blindspots Complicated The Fight Against COVID-19 - FiveThirtyEight

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in declines in cancer detection and surgical treatments, according to a study published in JNCI: The Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The investigators found that population-based cancer registries showed a 10.2% decline in real-time electronic pathology reports in 2020 compared to 2019.

The researchers observed declines across all age groups, including children under 18 years of age. Percentage declines were the highest for lung and colorectal cancers, with a decrease of 17.4% and 12.0%, respectively. Breast and prostate cancers were the next most serious declines, with percentage decreases of 9.0% and 5.8%, respectively.

We observed substantial declines in 2020 among cancers with effective screening tests, including breast and colorectal cancers, as well as across cancer sites and age groups without effective screening tests, including cancers among children and young adults, said Robin Yabroff, PhD, MBA, of the American Cancer Society, in a press release. Declines across cancer sites and age groups suggest that in addition to delays in cancer screening, there were also delays in routine well-child and primary care, evaluation of signs and symptoms, and treatment initiation for most cancers.

The study found that the patterns of decline seen in cancer care were similar to those seen in other fields of health care, with the greatest difference seen in April 2020 compared to April 2019. This decline in care aligns with the first peak in COVID-19 mortality rates in Georgia and Louisiana, and the declines in pathology reports seen in August, November, and December 2020 also coincided with COVID-19 mortality rate peaks. According to the investigators, the number of pathology reports across all of 2020 never consistently exceeded those in 2019 after these initial declines.

The findings suggest substantial delays in diagnosis and treatment services for cancers during the pandemic, and that ongoing evaluation can inform public health efforts to minimize any lasting adverse effects of the pandemic on cancer diagnosis, stage, treatment, and survival, the authors wrote. As data become available, evaluation of the effects of the pandemic on cancer stage at diagnosis and survival will be important, as will evaluation of racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities in access to care and outcomes.

REFERENCE

Study finds adverse effects of COVID-19 pandemic on cancer detection and surgical treatments [news release]. EurekAlert; June 28, 2021. Accessed June 29, 2021. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-06/acs-sfa062821.php

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Cancer Detection, Surgical Treatments Negatively Impacted by COVID-19 Pandemic - Pharmacy Times

Vials with Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine labels are seen in this illustration picture taken March 19, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

June 29 (Reuters) - Members of the U.S. military who were vaccinated against COVID-19 showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation, although the condition was still extremely rare, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study found that 23 previously healthy males with an average age of 25 complained of chest pain within four days of receiving a COVID-19 shot. The incident rate was higher than some previous estimates would have anticipated, it said.

All the patients, who at the time of the study's publication had recovered or were recovering from myocarditis - an inflammation of the heart muscle - had received shots made by either Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) and BioNTech SE (22UAy.DE) or Moderna Inc (MRNA.O).

U.S. health regulators last week added a warning to the literature that accompanies those mRNA vaccines to flag the rare risk of heart inflammation seen primarily in young males. But they said the benefit of the shots in preventing COVID-19 clearly continues to outweigh the risk. read more

The study, which was published in the JAMA Cardiology medical journal, said 19 of the patients were current military members who had received their second vaccine dose. The others had either received one dose or were retired from the military.

General population estimates would have predicted eight or fewer cases of myocarditis from the 436,000 male military members who received two COVID-19 shots, the study said.

An outside panel of experts advising the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said last week that reports of myocarditis were higher in males and in the week after the second vaccine dose than would be anticipated in the general population. A presentation at that meeting found the heart condition turned up at a rate of about 12.6 cases per million people vaccinated.

Eight of the military patients in the study were given diagnostic scans and showed signs of heart inflammation that could not be explained by other causes, the study said. The patients in the study ranged from ages 20 to 51.

The CDC began investigating the potential link between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis in April after Israel flagged that it was studying such cases in people who received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine there, and after a report that the U.S. military had also found cases.

Health regulators in several countries are conducting their own investigations.

Reporting by Carl O'DonnellEditing by Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Heart inflammation after COVID-19 shots higher than expected in study of U.S. military - Reuters

by: Tiffany Hudson, Nexstar Media Wire

2 Jul 2000: A view of the court WNBA Logo taken before a game between the Los Angeles Sparks and the Detroit Shock at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California. The Sparks defeated the Shock 85-63. NOTE TO USER: It is expressly understood that the only rights Allsport are offering to license in this Photograph are one-time, non-exclusive editorial rights. No advertising or commercial uses of any kind may be made of Allsport photos. User acknowledges that it is aware that Allsport is an editorial sports agency and that NO RELEASES OF ANY TYPE ARE OBTAINED from the subjects contained in the photographs.Mandatory Credit: Danny Moloshok /Allsport

NEW YORK (NewsNation Now) The WNBA announced 99% of all players are vaccinated against COVID-19 as other sports teams struggle to achieve herd immunity.

In the WNBAs statement, they also confirmed the league has not had a positive COVID-19 test for its players or staff since the regular season began.

Meanwhile, seven Major League baseball teams remain under the 85% vaccination threshold according to the Major League Baseball Association. The remaining 23 teams are all above the herd immunity threshold.

The NFL told ESPN that 65% of their players have received one shot. For the NBA, the last figure reported was a 75% vaccination rate according to ESPN.

Several players across sports have made headlines for expressing vaccine skepticism in the past several weeks. Buffalo Bills Player Cole Beasley told media he would rather retire than be vaccinated.

I will be outside doing what I do. Ill be out in the public. If your scared of me then steer clear, or get vaccinated. Point. Blank. Period. I may die of covid, but Id rather die actually living, Beasley wrote on Twitter.

Two other major sports players, Cubs Anthony Rizzo and Washington Football Teams Montez Sweat, both expressed skepticism about the vaccine and have not been vaccinated.

Many other players have partnered with health organizations along with city and state governments to encourage vaccination.

Most major stadiums have increased capacity to full or almost full as major cities relax pandemic restrictions. Wrigley Field became one of the first in June to return to full capacity.

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99% of WNBA vaccinated against COVID-19, but what about other sports leagues? - WKRN News 2

Last May marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. That her bicentennial fell during a worldwide pandemic is both illuminating and ironic. Nightingales experience as a nurse during the Crimean War in the mid-1850s led her to three insights that came to define her professional life, insights as revolutionary as they were unpopular:

Nightingale is best known for her work illustrating the first two tenets. When she arrived at the British military hospital in the Scutari region of the Ottoman empire in November 1854, a year after the war had begun, she was horrified to learn that far more soldiers were dying of infection and poor medical care than were dying on the battlefield. Her rigorous reforms of the wretched medical conditions reforms which rankled the military higher-ups slashed the hospital mortality rate from 33% to 2% over the course of a single year.

Nightingales approach to nursing education was equally meticulous, professionalizing a field whose standards until then had ranged from uneven to abysmal. (The nursing higher-ups at the time were similarly irritated by her ruffling of the status quo.)

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The third tenet of Nightingales lifes work that medical care does not exist in a vacuum from the world around it has received less historical attention.

After the Crimean War, Nightingale turned her attention to the health of the British military in India, this time from her London home. The scope of death and suffering dwarfed what had transpired in Scutari, and these soldiers werent even fighting a war. While the British public muttered disdainfully about Indias miasmas, Nightingale focused instead on data documenting sanitation drainage, water quality, housing construction, food quality, alcohol use, and physical activity. Extending her observations to the civilian population of India, she recognized the need to target education, housing, and the legal system things we now call social determinants of health.

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Though Nightingale never budged an inch from her insistence on scrupulously trained nurses as the backbone of good medical care, she knew that this could never be enough. The conditions that people lived in were equally important if not more so for achieving the best medical outcomes.

As Covid-19 begins to recede in the U.S., Nightingales observations could hardly be more prescient. The staggeringly uneven toll of infection and death we have witnessed is a bitter confirmation of the interrelationship between health care and society. The reasons for the disparity are in plain sight: unequal distribution of economic and housing stability, jobs without sick leave or options for telecommuting, crowded homes that render social distancing elusive, long commutes to jobs and grocery stores that preclude sheltering in place, and heavier burdens of chronic disease that contribute to more severe outcomes with Covid.

There has been much talk about how to re-envision the health care system once weve achieved the much-coveted settling of the dust. Theres no doubt that the U.S. health care system needs to be more flexible and nimble in nearly every aspect medical care, public health, research, supplies, prevention, communication, vaccination. The list goes on! But even at our creative best, the medical disparities will remain entrenched unless society is re-envisioned as well. Medical care does not exist in a vacuum from the world around it.

Contagious illnesses like Covid-19 bring into stark relief the fact that health is a both a communal good and community effort. Outbreaks can neither be created by individuals or tamed by them. It takes the oft-quoted village.

One the one hand, such interdependence goes against the grain of the rugged individualism supposedly embedded in American DNA. On the other hand, Americans exhibit a strain of community engagement thats especially prominent on the neighborhood and local level. Witness the strengths of PTAs, dog runs, community bulletin boards, sports leagues, houses of worship, neighborhood watches, and local libraries. These institutions exemplify the ethos of public health: How we inhabit our shared community has far-reaching effects on everyones health.

Florence Nightingales efforts presaged the challenges that face us today. Even though her day job was as a nurse, she recognized that her mandate, by necessity, extended to educating the public and lobbying the government at all levels. (She cannily delivered her book, Notes on Hospitals, directly to Queen Victoria.) Like outspoken health care workers today, she was often told to stay in her lane. Luckily for the untold number of people who lived longer because of her efforts, she did not.

Perhaps the most apt metaphor for the Covid experience is the burning house. Everyone in the neighborhood has a vested interest in getting the fire controlled. Moreover, everyone has a vested interest in understanding why the house caught fire to begin with. What were the conditions that made it vulnerable? How can we build houses to make fires less likely? How can we structure the fire department to respond more effectively?

Remaking health care will mean focusing on the lanes that relate to educational quality, job security, housing stability, and paid sick leave (to name a few), in addition to the more traditional medical lanes like expanding primary care, enhancing mental health and addiction treatment, improving care coordination, controlling drug prices, detoxifying electronic medical records, improving patient safety, and achieving universal, equitable access to health care.

Florence Nightingale was a boots-on-the-ground clinician as well as a hands-on administrator. She worked in Scutari under grueling circumstances, up to her neck in infectious risks, much as health care workers have been doing during the coronavirus pandemic. These feats of heroism, regretfully, arent enough then or now. Improving health for all citizens will indeed require major reconfiguring of the U.S. health care system. But well only see success if we simultaneously tackle the societal conditions that foster unequal heath.

Danielle Ofri is a primary care physician at Bellevue Hospital, clinical professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine, and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error (Beacon Press, April 2020).

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Florence Nightingale in the age of Covid-19 - STAT

WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) Wichita State University will begin offering free PCR tests at Wichita Eisenhower Airport on Thursday, July 1. The tests will be conducted in the space under the mezzanine next to the Aviators Caf.

The test, a simple, no-swab, saliva sample, takes just a few minutes and can be done before boarding or while waiting to pick up baggage from the carousel after returning home. Results of the test will be available online in less than 24 hours.

Hours of testing will be 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, expanding to 9 a.m. Midnight seven days a week beginning on Wednesday, July 14.

Students from WSUs National Institute for Research & Digital Transformation will be conducting the tests.

The service is not intended to be a community-testing site for the public but will be available to passengers and their families and to airport tenant employees.

Free testing for the public is available at the Wichita State University Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory at 4174 S. Oliver. For additional information, please visitwichita.edu/mdl.

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PCR tests for COVID-19 to be offered at Wichitas Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport - KSN-TV

What do these numbers mean?

The COVID-19 cases included in the report were tagged if the person had attended a Euro 2020 organised event between June 11-28. Such information was given to the contact tracing system Test and Protect by patients with COVID-19.

This included matches at Wembley Stadium or Hampden Park, as well as the official Euro 2020 fan zone at Glasgow Green.

Informal gatherings to watch a match at a pub or party were also included.

Attendance at hospitality venues was the most frequently reported tag, representing 34 per cent of all cases associated with the tournament.

The report said: PHS is working with Test and Protect and NHS boards to ensure that all public health actions are taken in the close contacts of these Euro 2020 cases as part of the 32,539 cases that were reported to the Test and Protect case management system during this period.

Nicola Sturgeon was forced to deny that her government had taken a softly, softly approach to fans travelling to London for the match against England.

Around 20,000 supporters headed to London for the match, which ended goalless.

Sturgeon said on Tuesday: We were very explicit to fans who did not have a ticket for Wembley not to travel.

She also urged people to abide by social distancing regulations while watching live sport this summer.

If you are meeting people in doors please stick to the limits and please open the windows and maximise ventilation, she said.

That applies if you are watching football and now with Wimbledon under way, to the tennis.

Scotland's health secretary Humza Yousaf said: We previously advised that fans should not have been travelling to London without tickets or unless they had somewhere safe to watch the match.

Travel was not banned and we are not able to stop people from travelling if they decide to do so.

We can see from these figures that there is an association with some the cases weve seen in recent days and the Euros. This is likely to include people who were on coach trips to and from London.

The issue of concern here is people coming together in enclosed public spaces whether thats on coaches or in a private house to watch matches or to gather for any other activity. Thats riskier than gathering with people outdoors.

Anyone planning to gather indoors to watch a match should remember the household limits and take a rapid lateral flow test.

We all have a vested interest in getting through the next few weeks as safely as possible because the end point is in sight as a result of the vaccine.

(Photo: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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Euro 2020 linked to almost 2,000 Scottish COVID-19 cases - The Athletic

The study explored the "wide gap" between known and asymptomatic cases.

June 23, 2021, 10:24 PM

6 min read

There may have been nearly 17 million undiagnosed COVID-19 cases in the United States in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new National Institutes of Health study.

The study suggests that the prevalence of COVID-19 in the spring and summer of 2020 "far exceeded" the number of confirmed cases -- especially in people who were asymptomatic.

"A hallmark of the coronavirus pandemic is that there are people infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 who have few or no symptoms," Dr. Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which participated in the research team, said in a statement. "While counting the numbers of symptomatic people in the United States is essential to contend with the impact of the pandemic and public health response, gaining a full appreciation of the COVID-19 prevalence requires counting the people who are undiagnosed."

The NIH report, which was published this week in Science Translational Medicine, represents the first data from a 12-month study launched in April 2020.

By analyzing blood samples of more than 8,000 people who were not previously diagnosed with the virus -- along with socioeconomic, health and demographic data -- NIH researchers estimated that for every diagnosed COVID-19 case during the spring and summer of 2020, there were 4.8 undiagnosed cases -- representing an additional 16.8 million cases.

A nurse swabs the nose of a person through a glass pane in a mobile COVID-19 testing truck on July 17, 2020, in Miami Beach, Fla.

"The estimate of COVID-19 cases in the United States in mid-July 2020, 3 million in a population of 330 million, should be revised upwards by almost 20 million when the percent of asymptomatic positive results is included," senior co-author Kaitlyn Sadtler, chief of the Section on Immunoengineering at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, an NIH institute that was part of the research team, said in a statement. "This wide gap between the known cases at the time and these asymptomatic infections has implications not only for retrospectively understanding this pandemic, but future pandemic preparedness."

Blood samples were collected from 8,058 volunteer participants primarily between May 10 and July 31, 2020, which were then analyzed to detect antibodies against COVID-19. Of the approximate 8,000 blood samples, 304 contained antibodies.

Based on those findings, the researchers estimated that 4.6% of U.S. adults had undiagnosed cases of COVID-19 during their study period -- which was also at a time when labs were still reporting a shortage of supplies and personal protective equipment needed to test patients.

Visitors walk past face mask signs along Decatur Street in the French Quarter on July 14, 2020, in New Orleans.

Black respondents had the highest estimated rate of positive COVID-19 antibody tests (14.2%), followed by Native American/Alaska Native (6.8%), Hispanic (6.1%), white (2.5%) and Asian (2%) respondents, researchers found. When comparing age groups, the youngest participants -- those between the ages of 18 and 44 -- had the highest estimated rate, at 5.9%, the study found.

"The information will be invaluable as we assess the best public health measures needed to keep people safe, as new -- and even more transmissible -- variants emerge and vaccine antibody response changes over time," NIBIB Director Bruce Tromberg said in a statement.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently warned that a highly contagious variant first detected in India could soon become the dominant strain in the U.S. The so-called delta variant has been detected in nearly every state, according to the CDC.

NIH researchers are currently following up with the study participants to evaluate the presence of antibodies after six and 12 months, as well as antibody reactivity to variants of concern, the medical research agency said.

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US had nearly 17 million undiagnosed COVID-19 cases in early months of pandemic: Study - ABC News