Category Archives: Corona Virus

TALLAHASSEE On June 22, a staffer in Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls office reached out to her colleagues with a request.

Please remind your staff to report when they are fully vaccinated, wrote Michelle Davila, the deputy chief of staff for operations and COVID-19 protocols, in an email reviewed by the Times/Herald.

Davila provided a link to a Google form in which respondents are asked to fill in the date they became fully vaccinated and the county in which they got their shots.

The form extols the virtues of the coronavirus vaccines. Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 adds one more layer of protection for you and those around you, it reads. Please do your part to keep the House a safe place to work.

Florida ranks toward the middle of the pack of the 50 states in vaccines administered per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The survey is not mandatory for staffers. The final question allows those responding to deny the House the right to collect and use information regarding...vaccination status for the purpose of implementing the House COVID-19 protocols.

Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law banning businesses, governments and schools from requiring the people they serve to provide evidence that they have been vaccinated. Violators can be fined up to $5,000 per infraction under the so-called vaccine passport ban.

DeSantis pushed hard for the ban during the legislative session. At the time, he argued requiring someone to disclose their vaccination status which some other countries have done in order to mitigate the spread of the disease is a violation of privacy.

The House collecting staffers vaccine data does not appear to violate the new law. Still, some lawmakers said they were surprised to see the House making the effort.

To me, its shocking that anybody would even ask the question in the state given the current state of affairs, said Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg. Later in the interview, Brandes added: It doesnt seem like something that the Legislature would do given that they just told people they couldnt do this.

Tom Yu, a spokesperson for the House, said in an emailed response that any comparison between the House survey and a vaccine passport is silly.

The information collected does not restrict an employees access to or entry to House spaces or (an employees ability to) participate in any employment-related activities, Yu said. Instead, he noted, the survey would be used to allow vaccinated staffers to avoid quarantining in the event of an office outbreak.

The 2021 lawmaking session ran through March and April, but lawmakers returned to the capitol to do business starting in January near the time of Floridas reported coronavirus case peak. During the months of lawmaking in Tallahassee, the House and Senate tested lawmakers, staffers and members of the press weekly for the virus.

Yu said the form sent to staffers last week has been available to representatives and staff since April 7. Around that time, the Legislature tweaked its rules to allow vaccinated workers to skip the testing process. Staffers, journalists and members were given the option to report in a separate Google form when they were fully vaccinated.

Rep. Evan Jenne, D-Dania Beach, the House Democratic leader, said he supports efforts to collect information on who in the House office has been vaccinated, so long as its done securely and without coercion.

It does confirm how serious this thing still is, and that we are still in the midst of the pandemic, Jenne said.

Jenne said he too was having some trouble squaring the Houses efforts with the Republican rhetoric around the importance of vaccine privacy.

Optically, its not the best look to talk out of both sides of your mouth, Jenne said.

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Florida House asks staff to report when they got vaccinated for the coronavirus - Tampa Bay Times

In support of them, many people question why no intermediate animal has been identified yet and point to the proximity of a top coronavirus lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located about a half hour drive from the Huanan Seafood Market that was linked to many of the first COVID-19 cases in December 2019.

WIV is home to a lab headed by Shi Zhengli, a virologist famous for her work tracking down the bat origins of the last coronavirus epidemic. Her lab specializes in collecting coronaviruses in the field and then studying them to understand their potential for creating pandemics.

The lab has made chimeric viruses that mix and match different elements to better understand whats required to infect human cellswhichsomepeopleconsider to be gain-of-function experiments, although Shi does not. As wevewritten, there is no single definition of gain-of-function, but in this context it typically refers to modifications that aim to make a virus more dangerous or infectious to study potential disease pathways.

Shi told Science that some of her coronavirus research was conducted at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) a basic lab safety level that some say is inadequate; this information has also been publicly available in the methods sections of published papers.

Fueling suspicions about the WIV is the institutes removal of its online database of samples and virus sequences in September 2019 and news of a U.S. intelligence report that three WIV researchers fell ill and sought care in a hospital in November 2019.

Some people also speculate SARS-CoV-2 could have come from an abandoned mine where researchers from Shis lab collected bat samples after workers removing bat guano fell ill with an unknown respiratory illness in 2012 and several died. It was a sampling effort there that turned up RaTG13, the bat virus Shi announced in late January 2020 that, at 96.2% similarity, is the closest of all known viruses to SARS-CoV-2 in its overall genome sequence.

A few proponents further argue that the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 contains several unexpected features that are indicative of bioengineering and that its curious that the virus was so well suited to infecting people from the start.

Underlying all of the supposition is Chinas lack of transparency and cooperation to find the origin of the virus, which many interpret to be incriminating.

Shi, however, has vigorously denied having the virus or any of its potential precursors and says that no one in the lab has tested positive for the coronavirus, nor do they have antibodies against it. If thats true, then theres no way SARS-CoV-2 came from her.

Despite several lab leak narratives that claim RaTG13 could have been modified to create SARS-CoV-2, scientists who study viruses do not believe thats possible. As others have explained before, RaTG13s genome differs from SARS-CoV-2 by more than 1,000 nucleotides, making it too different to plausibly have served as a progenitor. RaTG13 is too divergent to be this ancestral virus, David Robertson, the head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, told us.

Moreover, Shi says there is only a genome sequence for RaTG13 anyway live virus was never isolated from the sample and that she has only ever isolated three SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

The only way SARS-CoV-2 could have come from the lab, manipulated or not, is if the facility was in possession of a virus much more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13, multiple experts told us.

I would estimate at least 99%, thats the minimum. It probably has to be 99.9% similar to make that kind of switch in the lab at all, said Robert F. Garry, a virologist at Tulane University School of Medicine. Theres just no evidence that they had anything close to that.

In an email interview with the New York Times in June, Shi shot down the notion that she performed risky gain-of-function research, saying her lab had never conducted experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses. She also said she had no knowledge of any sick employees at the institute in November 2019, as suggested by a U.S. intelligence report.

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported a few additional details on the timing and number of alleged sick workers from the report, including that they had sought care at a hospital; otherwise, it was the same information in a fact sheet issued by the State Department on Jan. 15, which said the researchers symptoms were consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.

The credibility and significance of the report of illnesses during flu season remains unclear. No scientist has any way of verifying whether this is true or not, said Maciej Boni, an associate professor of biology at Pennsylvania State Universitys Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics.

In its article, the Wall Street Journal noted that officials have differing views on the strength of the intelligence and that in China, its common to visit the hospital for less serious ailments.

If several people did have COVID-19 and were quite ill, Garry said that would mean hundreds of other people would have had COVID-19 at some other level. The workers would also have generated antibodies. Thats where the seroconversion data comes in, he said, referring to the antibody tests the WIV says are negative.

Given that Wuhan had a huge surge of flu at the time, he said, it was likely any sick researchers had influenza.

Suspicions have also swirled around the bat viruses Shis group collected from a closed copper mine in Mojiang, Yunnan Province, with some opining that the mine workers mysterious lethal respiratory disease was COVID-19 or a disease caused by a similar coronavirus and that SARS-CoV-2 could have come from the mine.

A bat sample collected at the mine, which is located in southwestern China about 1,000 miles from Wuhan, in 2013 ended up producing RaTG13, a partial sequence of which made it into a publication in 2016 under a different name. In a November addendum to her 2020 paper describing RaTG13, Shi reported she had collected eight other SARS-related coronaviruses from the mine, which she described in a preprint posted on May 21. All of those viruses are nearly the same and are only a 77.6% match to SARS-CoV-2, falling on a separate branch of the viral family tree than both SARS-CoV-1, the virus that caused the first coronavirus epidemic, and SARS-CoV-2.

Some claim its fishy that Shi didnt disclose the sequences earlier or mention the pneumonia-like illnesses or mine in her publications. Shi explained in her addendum that her lab had tested serum samples from the sick workers for bat SARS-related coronaviruses and they were negative; she retested them more recently for SARS-CoV-2 and they also were negative. She also noted that all of the viruses were only distantly related to SARS-CoV-1 based on an initial check of a single gene sequence; RaTG13 was sequenced nearly in full in 2018 once sequencing technology in her lab had improved and had been renamed from its bat sample ID to reflect the bat species, the location and the sampling year. That sequence is what Shi was able to consult following the identification of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020.

Nothing about the mine story seems abnormal, Garry said, calling it a distraction. He added that there would have been no reason for Shi not to report identification of a virus more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 if she had found one.

We wouldnt be having this conversation because she would have known which animal or species of bat it came from. And the natural origin would be solved, he said.

In an interview with Science in July, Shi had already shared the details on the name change and explained that her lab did not pay special attention to RaTG13 initially because it was not especially close to SARS-CoV-1.

Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, told Science that her explanation made sense. Of course, they would have been mainly interested in bat viruses closely related to SARS-CoV not some random bat virus that is more distant, he said.

As for the missing database, WIV told the WHO team that there had been an online spreadsheet of samples for internal use and there had been plans to make an interactive system, but because of more than 3,000 cyberattacks the data was kept offline.

Its possible, of course, that the Chinese are lying about the database, negative coronavirus test results of WIV staff and that WIV or another facility had SARS-CoV-2 or its precursor in one of its labs.

Lab escapes of dangerous pathogens have happened in the past, including multiple instances with SARS-CoV-1 in China. Its nevertheless the case that there has never been a lab accident that sparked a pandemic or led to an outbreak of a novel pathogen, nor has there ever been a known breach at the WIV. (One incident frequently cited as an example of a lab accident, the 1977 influenza epidemic in Russia, is likely to have been a vaccine trial gone awry, not a lab release.)

The WHO team was not able to independently verify the labs virus collection or safety records, although that was never the mandate for the organizations origins studies.

Some scientists would nevertheless like a more comprehensive investigation.

Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who previously collaborated with Shi and was a signatory on the Science letter criticizing the WHO, told us in a statement that the genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 points to the virus originating in natural wildlife populations, most likely bats,thatpassed fromanimals to humans but that more investigationand transparency are necessary to define the origin ofthe pandemic.

For example,a rigorous investigation would have reviewed the biosafety level under which bat coronavirus research wasconducted at WIV, he added. It would have included detailed information on the training procedures with records, the safety procedures with records and strategies that were in place to prevent inadvertent or accidental escape.

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and a co-author on an influential Nature Medicine paper from March 2020 that found it improbable that SARS-CoV-2 was manipulated in the lab, has also raised concerns about safety. He told former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil that he was troubled by the fact that some of Shis coronavirus work had been done in BSL-2 labs.

Despite the storys suggestion that Lipkin might no longer agree with the Nature Medicine papers conclusion that the virus was not bioengineered, he confirmed to FactCheck.org that he did.

I said only that novel bat viruses should not propagated at BSL-2 and that this raised concerns about biosecurity at the WIV, he said in an email. I dont disavow the paper.

He has since told the Washington Post that its possible that WIV researchers might have unwittingly become infected with a coronavirus they hadnt yet characterized.

Possible, however, does not mean equally likely, as Lipkin readily acknowledged. And indeed, even some who signed the Science letter, such as Baric, think the most probable scenario is a natural one.

Seeing how the letter has been interpreted to support the lab leak hypothesis, one signatory, Caltech professor of biology and bioengineering Pamela J. Bjorkman, has backed away from it.

I thought the letter would have the effect of prompting more funding for searching for natural viruses in animal reservoirs, which I personally have always assumed represent the origin of SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans, she wrote in a letter to the podcast This Week in Virology. Perhaps naively, I did not anticipate that the letter would be used to promote the lab origin hypothesis.

Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and another co-author of the Science letter, also told Vice that the letter has been misinterpreted as backing the lab leak hypothesis instead of being a call for more research. He has emphasized the lack of evidence on the subject and told CNN that the lab leak hypothesis is not a fringe theory and should be investigated.

On the flip side, there are a few scientists who have reversed their opinions and now think a lab origin is more likely than a natural one.

But many scientists especially the ones with the most expertise in coronaviruses find a lab origin unlikely, even if they cannot exclude it.

The finding of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses circulating in horseshoe bats in both China and Southeast Asia, coupled with the strong links of the first cases to animal markets in Wuhan are very compelling evidence SARS-CoV-2 is the result of an animal associated spillover much like SARS, said Robertson, the University of Glasgow virus bioinformatician, who has studied how SARS-CoV-2 might have evolved. On lab-leak, theres no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab other than the coincidence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being there.

Goldstein, the University of Utah coronavirus virologist, agreed.

We know that a majority of the first cases that were picked up were directly linked to animal markets in Wuhan. We know that these SARS-related coronaviruses circulate in animals; we know that people are infected with these viruses, he told us, citing a study Shis group did that found 2.7% of people in a rural village had antibodies against bat SARS-like viruses, indicating past infection.

Additionally, he said, a study published in Scientific Reports in June showed the presence of multiple mammal species illegally being sold in wet markets across Wuhan between May 2017 and November 2019, adding to the plausibility of how viral transfer might have occurred.

And so, kind of all the ingredients are there, the epidemiological links are there; the scientific evidence for the virus being engineered doesnt hold up at all, he said.

Garry, the Tulane virologist, also noted the past examples of natural spillovers, including SARS; the fact that the first four known COVID-19 cases in Wuhan had links to different wet markets, as shown in the WHO report and no sign that Shis lab had any virus close to SARS-CoV-2.

There is no evidence at all for a lab leak. Nothing scientific, its just an accusation, Garry said. You have to think one of the leading virologists on the planet is part of a major conspiracy that is involving hundreds of people.

Early in the pandemic we repeatedlydebunkedbaseless conspiracy theories circulating on social media about SARS-CoV-2 being bioengineered.

For example, there werebogus claimsthatthe virus contains HIV insertions andfalse claimsthat the virus was created by a prominent Harvard chemist who wascharged by the Department of Justice on Jan. 28, 2020, for making false statements about his ties to China.

Many scientists remain open to a lab escape of a natural virus, but fewer entertain the notion that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered. While this cannot be ruled out entirely, multiple coronavirus experts view this as implausible.

I am completely confident that the virus was not engineered, University of Pennsylvania coronavirus researcher Susan Weiss told us in an email.

University of Utahs Goldstein said it was virtually impossible, while Dr. Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa, went with impossible.

In March, a group of scientists, including Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Garry of Tulane, published a paper in Nature Medicine that combed through the genome sequence for any signs of lab tinkering and concluded there were none.

Initially, the researchers had been suspicious that there were elements that were engineered. But upon closer examination, the group rejected that hypothesis, as we have written. (Contrary to some suggestions, the Andersen paper was not just an opinion piece that had no vetting by other scientists. A spokesperson for Nature Medicine told FactCheck.org by email that the paper was peer-reviewed.)

Even if scientists used methods that would not leave a trace of manipulation, as some lab leak proponents have suggested, that would still leave the arguably insurmountable problem of not knowing enough to create the virus.

No one would know how to do it, Perlman said. If one doesnt have the virus in hand, how do you decide to make this?

Recently, there has been additional speculation about SARS-CoV-2s furin cleavage site, which is a spot on the viruss spike protein thats cut by the enzyme furin to activate the spike and prepare the virus for entering cells. Experiments have shown the site is required for the virus to infect human lung cells and for viral transmission in ferrets. At first glance, the site is potentially curious, as its absent in coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

Furin cleavage sites, however, exist in many other coronaviruses, such as feline coronaviruses and the virus that causes MERS. Because similar sequences for the cleavage site are found in other coronaviruses, its presence is not at all suspicious or indicative of lab manipulation, Robertson said.

The lineage SARS-CoV-2 emerged from is under-sampled so its not surprising theres some unique properties in its genome, he added.

Thomas Gallagher, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Loyola University Chicago who studies coronaviruses, also said he did not think the furin cleavage site was a sign of engineering.

Some coronaviruses naturally have furin cleavage sites, others do not, he told us in an email. These cleavage sites evolve naturally under various natural selective pressures. The selective pressures are often powerful, so the furin cleavage site is a hotspot for coronavirus variation.

In a self-published story on Medium, later posted on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website, former New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade zeroed in on an ostensibly suspicious element of the furin cleavage site. Namely, that the underlying genetic sequence of the viruss cleavage site looked manipulated because of two CGG stretches that code for the amino acid arginine. Because CGG is not often found in coronaviruses, he argued, instead of evolving naturally, it was more likely that a scientist had gone in and inserted the site into the genome while doing gain-of-function research.

In support of his theory, Wade quoted David Baltimore,Nobel laureateand president emeritus of CalTech,as saying the furin cleavage site with its arginine codons was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus and that it made a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.

But on Twitter, Andersen pushed back, noting that while rare, CGG triplets are not unheard of in SARS-CoV-2s genetic sequence and are used to code for arginine 3% of the time. Indeed, some feline coronaviruses differ there from SARS-CoV-2 by just one nucleotide. And now that the world is awash in SARS-CoV-2 sequences, theres no sign of the virus mutating away from using those triplets at the cleavage site, which might be expected if the sequence was unnatural.

Informed of Andersens points, Baltimore told a journalist with Nature that he agreed that the site could have evolved naturally. FactCheck.org contacted Baltimore as well and in an email he acknowledged he shouldnt have used the phrase smoking gun because it sounds so definitive, although he added that he didnt think Andersen is giving enough credence to the possibility that the furin cleavage site had a non-natural origin.

Virologists, however, say there are plenty of other reasons why its incredibly unlikely that the furin cleavage site was engineered, starting with the fact that the site is not a very good cleavage site.

This is a pretty bad one; its not cleaved very efficiently by furin, Goldstein said.

In fact, he said that based on other coronaviruses with similar cleavage sites, its known that mutations that make the protein sequence closer to the SARS-CoV-2 sequence end up losing the ability to be cut.

If youre trying to insert a furin cleavage site, Goldstein said, why would you pick a furin cleavage site that is not actually a functional furin cleavage site in other viruses?

Additionally, the cleavage site exists as an insertion in the genome that strangely breaks up the triplets in what is called an out-of-frame insertion. Any scientist wanting to add a furin cleavage site would just plop it in nice and clean, Goldstein said. I dont how to explain from a scientific standpoint how ridiculous this is, the idea that you would do an out-of-frame insertion. It just makes no sense.

Garry, the Tulane virologist, was also baffled by the suggestion that the cleavage site sequence showed the virus had been engineered. Which graduate student or post doc would think to put it in out-of-frame? That part I just dont get, he said. This, for all the world, looks like a natural virus.

Another line of speculation is that instead of a scientist deliberately choosing what to modify, the virus was serially passaged through human cells or an animal. That, in theory, would eliminate the requirement for a scientist to know what to insert or change. Lab leak proponents often cite experiments with human cells or humanized mice as a potential way this could happen.

But Perlman, who has done experiments passaging coronaviruses in mice, said that would not work. Most of the time when you take viruses and pass them in tissue culture cells, you get cells that grow very well in tissue culture cells and nowhere else, he said. And humanized mice are still mostly mice, he said, so the virus would adapt to growing better in mice, not humans.

Itd have to be something nearer to a palm civet cat, which is a weird animal to be passaging it [the virus], Perlman explained.

Youd also need a starting virus that is much closer to SARS-CoV-2 than any known virus, he said, and even then, the virus youd end up with would almost certainly not be SARS-CoV-2.

As a result, Perlman said, such a scenario could be technically possible but is extraordinarily improbable. In his mind, the engineering scenario can be ruled out, although he still considered accidental release of a natural virus as an unlikely, but possible, pathway.

Further complicating the lab leak scenarios is that when SARS-CoV-2 is grown in the standard cells used to isolate and propagate viruses in the lab,the furin cleavage site is frequently lost, as is documented in multiple reports. The Shi lab, notably, used those cells with each of the three SARS-related bat coronaviruses it successfully isolated in the past.

Some have also argued that SARS-CoV-2 was too well adapted to infecting humans at the start of the pandemic and that this could indicate human design.

But Penn States Boni said thats a faulty line of thinking.

Theres no guarantee that something that crosses over has to be perfectly adapted or half adapted or a third adapted. Whatever happens, happens, he said.

The H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009, for example, he said, was very well adapted to humans and took off very easily and very quickly. It is not a sign that they were bioengineered, Boni said.

A paper he co-authored with Robertson in PLOS Biology pieced together SARS-CoV-2s evolutionary history and suggests that the viruss ability to infect a broad range of mammals evolved hundreds of years ago.

This would indicate that the SARS-CoV-2 progenitor did not have to adapt to humans much, if at all, Robertson said, because it had already become a generalist virus long ago, although he said an intermediate animal could very well still be involved in the transfer to a human.

For some, its more than a coincidence that a novel coronavirus outbreak began in the same place as Chinas premier coronavirus research lab.

But Wuhan is also a city of 11 million people and a hub for commerce, including the wildlife trade.

Theres thousands and thousands of large and small markets in a city like Wuhan where theres human-animal contacts every day, said Boni, who spent eight years doing field epidemiology in Vietnam. These human-animal contacts arent rare. People dont do their shopping at Whole Foods, people do their shopping at these markets.

Thus, while lab accidents do occur and Boni said the possibility should be investigated it doesnt really compare to the scale of human-animal contact that you have in a province like Hubei where theres 60 million people and on an average day 5 million of those people could have been in contact with an animal at a market.

Lacking more information, Boni said he thought a natural spillover for SARS-CoV-2 was a thousand times, a million times more likely than a lab leak.

Still, its true that there is no proof of a natural spillover, and some 18 months out from the first identified COVID-19 cases, the lack of an animal that transmitted the virus to humans has led some people to wonder whether there was one.

After all, with the first SARS epidemic in 2003, cat-like mammals known as palm civets were identified as possible intermediate hosts within several months and fingered more definitively within a year. And with MERS in 2012, it took about a year to find out that people had likely picked up the virus from camels.

But experts told us the delay is not unexpected.

Its not really surprising, said Goldstein. For one, unlike with the first SARS, the market linked to many of the early COVID-19 cases was quickly shut down, making it significantly more difficult to find any potential intermediate animals there.

You need to get lucky, he said. You have to go at the right time. If you go later, its going to be hard.

And, as Perlman, pointed out, If I were illegally trading in exotic animals and heard [a] SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was about to begin, the first thing Id do is take my exotic animals and high-tail it.

In China, it is not surprising that scientists did not find SARS-CoV-2 in potential animal sources immediately after the human outbreak in Wuhan. Nor does that result indicate there is a problem with the wildlife spillover theory, wrote Christine K. Johnson, director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics at the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, in an editorial in Scientific American. This is a difficult search that takes time.

There have been some efforts to look for an intermediate. The WHO reported that 80,000 wildlife and farm animal samples from China had been tested, all of which turned up negative for SARS-CoV-2. But Garry said that the figure is not as impressive as it might seem.

80,000 animals sounds like a lot, but a lot of those were domestic cattle and chickens and birds and things like that that wouldnt be expected to have SARS-CoV-2, he said. When you actually get down to the species that might have it, its maybe a few hundred samples at most.

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The Facts and Gaps on the Origin of the Coronavirus - FactCheck.org

LONDON -- Nearly 2,000 people who live in Scotland have attended a Euro 2020 event while infectious with COVID-19, Public Health Scotland said on Wednesday.

Thousands of Scots came to London for their game against England in the UEFA European Football Championship group stage on June 18.

Many headed to Wembley Stadium to see the game in person or gathered in the city center, while Hampden Stadium in Glasgow has also hosted games.

Of the 1,991 people identified as having attended a EURO 2020 event while infectious, 1,294 had traveled to London and 397 had gone to Wembley, Public Health Scotland said.

Cases were labeled if the person in question had seen a match at Hampden or Wembley, gone to a fanzone in Glasgow, or participated in an informal gathering at a pub or a house to watch a match.

There were only 38 reports of people attending Scotland's home game against Croatia while contagious, with 37 reports from Scotland's match against the Czech Republic at Hampden.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout. Editing by Andrew MacAskill)

See more here:

Nearly 2000 Scots attended Euro 2020 events with COVID-19: health agency - CTV News

Good evening. Im Karen Kaplan, and its Friday, June 25. Heres whats happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.

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Chen Mei and Cai Wei are friends and computer coders who live in China. In the early months of the pandemic, they decided to put their skills to use by creating an online archive about the COVID-19 outbreak, the whistleblowing doctors who tried to warn the world of the growing threat and the unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan.

Their archive, called Terminus2049, included reports by Chinese journalists who risked their lives to cover the story of the mysterious and deadly respiratory disease. The reward for their courage was censorship, as Chinese President Xi Jinping pushed for propaganda that extolled heroes, not stories that shed light on human suffering.

Chen, 28, and Cai, 27, may have had an inkling that the government wouldnt appreciate their project. But they didnt expect to be detained for documenting an event that was hardly a secret, said Chen Kun, Chen Meis older brother.

Ten years ago, this wouldnt be a problem. You wouldnt be detained for just archiving information. At most, theyd threaten you and have tea, Chen Kun told my colleague Alice Su, using a euphemism for disciplinary meetings with authorities. We didnt realize that in 2019 and 2020, Chinas internet control became much stricter than in the past.

Chen and Cai were held in detention for more than a year, until they went on trial last month in Beijing. The friends were accused of picking quarrels and provoking troubles, the same crime used to silence Chinese citizens who try to bring attention to the 1989 massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Family members were not allowed to see Chen and Cai. They couldnt hire lawyers to defend them or examine the documents explaining the charges against them, Chen Kun said. A verdict is expected in July or August; if theyre found guilty, theyll face up to five years in prison.

Chen Mei has been detained since April 2020 for archiving stories online about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. In May 2021, he and a friend went on trial in Beijing for picking quarrels and provoking troubles.

(Chen Kun)

And this is just one of more than 600 cases of people being punished for speaking up about COVID-19 and the Chinese governments pandemic response.

Theres a man from Qinghai who got 10 months in jail for criticizing on Twitter the governments handling of the outbreak. Theres a Beijing resident who was held for six months for warning classmates in WeChat about a person who had contracted COVID-19. Theres a blogger in Hebei province who was sentenced to half a year in prison for compiling stories of Wuhan residents suffering during the lockdown.

This hostility toward free speech comes as Chinas Communist Party prepares to celebrate its centennial. For the occasion, Xi launched a nationwide campaign for citizens to study a rewritten version of the partys history that extols its achievements. Five pages of the book are devoted to COVID-19, praising Xi and the party for putting the people first.

It is a brazen reinvention that will keep younger generations living with an airbrushed past, Su writes.

And it doesnt bode well for efforts to get to the bottom of the origin of the coronavirus, since any serious investigation into the possible role of a Wuhan virology laboratory would require Xis support.

What theyre doing is to control every Chinese persons thinking and erase every persons history, said Dong Zehua, who spent seven months in jail for trying to publicize the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. They want to write history themselves.

California cases, deaths and vaccinations as of 11:26 a.m. Friday:

Track Californias coronavirus spread and vaccination efforts including the latest numbers and how they break down with our graphics.

If you hear the name QAnon, you might think of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, or perhaps pizzagate. If COVID-19 vaccines arent on your list already, you should add them.

More and more, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory are embracing and spreading false claims about the lifesaving vaccines: They cause infertility. (They dont.) Theyre made with aborted fetuses. (They arent.) Bill Gates is using the vaccine to depopulate the world. (He isnt.)

Here in California, these fictions are making the rounds through the world of health and wellness, my colleague Laura Nelson reports. QAnon and New Age spiritualism may seem like an unlikely pairing one is toxic, the other seeks to cleanse but dig a little deeper, and youll see they have a lot in common.

The community of yogis, energy healers, sound bathers, crystal practitioners, psychics and quantum magicians is uniquely primed to accept a conspiratorial worldview. Its already awash in magical thinking, dietary supplements backed by psuedoscientific claims and a deep skepticism of mainstream medicine.

That includes vaccines.

Its always been the water we were swimming in, said Julian Walker, a yogi in Mar Vista who tracks the marriage of conspiracy theories and spiritualism. Now were seeing what happens when the water rises.

This is how QAnon roped in at least a dozen people in Kathleen Abrahams spiritual social circle, including two of her closest friends. (Her first reiki master pronounced the COVID-19 pandemic a conspiracy and said face masks were toxic.)

Its why yoga teacher Laura Schwartz moved all the way from Alexandria, Va., to Carlsbad, Calif., to put distance between herself and a fellow yoga practitioner who spouted coronavirus nonsense. Schwartz calls it Woo-Anon.

Yoga teacher Laura Schwartz closed her studio and moved to Carlsbad after QAnon conspiracy theories, including false claims about the COVID-19 vaccine, came too close to home.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

If you think QAnon is just a fringe movement, you havent been keeping up. It exploded in popularity while Donald Trump was in the White House and now has more adherents than some major religions.

Two recent polls found that about 1 in 6 Americans are onboard with QAnons key tenet: that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are trying to control the countrys government, mass media and financial systems, as Nelson puts it.

QAnons proponents were well-positioned to capitalize on the uncertainty brought on by the pandemic. When stay-at-home orders separated New Agers from their yoga studios and meditation rooms, they turned to Instagram, where aspiring influencers make controversial claims to get attention and build their brands.

It may seem like harmless nonsense, but consider this: The vast majority of people who are still dying of COVID-19 in the U.S. are those who havent been vaccinated.

More than 18,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in May, and only 150 of them were fully vaccinated. It stands to reason that if people took advantage of the vaccines, thousands of lives could be saved.

This is a pandemic of unvaccinated people, said L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, who is constantly urging people to get their shots.

A relatively small number of people have health conditions that make them ineligible for the vaccines, and some people who want them have been unable to get them due to financial, logistical or cultural barriers.

But that still leaves plenty of Americans with ready access to a doctor, a smartphone app or a Google search bar that would match them up with a vaccine. All theyre missing is the desire to do so.

See the latest on Californias coronavirus closures and reopenings, and the metrics that inform them, with our tracker.

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When California reopened, officials warned that one of the things that could send the state back toward the lockdown days was the emergence of a coronavirus variant that was able to get around the defenses weve built up over the last year-plus. It looks like the Delta variant is auditioning for the role.

The Delta variant is the one that originated in India. It spreads more readily than its predecessors perhaps twice as readily as the original strain and there have been some indications that its less susceptible to the antibody treatments offered to COVID-19 patients.

So far, the vaccines available in the U.S. seem to be effective against Delta, but for those who remain unvaccinated, the risk of infection is real. If youre not vaccinated, youre hosed, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco.

Delta currently ranks fourth among the variants identified when California coronavirus samples are genetically sequenced. (The top spot belongs to Alpha, the variant from the United Kingdom.) But its rising fast, growing from about 1.8% of sequenced samples in April to 4.8% in May.

Los Angeles County identified 64 cases involving the Delta variant between late April and early June, most of them in the last few weeks. Santa Clara County, the most populous county in Northern California, has turned up 58 cases.

With 58% of Californians at least partially vaccinated and 49% fully vaccinated, officials arent expecting Delta to produce another overwhelming surge. But they fear the variant will take root in communities where immunizations are low and people havent built up immunity through previous infections.

Speaking of previous infections, a new study by scientists at the National Institutes of Health finds that the official count of coronavirus cases before the countrys devastating fall-and-winter surge was way, way off.

For every infection recorded during the spring and summer of 2020, nearly five more went undetected. That amounts to nearly 17 million cases by July 2020 that were previously uncounted, my colleague Amina Khan reports.

The researchers determined this by gathering blood samples from thousands of people across the country and testing them for coronavirus antibodies a sure sign of a previous infection. With all these cases accounted for, the NIH team offered a clearer picture of who had been swept up by the pandemic as of last summer.

For instance, 14.2% of Black Americans in the sample had been infected, along with 6.8% of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives and 6.1% of Latinos. At the other end of the spectrum, 2% of Asian American and 2.5% of white volunteers had been infected. The highest antibody prevalence was in adults ages 18 to 44 (5.9%), and people in urban areas (5.3%) were far more likely than those in rural areas (1.1%) to have evidence of a past infection.

And in other statistical news, a different group of researchers says the pandemic has slashed close to two years off Americans life expectancy. A baby born in the U.S in 2018 could expect to live 78.7 years; by the end of 2020, that number was down to 76.9.

The precipitous drop more than eight times steeper than in any other country in the U.S. economic league puts American life spans on par with those in Peru, Colombia, Chile and Thailand, my colleague Melissa Healy reports.

Even more shocking is the pandemics power to shorten the lives of Black and brown people in the U.S.

Thanks to COVID-19, the average life span of Black Americans shrank by more than three years between 2018 and 2020, to 71.5 years. At the same time, the average life span for white Americans fell less than half as much, to 77.3 years. That caused the gap between Black and white Americans to grow from 3.9 years to 5.8 years wiping out two decades of progress in just one year.

The pandemic all but erased the longevity advantage of Latino Americans who, despite higher rates of poverty and hardship, historically lived close to three years longer than non-Hispanic whites. COVID-19s toll on Latino communities especially among working-age adults reduced their average life expectancy from 81.8 years in 2018 to 78 years at the end of 2020.

This was really disturbing, said Dr. Stephen Woolf, a community health expert at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the study. It reflects the huge loss of life, and it demonstrates the price people pay for systemic racism.

Meanwhile, in Houston, a hospital that says its the first in the nation to implement a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees has terminated at least 153 workers who refused to comply.

Houston Methodist Hospital allowed more than 600 exemptions for medical conditions (including deferments for women who were pregnant) and for those with a sincerely held religious belief. Still, out of more than 25,000 employees, two managers were fired for refusing the vaccine, and 178 other staffers were suspended for failing to meet the vaccination deadline. They were given until midnight Tuesday to get with the program; those that didnt were fired or resigned.

The mass termination has reinvigorated the antivaccine movement and prompted a lawsuit challenging the mandate on the grounds that the vaccines which have been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use but have not received formal approval are still experimental. But Dr. Marc Boom, Methodists chief executive, said hes unfazed by the backlash.

Criticism is sometimes the price we pay for leading medicine, he said.

Demonstrators in Baytown, Texas, wave at cars to support the protest against Houston Methodists COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

(Yi-Chin Lee / Houston Chronicle)

Todays question comes from readers who want to know: When will I need to get a COVID-19 booster shot?

Its too soon to say. In fact, its too soon to say whether booster shots will be necessary at all.

There are two primary reasons why a booster shot would be in your future.

The first is that the immunity you gained from your initial COVID-19 vaccination has waned over the course of months or years.

Scientists are already seeing some evidence that the immunity provided by vaccines wont last forever. (The same is true for immunity gained by an infection.) But even a seemingly dramatic decline in antibody levels may leave enough to protect us.

The vaccines generated a vast excess of antibodies compared to whats needed, Dr. Otto Yang, an infectious disease specialist at ULCA, told my colleague Deborah Netburn. Even 10% of the original antibody level is probably a lot.

The second reason for a booster is that a new coronavirus variant comes along thats able to evade the antibodies your body produced in response to the initial vaccine.

So far, the two-dose vaccines being administered in the United States have held up well against the coronavirus variants now in circulation, said Dr. Kawsar Talaat, associate professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Only time will tell if that remains true, she said.

We want to hear from you. Email us your coronavirus questions, and well do our best to answer them. Wondering if your questions already been answered? Check out our archive here.

Chuck Laird, co-owner of a Shell station in Point Roberts, Wash., tosses a pizza for a customer.

(Richard Read / Los Angeles Times)

Chuck Laird, the man in the photo above, is tossing pizza dough in the air. What does that have to do with the pandemic?

If it werent for the coronavirus, Laird would be selling gasoline to customers of his Shell station in Point Roberts, Wash. But theres not much demand for fuel in the 4.8-square-mile town, which is surrounded by water on three sides and borders Canada on the fourth.

U.S. and Canadian officials closed the international border on March 21, 2020. American residents of tiny Point Roberts were suddenly stranded left without access to their doctors, schools and all kinds of services they once took for granted.

As the pandemic wore on, about 300 of Point Roberts residents decamped for the U.S. mainland, but 800 stayed behind, figuring the border was bound to reopen soon. So far, that hasnt happened.

Dont miss this tale by my colleague Richard Read about the Americans marooned on a virtual island.

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Need more vaccine help? Talk to your healthcare provider. Call the states COVID-19 hotline at (833) 422-4255. And consult our county-by-county guides to getting vaccinated.

Practice social distancing using these tips, and wear a mask or two.

Watch for symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and loss of taste or smell. Heres what to look for and when.

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Coronavirus Today: China rewrites the history of COVID-19 - Los Angeles Times

Oregon health officials on Saturday announced 227 new coronavirus cases and two COVID-19 deaths.

The announcement came a day after Gov. Kate Brown said the state would be lifting COVID-19 restrictions, announcing an end to most mask mandates, social distancing requirements and capacity no later than June 30.

Federal rules requiring masks on public transit, in airports and medical facilities would remain in place, however.

Vaccines: Oregon reported 12,748 newly administered doses, which includes 6,037 Friday and the remainder from previous days.

Where the new cases are by county: Baker (4), Benton (4), Clackamas (24), Clatsop (2), Columbia (6), Coos (5), Crook (1), Curry (2), Deschutes (8), Douglas (12), Hood River (3), Jackson (14), Jefferson (2), Josephine (3), Klamath (1), Lake (1), Lane (13), Lincoln (6), Linn (20), Malheur (1), Marion (28), Morrow (4), Multnomah (35), Polk (4), Tillamook (2), Umatilla (4), Union (1), Wallowa (1), Wasco (1), Washington (11) and Yamhill (4).

Who died: Oregons 2,762nd death connected to the coronavirus was an 86-year-old Marion County man who tested positive June 19 and died June 24 at Salem Hospital. He had underlying medical conditions.

Oregons 2,763rd death connected to the coronavirus was a 72-year-old Harney County man who tested positive June 13 and died the next day at Boise VA Medical Center. He had underlying medical conditions.

Hospitalizations: 145 people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 are hospitalized, down six from Friday. That includes 35 people in intensive care, up three from Friday.

Since it began: Oregon has reported 207,998 confirmed or presumed infections and 2,763 deaths, among the lowest per capita numbers in the nation. To date, the state has reported 4,363,011 vaccine doses administered, fully vaccinating 2,139,376 people and partially vaccinating 238,062 people.

-- Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale

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Coronavirus in Oregon: 227 new cases and 2 deaths - OregonLive

A star NBA player, the U.S. Open golf champion and a Ugandan Olympic coach have something in common that is creating a new headache for sports organizers: they tested positive for the novel coronavirus after being vaccinated.

Throughout the pandemic, athletes have been the most tested population on the planet, sometimes providing vivid examples of emerging theoriesand sometimes helping prove them.

Now these athletes are showing that while vaccines are exceptionally effective in preventing death and severe illness from the coronavirus and its known variants, some are far from foolproof in preventing infection altogether.

Most of the athletes with so-called breakthrough infections are asymptomatic. The infections wouldnt have been noticed except for the fact that people who work in sports are among the last being tested intensely for the virus.

These surprising positive tests are a problem for the hosts of large events. In the case of the Olympics, they could trigger an outbreak in the surrounding Japanese population or beyond, to any of the 200 participating nationsin addition to creating chaos in competitions.

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Why Vaccinated Athletes Are Testing Positive for Coronavirus - The Wall Street Journal

Florida officials reported 11,873 coronavirus cases over the seven-day period from June 18 to June 24.

That brings the total number of cases up to 2,321,929 since the pandemics first two cases in Florida were reported on March 1, 2020, nearly 16 months ago.

The state added 217 deaths since the previous weeks report, bringing the total statewide number of deaths since the pandemic began to 37,772. It can take officials up to two weeks to confirm and report a coronavirus-related death.

The Florida Department of Health announced earlier this month ago that it would no longer release daily COVID-19 data. Instead, it is now releasing a weekly report every Friday, but has withheld some information that was publicly available before.

As of June 4, the state no longer reports non-resident vaccinations, coronavirus cases and fatalities. The Florida Department of Health has declined repeated requests to provide non-resident data to the Tampa Bay Times.

Florida is transitioning into the next phase of the COVID-19 response, and has shifted reporting to parallel this, the agency said in an email to the Times. Among reportable diseases monitored by the department, such as HIV and Hepatitis, it is not typical to calculate cases for non-Florida residents.

Florida is the only state that updates its coronavirus caseloads and data once a week. Although weekly reports can be more reliable than daily updates, experts warn that infrequent data updates may delay identification of emerging trends.

Vaccinations: Florida administered 281,042 vaccines in the past week, nearly 100,000 fewer doses than the week before. The number of first doses administered dropped to 116,089, the third consecutive week that first-dose vaccines have fallen.

So far 57 percent of Florida residents age 12 and up have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the state. Thats a slight rise from 56 percent last week.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 63.8 percent of Floridas adults age 18 and up have been vaccinated. President Joe Biden has set a goal of getting 70 percent of U.S. adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4, but the White House says the nation will likely fall short.

More than 83 percent of Floridians over the age of 65 and 73 percent of those ages 60 to 64 have been vaccinated, according to state data. Meanwhile, 33 percent of Floridians between the age of 12 and 30 have been vaccinated.

In Hillsborough County, 52 percent of residents age 12 and up have been vaccinated; in Pinellas, 56 percent; in Pasco, 53 percent; in Manatee, 55 percent; in Polk, 49 percent; in Hernando, 47 percent; and in Citrus, 50 percent.

Variants: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention June 19 estimate suggests the Delta variant accounts for 20 percent of new cases in the U.S., more than double the last projection on June 5.

Experts warn that the highly infectious strain may soon become the dominant variant in the nation. It accounted for 2.3 percent of the states COVID-19 cases as of June 5.

Positivity: Floridas positivity rate rose to 3.8 percent in the past week, up from 3.3 percent the week before.

Before reopening, states should maintain a positivity rate of 5 percent or less for at least two weeks, according to the World Health Organization. A positivity rate of 5 percent or less indicates testing is widespread enough to capture mild, asymptomatic and negative cases.

In the Tampa Bay area, the positivity rate was 4.2 percent in Hillsborough, 3 percent in Pinellas, 4.4 percent in Polk, 3.3 percent in Manatee, 4.2 percent in Pasco, 4.4 percent in Hernando, and 3.9 percent in Citrus.

Hospitalizations: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 246 confirmed COVID-19 patients were admitted to Florida hospitals every day from June 17 to June 23, on average.

The federal agency no longer reports detailed hospitalization data by county and neither does the state.

Local numbers: Tampa Bay added 1,981 cases in the past week, bringing the total number of cases to 406,787.

As of Thursdays count, Hillsborough added 738 new cases, Pinellas had 347 cases, Polk had 402 cases, Manatee had 132 cases, Pasco had 235 cases, Hernando had 84 cases, and Citrus had 43 cases.

The state no longer reports deaths by county. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Hillsborough, Pinellas, Polk, Manatee, Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties each recorded fewer than 10 confirmed COVID-19 related deaths in the past week. The federal agency does not report exact deaths by county when the count is under 10.

CORONAVIRUS IN FLORIDA: Find the latest numbers for your county, city or zip code.

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A sign urges people to get tested for a COVID-19 variant in Blackburn, England. The U.K. is experiencing a surge in the delta variant, which was first identified in India. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A sign urges people to get tested for a COVID-19 variant in Blackburn, England. The U.K. is experiencing a surge in the delta variant, which was first identified in India.

Each week, we answer frequently asked questions about life during the coronavirus crisis. If you have a question you'd like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the subject line: "Weekly Coronavirus Questions." See an archive of our FAQs here.

I've been vaccinated. Do I need to worry about variants?

That depends on a few things including your personal risk tolerance.

But first off, know that your vaccine is quite valuable. The COVID-19 vaccines are expected to be protective against the new virus variants, according to the World Health Organization.

Exactly how much the various vaccines protect against the delta variant the newest form of the virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dubbed a "variant of concern" is still somewhat of a guessing game. But if you're fully vaccinated (two weeks after your second dose) the odds are highly favorable that you won't get a breakthrough COVID-19 infection, and even better that if you are one of the unfortunate few, you won't get a severe case.

"At least for those vaccines approved in Europe and North America, in the case of the variants, these seem to be effective in preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death," says Dr. Jerome Kim, director general of the International Vaccine Institute.

The alpha variant, first identified in the U.K., is around 50% more transmissible than the original form of the virus. The Pfizer vaccine was found to be 90% effective against the most severe forms of infection (i.e., those resulting in hospitalization or death) caused by this variant. That study also showed high protection against the beta variant, first spotted in South Africa.

A study from Public Health England, an agency of the Department of Health and Social Care in the U.K., found that AstraZeneca also showed a high level of effectiveness against alpha, with an 86% reduction of hospitalizations. The study has not yet been published.

The delta variant is expected to overtake the alpha variant as the main form of the virus in the United States. More than 20% of new cases in the U.S. are already due to the delta variant.

Since the delta variant is even more transmissible about 60% higher than alpha that's what people in the U.S. will be at highest risk of soon. It's part of the reason the CDC upgraded delta from a variant of interest to a variant of concern.

Experts are also concerned because therapies such as monoclonal antibodies and convalescent serum don't seem to work as well against this variant, says Dr. Jill Weatherhead, assistant professor of adult and pediatric infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine.

As for the vaccines, one study of the delta variant in Scotland from the University of Edinburgh found that while the variant was associated with a doubling in the risk of hospitalization in those infected in the region, the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines offered a 79% and 60% protection, respectively, against infection two weeks after the second dose. And a study from Public Health England showed that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the delta variant.

As for other vaccines, David Montefiori, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development at Duke University Medical Center, is optimistic. Based on research he has conducted that has not yet been published, including the Moderna vaccine, he says that "delta does not look like it will be much of a threat to vaccines."

And Weatherhead has this to say about Johnson & Johnson's effectiveness for the delta variant: "We just don't have the data, but that doesn't mean it's not efficacious. We know it works against [other variants]. We're going to have breakthrough infections, but the vaccines really prevent severe disease and death."

Just keep in mind that vaccines aren't effective the second you get them, she adds.

"The problem is you're really not protected until you've gotten both doses of the vaccines and you've waited two weeks afterward," she says. "So you're still vulnerable in between. That's why it's so important to get vaccinated now, before [delta] becomes the dominant variant circulating."

Think about the vaccine as a really good raincoat, suggests Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University. "If it's drizzling out, you're not going to get wet, and even if it's raining hard, you probably won't get wet. But if there's a hurricane or a thunderstorm, there's a chance you'll get wet."

In that case, people who really don't want to get wet might want an additional layer of protection. Other people may not mind getting damp.

Both of those are reasonable conclusions, Wen says. If the delta or "delta plus," an even newer mutation just discovered in India turns out to be a thunderstorm in your area, some vaccinated people may want to rely on the same precautions we've adopted throughout the pandemic: masking up, physical distancing when you're with unvaccinated people and getting tested when traveling upon arrival and departure to make sure you aren't carrying any variants into or out of your destination.

Just like stormy weather, outbreaks of COVID-19 due to the delta variant will likely be localized. But unlike a weather forecast, it's easy to predict where they'll happen: wherever there are high rates of unvaccinated people, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health has said.

Sheila Mulrooney Eldred is a freelance health journalist in Minneapolis. She's written about COVID-19 for many publications, including Medscape, Kaiser Health News, Science News for Students and The Washington Post. More at sheilaeldred.pressfolios.com. On Twitter: @milepostmedia.

Pranav Baskar is a freelance journalist who regularly answers coronavirus FAQs for NPR.

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Will My COVID-19 Vaccine Protect Me From Variants? : Goats and Soda - NPR

Here are the latest local COVID-19 statistics.

Dutchess County:54 reported Saturday, down 70 from the previous day.

Ulster County: 17 reported Friday, unchanged from the previous day. (Ulster does not provide case data on Saturdays.)

Ulster County: 0.4%.

Dutchess County: 0.31%.

Ulster County: 15,225 confirmed cases, 14,942 recoveries, 264 deaths. (No new deaths were reported Friday.)

Dutchess County: 29,500 confirmed cases, 446 deaths. (No new deaths were reported Saturday.)

Ulster County: 57.5% fully vaccinated, 62.8% with at least one dose of a two-dose regimen, 72.6% of 18+ population with at least one dose.

Dutchess County: 52.1% fully vaccinated, 57.5% with at least one dose of a two-dose regimen, 67.4% of 18+ population with at least one dose.

Appointments:vaccinateulster.com, bit.ly/dut-vax, bit.ly/ny-vaxme.

New York state on Saturday reported no new cases of COVID-19 in area school districts.

For online local coverage related to the coronavirus, go tobit.ly/COVID19DF.

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Active cases of coronavirus drop sharply in Dutchess County - The Daily Freeman

Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who werent vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day now down to under 300 could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine.

An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows that breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations. Thats about 0.1%.

And only about 150 of the more than 18,000 COVID-19 deaths in May were in fully vaccinated people. That translates to about 0.8%, or five deaths per day on average.

The AP analyzed figures provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.

Among them: Only about 45 states report breakthrough infections, and some are more aggressive than others in looking for such cases. So the data probably understates such infections, CDC officials said.

Still, the overall trend that emerges from the data echoes what many health care authorities are seeing around the country and what top experts are saying.

Earlier this month, Andy Slavitt, a former adviser to the Biden administration on COVID-19, suggested that 98% to 99% of the Americans dying of the coronavirus are unvaccinated.

And CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Tuesday that the vaccine is so effective that nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable. She called such deaths particularly tragic.

Deaths in the U.S. have plummeted from a peak of more than 3,400 day on average in mid-January, one month into the vaccination drive.

About 63% of all vaccine-eligible Americans those 12 and older have received at least one dose, and 53% are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. While vaccine remains scarce in much of the world, the U.S. supply is so abundant and demand has slumped so dramatically that shots sit unused.

Ross Bagne, a 68-year-old small-business owner in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was eligible for the vaccine in early February but didnt get it. He died June 4, infected and unvaccinated, after spending more than three weeks in the hospital, his lungs filling with fluid. He was unable to swallow because of a stroke.

He never went out, so he didnt think he would catch it, said his grieving sister, Karen McKnight. She wondered: Why take the risk of not getting vaccinated?

The preventable deaths will continue, experts predict, with unvaccinated pockets of the nation experiencing outbreaks in the fall and winter. Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said modeling suggests the nation will hit 1,000 deaths per day again next year.

In Arkansas, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, with only about 33% of the population fully protected, cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising.

It is sad to see someone go to the hospital or die when it can be prevented, Gov. Asa Hutchinson tweeted as he urged people to get their shots.

In Seattles King County, the public health department found only three deaths during a recent 60-day period in people who were fully vaccinated. The rest, some 95% of 62 deaths, had had no vaccine or just one shot.

Those are all somebodys parents, grandparents, siblings and friends, said Dr. Mark Del Beccaro, who helps lead a vaccination outreach program in King County. Its still a lot of deaths, and theyre preventable deaths.

In the St. Louis area, more than 90% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 have not been vaccinated, said Dr. Alex Garza, a hospital administrator who directs a metropolitan-area task force on the outbreak.

The majority of them express some regret for not being vaccinated, Garza said. Thats a pretty common refrain that were hearing from patients with COVID.

The stories of unvaccinated people dying may convince some people they should get the shots, but young adults the group least likely to be vaccinated may be motivated more by a desire to protect their loved ones, said David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington Universitys school of public health in the nations capital.

Others need paid time off to get the shots and deal with any side effects, Michaels said.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration this month began requiring health care employers, including hospitals and nursing homes, to provide such time off. But Michaels, who headed OSHA under President Barack Obama, said the agency should have gone further and applied the rule to meat and poultry plants and other food operations as well as other places with workers at risk.

Bagne, who lived alone, ran a business helping people incorporate their companies in Wyoming for the tax advantages. He was winding down the business, planning to retire, when he got sick, emailing his sister in April about an illness that had left him dizzy and disoriented.

Whatever it was. That bug took a LOT out of me, he wrote.

As his health deteriorated, a neighbor finally persuaded him to go to the hospital.

Why was the messaging in his state so unclear that he didnt understand the importance of the vaccine? He was a very bright guy, his sister said. I wish hed gotten the vaccine, and Im sad he didnt understand how it could prevent him from getting COVID.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated - The Associated Press