Protect yourself, other holiday travelers, by masking up on public transit, CDC says
As the last week before Christmas counts down, federal health officials are dispensing pandemic safety advice for travelers, urging “actions to help prevent spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory infections.” That includes wearing a high-quality mask in “indoor public transportation settings.” The guidance Monday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also urges travelers to: Be up to date on COVID-19 vaccines, including an updated booster; get a flu vaccine at least weeks 2 weeks before travel; practice good cough and sneeze etiquette by covering your mouth and nose with a tissue or your elbow; and delay travel on public transportation when you’re sick. Air travel levels this holiday season have been approaching what they were in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, security checkpoint statistics from the government show.
East Bay university cites COVID fallout in closure decision
Declining enrollment in pandemic times was cited Monday as a contributing factor, along with soaring administrative costs, in the closure of venerable 154-year-old Holy Names University in Oakland. The school is preparing to shut down at the end of the spring semester, and had issued advance warnings Dec. 1 of possible mass layoffs. “Five years ago we decided to build a business plan and use it to secure long-term financing. We were plugging along and hitting milestones, and then COVID-19 hit,” said the school’s board chairperson Steven Borg. While the university had a strong five-year strategic business plan, Borg said, it was unable to withstand the intensifying challenges of COVID-19 and a turbulent economy, both of which derailed students’ academic career. Read more about Holy Names University’s decision to shut its doors.
FDA looks at updating shots and boosters to attack evolving coronavirus
Federal regulators are considering whether today’s COVID-19 vaccines are sufficiently protective or may need updating to fight emerging generations of the coronavirus. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee plans to meet Jan. 26, along with CDC and National Institutes of Health officials to consider “whether and how the composition of currently available primary vaccines should be modified,” and whether booster shot composition and schedules should be adjusted to attack 0evolutionary virus strains. “COVID-19 vaccines remain our best available protection against COVID-19, particularly the most devastating consequences of the disease, including hospitalization and death,” an FDA release stated. Scientists have learned that vaccine protection wanes over time, and breakthrough infections occur as the virus mutates into new variants. “Therefore, it’s important to continue discussions about the optimal composition of COVID-19 vaccines for primary and booster vaccination, as well as the optimal interval for booster vaccination,” FDA’s statement said. At the meeting, manufacturers also will present their timeline needs relating to vaccine composition changes. After evaluation of the science and issues, “the FDA will consider the most efficient and transparent process to use for selection of strains for inclusion in the primary and booster vaccines.”
Child deaths soared in pandemic’s first year, Black children disproportionately victimized
As the pandemic spread in 2020, the number of American children who were killed rose precipitously, as did the number injured by firearms, the New York Times reports, citing two scientific studies on Monday. A majority of the deaths were among Black children, and almost half were among children in the southern United States. TheTimes reported last week that gun homicides involving children had increased by more than 73% since 2018 and that the disparity in risk between Black children and others was rapidly widening. The rate of child homicide in the United States rose by about 28 percent in 2020, from 2.2 per 100,000 in 2019 to 2.8 per 100,000 in 2020, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Homicide is the leading cause of death among American children, with about half caused by firearms. The authors of the new study published in JAMA Pediatrics, said the trend revealed a public health concern “warranting immediate attention.” Child homicides are “fundamentally preventable,” yet they are becoming “more common, not less,” an accompanying editorial said.
Dr. Wachter cites “confusion & misinformation” on myriad COVID topics
UCSF’s Dr. Bob Wachter, one of the Bay Area’s most prominent voices on COVID-19, says COVID confusion and misinformation abound, and he sees it focused largely around masks, vaccines, and home tests. In a lengthy, he told his many Twitter followersover the past couple of days that these “correct” statements are the starting point: “Wearing the wrong mask, or wearing a mask incorrectly, doesn’t work. Vaccination/boosters don’t work as well as they used to in preventing infection. Home tests yield more false negative results than they used to.”
But he warned against “unambiguously wrong” statements holding that masks, vaccines, booster shots, and home tests do not work. He called it “dangerous” to say that vaccines do not work. For masking he himself wears an N95 mask in crowded indoor spaces, Wachter said, adding that cloth masks work less well, “though better than nothing” — and a mask worn incorrectly, such as not covering the mouth and nose snugly, will not work.
Regarding vaccination, Wachter noted that despite early evidence showing about 95% effectiveness of the primary shot series against infection, that protection has fallen over time “mostly owing to the immune-evasive properties of successive variants” of the coronavirus. “We now know that current boosters cut the risk of infection by only ~50%, and the effect only lasts for 2-3 months. That’s not nothing,” he wrote. But more important are studies showing the latest bivalent booster shot reduces hospitalization risk by about half across all age groups, he said.
As to home tests, he said, confusion often stems from the higher rate of false negatives seen with rapid antigen home tests than for the PCR tests. It owes to the fact that PCR tests can pick up tinier amounts of virus and thus detect COVID in a person longer. But antigen tests in fact are useful, and he often uses them himself, Wachter said.
