New dashboards track combined U.S. virus trends, underscore downward trend
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday launched two new dashboards to track respiratory virus trends nationally. The Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network tracks laboratory-confirmed hospitalizations associated with COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). It uses data from a network of acute care hospitals in 13 states covering more than 29 million people and includes an estimated 8-10% of the U.S. population. The second site provides a combined view of emergency department visit data for multiple respiratory conditions. Both dashboards show that virus-related admissions for the season peaked in early December and are currently on a downward trend.
Doctors in China discouraged from recording virus deaths, report finds
Physicians in China said they have been instructed to “try not to” report COVID-induced respiratory failure on death certificates, according to a report from Reuters. A government notice, obtained by the international news agency, tells doctors that if a patient had an underlying condition, that should be named as the cause of death. If COVID-19 is believed to be the sole cause of death, the certificate must be reviewed by their superiors, who will arrange for two levels of “expert consultations” before a COVID death is confirmed, it said. Some relatives of people who have died of COVID say the disease did not appear on their death certificates, and patients have reported not being tested for coronavirus despite arriving with respiratory symptoms. “We have stopped classifying COVID deaths since the reopening in December,” said a doctor at a large public hospital in Shanghai. “It is pointless to do that because almost everyone is positive.”
Pregnant women who get COVID have significantly higher risk of dying, study finds
Pregnant women who are infected with the coronavirus face a sevenfold increased risk of death and also are at higher risk of being admitted to intensive care or getting pneumonia, according to new research published this week in BMJ Global Health. Babies born to women who got COVID during pregnancy also may have increased risk of needing intensive care, the study suggests. “This study provides the most comprehensive evidence to date suggesting that COVID-19 is a threat during pregnancy,” said lead author Emily R. Smith, an assistant professor of global health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. “Our findings underscore the importance of COVID-19 vaccination for all women of childbearing age.”
The study used data involving 13,000 pregnant women from 12 studies in a dozen countries, including the United States. Many pregnant women still hesitate to get vaccinated against the coronoavirus because they think they don’t need it or that it’s not safe, Smith said in a news release. But among other findings, the study said the virus leaves them with a risk of blood clots more than 5 times higher than women who don’t get infected.
Outbreak at Northwestern postpones game at Iowa
The men’s basketball game between Iowa and Northwestern scheduled for Wednesday in Iowa City will not be played due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols within the Northwestern program. The two schools will work with the Big Ten to reschedule the game, the Associated Press reports.
Tennis player Djokovic back at Australian Open, with no COVID shot required
Serbia’s Novak Djokovic was returning to action Tuesday at the Australian Open after being banned from the country a year ago because he was not vaccinated against COVID-19. The government has removed COVID restrictions for players and visitors. He has won 30 of his past 31 tournament matches dating to the end of last season. He is chasing his 10th trophy at the Australian Open and 22nd Grand Slam title overall. His first-round matchup Tuesday was against Spain’s Roberto Carballes Baena.
House commmittee to hold hearing Feb. 1 on COVID fraud
The newly Republican-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee will hold a Feb. 1 hearing into waste and fraud involving the millions of dollars in aid the government has dispensed to help people who lost work due to the pandemic, the Washington Post reports. The committee is seeking to learn how much was scammed from the unemployment insurance program. The new committee chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said the committee will be exploring “hundreds of billions of dollars in spending under the guise of pandemic relief.”
A Washington Post investigation found that government efforts to aid Americans who lost work during the pandemic opened the door for as much as $163 billion in fraudulent or mistaken payments.. Comer has sent a letters to the Labor Department and its top watchdogs, to understand the extent of the misspending, the Post reported, and he pressed California, New York and Pennsylvania to turn over records related to their administration of federal unemployment benefits, citing cases where states paid out benefits to suspected.
California health department seconds federal affirmation of bivalent booster shot
The California Department of Public Health said Sunday it concurs with the recommendation by federal regulators, made after a signal flagged a preliminary potential link between the bivalent booster and strokes, “that the updated bivalent vaccines are safe and effective against COVID-19.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said a vaccine safety monitoring system in late November had detected a signal that the updated Pfizer coronavirus vaccine booster was possibly linked to an increased risk of strokes in people 65 and older. But a deep dive into several large databases failed to confirm the preliminary information, leading federal health officials to conclude the risk was not validated and is very unlikely, the agencies said in a statement Friday.
“No change in vaccination practice is recommended given the totality of the evidence from the United States and other countries,” the California health department said in its Sunday statement, echoing the federal agencies’ statement that everyone should stay up to date on their COVID vaccinations. “Vaccines continue to be safe and effective, and they remain the most powerful weapon against hospitalization and serious illness due to COVID-19. Widespread vaccination is a major reason California is in a position to wind down emergency processes,” the state officials said.
The federal agencies said the preliminary signal involved Pfizer’s bivalent booster which targets the original coronavirus and omicron subvariants, and did not apply to Moderna’s updated booster. “Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD (Vaccine Safety Datalink) represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal,” the agencies said.
WHO asks China to keep the COVID information coming
The World Health Organization is appealing to China to continue releasing information about its wave of COVID-19 infections after the government announced nearly 60,000 deaths since early December following weeks of complaints it was failing be straightforward with the world. The announcement Saturday was the first official death toll since the ruling Communist Party abruptly dropped anti-virus restrictions in December despite a surge in infections that flooded hospitals. That left the WHO and other governments appealing for information, while the United States, South Korea and others imposed controls on visitors from China. The government said 5,503 people died of respiratory failure caused by COVID-19 and 54,435 were fatalities from cancer, heart disease and other ailments combined with COVID-19 between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis infected
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis said she has tested positive for COVID days after attending the Golden Globe Awards, and would miss out on attending Sunday’s Critics Choice awards and other events over the week. “F— COVID!” she wrote on Instagram, sharing photos of positive COVID tests and stating she would not be attending a round of awards events this past weekend. “I’m glad that there are all these home tests available so that I didn’t go to the @americanfilminstitute lunch and spread my germs.”
Holiday gatherings fall short of spurring expected surges in respiratory diseases
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that visits to doctors’ offices for flu-like illnesses fell for the sixth straight week, and the feared post-holiday surge of COVID didn’t really happen. Reports of RSV, a common cause of potentially serious illness for infants and older adults, are also down, and all are trending down overall, CDC said Friday.
In California the average number of reported COVID-19 cases peaked in early December and edged down since, while wastewater surveillance shows a plateauing trend over the most recent three-week period. Despite the earlier-than-usual flu season, hospital admissions fell sharply through December, with a small post-holiday bump. “We’ll see what happens moving forward,” Erica Pan, California’s state epidemiologist, told medical professionals during her monthly grand rounds discussion last week, saying officials are “hoping that maybe we are out of the worst of it” this flu season.
N.Y. considers options after court tosses out vaccination mandate for health workers
New York state’s Department of Health is “exploring its options” after a state Supreme Court judge struck down a statewide mandate that required health care workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Judge Gerard Neri’s ruling Friday said Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and the health department overstepped their authority by mandating a vaccine that’s not included in state public health law, the Syracuse Post-Standard reported. The judge He sided with Medical Professionals for Informed Consent, a group of medical workers impacted by the vaccination mandate. The mandate protects people most at-risk for serious symptoms and the people who care for them, the health agency said in a statement to the Associated Press. “The requirement is a critical public health tool,” the agency said in voicing its disagreement with the ruling.
