Featured COVID Headlines
Long COVID risk lower with Omicron than Delta, study finds – Medical News Today
New research has compared the risk of getting long COVID from two different SARS-CoV-2 variants, the virus that causes COVID-19. Researchers from King’s College London recently found that people with Omicron infections are 20-50% less likely to develop long COVID symptoms than those who had the Delta variant.
How to Control the ‘Information Fire Hose’ of the Pandemic – Medical Page Today
You want to know how bad communication has been throughout the pandemic? In February I appeared on the podcast “Medicine and the Machine,” with host Eric Topol, MD. When it came time to talk about pandemic communication, he referred to it as a “historic botch job.”
Five COVID Numbers That Don’t Make Sense Anymore – The Atlantic
The past two and a half years have been a global crash course in infection prevention. They’ve also been a crash course in basic math: Since the arrival of this coronavirus, people have been asked to count the meters and feet that separate one nose from the next; they’ve tabulated the days that distance them from their most recent vaccine dose, calculated the minutes they can spend unmasked, and added up the hours that have passed since their last negative test.
Emerging Infectious Disease Headlines
Britain Declares National Incident After Poliovirus Found in London – NYT
No cases of polio have been identified so far, but health officials urged those who were not fully immunized to seek vaccines immediately.
Monkeypox
Scientists Zero In on Origins of the Monkeypox Outbreak – NYT
Even as cases rise, genetic analysis suggests that the virus has been silently circulating in people since 2018. When the first monkeypox cases were identified in early May, European health officials were stumped. The virus was not known to spread easily among people, let alone infect dozens — and soon hundreds — of young men.
U.S. CDC confirms evidence of local monkeypox transmission – Reuters
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said there was evidence of local transmission of monkeypox, in addition to reports of cases where people had traveled abroad.
HHS Expanding Monkeypox Testing Capacity to Five Commercial Laboratory Companies – HHS
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), began shipping orthopoxvirus tests to five commercial laboratory companies, including the nation’s largest reference laboratories, to quickly increase monkeypox testing capacity and access in every community during the ongoing monkeypox outbreak. The companies include Aegis Science, Labcorp, Mayo Clinic Laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and Sonic Healthcare.
Squirrels Could Make Monkeypox a Forever Problem – The Atlantic
If the virus finds a new animal host, it could settle in for the long run—and cause more outbreaks in the future. In the summer of 2003, just weeks after an outbreak of monkeypox sickened about 70 people across the Midwest, Mark Slifka visited “the super-spreader,” he told me, “who infected half of Wisconsin’s cases.”
Vaccine Headlines
Second COVID Booster Protected Seniors in Long-Term Care – Medical Page Today
A fourth dose, or second booster, of Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine (Comirnaty) protected seniors living in long-term care from the most severe outcomes during the Omicron wave, despite showing a more limited effect against infection, according to prospective data from Israel.
Moderna CEO says new COVID-19 variant shot will be ready by August – CBS News
Moderna expects a new COVID-19 vaccine the drugmaker is developing that it says offers protection against the Omicron variant of the virus to be ready for public distribution by August. The company has been manufacturing shots of the vaccine, called mRNA-1273.214, ahead of it getting regulatory approval in order to be ready for the fall and winter, when health experts say COVID-19 could flare.
What to Know About the Covid Vaccine for Little Kids – NYT
Millions of U.S. parents — including many of my friends with children under 5 — were crossing their fingers again this week, hoping the vaccines would soon be available for younger age groups. An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Wednesday to recommend that the agency authorize the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for use in very young children. On Friday and Saturday, advisers to the C.D.C. met to discuss and voted yes unanimously.
Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study – The Lancet
The first COVID-19 vaccine outside a clinical trial setting was administered on Dec 8, 2020. To ensure global vaccine equity, vaccine targets were set by the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility and WHO. However, due to vaccine shortfalls, these targets were not achieved by the end of 2021. We aimed to quantify the global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination programmes.
Clinical Considerations
1 in 5 U.S. Adults Who Got COVID-19 Now Have Long COVID, Data Find – Time
About 7.5% of U.S. adults—roughly 20 million people—are currently living with Long COVID symptoms, according to new federal data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
Long-Lasting COVID Symptoms Prevalent in Children – MedPageToday
Children and adolescents with COVID had more prevalent long-lasting symptoms than those never infected with SARS-CoV-2, the Long COVID Kids DK study showed.
Official Reporting for June 24, 2022
World Health Organization
Weekly Epi Update June 22, 2022(latest release)
New Cases: 732,529 ⬆︎
Confirmed Cases: 539,119,771
Deaths: 86,757,771
Johns Hopkins
Confirmed Cases: 542,190,733
Deaths: 6,326,295
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Total cases: 86,512,787 (+97,430 New Cases) ⬇︎
Total deaths: 1,010,089 (+255 New Deaths) ⬇︎
Science and Tech
Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 appear to escape antibody responses among both people who had previous Covid-19 infection and those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted, according to new data from researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, of Harvard Medical School.
Hunting for the Immune Cells That Lead to Severe COVID-19 – SciTechDaily
University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering researchers point to macrophages. When a virus makes its way into a person’s body, one of the immune system’s first responders is a set of pathogen-removal cells called macrophages. But macrophages are diverse; they don’t all target viruses in the same way.
The results of that research are now online in the New England Journal of Medicine and in the June 23 print edition of the journal. Co-study leads Erin Scherer, PhD, DPhil, assistant professor of medicine in Emory’s division of infectious diseases, and Anne Piantadosi, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and physician in the Emory division of infectious diseases, chose to study patients with prolonged infections because the longer infection period provides an opportunity to examine how the virus mutates over time.
Psychological and Sociological Impact
Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Complications of COVID-19 – Psychiatric Times
Avindra Nath, MD, a neurologist in Bethesda, Maryland, discussed the neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 at the 2022 American Psychiatric Association (APA) Annual Meeting, beginning with the recent statistics related to COVID-19. To date, there have been 100 million infections and 1 million deaths in the United States alone, with 500 million infections and 50 million deaths globally.
Published Research
Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study – The Lancet
Hospitalization and Emergency Department Encounters for COVID-19 After Paxlovid Treatment — California, December 2021–May 2022 – CDC MMWR
Neutralization Escape by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Subvariants BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5 – NEJM
Long COVID symptoms in SARS-CoV-2-positive children aged 0–14 years and matched controls in Denmark (LongCOVIDKidsDK): a national, cross-sectional study – Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. – The Lancet
Misinformation, Disinformation, and Conspiracy Theories
We Can’t Let Monkeypox Turn into a Repeat of COVID – Scientific American
The global monkeypox outbreak is a test for world leaders. We are still in early days, and policy makers have a small window of opportunity to act quickly and put the right measures in place to stop monkeypox from turning into another disaster. They should strengthen virus surveillance and work on deploying decentralized, privacy-preserving and encrypted contact tracing to avoid data breaches and to ensure trust within their communities. There are many unknowns about this outbreak, and political leaders should avoid making sweeping statements; instead, they should raise public awareness based on information scrutinized by science experts. They should also be prepared to combat the tidal wave of a possible “misinfodemic.”
Coping with COVID
