Vaccination prevention for Covid-19 deaths in the United States is simple: Do you know when to go get your vaccine and when to get it before the holidays?
An analysis published this week found that if more people in the United States get their booster by the end of the year, about 90,000 Covid-19 deaths could be prevented this fall and winter.
The message is simple: Don’t wait. Get a vaccine. Don’t wait to get your vaccine, get it before Halloween so you are ready for Thanksgiving and the holidays.
“The most important thing every American can do to reduce their likelihood of having significant, preventable health issues in the next three to six months is to go get an updated Covid vaccine,” Jha said. “Beyond that, we need to make sure that everyone over the age of 50 or otherwise with high-risk conditions gets treatments if they do get infected. We have treatments widely available.”
When people head indoors for holiday festivities, respiratory viruses are likely to spread quickly. There are rising Covid-19 cases in the UK and Europe that may be indicative of what to expect in the United States. Although the Omicron BA.5 subvariant continues to dominate globally, other variants are beginning to spread, too.
If you factor in the cases of long Covid that vaccines likely prevented, the savings may be much higher, according to Alison Galvani, one of the study authors.
Preventing Covid in the U.S. Vaccination Rates from the Delta and Omicron surges in the December 2017 Data Release
The study looked at the data of 26.8 million older Americans and others who had Enrolled in a Medicare fee forservice health plan. It included data from the Delta and Omicron surges last year.
With this report we hope to encourage Americans to get their vaccinations up to date and prepared for the fall and winter.
The administration still encourages people to get the updated Covid-19 boosters for ages 12 and up. Moderna and Pfizer have asked the FDA for approval to sell new boosters for children as young as 5 years old.
This is the last newsletter I will publish before I start a book leave. I’ll be back in late January. I look forward to reading the work of the other Times journalists until then, but they will also be writing The Morning.
A large chunk of deaths are preventable with Paxlovid alone, according to the White House Covid response coordinators. If every American 50 and above with Covid received a course of either Paxlovid or a treatment known as monoclonal antibodies, the daily death could fall from 400 to 50, according to his predictions.
The warning echoes that of some other experts who anticipate a rise in cases in the coming months, while other modelling suggests that infections will recede in the near future.
“We are seeing this increase in Europe, and Europe tends to precede us by about four to six weeks,” Jha told NPR. “And so it stands to reason that as we get into November, December, maybe January, we are going to see an increase in infections across much of the country.”
Covid cases us vaccination holidays-white-house-house. If you’re allergic to BA.5 or BA.2, get it now
There are at least three subvariants that we’re tracking very, very closely, all of which appear to have a lot more immune escape. Now, the good news about them is while they seem to do a better job of escaping immunity, they are derived from BA.5 or BA.2, its closely related cousin, and the new vaccines we have, which protect you against BA.5 should really continue to work really quite well against these new variants. We don’t know all of the details. We are studying that right now. There is one more reason for people to get this vaccine.
I’ve been recommending to all my family and friends that they get it before Halloween. I mean, go get it now. If you get it before Halloween, you’re going to have good protection as you get into Thanksgiving, as well as the holidays. It is not possible to time certain things too tightly. So in general, my recommendation is go get it, go get it soon. Don’t wait until Halloween to get it.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1128519924/covid-cases-us-vaccine-holidays-white-house
I Understand the Fatigue of the Early 1900s and the Implications for the Future of the U.S. Chronic Influenza
I would say I understand the fatigue. You know, we’re now at a point where COVID doesn’t have to rule our lives. We don’t have to take extraordinary precautions the way we did two years ago or even a year ago. It’s now a once-a-year shot for most Americans. I have gotten a flu shot for at least 20 years. It’s not a big deal. I go get my flu shot every fall It protects me in the fall and winter. For a lot of Americans, it’s a once-a-year shot for the vaccine, and that’s what we are in in relation to COVID.
For some high risk people, I am very clear that they may need a shot more than once a year. It’s possible that they need one again in the spring. But for a majority of people, we’re at a point where it’s a once-a-year shot, it’s not that inconvenient, not that big a deal, and it’s a great way to protect yourself.
One answer is that we want to not see those deaths at all, which would make them seem like a type of background noise or faded wallpaper. We don’t need to know who is dying or why because we don’t want to see how many people die from Covid-19 every year. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.
Many of us were turned off by the idea of disproportionate risks to the very old being the reason not to worry much about limiting spread of the H1N1 strain. The country as a whole may be ageist, without all that much empathy for the well-being of octogenarians and nonagenarians. But hearing the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro or the Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick so blithely dismissing the deaths of older adults in 2020 probably made the whole subject seem considerably more taboo to the rest of us than it might’ve been otherwise.
A computer model of infectious disease transmission and its public use: How many shots did the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis have helped?
Researchers from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health created a computer model of disease transmission, incorporating demographic information, people’s risk factors, and the dynamics of infections, to determine how much shots have helped.
“Given the emergency of highly transmissible variants and immune-evading variants like Omicron, it is a remarkable success and an extraordinary achievement,” said Galvani, founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis.
Public transportation passengers should be masked according to the CDC. It also suggests wearing one in other public settings in communities where there is a high level of transmission. People who are at high risk of severe illness should wear masks even in areas with only medium community levels.