Category Archives: Covid-19

The Allegheny County Health Department reported 1,582 new COVID cases in the week ending April 27, marking four weeks of consecutive case increases.

The county health department reported 1,208 new infections for the previous week, which ended April 20. The current data shows the county now has roughly triple the 487 cases recorded at the beginning of April.

According to health department data, there were 72 hospitalizations in the last seven-day period, compared with 0 hospitalizations in the previous seven-day period. There were also three deaths due to COVID.

The seven-day moving average increased to 182.9 infections per day, up from 146.1 infections per day in the previous seven-day period.

Viral counts in county wastewater samples remained stable from the second to third week of April. The BA.2 subvariant accounted for about 85% of the detected virus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies the community level as low in Allegheny County.

About 72% of eligible people in the county are fully vaccinated.

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Allegheny County COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations on the rise - 90.5 WESA

Health personnel are preparing injection syringes with Covid-19 vaccine in 2021 in Copenhagen, Denmark. the country has now announced it will suspend its vaccination program and will review whether it's needed later in the year.

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Denmark has become the first country to halt its Covid vaccination program, saying it is doing so because the virus is now under control.

"Spring has arrived, vaccine coverage in the Danish population is high, and the epidemic has reversed," the Danish Health Authority said in a statement Wednesday.

"Therefore, the National Board of Health is now ending the broad vaccination efforts against Covid-19 for this season," it said. People will not be invited for vaccines from May 15, it said, although everyone will be able to finish their course of vaccination.

Denmark's Covid vaccination campaign began soon after Christmas in 2020. Some 4.8 million citizens have been vaccinated, the health authority said, with more than 3.6 million people receiving a booster shot.

At the same time, many people have been infected since the omicron variant became the dominant strain of the virus, it said, meaning immunity levels among the population are high.

"We are in a good place," Bolette Soborg, unit manager at the National Board of Health, commented.

"We have good control of the epidemic, which seems to be subsiding.Admission rates [to hospitals] are stable and we also expect them to fall soon.Therefore, we are rounding up the mass vaccination program against Covid-19."

Soborg insisted that the public can still be vaccinated over the spring and summer if they want, and that vaccination sites will remain open around the country.

He added that immunization was still recommended to people for whom Covid poses a heightened risk, such as those over the age of 40 and for unvaccinated pregnant women. "We also continue to recommend that you complete your started vaccination course," he said.

Denmark's move to suspend its vaccination program comes as the Covid situation around the world remains mixed. Europe and the U.S. have abandoned most Covid restrictions, but China is still imposing (or considering) lockdowns as the virus spreads in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

Far from scrapping its vaccination program altogether, however, the Danish Health and Medicines Authority said there will probably be a need to vaccinate against Covid-19 again in the fall as the virus continues to mutate.

New variants have emerged over the course of the pandemic, which is now into its third year. These have eroded the efficacy of the Covid vaccines that were developed in record time in 2020, although the shots authorized for use in the West remain effective at preventing serious infection, hospitalization and death from Covid-19.

With the vaccination program likely to restart in a few months' time, Denmark's health experts will be looking at who should be vaccinated, when the shots should be given and which vaccines should be used.

The Danish Health and Medicines Authority said it would continue to follow the development of the epidemic closely, and is ready to restart vaccination efforts again if there is a need to immunize additional target groups before the fall.

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Denmark becomes the first country to halt its Covid vaccination program - CNBC

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As COVID-19 testing sites close and experts warn that case numbers are capturing a small minority of infections, many public health experts are turning to a newer source that might tell us whats going on with the virus: our poop.

In the past two years, scientists have developed systems that can detect COVID-19 in our wastewater. This is a great early warning system, since the virus can show up in peoples waste days before they begin to experience symptoms or are able to get tested. Its also less biased than case data: Not everyone can find a COVID-19 test and not every positive result will get reported but everybody poops.

As with so many other COVID-19 metrics, however, interpreting wastewater data is not as simple as it seems. Before COVID-19, this type of data hadnt been used to track respiratory viruses. This means the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has little established infrastructure to build upon. The agency is attempting to standardize reporting from researchers across the country, many of whom have different water sampling methods. Plus, the state and local health officials who cite wastewater as a potential replacement for underreported case numbers arent used to interpreting data from the environment, which has unique caveats and requires a learning curve for those used to looking at numbers from hospitals and health clinics.

The Documenting COVID-19 project surveyed 19 state and local health agencies, as well as scientists who work on wastewater sampling, to learn about the challenges theyre facing. We found that many states are months away, if not longer, from being able to use wastewater data to guide public health decisions, even as the rise of an omicron subvariant, BA.2, looms. Meanwhile, the CDCs highly shared wastewater surveillance dashboard is a work in progress, and is difficult to interpret for users who might hope to follow the trends in their areas.

People are saying, We cant trust the [PCR] testing data now, and shifting to rely more on data from wastewater, said Steve Balogh, research scientist at the Metropolitan Council, a local agency in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, metro area that started wastewater surveillance in late 2020.

But health departments cant just flick a switch or gaze into the bottom of a toilet bowl and suddenly get comprehensive COVID-19 trends from wastewater. It takes time to set up sampling technology, understand the environment around a wastewater site and collect enough data for trends to be easily interpretable.

Some universities and their public health partners in California began investing in wastewater surveillance early in the pandemic. San Diego, for example, began wastewater sampling in fall 2020 as part of the campus reopening efforts for the University of California, San Diego, said Smruthi Karthikeyan, a postdoctoral researcher who works on the surveillance. It was later expanded to other parts of the city, including sites chosen to monitor COVID-19 at local public school districts.

Karthikeyans team uses machines called autosamplers, which are placed inside a sewage system and programmed to collect small volumes of water over time. These machines slowly collect a set amount of water over the course of 24 hours, which is a more thorough method than grabbing that volume all at once since it captures waste from the entire day. Researchers will then typically take a small portion of the wastewater, dilute it with other chemicals to preserve genetic material in the sample and run COVID-19 PCR tests to determine whether the virus is present. They might also run tests to look for specific variants, like omicron. Karthikeyans team uses robots to automate these analysis steps and cut down on errors; other researchers have more human-driven processes.

UCSD now processes about 200 wastewater samples daily, Karthikeyan said. When signs of COVID-19 show up in the wastewater for a particular site, another automated system alerts residents or workers of that site that they should get a PCR test. These alerts help contain outbreaks on UCSDs campus while minimizing testing costs.

People who receive the alerts feel like they have a reason to get tested, Karthikeyan said. And we get 98 percent compliance when we send out these emails to students. Other colleges and universities have similarly used wastewater to drive targeted testing.

The San Diego wastewater surveillance network also directs COVID-19 precautions at the UCSD Health system, with tiered guidance based on wastewater data (and a couple of other metrics) telling workers when they need to mask, reduce their in-person work hours or take other precautions. In March, just one week after the health system started using this guidance, wastewater trends prompted a return to mandatory masking.

But many places dont have the same resources to set up wastewater surveillance or peg public health actions to data as San Diego does. When asked if he knew of other institutions using wastewater to guide their safety measures, UCSD Health chief medical officer Dr. Christopher Longhurst said no: I couldnt point you to one.

In recent months, scientists in California have expanded wastewater surveillance to more rural parts of the state, with support from the states Department of Public Health. This poses new challenges: Public health officials often arent used to looking at data from outside hospitals or health clinics, and there are many logistical hurdles to setting up sampling in new locations, combined with the complications of interpreting data from less populous areas, where wastewater surveillance is highly sensitive to changes in COVID-19 spread.

One document from Stanford Universitys Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network (SCAN) describes how the genetic material shed by someone with COVID-19 may change: over the course of their infection, from person to person and depending on measurement techniques, the weather, an influx of spring breakers, or even local business practices. For example, Modesto a city in Californias Central Valley had a lot of fruit cannery waste in its sewage. This industrial flow may have blocked the signal of the coronaviruss genetic material, impacting scientists ability to isolate it in PCR testing, said Colleen Naughton, an environmental engineering professor at the University of California, Merced, who works on wastewater monitoring in this region.

The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention has faced similar issues as it expands monitoring from Portland, the states major urban center, to more rural communities, said Michael Abbott, who leads wastewater screening at the agency.

One of Portlands wastewater treatment plants has been a long-running collection site for Biobot, a wastewater monitoring company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland, a city of almost 70,000, it takes a really significant increase in COVID-19 prevalence for the virus levels in sewage to begin ticking up, Abbott said. So when the wastewater goes up, the trend is easy to interpret.

But in rural parts of the state, some of which started monitoring during the omicron surge, the data tends to bounce up and down more rather than following a fairly smooth curve, Abbott said. Small numbers of cases may have an outsized impact on wastewater levels, particularly when those cases represent outside tourists going into tiny towns, as is common in Maine.

As public health officials learn to navigate wastewater data, several states public health agencies told us they dont yet consider the system a reliable source for making policy decisions at least not in isolation. A recent report from The Rockefeller Foundation found that many local agencies, especially those serving rural areas, dont have the internal capacity to go all-in on wastewater data as they deal with budget cuts and burnout.

The Minnesota Department of Health is working to expand wastewater sampling, agency spokesperson Garry Bowman said in an email. But this expansion would take weeks or months to turn into useful data, long after Minnesotas PCR testing numbers have become wholly unreliable. And even if Minnesota does expand its wastewater monitoring to cover the whole state, the agency isnt sure if the federal government will keep up its funding, said Bowman.

It would be hard to tell these local wastewater challenges exist, though, looking at the CDCs wastewater dashboard. Highly publicized upon its addition to the agencys COVID Data Tracker in February, the dashboard only showed one metric until early April: colored dots representing an increase or decrease in coronavirus levels detected at each site over the past two weeks. There was no context about the viruss actual prevalence or how recent trends compare to longer time frames.

If a site measures virus not detected (meaning no COVID-19) for three weeks in a row, and then measures a fairly low level of COVID-19, the CDC dashboard would show a 100 percent increase, said Zuzana Bohrerova, an environmental scientist at Ohio State University who works on Ohios monitoring program. A red dot on the dashboard might be a serious warning, or it might be unimportant the CDCs original presentation made it difficult to tell.

I think they were trying to be simpler, Naughton said of the CDC dashboard. They didnt want to release all the concentration data, since they thought thats difficult for people to understand.

On April 8, the agency updated this dashboard, adding new metrics and the option to click into a specific site for a chart showing wastewater trends at that location. The updates were intended to help users better understand changes in virus levels at different sites, CDC spokesperson Brian Katzowitz said. Wastewater experts who talked to me on Twitter said they were glad to see the CDC adjusting its data visualization. Still, theres room for other improvements that would make the data more easily understandable, Katzowitz said.

Even if thousands of new wastewater collection sites are added to the U.S.s network in the coming weeks, it will take serious investment in data analysis and communication for the country to actually use these numbers in predicting new surges. Expanding wastewater sampling can take weeks or months before the effort begins to produce usable data and it costs a lot money agencies aren't sure the federal government will continue to provide.

Despite its challenges, experts say that wastewater monitoring has potential beyond COVID-19 for other respiratory viruses, antimicrobial resistance, and even identifying entirely new viruses. But without continued federal support, we wont even be able to get useful COVID-19 surveillance at a time that its deeply needed.

This story was published in partnership with the Documenting COVID-19 project, which is supported by Columbia Universitys Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock. The project collects and shares government documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic and works on investigative journalism projects with partner newsrooms.

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The National Fight Against COVID-19 Isnt Ready To Go To The Sewers - FiveThirtyEight

Editor's note: This story was updated on March 11 to include all Commonwealth Campus locations as having CDC yellow or green COVID-19 Community Levels.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. With cases of COVID-19 declining on Penn State campuses and across the state and nation, University officials are adjusting Penn States indoor masking policy to no longer require face masks be worn in many indoor common spaces on campuses in counties designated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to have low or medium COVID-19 Community Levels beginning Monday, March 7.

Based on the new CDC guidance, at this time, all Penn State campuses except for the College of Medicine will adjust their masking requirements. At this time, the College of Medicine will continue the mask mandate in alignment with Penn State Health to support patient care.

The masking requirement will remain in effect in classrooms, labs and other academic and creative spaces on all campuses, regardless of CDC COVID-19 Community Level designation, due to high-density congregation. Face masks will continue to be encouraged in all other common indoor spaces. Additionally, masks will continue to be required where mandated by law, regulation or rule includingunder guidance particular to individual workplaces or health care settings, COVID-19 testing centers and public transportation.

On Feb. 25, the CDC announced new, county-by-county COVID-19 Community Levels, as a new tool to help communities decide what prevention steps to take based on the latest data. Levels can be low (green), medium (yellow) or high (orange), and are based on the number of new COVID-19 cases in each county as well as new hospital admissions and hospital capacity.

Green counties: CDC recommendations call for individuals to stay up-to-date on their vaccinations and to get tested if they have symptoms of COVID-19.

Yellow counties: The recommendations advise those who are at high risk for severe illness to talk to their healthcare provider about their individual need to wear a face mask.

Orange counties: CDC recommends all individuals wear a mask indoors.

Our community really stepped up in January and February, embracing our mitigation measures to help us be successful in maintaining in-person classes and activities, allowing our campuses to thrive, said Penn State President Eric Barron. In consultation with our COVID-19 operations team, and recognizing that all but one of our campuses (Schuykill) are in counties currently designated by the CDC to have low or medium COVID-19 Community Levels, we have determined that we have reached a point where we can allow each individual to choose to wear a mask and no longer mandate that they be worn indoors, except in our academic and creative spaces. We are hopeful the diligence of our community in mitigating this disease will continue throughout the spring semester.

Penn State officials will continue to closely monitor changing pandemic conditions nationally and in the areas surrounding Penn State campuses. The University will alter plans, including the reinstatement of indoor masking mandates, if necessary.

Regardless of a campus COVID-19 Community Level, individuals who have not indicated to the University they are fully vaccinated for COVID-19 must still test weekly for the virus. University contact tracing will continue, and quarantine and isolation space for students will remain available.

Individuals who are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 should not come to campus and should stay home. Faculty and staff should seek out symptomatic testing through their health care provider. At University Park, students living on campus or in the local community who are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 should continue toschedule testing appointments with University Health Services (UHS) via myUHS.Students living on or nearother Penn State campusesshould seek symptomatic testing via their campus health servicesor a local provider.

Kelly Wolgast, director of Penn States COVID-19 Operations Control Center, reaffirmed that since the beginning of the pandemic, Penn State has not seen any indications of virus transmission in classrooms or workspaces.

Our campuses are highly vaccinated communities and, along with declining case numbers, we are seeing hospitalizations decline as well at our local health care facilities, Wolgast said. Even with this shift in the masking mandate, individuals who feel that masking is something they wish to continue can of course continue this mitigation strategy.

Employees at Penn State who work in their own individual offices may request that visitors wear masks while in their private offices, and the University asks that community members cooperate with these requests.

Additional research protocols for mask wearing will be determined and disseminated by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research.

The University continues to strongly encourage students, faculty and staff to stay up-to-date with their vaccinations, including booster doses. Students at University Park, Commonwealth Campuses and Dickinson Law who have received their booster shot canupload their vaccination records through myUHS.Faculty and staff who have received their booster shot can upload an image of their COVID-19 vaccination card into Penn StatesSalesforce Health Cloud, a secure online platform for collecting and storing health data.

For the latest information on the Universitys response to the coronavirus pandemic, visit https://virusinfo.psu.edu.

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Penn State to adjust face mask requirement based on local ...

For two years you didnt see friends like you used to. You missed your colleagues from work, even the barista on the way there.

You were lonely. We all were.

Heres what neuroscientists think was happening your brain.

The human brain, having evolved to seek safety in numbers, registers loneliness as a threat. The centers that monitor for danger, including the amygdala, go into overdrive, triggering a release of fight or flight stress hormones. Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure and blood sugar level increase to provide energy in case you need it. Your body produces extra inflammatory cells to repair tissue damage and prevent infection, and fewer antibodies to fight viruses. Subconsciously, you start to view other people more as potential threats sources of rejection or apathy and less as friends, remedies for your loneliness.

And in a cruel twist, your protective measures to isolate you from the coronavirus may actually make you less resistant to it, or less responsive to the vaccine, because you have fewer antibodies to fight it.

New York City, where one million people live alone, was for two years an experiment in loneliness: nine million people siloed with smartphones and 24/7 home delivery, cut off from the places where they used to gather. Therapists were booked up, even as tens of thousands of New Yorkers were grieving for a best friend, a spouse, a partner, a parent.

For Julie Anderson, a documentary filmmaker, it sets in every day at 5 p.m. the hour when she would be thinking of dinner with friends, evening plans, now shrunk to watching television alone. Stephen Lipman, a fine artist in the Bronx, feels it in the idle hours once a cherished time to work on his art, now drained of ideas or motivation. Eduardo Lazo, whose wife died of pancreatic cancer early in the pandemic, feels it every minute, as the end of the world they made together.

Who doesnt see suicide as an option at that juncture of life? he said. But Im religious, and that would terminate any chance I have of being with my wife or my loved ones when Im dead. I cant jeopardize that possibility.

Robin Solod, who lives alone on Manhattans Upper East Side, thought she was an unlikely candidate for loneliness.

I was too busy schmoozing, she said of her life before the pandemic. Chicken soup at the Mansion Diner. We would go to Zabars on the West Side every week, get a bagel, sit, schmooze. Who was home? I never was home. Then all of a sudden, everything comes to a halt.

As some pandemic restrictions now finally lift, and New York returns to some semblance of normal, one unknown is the lasting effects of two years of prolonged isolation and the loneliness that came with it. Some people cut off nearly all physical interaction, others were more social, but few got through the various lockdowns and spikes without some sense of loss for the human connections they were missing.

For Ms. Solod, who believed people are my air, the last blow came when she had to part with her loyal companion, a rescue Shih Tzu named Annie. Ms. Solod, 67, has health problems that keep her in a wheelchair, and she relied on volunteers from a nonprofit organization called PAWS NY to walk her dog. But when the pandemic started, the volunteers stopped coming.

Now Annie lives out in Long Island, and its so lonely without her, she said. I never didnt have a dog. The environment that Ive always lived in has been my dog, the park, the people with dogs in the building. That was the connection. Everything has changed.

Loneliness, as defined by mental health professionals, is a gap between the level of connectedness that you want and what you have. It is not the same as social isolation, which is codified in the social sciences as a measure of a persons contacts. Loneliness is a subjective feeling. People can have a lot of contact and still be lonely, or be perfectly content by themselves.

For many New Yorkers, the pandemic brought too much contact with others in crowded apartments, workplaces or subways. But the contacts were not necessarily fulfilling or desired and maybe seemed dangerous. This, too, is a condition for loneliness.

In small doses, loneliness is like hunger or thirst, a healthy signal that you are missing something and to seek out what you need. But prolonged over time, loneliness can be damaging not just to mental health, but also to physical health.

Even before the pandemic, the United States surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said the country was experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, driven by the accelerated pace of life and the spread of technology into all of our social interactions. With this acceleration, he said, efficiency and convenience have edged out the time-consuming messiness of real relationships.

The result is a public health crisis on the scale of the opioid epidemic or obesity, Dr. Murthy said. In a 2018 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said they always or often felt lonely or socially isolated.

The pandemic only exacerbated these feelings. In a recent citywide survey by New Yorks health department, 57 percent of people said they felt lonely some or most of the time, and two-thirds said they felt socially isolated in the prior month.

Loneliness, Dr. Murthy said, has real consequences to our health and well-being.

Being lonely, like other forms of stress, increases the risk of emotional disorders like depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Less obviously, it also puts people at greater risk of physical ailments that seem unrelated, like heart disease, cancer, stroke, hypertension, dementia and premature death. In lab experiments, lonely people who were exposed to a cold virus were more likely to develop symptoms than people who were not lonely.

An often-cited meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University compared the risk effects of loneliness, isolation and weak social networks to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

The general public recognizes how loneliness might influence our levels of distress, our emotional or mental health, Dr. Holt-Lunstad said. But we probably dont recognize the robust evidence of the effects on our physical health.

Nor do we recognize the economic cost.

Social isolation and loneliness are associated with an additional $6.7 billion in Medicare spending and cost employers more than $154 billion annually in stress-related absenteeism, plus more in job turnover, according to studies by AARP and the insurance giant Cigna.

Yet the culture has moved slowly to address the epidemic, Dr. Murthy said, treating loneliness as an unpleasant feeling rather than a public health crisis. There are more adults struggling with loneliness than have diabetes, he said. Yet think about the discrepancy in the attention that we give to these two conditions.

Ms. Solod, before the pandemic, was not concerned about any of this. She lived alone, which did put her at higher risk of isolation, but she had always immersed herself among people. A million friends, she said.

She had run an electrolysis business, cut hair at Bergdorf Goodman and had a real estate license. Shed even worked as a hostess at Chippendales.

I was beyond dynamic, she said.

But New York can chip away at ones social network. Friends get buried in work, move away, find lovers, change dog parks. Men are more likely to be socially isolated, but women are more likely to be lonely.

For people over 60, like Ms. Solod, who are one of the highest-risk groups, the isolation often begins with their health.

Six years ago, Ms. Solod began treatment for lung cancer, then multiple myeloma. Suddenly her life revolved around medical treatments, not socializing, and she needed a wheelchair to get around.

Yet she was still enjoying the city with friends or with her mother, who lived nearby. I could hear my mothers voice: Dont stay home, she said. Then a year before the pandemic her mother died. That was a connection she could not replace, a role no one else could step into. She still had lots of social contacts, but she was missing a meaningful connection that she needed. The name for that gap is loneliness.

The worst was the Jewish holidays, she said, when all her losses seemed to pile up. I once had a life. I had a husband, I had a mom, neighbors and friends and relatives. That ceases to exist in the same way when the focal point of the mother is gone, that central person. When thats gone, nothing can bring back the holidays.

At least she still had her dog.

Then the pandemic hit.

Turhan Canli, professor of integrative neuroscience at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wondered whether there was a gene that turned on or off when a person was lonely. Past researchers had shown that loneliness, like other forms of stress, was associated with depression, inflammation, cognitive decline and heart disease. But how? What pathways were opened or closed when people were lonely, what genes activated or deactivated? From the Rush University Memory and Aging Project in Chicago, he was able to get tissues from the brains of older adults who in their final years had answered questions about their levels of loneliness.

His analysis provided an insight into the physical, cellular nature of loneliness. He found distinct differences between the brains of lonely or non-lonely people. Some genes that promote the proliferation of cancerous cells were more activated in lonely people, while genes that regulate inflammation were turned off.

We found hundreds of genes that would be differently expressed depending on how lonely these people felt, he said. These genes were associated with cancer, inflammation, heart disease, as well as cognitive function.

He cautioned that, as with many studies of loneliness, his did not prove that loneliness caused these differences in gene expression; it might simply have been more prevalent in people who had them.

Ms. Anderson, the documentary filmmaker, described nights in her apartment when she felt so oppressively lonely that she would not answer her telephone, even though the conversation might improve her mood. Youd think I would pick up the phone and call people, she said. I feel that the loneliness feels so heavy, that if I call someone Im going to be so down that they dont want to talk to me. Its exactly what I should do. I just dont feel like it.

For Ms. Solod, who had been struggling before Covid, the pandemic brought several new levels of loneliness. There was the abrupt end to casual encounters with neighbors, merchants, the waitstaff at her favorite diner or deli. There were the friends who used to visit, but were suddenly just voices on the telephone. And there was the dog.

In December of 2021, she was hospitalized for two weeks in the Covid unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, so she could receive treatment for cancer and the coronavirus. Since that experience, she said, Im terrified.

So even as she saw neighbors return to some social activity, she remained extremely cautious. Sometimes shed take her wheelchair into her building lobby to watch the dogs, then go back upstairs, missing her own dog. And always, she said, she was conscious of how many people had died.

I speak to my friends all the time, she said. They call me. But its very different, that type of connection. You dont have the same emotions, the same feelings, as when you see someone in person. And also, when you can hug someone, its very different.

The pandemic has underscored just how important even casual connections are for emotional well-being, said Anne Marie Albano, director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Even the little things like making room for someone to sit down next to you on the subway, or someone doing that for you those kinds of things are not happening, Dr. Albano said. And that makes an individual who is prone to feel alone feel that more intensely.

Even as case numbers in New York have remained well below their peak, Ms. Solods loneliness has not eased. If anything, she said, seeing people about their business, without masks, has made her feel even more isolated.

So many people I know say, Oh, dont worry, and they start quoting the mayor and talk about the kids in school. But even putting the cancer and my illness aside, I would say Im still very frightened of the virus. I dont want to have to go back to that world of isolation.

During the Iranian New Year in late March, an Iranian friend brought her food, for which she was grateful. But then people dont like to stay, she said. Its almost like weve been ingrained in running out. Its a quick hello, and see you later. In my world, no ones really staying.

Even if life returns to the way it was before the pandemic, it is unclear how far the loneliness of the last two years will lift, or what scars it might leave behind. According to Stephanie Cacioppo, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, loneliness, like other forms of stress, may leave lasting damage.

One early indicator is life on the college campus, Dr. Cacioppo said. Now that students are back, we are hearing so much loneliness and isolation tied to disappointment. College is not what kids expected it to be. So social isolation was reduced, but a form of loneliness has lingered, in the gap between the social life people want and what they have.

A paradox: People are more connected now than ever through phones, social media, Zoom and such yet loneliness continues to rise. Among the most digitally connected, teenagers and young adults, loneliness nearly doubled in prevalence between 2012 and 2018, coinciding with the explosion in social media use.

Four years ago, the British government appointed a minister of loneliness to address growing concerns among the public. One town set up Happy to Chat benches, with signs reading Sit here if you dont mind someone stopping to say hello. The model has proved popular and spread around England and to Canada and Poland.

In the United States, the health care system has focused on social isolation in older adults but been slower to address loneliness as a broad public health problem.

Yet there are interventions that can help, Dr. Cacioppo said.

For years people thought the best thing you could do for a lonely person is to give them support, she said. Actually, we found that its about receiving and also giving back. So the best thing you can do for someone who is lonely is not to give them help but ask them for help. So you give them a sense of worth and a chance to be altruistic. Even if were getting the best care, we still feel lonely if we cant give something back. The care is extremely valuable but its not enough.

She also suggested a regular practice of gratitude and altruism, both of which counter a mind-set of seeing others as threats.

But real remedies to the problem of loneliness, Dr. Murthy stressed, must address not just the lonely people but the culture making them lonely.

We ask people to exercise and eat a healthy diet and take their medications, he said. But if we truly want to be healthy, happy and fulfilled as a society, we have to restructure our lives around people. Right now our lives are centered around work.

From the surgeon general of the United States, this is a moonshot call, to reverse cultural patterns that are decades in the making and that profit some of the nations biggest businesses.

Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, charted a steady erosion of social ties dating back to 1950.

Hannah Arendt called widespread loneliness an underlying condition for totalitarianism.

Dr. Murthys moonshot called for a complete shift in societal priorities. But the alternative, he said, is literally killing people. Connected people live longer, happier, healthier lives. So a shift is in order, starting in our homes and workplaces.

We have this powerful force for enhancing health and well-being, in their relationships, he said. But how often do we invest in that?

For Robin Solod, alone in her East Side apartment, this is a need she came to recognize the hard way.

Shed always been too busy running around to think about how much she depended on her connections with people, and how fragile those could be, she said. But when you take that away, whats left? What do you replace it with?

She answered her own question. Without the connection to other people, she said, you have bupkis.

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Covid-19 Mask Mandates and Travel News: Live Updates - The New York Times

ASHWAUBENON -One of the first orders of business for the new Brown County Board will be reviewing the county's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

County Board member Megan BorchardtofGreen Bay has asked the county's Human Services Department for a report on successesand opportunities for improvementinhow Brown County responded to the public health needs of county residents. The goal, supervisors said, was to continue doing what the county had done well, whileimprovingwhere improvements were needed.

"We know there is a plan of action, and it continues to be updated," Borchardt said. County health officials said they plan further updates to the plan later this spring.

Human Services Committee members in March discussed a number of successes in the county's response, including areas where the county's response had started slowly but had grown into a strength. In other areas, officials said, Brown County's response later became a best practice adopted by a number of counties.

At the same time, Human Services meeting minutes from March show that the committeeacknowledged that Brown County struggled, especially early in its response,in involving some community partners sooner. For example, some people, including a member of the county Board of Health, complained that it took several calls before they got an answer about where help from speakers fluent inlanguages other than English wasneeded.

Also, some believed there were timeswhere the county should have realizedit needed to ask earlier for other types of assistance. For example, a COVID-19 testing clinic catering to Spanish speakers, and people with limited access to transportation, opened at CASA Alba Melanie in downtown Green Bay in May2020 a day after the county opened a clinicat the Resch Expo construction site in Ashwaubenon, that was geared towardpeople able to drive to the facility.

Health & Human Services officials didn't return a call seeking an interview.

County Board members said they expect the report on the pandemic response to be discussed at their May board meeting.

Also Tuesday:

Supervisors agreed to accept $5 million in federal transportation funding for environmental andengineering/design work for the Southern Bridge project that would funnel some traffic south of De Pere. The board also agreed to allocate $600,000 in county money, and $600,000 from the city of De Pere, as the local share.

The board accepted $103,000 in grant money for the Child Support Department; funding, which must be spent by June 30, will pay for department overtime, new office printersand new furniture.

The board elected Dave Kaster of Bellevuevice-chairman over Borchardt. KastersucceedsTom Sieber, who did not seek reelection to the board. Patrick Buckley remains chairman of the County Board.

More:Brown County coronavirus cases zoom past 1,400, as people continue to ignore preventive measures

More: COVID-19: Here's where you can get tested in Green Bay, Brown County

More: Updated: Where to get COVID-19 vaccinations in Brown County

Contact Doug Schneider at (920) 431-8333, or DSchneid@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PGDougSchneider.

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Brown County Board looks to build on COVID-19 response, acknowledges there's room for improvement - Green Bay Press Gazette

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.(KRQE) Its been more than a month since the state stopped giving weekly COVID-19 updates, but the pandemic is still here. KRQE went one-on-one with Acting Secretary of the New Mexico Department of Health to see where the state stands.

Dr. David Scrase said overall, hes pleased with where New Mexico is in terms of COVID cases and the ongoing pandemic.

Right now, were doing real well, said Dr. Scrase. He said the state is averaging about 160 new COVID cases a day and hospitalizations are remaining low.

Only 41 people in the hospital yesterday with COVID and only two people on a ventilator, which is really a low, you have to go back a couple years to get that low, he said. The number of deaths is also staying low.

The state is monitoring the BA-2 subvariant which is linked to omicron. Dr. Scrase said its too early to know if its more infectious or severe, but so far vaccines are still holding up.

BA-2, again, were a little early to know about vaccine effectiveness but early data suggested that it still can actually prevent hospitalizations and death in some of the new variants, said Dr. Scrase. Its part of the reason why the state is still encouraging people to get their booster shoots. So far, only 46.6% of New Mexicans 18 and older have gotten the booster.

I would love to see more folks boosted, said Dr. Scrase. Over time the more people that get boosted, the more immune well all be to COVID. He said companies are working on updated vaccines for newer variants but he stresses the current ones still help.

Clear, dramatic difference in just getting the primary series, or the primary series plus a booster in hospitalizations and deaths, he said. With mask mandates being dropped on public transportation, KRQE asked Dr. Scrase for his advice to New Mexicans.

Im probably going to wear a mask and I also think that people who want to avoid getting COVID should do the same, he said. KRQE also asked if they would consider new regulations at New Mexicos airports and bus stations for mask wearing, Dr. Scrase said right now, thats not something the state is looking to get involved with.

Here is the original post:

Where New Mexico stands in its fight against COVID-19 pandemic - KRQE News 13

Authorities in the Chinese financial hub, Shanghai, released another 4 million people from its strict COVID-19 lockdown rules as part of the citys efforts to restore its economic activity.

Officials announced seven new COVID-19 deaths Wednesday, bringing the death toll from the current outbreak to 17, although those numbers have been questioned by international health officials. Chinas second-largest city also reported more than 18,000 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday.

Shanghais 26 million residents have been ordered to remain in their homes since early April in response to the surge of new COVID-19 infections largely driven by the highly contagious omicron variant.

The breakthrough of new COVID-19 cases in China is happening despite Beijings official zero COVID strategy that aims to completely eliminate coronavirus outbreaks across the mainland.

The lockdown has led to growing complaints online of a lack of fresh food, especially vegetables, with grocery stores closed and residents unable to obtain food deliveries through online apps. The anger has led to an unusual amount of public protests, including one where residents screamed in unison from the open windows of their high-rise apartments that was caught on video and went viral on social media.

A total of 12 million Shanghai residents have been given permission to venture outside their homes since authorities introduced guidelines last week that allows movement in neighborhoods with no recorded cases over the past 14 days.

Some factories in Shanghai are slowly resuming operations, including electric car company Tesla, which restarted production Tuesday after being idled for about three weeks. More than 600 firms are on a list of key industries and companies that have been allowed to either resume or keep their operations running.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.

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Shanghai Slowly Turning the Corner from Strict COVID-19 Lockdown - Voice of America - VOA News

Norwegian health authorities say they are open to giving people aged 80 and above a booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine but see no cause for a general recommendation for that age category to get a fourth shot

ByThe Associated Press

April 20, 2022, 1:14 PM

1 min read

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- Norwegian health authorities said Wednesday they are open to giving people aged 80 and above a booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, but see no cause for a general recommendation for that age category to get a fourth shot.

Geir Bukholm, assistant director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, said the agency believes this can be assessed and chosen by the individual.

However, the agency urged more people with severely weakened immune systems to take a booster shot of the vaccine.

The agency said the updated assessment was in line with guidelines by the European Infection Control Agency and the European Medicines Agency.

In neighboring Sweden, authorities this month recommended a fourth vaccine dose for people 65 and over and for those living in nursing homes or getting home care, down from an earlier recommendation for people 80 and older. The recommendation also includes fourth shots for those aged 1864 with moderate to severe immune deficiency.

Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

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Norway is open to 4th COVID-19 shot to people over 80 - ABC News

The White House announced on Monday that it would co-host the second global Covid-19 summit next month, a gathering intended to build momentum for vaccine donations and for ending what the White House called the acute phase of the pandemic.

The meeting, which was originally expected to be held in March, is now scheduled to take place virtually on May 12.

Efforts to subsidize more global vaccinations stalled in the United States after lawmakers stripped $5 billion from a pandemic relief package that could come up for a Senate vote in the next few weeks.

When lawmakers announced an agreement earlier this month on the $10 billion coronavirus aid package, which is centered on domestic coronavirus testing, vaccination and treatment, they turned away a push from the Biden administration and from some members of Congress to reinforce the nations global Covid-19 commitments, which some public health experts said were already lacking. Republicans had demanded that any new aid be financed in part by repurposing previously approved but unspent Covid-19 relief.

The emergence and spread of new variants like Omicron have reinforced the need for a strategy aimed at controlling Covid-19 worldwide, the White House said on Monday in a statement announcing the May summit, which will also be hosted by Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal.

Global health experts are worried that the United States commitment to addressing the global pandemic is waning as President Bidens attention has been consumed by other matters, notably the war in Ukraine.

Peter Maybarduk, director for access to medicines at the advocacy group Public Citizen, called the summit late and necessary, and criticized the Biden White House for not fighting harder to get money from Congress for the global effort. He said the effort must go beyond vaccination, to expand access to testing and therapeutics in low- and middle-income nations.

If you are going to solve a global pandemic, you need the wealthiest governments to really commit to it, Mr. Maybarduk said. And if you dont have a highly prioritized U.S. leadership, the world is going to stumble through it.

About 16 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a vaccine, compared to 80 percent of people in high-income and upper-middle-income countries, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. Production problems, export bans and vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations have helped widen the gap.

The May summit will carry over themes from the first meeting, held in September, the White House said. Those themes include the logistical work of getting shots into arms, reaching high-risk groups with virus tests and treatments, building up more local and regional vaccine manufacturing capacity and increasing the number of public health workers.

The lowest-income countries are getting more vaccine supplies than before, but health officials say that the doses may arrive on irregular schedules, making it difficult to organize vaccination campaigns, particularly when local health systems are short of staff, transportation and storage facilities.

Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat who helped negotiate the pandemic relief package, said on Sunday that the United States had millions of vaccine doses on hand that could be sent abroad before they expire.

Link:

A Second Global Covid-19 Summit Led By the White House Is Set for May - The New York Times