quote:

The CDC Only Tracks a Fraction of Breakthrough COVID-19 Infections, Even as Cases Surge

A May 1 decision by the CDC to only track breakthrough infections that lead to hospitalization or death has left the nation with a muddled understanding of COVID-19’s impact on the vaccinated.

quote:

I Got A 'Mild' Breakthrough Case. Here's What I Wish I'd Known

quote:

The pandemic marks another
grim milestone: 1 in 500
Americans have died of covid-19

quote:

People older than 85 make up only 2 percent of the population, but a quarter of the total death toll. One in 35 people 85 or older died of covid, compared with 1 in 780 people age 40 to 64.

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
And if we weren't confused enough....

quote:

The CDC Only Tracks a Fraction of Breakthrough COVID-19 Infections, Even as Cases Surge

A May 1 decision by the CDC to only track breakthrough infections that lead to hospitalization or death has left the nation with a muddled understanding of COVID-19’s impact on the vaccinated.

https://www.propublica.org/art...-even-as-cases-surge

quote:

Overwhelmed by a surge in COVID-19 patients, Alaska’s largest hospital implemented crisis standards of care, prioritizing resources and treatments to those patients who have the potential to benefit the most.

“While we are doing our utmost, we are no longer able to provide the standard of care to each and every patient who needs our help,” Dr. Kristen Solana Walkinshaw, chief of staff at Providence Alaska Medical Center, wrote in a letter addressed to Alaskans distributed Tuesday.

“The acuity and number of patients now exceeds our resources and our ability to staff beds with skilled caregivers, like nurses and respiratory therapists. We have been forced within our hospital to implement crisis standards of care,” Walkinshaw wrote.

quote:

Idaho declares statewide hospital resource crisis amid Covid surge

State officials made the announcement Thursday, which will permit medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.

Idaho hospitals are so overwhelmed with the surge in coronavirus cases that doctors and nurses have to contact dozens of regional hospitals across the West in hopes of finding places to transfer individual critical patients.

The situation has grown so bad that the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness announced Thursday that the entire state is in a hospital resource crisis, permitting medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.

Kootenai Health, a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has already converted a conference room into an overflow Covid unit, started paying traveling nurses $250 an hour and brought in a military medical unit. The hospital received permission from the state to begin rationing care last week. That's all in response to the Covid surge that in recent weeks has taken over much of Idaho — a state with one of the nation's lowest vaccination rates.

quote:

The Biden administration is imposing new limits on states’ ability to access to Covid-19 antibody treatments amid rising demand from GOP governors who have relied on the drug as a primary weapon against the virus.

Federal health officials plan to allocate specific amounts to each state under the new approach, in an effort to more evenly distribute the 150,000 doses that the government makes available each week.

The approach is likely to cut into shipments to GOP-led states in the Southeast that have made the pricey antibody drug a central part of their pandemic strategy, while simultaneously spurning mask mandates and other restrictions....

Still, until recently, the administration had shipped the antibody treatments to states on an as-needed basis — with top health officials in early August going as far as encouraging those battling the Delta surge to seek even more supply.

But demand from a handful of southern states has exploded since then, state and federal officials said, raising concerns they were consuming a disproportionate amount of the national supply. Seven states — Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama — accounted for 70 percent of all orders in early September.

The imbalance prompted an effort to rein in control of supplies, over concerns that the government wouldn’t have enough on hand to respond to Covid-19 surges elsewhere in the country.

quote:

A scientific advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday recommended authorizing a booster shot for recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine who are 65 or older or are at high risk of severe Covid-19.

The move came after the panel overwhelmingly recommended against approving a Pfizer booster for people 16 and older.

quote:

Jonathan Sterne, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology in the United Kingdom, said he had analyzed 76 different studies on the vaccines’ real world effectiveness and found that multiple factors can skew the results, including how many unvaccinated people in a study have natural immunity from prior Covid-19 disease. He also warned against drawing conclusions from short-term results from booster shots; data from Israel, for example, only included a follow-up period of several weeks for older adults.

quote:

Dr. Oliver, the C.D.C. official, questioned attempts to draw a parallel between the United States and Israel, noting that Israel has only nine million residents and is less diverse than the United States. Notably, she also said that Israel defines a severe case of Covid-19 more broadly than the United States does, which might help explain why Israel reports more serious breakthrough infections among its vaccinated.

quote:

Kristen Solana Walkinshaw, a physician on the coronavirus triage committee at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, found her team last weekend making one of the most agonizing decisions of their careers. With the delta variant surging, the hospital was overwhelmed, and the doctor-on-call had paged the group for guidance.

Four patients needed continuous kidney dialysis, her colleague explained, but only two machines were available. How should I choose?

"This is the worst it's been for us," Solana Walkinshaw said, and "it's not over."
.
.
.
.

With our wealth and advanced technology, hospitals in the United States typically operate in a state of abundance that allows them to take patients on a first come, first served basis and still treat everyone to high standards.

That changed in Idaho in recent days.

Jim Souza, chief physician executive at the state's largest health system, St. Luke's, described having to squeeze bags for up to hours at a time to provide oxygen for patients while awaiting a mechanical ventilator to become available; having to leave patients on oxygen treatments in unmonitored areas where staff might not be able to hear alarms; and stopping all surgical procedures, including those they know may result in "permanent disability or pathology," such as those for breast or endometrial cancer. St. Luke's is part of the northern region of Idaho where crisis standard were activated Sept. 7 ahead of the change on Thursday.

"The net is gone," Souza said, "and people will fall from the wire."
.
.
.
.


"We are very close to flipping to crisis standards," Billings Clinic CEO Scott Ellner said Thursday.

He said the clinic convened a team, led by an ethicist, to make decisions about care in the coming weeks should they become necessary.

"We may have to remove some equipment, a ventilator, or a bed from one patient to another patient because that patient is more likely to survive," Ellner, a physician for 25 years, said. "I never thought I would see anything like this."

quote:

Amid persistent concerns that the protection offered by COVID-19 vaccines may be waning, a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that America's workhorse shot is significantly less effective at preventing severe cases of disease over the long term than many experts had realized.

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.

Meanwhile, Moderna's vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.

Overall, 54% of fully vaccinated Americans have been immunized with the Pfizer shot.

The surprising findings came as a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended against offering booster doses of the Pfizer vaccine to all Americans ages 16 and older. In a striking rebuke, 16 of 18 experts told the agency it had not mustered enough data to make a third shot the norm.

quote:

After 169 hospitals, a dad finally got the Covid-19 care he needed -- and changed dozens of skeptics' minds

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

After 169 hospitals, a dad finally got the Covid-19 care he needed -- and changed dozens of skeptics' minds

His story. There's also an interesting graphic with a breakdown of COVID hospitalizations (unvaccinated, 2 weeks post-vaccination, partially vaccinated, vaccinated).



https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/19...cinations/index.html

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

Amid persistent concerns that the protection offered by COVID-19 vaccines may be waning, a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that America's workhorse shot is significantly less effective at preventing severe cases of disease over the long term than many experts had realized.

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.

Meanwhile, Moderna's vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.

Overall, 54% of fully vaccinated Americans have been immunized with the Pfizer shot.

The surprising findings came as a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended against offering booster doses of the Pfizer vaccine to all Americans ages 16 and older. In a striking rebuke, 16 of 18 experts told the agency it had not mustered enough data to make a third shot the norm.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/big...derna-034719881.html

I think the lead paragraph is a bit overblown ("significantly less effective"), but I do think it's interesting that we're getting a better idea of how well the vaccines are working over time now that they are out in wide use in the real world.