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Sharon us still coughing and sleeping in the recliner. Daughter Kim is still coughing and is dealing with some serious headaches.

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Covid: How new drugs are finally taming the virus

The first patients in the NHS are being offered a new drug to help treat Covid-19. As Covid treatments are changing, fewer patients are becoming seriously ill or dying. So does this mean we are finally taming the virus?

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Before omicron, one-third of Americans had been infected with the coronavirus, but by the end of February, that rate had climbed to nearly 60 percent, including 3 out of 4 children, according to federal health data released Tuesday.

The data from blood tests offers the first evidence that over half the U.S. population, roughly 190 million people, have been infected at least once since the pandemic began. That is more than double the official case count. Many of those infections are likely to have been asymptomatic or with few symptoms.

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Unvaccinated people accounted for the overwhelming majority of deaths in the United States throughout much of the coronavirus pandemic. But that has changed in recent months, according to a Washington Post analysis of state and federal data.

The pandemic’s toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to get shots, with vaccine protection waning over time and the elderly and immunocompromised - who are at greatest risk of succumbing to covid-19, even if vaccinated - having a harder time dodging increasingly contagious strains.

The vaccinated made up 42% of fatalities in January and February during the highly contagious omicron variant’s surge, compared with 23% of the dead in September, the peak of the delta wave, according to nationwide data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by The Post. The data is based on the date of infection and limited to a sampling of cases in which vaccination status was known.

As a group, the unvaccinated remain far more vulnerable to the worst consequences of infection - and are far more likely to die - than people who are vaccinated, and they are especially more at risk than people who have received a booster shot.

“It’s still absolutely more dangerous to be unvaccinated than vaccinated,” said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies covid-19 mortality. “A pandemic of - and by - the unvaccinated is not correct. People still need to take care in terms of prevention and action if they became symptomatic.”

A key explanation for the rise in deaths among the vaccinated is that covid-19 fatalities are again concentrated among the elderly.

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A recent Pfizer or Moderna mRNA-vaccine booster provided good but temporary protection against infection by the SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant, according to a study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine—Qatar.

In the study, published June 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers analyzed the omicron wave in Qatar last winter, comparing prior infections, vaccine immunity and combinations thereof among more than 100,000 omicron-infected and non-infected individuals.

The analysis showed, as expected, that full mRNA vaccination plus a booster dose, atop natural immunity due to infection by an earlier variant, was associated with the strongest protection from omicron infection. However, vaccine immunity against new infection appeared to wane rapidly, whereas people with a prior-variant infection were moderately protected from omicron with little decline in protection even a year after their prior infection.

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Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies Pfizer and BioNTech announced Saturday that updated versions of their vaccines that were adapted to the omicron variant of COVID-19 deliver a “substantially higher immune response” against the strain.

Studies “found that a booster dose of both Omicron-adapted vaccine candidates elicited a substantially higher immune response against Omicron BA.1 as compared to the companies’ current COVID-19 vaccine,” according to a press release from the companies, referring to the original omicron variant.

One of the updated vaccines is monovalent, targeting omicron alone, and the other is bivalent, combining the monovalent one with the companies’ vaccine targeting the initial COVID-19 strain.

Both vaccines, when taken as a fourth booster shot, were found to significantly increase neutralization against omicron. The companies said that after the shots were administered, each in two different dosage amounts, the monovalent booster increased that neutralization 13.5- and 19.6-fold and the bivalent increased it 9.1- and 10.9-fold.

The studies were conducted with 1,234 adults aged 56 or older.