More than 10,000 patients caught Covid-19 in a hospital, analysis shows. They never made it out

(KHN)They went into hospitals with heart attacks, kidney failure or in a psychiatric crisis.

They left with covid-19 — if they left at all.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/07/health/c ... Stories%29

When will the pandemic become endemic? Disease experts eye beginning of the end
Julie Steenhuysen

As the devastating Delta variant surge eases in many regions of the world, scientists are charting when, and where, COVID-19 will transition to an endemic disease in 2022 and beyond, according to Reuters interviews with over a dozen leading disease experts.

They expect that the first countries to emerge from the pandemic will have had some combination of high rates of vaccination and natural immunity among people who were infected with the coronavirus, such as the United States, the U.K., Portugal and India. But they warn that SARS-CoV-2 remains an unpredictable virus that is ...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavir ... -1.5653443

United can impose vaccine mandate, federal judge rules

United Airlines can uphold its COVID-19 vaccine mandate that places on unpaid leave employees who have been granted a medical or religious exemption, a federal judge ruled Monday, per Reuters.

Details: U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman noted in his ruling in Fort Worth, Texas, that it was a human resources matter and that no airline staff member was required to get the vaccine, according to Reuters.


The big picture: United said in September that ...

https://www.axios.com/united-airlines-c ... 310bf.html

Costa Rica requires all children to get a coronavirus vaccine
Bryan Pietsch

Costa Rica has made coronavirus vaccinations a requirement for all people under the age of 18, in what experts say is one of the world’s broadest mandates to immunize children against the virus.

The Health Ministry in the Central American nation said Friday that the vaccinations would be included with other mandatory shots against chickenpox, polio and the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

It said that the measure was taken to “safeguard” the best interests of the children and that parents and legal guardians were responsible for ensuring minors are vaccinated in a “timely manner.”

The republic of about 5 million people is the first in the world to include coronavirus vaccines in its list of required immunizations for children, according to ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... -children/

People ‘unvaccinated by choice’ in Singapore no longer can receive free covid-19 treatment
Miriam Berger

Eighty-five percent of people in Singapore eligible for coronavirus vaccines are fully vaccinated, and 18 percent have received booster shots.

But the Singaporean government said Monday that it will no longer cover the medical costs of people “unvaccinated by choice,” who make up the bulk of remaining new covid-19 cases and hospitalizations in the city-state.

“Currently, unvaccinated persons make up a sizable majority of those who require intensive inpatient care, and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our health care resources,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement Monday.

“Covid-19 patients who are unvaccinated by choice may still tap on regular health care financing arrangements to pay for their bills where applicable,” the ministry added.

The government now foots the bill for any Singaporean citizen, permanent resident and holder of a long-term work pass who is sick with covid-19, unless they tested positive shortly after returning from overseas.

“This was to avoid financial considerations adding to public uncertainty and concern when covid-19 was an emergent and unfamiliar disease,” the Health Ministry said in its statement.

“Until the covid-19 situation is more stable,” it added, it will continue to ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... -covid-19/

Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci on the future of mRNA therapies
The founders of BioNTech are looking beyond covid-19
BY UGUR SAHIN AND OZLEM TURECI: FOUNDERS OF BIONTECH

The rapid development of multiple covid-19 vaccines is an unprecedented achievement in drug development that has offered a way out of the pandemic. But there is more good news to come. The role of vaccines based on messenger rna (mrna) technology in this success heralds a new era in the development of therapies for other diseases.

The mrna breakthrough was made possible by scientific co-operation over three decades that helped transform a promising concept into a highly potent and versatile biopharmaceutical platform. We believe that in 15 years, one-third of all newly approved drugs will be based on mrna.

Rather than relying on ...

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahe ... -therapies

“A Texas hospital suspended the privileges of a doctor who promoted ivermectin as a COVID treatment and attacked vaccines, saying she spread "dangerous misinformation" that is "not based in science.”

Texas doctor who promoted ivermectin as Covid treatment suspended by hospital
Houston Methodist Hospital says it suspended Dr. Mary Bowden's privileges after she spread "dangerous misinformation" on social media.
By Marlene Lenthang

A Texas hospital suspended the privileges of a doctor who promoted ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment and criticized vaccine mandates, saying she spread "dangerous misinformation" that is "not based in science."

Dr. Mary Bowden, an ear, nose and throat doctor at the hospital, had her privileges suspended Friday, Houston Methodist Hospital said in a statement to NBC News.

That means she no longer has the power to admit or treat patients at the hospital as the investigation continues. Houston Methodist said she has had privileges for less than a year and had never ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/te ... d-rcna5588

From the UK

Alarm grows as mortuaries fill with thousands of extra non-Covid deaths
Nearly 10,000 more people than usual have died in the past four months from non-Covid reasons, as experts called for an urgent government inquiry into whether the deaths were preventable.
Sarah Knapton

Fears are growing that NHS delays at the height of the pandemic left large numbers of people with previously treatable conditions suffering illnesses that have now become fatal.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that England and Wales registered 20,823 more deaths than the five-year average in the past 18 weeks. Only 11,531 deaths involved Covid.

It means that 9,292 deaths - 45 per cent - were not linked to the pandemic.

‘We urgently need to understand what’s going wrong’
Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “I’m calling for an urgent investigation.

“If you look at where the excess is happening, it's in conditions like ischemic heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes, all which are potentially reversible.

“This goes beyond just looking at the raw numbers and death certificates. We need to go back and find if these deaths have any preventable causes.

“This could be the fallout from ...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/a ... d=msedgntp

The #1335 scenario was foreseen at the very outset of the pandemic.

First Known Covid Case Was Vendor at Wuhan Market, Scientist Claims
A new review of early Covid-19 cases in the journal Science will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over how the pandemic began.
Carl Zimmer, Benjamin Mueller and Chris Buckley

A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had most likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it.

The report, published on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way. The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question.

The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/heal ... -leak.html

Evidence is piling up that COVID transmission is seasonally driven. But that doesn't mean we can predict it perfectly yet, Rachel Gutman reports.

"Now we have nearly two years’ worth of data—from eight full seasons of pandemic—to pick apart for clues. We also know something we didn’t in spring 2020: In all likelihood, we will not eradicate COVID. That makes it all the more important that we know how cases might ebb and flow with weather in the months and years to come.

"Anyone who lives in a temperate climate has an intuitive understanding of seasonal disease. The most canonical example is the common cold—just look at what it’s named. But infecting more people in cold weather is far from the only once-a-year cycle a disease can settle into. Lyme disease peaks in the summer. Polio was historically a summer sickness. Even genital herpes tends to spike around the spring and summer in the United States. The same disease can also show different patterns in different places. Americans are used to a winter flu season, but in Bangladesh, flu cases spike during the monsoon season, which runs from May to September and is the warmest part of the year," Gutman continues. "To acknowledge a strong seasonal influence might feel like admitting defeat: If Louisiana is going to face devastating case rates every summer, and Minnesota will fall prey to a winter surge like clockwork, how much can we really do? But a regular pattern doesn’t have to mean inevitable suffering. Pandemic-fighting policies can take strategic account of seasonality; they’ve done so before."

COVID Sure Looks Seasonal Now
After two years of pandemic waves, we’re finally learning whether the disease has a predictable schedule.
By Rachel Gutman


The first part of what may be the first epidemiologic text ever written begins like so: “Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year.”

The book is On Airs, Waters, and Places, written by Hippocrates around 400 B.C. Two and a half millennia later, the Northern Hemisphere is staring down its coming season of the year with growing apprehension. America’s grimmest phase of the coronavirus pandemic so far occurred from November 2020 to February 2021. Now the calendar has turned to a new November, and even though the majority of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, cases are once again, horrifyingly, on the rise.

If Hippocrates was right, we could be doomed to repeat the sickness and death that defined last winter. To be fair, Hippocrates also thought that among the most important factors in anyone’s health was their balance of black and yellow bile. But evidence is piling up that COVID really is a seasonal disease, surging with the weather and the annual rhythms of human life. If that’s the case, then understanding those seasonal patterns could help us predict where the virus is headed next, and address its attacks in advance.

The seasonal-COVID hypothesis, and its promised benefits for pandemic planning, have been around nearly as long as the disease itself. Way back in February 2020, President Donald Trump predicted that in April, “when it gets a little warmer,” the coronavirus would “miraculously” disappear. That clearly didn’t happen, but evidence of seasonality, the thinking went, might show up in summer, when things got really ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... er/620766/

A mixed blessing
DNA from Neanderthals affects vulnerability to covid-19
One genetic legacy is protective. Another is harmful

As best as scientists can tell, Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago. But they did not vanish from the Earth entirely. In the past decade it has become clear that Neanderthals mated with the ancestors of modern humans, and that at least some of those unions produced viable offspring. The upshot is that almost half of the Neanderthal genome still survives, scattered in small quantities among almost all modern people’s dna. (The exception is those with mostly African ancestors, for Neanderthals seem never to have lived in Africa.)

Such genes have been associated with everything from ...

https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... o-covid-19

It's possible multiple Tories are COVID vaccine exempt, Holland said, but there is also “a possibility that chair could fly."

‘Statistically improbable’ multiple Tory MPs have valid COVID vaccine exemptions: Holland
By Rachel Gilmore

It is statistically unlikely multiple Conservative members of Parliament have valid medical reasons not to get vaccinated against COVID-19, Government House Leader Mark Holland said on Monday.


All MPs must be vaccinated against COVID-19 if they want to sit in person in the House of Commons, the Board of Internal Economy ruled last month, unless they have a valid medical exemption that has been shown to House administration.

While there is “some possibility” multiple Conservative members are ...

https://globalnews.ca/news/8392343/covi ... accinated/

Lets just look at it as evolution at work.

I'd agree if they were the only people affected. So would Darwin.

Companies are telling unvaccinated workers to pay more for health insurance
Andrea Hsu

As Covid cases surged over the summer, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian took action: Unvaccinated workers would have to pay an extra $200 a month for their health insurance, starting Nov. 1.

It felt less onerous than the vaccine mandate imposed on workers by rival United Airlines. But still, it was audacious.

Around 75% of Delta's workforce had already received the Covid shots by that time. But each employee who was hospitalized with Covid had cost Delta $50,000, and Bastian noted in an August memo that none of those hospitalized in the summer surge had been fully vaccinated.

"This surcharge will be necessary to address ...

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/22/10562387 ... e-premiums

They are still the people MOST affected.
And that is all that is needed.

WHEN WILL THEY LEARN?

Seven From Anti-Vax Doctors’ COVID Conference Fall Sick Within Days
That includes Bruce Boros, who claimed ivermectin was keeping him healthy and said he wanted to smack his own father for getting the vaccine.
Michael Daly

To hear the fringe doctors who gathered at an equine facility for the Florida COVID Summit earlier this month, ivermectin is as effective against the virus in humans as it is against worms in horses.

“I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,” Dr. Bruce Boros declared at the end of the meeting at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala. “I have never felt healthier in my life.”

Two days later, the 71-year-old cardiologist fell ill with COVID-19, according to the organizer of the one-day gathering and two other people with direct knowledge.

The organizer, Dr. John Littell, further reported to The Daily Beast that six others among the 800 to 900 participants had also tested positive or developed COVID symptoms “within days of the conference.”

“People are considering if it was a superspreader event,” Littell said.

In the next breath, he dismissed the very thought with an emphatic “No.”

Littell conveniently decided that those with COVID were already infected when they arrived at the summit, where no masks or social distancing were in evidence.

“I think they had gotten it from New York or Michigan or ...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dr-bruce- ... -fall-sick

ICU = Insane Conservative Unit?

From the UK

Covid patients in ICU now almost all unvaccinated, says Oxford scientist

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/c ... d=msedgntp

Conspiracy theorists are pushing toxic bleach and other harmful treatments they claim can 'de-vaccinate' people

- In Facebook groups and Telegram channels, "de-vaccination" misinformation is spreading.
- De-vaccination is medically impossible. But some advocates are encouraging people to try.
- Insider found blood-letting and dangerous chemicals recommended as methods.

https://www.businessinsider.com/bleach-among-grim-devaccination-procudres-hyped-conspiracy-theorists-2021-11?r=US&IR=T

How did we get to this? Did no one go to school as children? I thought the average 5th grader had enough critical thinking ability to not drink bleach.