Good night. I’m Karen Kaplan and it’s Tuesday, February 21. Here’s the latest news on what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that after 3 complicated years, humanity has brought COVID-19 under control. Sure, the coronavirus continues to spread, but for most of us, the prospect of contracting it no longer scares us. Now we can shift our attention elsewhere.
Not so fast, scientists warn.
This pandemic has given us the possibility to catch our collective breath, and we want to use the time wisely to prepare for the next one, they say.
In fact, its genuine purpose is to prevent a coronavirus-fueled pandemic from occurring. The XXI century has already noticed 3 fatal outbreaks caused by coronavirus, and that is more than enough for them.
First, the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed 774 people, with peak frequency in China and Hong Kong. Then Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and is responsible for at least 858 deaths. The recent high, of course, is COVID-19, whose international death toll now exceeds 6. 8 million.
In the first two cases, and almost in fact in the third, the culprit of the coronavirus passed from an animal to a human being. Considering that there are thousands of coronaviruses circulating in animals (bat species alone are thought to harbor over 3200 distinct coronaviruses) it’s a bet that at least one will attempt to cross the species barrier for the foreseeable future.
The maximum tool to counteract this situation is a vaccine.
The ideal vaccine would be to neutralize any type of coronavirus that comes our way. Not only would it keep other people alive and out of hospitals, but it would make sure they don’t have health problems in the first place. By doing so, it would prevent any incoming coronaviruses from spreading between humans. And, to be more sensible, the protection provided by this dream vaccine would last for years, if not a lifetime.
Unfortunately, lately there is no such vaccine. But if we gave enough researchers enough resources to solve the problem, that might be the case.
While a difficult task, a foreign team of more than 50 scientists has developed a roadmap to get there. The plan breaks down the challenge into dozens of distinct elements, identifying individual obstacles to overcome and setting target dates for dealing with them.
The experts who worked on the roadmap for about a year organized their epic to-do list around five thematic areas:
Virology: To create a pan-coronavirus vaccine, scientists will want to better perceive all the coronaviruses that exist and what they do. Next, they’ll want to know which ones are the most threatening and how many they’ll want to be considered as in designing a vaccine to make sure it’s broadly effective.
Immunology: This is about learning more about how other parts of the human immune formula react to coronaviruses, and once their protections are activated, how long they last. One thing scientists must perceive is how pre-existing immunity to one or more coronaviruses affects how the immune formula responds when it encounters a new member of the viral family.
Vaccinology: This is about finding out what types of vaccines are capable of offering the kind of coverage our immune formula will need, as well as finding effective methods to verify candidate vaccines. Another attention is that any effective vaccine can be manufactured and distributed. worldwide.
Animal and human infection models: There is no way to create a new vaccine without first verifying it. This work begins in animals, so it will be necessary to find animals that respond to viruses and vaccines as other people do. Unfortunately, other coronaviruses will be more likely to require other animal models. When it’s time to test other people for vaccines, they’ll want to have a careful way of doing so that exposes volunteers to minimal risk.
Policy and funding: At the beginning of the pandemic, governments and other donors were willing to invest billions of dollars in the progression of a COVID-19 vaccine. Creating a vaccine that can combat a wide diversity of coronaviruses will require at least as much money as well as the political will to spend it.
The latter issue is the least scientific, but in many tactics it is the most important, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, which released the 92-page roadmap today.
“If we don’t have the policy and the funding, we’re never going to have the study dollars invested to examine virology, immunology and vaccines,” he told me.
“This is probably not the last coronavirus pandemic,” Osterholm said. “In fact, maybe it’s not even the biggest. “He described a nightmare situation involving a coronavirus that spreads as easily as the one that causes COVID-19. however, it has the 10% mortality rate of SARS or the 35% mortality rate of MERS.
With so much work to do, he and others painted on the roadmap the importance of getting started right away.
Can they do everything?
“I don’t know,” he said, “but since I’m a grandfather with five grandchildren, I’ll never waste a moment without trying. “
Cases and deaths in California at 12:16 p. m. Tuesday:
Track California’s coronavirus and vaccination efforts, adding the latest numbers and their breakdown, with our charts.
Mokhtar Ferbrache incarcerated at Norco’s California Rehabilitation Center when the coronavirus hit. The emotions of uncertainty, apprehension and terror that characterized the early months of the pandemic have been amplified for those incarcerated.
“You’re sitting there all the time watching him move in space,” Ferbrache told my colleague Steven Vargas. “And then you look at the other people around him.
I had no idea what the virus would do to a human body. All he knew was that when a fellow prisoner beat him, he would be placed in isolation with other inflamed people.
So when Ferbrache himself tested positive on Christmas Day 2020, the news was accompanied by a sense of relief. The questions in his head would be answered, and he saw that COVID-19 was no joke.
At least 260 other people in California prisons have died from COVID-19, according to the State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Ferbrache recovered. But it wasn’t until much later that he learned how traumatic the total party had been.
What brought his feelings to the surface “Data or 7 Ways to Dance a Dance Through the Prison Walls,” an exhibition based on statistics about the effect of COVID-19 on other California inmate prisons. It was held this month at the Odyssey Theater in West Los Angeles.
In one of the editions, long rolls of paper were unrolled from the ceiling. On it were written the counts of the number of infections and deaths of the state’s prison population.
Ferbrache hit when he saw the date of 25/12/2020. That’s when it became a COVID-19 statistic.
“It’s me,” he said when he saw it.
The audience had a reaction, adding: “It’s just writing on a piece of paper, but getting it to provoke such a reaction is very attractive to me. “
“Data” created through Suchi Branfman, who taught dance workshops at the California Rehabilitation Center for 10 years. The pandemic forced her to talk to her students through activities written on sheets of paper. The dancers responded with words and drawings to convey their choreography. ideas
The theme of the exhibit is that what happens in the criminal shopping complex affects those of us outside, as well as those inside.
“How do you create a painting that invites other people to realize that we are not separated from other incarcerated people, that we are concerned about their incarceration?”Branfman asks. ” Our hope is that this is a position where we can place a verbal exchange through dance. “
An incarcerated ex-man who participated in the dance show said he also expected something more: public popularity that the grim numbers of COVID-19 constitute genuine people.
“We are human,” said the man, who asked to remain anonymous because he risked his probation and safety. “Yes, we did it wrong, but we are paying for it. We are human.
Discover advances in vaccination in California with our tracker.
Congratulations to Southern California! The COVID-19 network point for the county has controlled staying in the “low” zone for the past week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC says new cases in Los Angeles County have declined 6 weeks over week and now stand at 72 cases out of 100,000 citizens per week. Deaths dropped 28Array to just over 1 in 100,000 per week.
Ventura County has the lowest weekly case rate in the region, in instances consistent with 100,000 residents, with Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Bernardino counties recording fewer than 10 COVID-19 deaths last week.
But that’s not all the good news for California. A report released last week found that when citizens interacted with the health care formula during the pandemic, they had discovered other reports about their racial and ethnic identities.
The report from the nonprofit California Health Care Foundation states that at least once in recent years, 69 of black citizens and 62 of Latinos have had at least one negative interaction with a fitness provider. That compares with 48 of the white and Asian citizens.
Types of negative reports included instances where patients felt their doctor didn’t pay attention to what they said, spoke to them in a condescending manner, or treated them with respect. When the researchers took into account demographic points such as income, gender and age, they found that the likelihood of such encounters was twice as likely for black Californians as for their white counterparts.
The findings were obtained from a survey of 1739 adults in the state. Kristof Stremikis, director of research and market knowledge at the California Health Care Foundation, called the findings “deeply disappointing,” especially since those kinds of racial disparities have persisted for “years and years. “
Here’s the racial disparity that plagues some of California’s youngest people: In Los Angeles County, only five percent of Latino youth ages 6 months to four years and 6 percent of black youth at the same age have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. compared to about 19% of their white counterparts and 22% of Asian descent.
The overall vaccination rate for infants, toddlers and preschoolers remains concerning: 12 percent are at least partially vaccinated and 7 percent are fully vaccinated, according to data from the county’s public fitness department.
“We have a lot of pictures to do,” Barbara Ferrer, director of the fitness department.
Nationally, 10 percent of children in the youngest cohort were vaccinated at least by the end of 2022, and a scant five percent were fully vaccinated, according to a report released last week by the CDC.
To get an idea of how low those numbers are, here: Two months after COVID-19 vaccines were approved for children ages 5 to 11, 24% of them had gained their first dose. And two months after the vaccines were made to have teens older than 12 to 15, 33% of them had rolled up their sleeves at least once.
About 71% of children under five included in the CDC report had race or ethnicity data on file. Of those, 7 percent were black, 13 percent Asian, 20 percent Latino, and 55 percent white.
Speaking of vaccines, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) invited Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel to Washington, D. C. , to explain why the value of his company’s COVID-19 vaccine would increase by 5. Doses purchased by the federal government through the late last year charged about $21 depending on the dose, and Moderna said it planned to increase that amount to between $110 and $130 when it began selling vaccines directly to health care providers and insurance companies.
Bancel accepted Sanders’ invitation. So Moderna abandoned its obvious plan to make money.
The company said in a statement that other people with health insurance will continue to receive Spikevax, its COVID-19 vaccine, “free of charge. “
“Everyone in the U. S. “The U. S. will have access to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, regardless of their ability to pay,” he said.
And finally, China declares victory over the coronavirus 3 months after its remaining “zero COVID” regulations a national outbreak.
Notes from a ruling Communist Party assembly said China had “decisively defeated” the pandemic. The notes imply that more than two hundred million Chinese citizens have been treated for COVID-19, adding 800,000 critically ill patients who have recovered from the disease.
These figures are taken literally. The World Health Organization, for example, says there have been only about 99 million infections and 119,155 deaths.
Today’s comes from readers who need to know: How is wastewater tested for coronavirus in Los Angeles?
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health tracks the virus in 4 locations: the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant in Carson, the Lancaster Water Recovery Plant, the Hyperion plant in Los Angeles, and the Tapia water recovery plant near Malibu. Samples are taken up to 3 times a week, and the effects are weighted to reflect the duration of the population served through each. (The Carson plant serves more than 4. 8 million people, for example, while the Lancaster plant serves about 160,000. )
The effects of this wastewater tracking can be obtained online at a site maintained through the State Department of Public Health. In fact, this site displays coronavirus concentrations reported through all members of the California Wastewater Systems Monitoring Network (which uses the impressive short form Cal-Suertes).
You can also see how Los Angeles County is doing by visiting this webpage maintained through the county fitness department. The figure reported there compares the existing concentration of coronavirus in wastewater with the concentration in the summer of 2022.
As of Tuesday, the county had 36 more SARS-CoV-2s in its wastewater than it did in the summer, a point that warrants a “medium concern,” according to the fitness department.
We need to hear from you. Please email us your coronavirus inquiries and we will do our best to answer them. Wondering if your inquiry has already been answered? Check out our archives here.
It’s carnival in Brazil and the attendees are like in 2019.
The 2020 edition took position before the pandemic shut things down, but it was canceled in 2021 for the first time in more than a century. Locals
This year’s full return is a boon for carpenters, welders, sculptors, electricians, dancers, choreographers and others whose livelihoods depend on exaggerated parades. The festivities officially began on Friday and will continue into tomorrow, with approximately 46 million more people. People waited.
Brazil has recorded more COVID-19 deaths, nearly 700,000, than any other country except the United States. The country has recorded 2400 such deaths in the last month, as well as around 300 000 new diseases. Despite the lingering threat, many Brazilians are more than in a position to put the pandemic on them and celebrate.
“We’ve waited so long,” said Thiago Varella, a 38-year-old engineer who braved the rain in Sao Paulo. “We deserve this catharsis. “
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Karen Kaplan is scientific and medical editor at the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the clinical group, he worked in the Business section. He graduated from MIT and Columbia University.
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