GENEVA, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Europe is once again the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic amid a "false sense of security" over the protection offered by vaccines, World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
The risk to health systems across the country is further heightened because influenza and RSV are also on the rise.
Coronavirus cases are rising once again, disrupting classrooms, overwhelming hospitals and alarming public health officials — even in areas with high vaccination rates — who warn the country is headed for a holiday surge that could leave thousands dead.
The Delta variant was first detected a year ago and is now dominant across the globe. Scientists are concerned that a new strain could supersede it.
Every week, a group of epidemiologists across the north-east of the United States joins a Zoom call entirely devoted to discussing the latest hints of new Covid-19 variants being reported around the world.
Over 500 people at the University of Michigan have recently come down with influenza, with a large majority of cases being unvaccinated.
An outbreak of flu at the University of Michigan has sickened more than 500 people since early October. Local health officials have now brought in help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the matter, which may offer a preview of the flu season this winter. One important consideration is that a majority of those sick so far have been unvaccinated.
The delta variant is partly to blame.
Vermont is one of the most vaccinated states in the country and has served as a model for its COVID-19 response throughout the pandemic. But now, the state is experiencing its worst COVID-19 surge yet, with several factors -- including its own success -- to blame, officials said.
Coronavirus cases are surging in several U.S. states with relatively high vaccination rates, prompting concern among health officials who had hoped inoculations would help curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current uptick — arriving exactly one year after last winter’s massive COVID wave — appears to be the start of a seasonal spike in places with cooler weather that were spared the worst of the initial U.S. Delta surge, which hit undervaccinated Southern states hardest this summer.
“I don’t think the spike will be as bad as last winter because we have vaccines available and the approval for younger age groups is a big game changer,” one public health expert said.
A new surge of Covid-19 cases is expected to start hitting the United States around Thanksgiving just as the holiday season begins, public health experts are warning.
Better indoor air quality means significantly better health, productivity, and decision making by workers, according to a series of studies by a team of scientists from Harvard, SUNY Upstate, and Syracuse universities. Because Air-Clenz is the only system that cleans air within three feet of an individual's face and within about three seconds, Air-Clenz may be the world's best solution to deliver better indoor air quality.
Learn more about the The COGfx Study.
Any C-suite executive looking to lure workers back into the office has likely spent more time thinking about indoor air quality and ventilation over the past year-and-a-half than at any other point in their pre-pandemic life.
Even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been much discussion of what will be the next big pandemic and how do we prepare for it. New research has found that tuberculosis bacteria can spread via airborne and asymptomatic transmission similarly to SARS-CoV-2. This finding upends the conventional wisdom that coughing was the main route of transmission. It is these two characteristics that make SARS-CoV-2 so dangerous. Therefore I believe the next big pandemic might well be drug-resistant tuberculosis.