It’s boo-yeah and not a boo-hoo time for kids of all ages when it comes to Halloween merry-making this year. And while experts may feel more confident about trick-or-treating during the coronavirus pandemic, grownups need to take special care to ensure the safety of costumed, candy-seeking kids. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease….
Continue ReadingVaccinations
Hospitals struggle to keep nurses, as nursing homes stall on staff shots
The U.S. health care system and all who rely on it may be reaching painful reckonings on how the coronavirus pandemic keeps affecting caregiving personnel, whether with highly trained nurses who are forcing hospitals to pay them more or see them leave or with poorly paid and ill-trained aides who still aren’t getting Covid-19 shots….
Continue ReadingU.S. has three approved boosters and is prepped to vaccinate kids
Don’t doubt the central role that vaccines are playing in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic. Federal officials — even as the Delta-variant surge is easing — have dominated the news by approving yet more boosters for those who have gotten the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson shots and announcing preparations to vaccinate kids ages….
Continue ReadingAs Delta surge eases, what’s next with this pandemic?
As the summer’s deadly Delta variant surge slowly seems to be receding, questions are rising anew as to what further harms the coronavirus pandemic may inflict on a nation that already has suffered greatly. The infection still is creating major problems in Alaska, as well as parts of the West and Upper Midwest, notably Minnesota…..
Continue ReadingAs experts ponder vaccinating our kids, Covid orphans tens of thousands
The battle to quell the coronavirus pandemic and especially its deadly Delta variant surge soon may extend to the nation’s children. A drug maker has submitted required data and formally requested from federal regulators an emergency approval for a vaccine for youngsters ages 5 to 12. Officials say they will take up this request, pronto,….
Continue ReadingAnother milestone of lives lost needlessly
It’s one thing when toddlers in their terrible twos react to common sense directions for their own good, throwing themselves to the floor, declaring, “I won’t, I won’t — and you can’t make me …” When grownups behave in, basically, the same way, the results can be catastrophic. The estimated death toll of the coronavirus….
Continue ReadingPfizer booster OKayed for millions, as U.S. struggles with toll of the unvaccinated
The battle against the coronavirus pandemic is further splintering Americans into brittle groups, segments familiar because they long have been components of the inequitable U.S. health care system — let’s call them the have nots, the have somes, the have much, and the won’ts. Regulators have decided that those who have some protection with lifesaving….
Continue ReadingNursing homes misdiagnose and sedate residents with strong drugs but lag on vaccinating staff
The nation’s nursing homes, battered by the coronavirus pandemic, are under more fire for their resurgent reliance on powerful and risky psychiatric drugs and shaky diagnoses of mental illness to treat elderly residents, as well as for the institutions’ inability to safeguard the old, sick, and injured in their care by ensuring their staff are….
Continue ReadingPandemic’s deadly toll rises each day. Why isn’t everybody taking it seriously?
Nineteen months after the coronavirus pandemic first began to rage, the nation has racked up mortality and morbidity statistics that are tragic and horrifying: 1 in 500 Americans now has died of the disease People older than 85 make up only 2% of the population, but a quarter of the total death toll Among those….
Continue ReadingU.S. toughens steps to quell surging pandemic as cultish resistance cries foul
To those unfamiliar with the history of world religions and disease, the formidable duo shown here are Hosogami (left) and Shapona (right). In two different societies of yore, in the 600s and 700s A.D. in Japan and in the 18th and even into the 19th century in Nigeria, the fervent built religious rites around these….
Continue Reading