‘Pregnant women who tested positive for Covid-19 when admitted to a hospital to give birth were at a greater risk for stillbirth compared to those who did not, according to a study released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on Friday, with risks rising more since the delta variant has become the dominant strain.’
Read here (Forbes, Nov 19, 2021)
Read CDC report here.
‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency has documented about 5,800 “breakthrough” COVID-19 cases among the millions of Americans who are fully vaccinated, totaling far less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people.
"Vaccine breakthrough infections make up a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated,” the CDC told The Hill in a statement. “CDC recommends that all eligible people get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one is available to them.”
‘The CDC told The Hill on Thursday that about 7 percent of the recorded breakthrough cases resulted in hospitalization and about 1 percent of the people who contracted breakthrough infections died.’
Read here (The Hill, Apr 15, 2021)
‘The likelihood of contracting Covid-19 from touching contaminated surfaces is low at less than one in 10,000, announced the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
‘In new guidance released on April 5, the CDC said although it is possible for people to contract the coronavirus from surface transmission, the main mode of transmission of the disease is through direct contact with an infected person, droplet transmission (most likely to occur when one is within two metres of an infected person exhaling virus-containing respiratory droplets), and airborne transmission (exposure to smaller virus-containing respiratory droplets that can remain suspended in the air).’
Read here (Code Blue, Apr 9, 2021)
‘The US faces “impending doom” from a resurgent coronavirus pandemic, the head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned on Monday. “Right now I’m scared,” Rochelle Walensky said in an emotional and unscripted moment during a White House briefing. “I’m speaking not necessarily as your CDC director, and not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter to ask you to just please hold on a while longer.”
Read here (The Guardian, Mar 30, 2021)
‘As Robert Redfield awoke Friday morning, he found himself transformed in his TV into a gigantic target of viral scorn.
‘The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lifted many expert eyebrows from their microscopes, telling CNN’s Sanjay Gupta he believes the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 originated in a lab in China. In clips CNN aired from an upcoming special this Sunday (which Gupta dubbed an “autopsy” of the pandemic), Redfield dismissed the possibility that the virus could have evolved sufficiently on its own to have “somehow jumped” quickly from bats to humans. “I just don’t think this makes biological sense,” Redfield told Gupta, arguing it’s easier to conclude that the virus gained greater efficiency at infecting humans inside a lab.
Read here (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Mar 26, 2021)
‘Not until early May, when the CDC published its own deeply inadequate data dashboard, did we realize the depth of its ignorance. And when the White House reproduced one of our charts, it confirmed our fears: The government was using our data. For months, the American government had no idea how many people were sick with COVID-19, how many were lying in hospitals, or how many had died. And the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, started as a temporary volunteer effort, had become a de facto source of pandemic data for the United States.
‘After spending a year building one of the only U.S. pandemic-data sources, we have come to see the government’s initial failure here as the fault on which the entire catastrophe pivots. The government has made progress since May; it is finally able to track pandemic data. Yet some underlying failures remain unfixed. The same calamity could happen again.
‘Data might seem like an overly technical obsession, an oddly nerdy scapegoat on which to hang the deaths of half a million Americans. But data are how our leaders apprehend reality. In a sense, data are the federal government’s reality. As a gap opened between the data that leaders imagined should exist and the data that actually did exist, it swallowed the country’s pandemic planning and response.’
Read here (The Atlantic, Mar 16, 2021)
Fully vaccinated people can:
For now, fully vaccinated people should continue to:
Read here (US CDC, Mar 8, 2021)
‘We are commenting on the shocking CNN website report (March 2), headlined “All our recent progress with COVID-19 could be wiped out by variants, CDC director says”. The first two paragraphs (below) are enough to sum up the CNN report: “The US is at risk of losing all its recent gains in the battle against COVID-19 as highly contagious variants take advantage of Americans getting lax with safety measures... “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” said Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the US centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”...
‘With new variants, serious doubts are suggested by the CNN report on whether this “vaccine” [mRNA], the first in the global market, would work, even if safety factor is put aside. Nevertheless, there are safe and workable vaccines, using tried and tested technologies like using inactivated or attenuated virus from nature to stimulate the body to produce anti-body response. Even the adenovirus viral vector technology, tried and tested for Ebola, appears to be safer than mRNA.
‘There are also safe and good alternatives, like the anti-viral “broad spectrum” drug Ivermectin, which can destroy the new variants. In the meantime, it is vital that we improve our body immunity against COVID-19 by taking Vitamin C with zinc, Vitamin D, minerals and trace elements needed, explore proven traditional and complimentary medicines, and maintain established standard operating procedures (SOPs) of physical distancing, wearing surgical masks and personal hygiene in public places.’
Read here (Focus Malaysia, Mar 4, 2021)
‘Pregnant women looking for guidance on Covid-19 vaccines are facing the kind of confusion that has dogged the pandemic from the start: The world’s leading public health organizations — the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization — are offering contradictory advice. Neither organization explicitly forbids or encourages immunizing pregnant women. But weighing the same limited studies, they provide different recommendations.’
Read here (New York Times, Feb 2, 2021)
‘Herd immunity against the novel coronavirus could require vaccination rates "between 70 per cent and 90 per cent", Dr Anthony Fauci, the most prominent US infectious disease expert, said in an interview published on Thursday (Dec 24). More than 1 million Americans have received a first dose of a vaccine since Dec 14, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, or only about 0.3 per cent of the population.
‘Fauci, who is advising both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden on the pandemic, acknowledged that he had incrementally increased his estimates from earlier in the year, when he tended to say only 60 per cent to 70 per cent would need to be inoculated for herd immunity to be reached.’
Read here (Channel News Asia, Dec 25, 2020)
‘The US CDC published updated guidance regarding quarantine after known exposure to SARS-CoV-2. The CDC’s quarantine guidance continues to direct individuals to quarantine for 14 days* after the last known exposure to a COVID-19 patient, but the updated guidance provides options to shorten the quarantine period. Under the new guidance, individuals who do not exhibit any COVID-19 symptoms can end their quarantine as early as Day 10* without testing and Day 7* if they have a negative diagnostic test result (RT-PCR or antigen test). Importantly, for individuals who get tested, the test specimen should be collected within 48 hours of ending the quarantine period, which means that individuals should be tested at Day 5 or later. Even if a test conducted on Day 5 or 6 is returned before Day 7, in no case should quarantine be terminated prior to Day 7.’
Read here (US CDC, Dec 2, 2020)
‘Testing has found Covid-19 infections in the U.S. in December 2019, according to a study, providing further evidence indicating the coronavirus was spreading globally weeks before the first cases were reported in China.
‘The study published Monday identified 106 infections from 7,389 blood samples collected from donors in nine U.S. states between Dec. 13 and Jan. 17. The samples, collected by the American Red Cross, were sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing to detect if there were antibodies against the virus...
‘The revelations in the paper by researchers from the CDC reinforce the growing understanding that the coronavirus was silently circulating worldwide earlier than known, and could re-ignite debate over the origins of the pandemic.’
Read here (Bloomberg, Dec 1, 2020)
‘The CDC must be transparent about the side effects people may experience after getting their first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, doctors urged during a meeting Monday with CDC advisors. Dr. Sandra Fryhofer said that both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines require two doses and she worries whether her patients will come back for a second dose because of potentially unpleasant side effects after the first shot. Both companies acknowledged that their vaccines could induce side effects that are similar to symptoms associated with mild Covid-19, such as muscle pain, chills and headache.’
Read here (CNBC, Nov 23, 2020)
‘According to the New York Times, the study followed the movement of 98 million people to and from indoor public spaces, then calculated traffic to each spot visited as well as how long people stay and each venue’s square footage. Using the area’s infection rate, they then used “standard infectious disease assumptions” to determine how the illness spread across cities.
‘Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec, the senior author of the report, tells the Times that “restaurants were by far the riskiest places” for new infections, “about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels,” he says. It’s news that jibes with another recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which said in September that a study of adults across 11 U.S. cities who tested positive for the novel coronavirus were twice as likely to have dined out within the last two weeks than those who tested negative.’
Read here (Eater San Francisco, Nov 11, 2020)
‘The mortality rate of the coronavirus has been a moving target since the outbreak began. Early reports out of China put it as high as 7 percent. But that was based mostly on hospitalized patients, and by the time the wave hit the United States, epidemiologists believed it was closer to 2 to 3 percent. Now, factoring in asymptomatic infections, as well as mild cases that might not be part of official tallies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the mortality rate at 0.65 percent.
‘Public health officials cite multiple reasons for the lower death rates: They note a shift in the demographics of who is being stricken with the virus, with younger people making up the bulk of new infections. More widespread testing is capturing a more diverse range of people and illness, and improved treatment strategies that include antivirals and steroids are saving more lives. But some researchers speculate there may be more to the story...’
This story is behind a paywall.
Read here (Washington Post, Oct 9, 2020)
‘Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.
‘The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering,1 the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.’
Read here (New England Journal of Medicine, Oct 8, 2020)
‘A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health titan who led the eradication of smallpox asked the embattled, current CDC leader to expose the failed U.S. response to the coronavirus, calling on him to orchestrate his own firing to protest White House interference. William Foege, a renowned epidemiologist who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, detailed in a private letter he sent last month to CDC Director Robert Redfield his alarm over how the agency has fallen in stature while the pandemic raged across America.
“You could upfront, acknowledge the tragedy of responding poorly, apologize for what has happened and your role in acquiescing,” Foege wrote to Redfield. He said simply resigning without coming clean would be insufficient. “Don’t shy away from the fact this has been an unacceptable toll on our country. It is a slaughter and not just a political dispute.”
Read here (USA Today, Oct 7, 2020)
‘The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention again urged Americans during a Wednesday Senate hearing to wear face masks, in contrast to President Donald Trump’s lax attitude. “These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have. ... If we did it for six, eight, 10, 12 weeks, we would bring this pandemic under control,” Robert Redfield said. “We have clear scientific evidence they work.”
‘He added that it was unlikely that a vaccine would be available to the general public until mid-late 2021. This comes as the federal government rolls out a COVID-19 vaccine plan, aiming to make the vaccine free to all Americans. Trump publicly slapped down Redfield later, saying he was wrong about a vaccine timeline and the effectiveness of masks.’
Read here (Huffington Post, Sept 16, 2020)
‘A coalition of nine pharmaceutical chief executives issued a joint pledge Tuesday that they will not rush the development of a COVID-19 vaccination for political purposes and will not seek approvals until the vaccines have gone through Phase 3 clinical trials.
‘The unusual joint move from nine industry leaders comes after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified states to be ready to distribute a vaccine to certain groups just two days before the presidential election, stoking concerns that the Trump administration may be putting political pressure on companies and health officials to fast-track vaccine approvals ahead of the November vote.’
Read here (ABC News, Sept 8, 2020)
‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has notified public health officials in all 50 states and five large cities to prepare to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to health care workers and other high-risk groups as soon as late October or early November.
‘The new C.D.C. guidance is the latest sign of an accelerating race for a vaccine to ease a pandemic that has killed more than 184,000 Americans. The documents were sent out on the same day that President Trump told the nation in his speech to the Republican National Convention that a vaccine might arrive before the end of the year.’
Read here (New York Times, Sept 2, 2020)