As U.S. leaders work to control the spread of coronavirus, researchers around the world are working to answer the mysteries that remain about infections.
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Employees of St. John’s Well Child & Family Center is preparing to test a woman for COVID-19 at a free mobile test clinic set up outside Walker Temple AME Church in South Los Angeles amid the coronavirus pandemic on July 15, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images)
One of those mysteries: why can the experience be so different from person to person. One expert says the answer may include looking at previous faxes that individuals have had.
“When we looked at the setting of Covid’s disease, we found that people who had previous vaccinations with a variety of vaccines – for pneumococcus, flu, hepatitis and others – appeared to have a lower risk of Covid’s disease. , “said Dr. Andrew Badley, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic, told CNerson’s Anderson Cooper Monday night.
It’s what immunologists call immune training: how your immune system creates an effective response to fight infections, Badley says.
“A good analogy is to think of your immune system as a muscle,” he said. “The more you exercise that muscle, the stronger it will be when you need it.”
There has been no definitive evidence of other vaccines stimulating immunity to Covid-19. But some researchers have suggested that it is possible.
In June, a team of researchers in the US proposed giving a booster dose of the vaccine against the mice, mumps and rubella (MMR) to people to see if it helps prevent the most serious effects of infections with coronavirus. And last month, researchers found that countries where many people received the tuberculosis vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) had lower coronavirus mortality, a finding that is consistent with other studies suggesting that the vaccine has immunity of people in general can stimulate.
But once you are infected, how much of the virus made it into your body can also affect what your experience is, another expert told CNN on Monday.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, has partnered with a team of researchers to understand how more people can pass on their infections with minimal or no symptoms. About 40% of people infected with the virus have no symptoms, according to an estimate last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gandhi’s team found that masks make a difference.
“What the mask does is really reduce the amount of virus you get in, if you get infected,” she said. “And by reducing that … you have a lower dose, you are able to manage it, you are able to have a calm reaction and you have mild symptoms if no symptoms at all.”
Coronavirus: Your questions, answered
‘We have nothing to do’ about current case levels, says doctor
To date, more than 5 million Americans have tested positive for the virus and at least 164,000 have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The average number of daily new cases in the U.S. is more than 54,000, down from more than 65,000 per day in mid to late July.
However, average daily deaths from Covid-19 have remained above 1,000 for more than two weeks. The country had been below that level for seven consecutive weeks before that.
“We have nothing to do (simply) because we will have 50,000 cases a day. We have an enormous amount of morbidity and mortality at our feet at the moment and in the weeks ahead,” Drs. Rochelle Walensky, boss of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, said Tuesday.
“Even at 18,000 cases a day (like the US had) in mid-May, we could not really crush this,” Walensky said.
These states require face masks
Study: Many Americans were not infected because of distancing commands
Up to 80% of Americans would have been infected with Covid-19 had states not implemented physical distancing policies, according to a recently published modeling study.
Researchers from Harvard University and University College London found that every state in the US took at least one physical distance measure in March to slow the spread of the pandemic.
The policy resulted in the reduction of more than 600,000 cases within just three weeks, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS.
“The results show the timing of order-issued orders strongly correlates with reductions in both cases and deaths. In short, these measures work, and policymakers need to use them as an arrow in their basements to get on top of local epidemics where they are not responding to containment measures, “said Dr. Mark J. Siedner, a co-author of the Harvard Medical School study and a physician of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Mortality decreased by 2% per day beginning in the week after a physical distancing policy began, the study says.
Often spiked in nursing homes because of the spread of the community, group says
Covid-19 cases rose sharply in U.S. nursing homes in July after a steady decline in June – signaling a serious risk to a particularly vulnerable group of people, a health organization said Tuesday.
The jump in nursing home cases was due to a general jump in cases among the general population, and it should encourage the U.S. government to take steps to protect the homes, said the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living.
“We need public health officials to focus on reducing proliferation within the wider community and prioritizing long-term care for resources,” including personal protective equipment, testing and support staff, wrote Mark Parkinson, CEO of the AHCA / NCAL, on CNN on Tuesday.
New weekly Covid-19 cases in nursing homes fell from 9,072 at the end of May to 5,468 by June 21 – but then increased to 8,628 for the week of July 19, the last week for which data are available, the group said. The group cited data collected by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The report said that these confirmed fears had the group: That cases would increase in nursing homes if they spiked from June to July in the wider community across the country.
Elderly adults and people with certain underlying medical conditions increase the risk of serious illness, the CDC says.
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