Tag Archives: COVID-19

Women in 40s, 50s who survive COVID more likely to suffer persistent problems: UK studies

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Women in their 40s and 50s appear more at risk of long-term problems following discharge from hospital after COVID-19, with many suffering months of persistent symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and brain fog, two UK studies found on Wednesday.

One study found that five months after leaving hospital, COVID-19 patients who were also middle-aged, white, female, and had other health problems such as diabetes, lung or heart disease, tended to be more likely to report long-COVID symptoms.

“Our study finds that those who have the most severe prolonged symptoms tend to be white women aged approximately 40 to 60 who have at least two long term health conditions,” said Chris Brightling, a professor of respiratory medicine at Leicester University who co-led the study known as PHOSP-COVID.

A second study led by the International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infections Consortium (ISARIC) found that women under 50 had higher odds of worse long-term health outcomes than men and than older study participants, even if they had no underlying health conditions.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that COVID-19 has profound consequences for those who survive the disease,” said Tom Drake, a clinical research fellow at Edinburgh University who co-led the ISARIC study.

“We found that younger women were most likely to have worse long-term outcomes.”

The ISARIC study, which covered 327 patients, found that women under 50 were twice as likely to report fatigue, seven times more likely to have breathlessness, and also more likely to have problems relating to memory, mobility and communication.

The PHOSP study analyzed 1,077 male and female patients who were discharged from hospitals in Britain between March and November 2020 after having COVID-19.

A majority of patients reported multiple persistent symptoms after 5 months, with common symptoms being muscle and joint pain, fatigue, weakness, breathlessness and brain fog.

More than a quarter had what doctors said were “clinically significant symptoms of anxiety and depression” at five months, and 12% had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Louise Wain, a professor and respiratory specialist at Leicester University who co-led PHOSP, said differences in male and female immune responses “may explain why post-COVID syndrome seems to be more prevalent” in women.

“We…know that autoimmunity, where the body has an immune response to its own healthy cells and organs, is more common in middle-aged women,” she said, but “further investigation is needed to fully understand” the processes involved.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Number of COVID patients in intensive care in France at highest level this year

PARIS (Reuters) – The number of people with COVID-19 in French intensive care units rose by 84 on Tuesday to a new 2021 high of 4,634, health ministry data showed.

But the number of new infections, at 14,678, was the lowest since Jan. 3, excluding Mondays, when case numbers dip because fewer tests are done over the weekend.

A third of France’s population, including the Paris region, has since Friday been under a lockdown that is due to last four weeks. Experts generally say it takes two weeks for restrictive measures to take effect.

The total number of people in hospital for COVID-19 rose by 268 to at 26,756, the highest since Feb. 11.

The COVID-19 death toll rose by 287 to 92,908, the seventh-highest in the world.

(Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

COVID-19 surging dangerously in Brazil, WHO Americas branch warns

BRASILIA (Reuters) – The coronavirus is surging “dangerously” across Brazil, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) regional director for the Americas, Carissa Etienne, warned on Tuesday, urging all Brazilians to adopt preventive measures to stop the spread.

“Unfortunately, the dire situation in Brazil is also affecting neighboring countries,” Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), said in a briefing.

Cases have risen in Venezuela’s Bolivar and Amazonas states, and in border regions of Peru and Bolivia, she said.

“The COVID-19 virus is not receding, nor is the pandemic starting to go away,” Etienne said.

In the Southern Cone, cases continue to spike in Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, according to PAHO.

In Paraguay, a majority of intensive care unit (ICU) beds are occupied, and the health system is buckling under the pressure. Uruguay has reported more than 1,000 cases per day several times in the past few weeks, an alarming number given the size of the country.

In Central America, cases have declined in Panama, but in Guatemala the rise in hospitalizations is straining ICU bed capacity.

“Vaccines are coming but they are still several months away for most people in our region.” Etienne said.

The COVAX facility led by WHO and the Gavi coalition to provide equitable access to vaccines has delivered 2,161,800 doses to the region so far, including more than 1 million doses to Brazil last weekend.

PAHO expects over 100,000 vaccine doses to be delivered this week to El Salvador, Belize and Suriname, and 1.2 million additional doses have already been procured.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Austria delays reopening restaurants as COVID-19 cases rise

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria has postponed the reopening of café, restaurant and bar terraces planned for March 27 due to rising coronavirus cases and is preparing for regions to adapt restrictions locally, the government said on Monday.

Infections have been increasing steadily since Austria loosened its third lockdown on Feb. 8 by letting non-essential shops reopen despite stubbornly high COVID-19 cases. A night-time curfew replaced all-day restrictions on movement.

The number of new infections reported rose above 3,500 on Friday, the highest level since early December, when cases were falling during the second national lockdown.

The government met with the governors of its nine provinces on Monday to review its plan to let terraces reopen next weekend in all but one of them, after the small Alpine province of Vorarlberg got a head start earlier this month.

“The experts have advised us not to carry out any more loosening of restrictions here, unfortunately,” Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said of most provinces, adding three hard-hit eastern ones including Vienna would work on extra measures.

A government source said loosening of restrictions could happen in some regions after Easter if intensive-care figures are stable.

Last week the hardest-hit provinces were Vienna and the province surrounding it, Lower Austria, as well as Burgenland, which borders Hungary. The latest government data shows them in the top five in terms of infection rates and intensive care bed use, with Salzburg and Upper Austria.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Janet Lawrence)

New U.S. COVID-19 cases show weekly uptick for first time since January

(Reuters) – New cases of COVID-19 in the United States rose 5% to more than 394,000 last week, the first increase after declining for nine straight weeks, according to a Reuters analysis of state, county and CDC data.

Thirty out of 50 states reported more new infections in the week ended March 21 compared with the previous seven days, up from 19 states in the prior week, according to the Reuters analysis.

Nationally, the weekly number of new cases had been on a downward trend since January, though health authorities have warned that infections could surge again if Americans relaxed social distancing restrictions too quickly. More infectious variants have also spread across the country.

“I am worried that if we don’t take the right actions now we will have another avoidable surge just as we are seeing in Europe right now and just as we are so aggressively scaling up vaccinations,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Monday.

The Northeast logged some of the highest rates of infection per capita, led by New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

Deaths from COVID fell 15% to 7,793 last week, or about 1,100 per day, according to the Reuters analysis. Health officials hope the country’s vaccination effort can prevent a rise in deaths even if cases surge again.

For a fourth week, daily average vaccinations set a record, with 2.5 million shots given per day last week. As of Sunday, 25% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, up from 21% a week ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 13% has received two doses, up from 11%.

The average number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals fell 6% to 36,000, the lowest since October, according to a Reuters tally.

Hospitalizations have fallen for 10 weeks nationally, but they are rising in 18 states, up from four states the previous week.

(Graphic by Chris Canipe, writing by Lisa Shumaker, editing by Tiffany Wu)

AstraZeneca vaccine safe and effective in new trial data

FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine developed with Oxford University was 79% effective in preventing symptomatic illness in a large trial in Chile, Peru and the United States, the company said on Monday, paving the way for it to apply for U.S. approval.

The vaccine was also 100% effective against severe or critical disease and hospitalization, and was safe, the partners said on Monday, releasing results of the late-stage human trial study of more than 32,000 volunteers across all age groups.

The data will give credence to the British shot after results from earlier, separate late-stage studies raised questions about the robustness of the data.

It will also help to allay safety concerns that have disrupted its use in the European Union after a small number of reports of rare blood clots in people who received the vaccine.

After briefly halting its use, many European countries have resumed using the shot in their inoculation programs after a regional regulator said it was safe, while several country leaders are also taking the vaccine to boost confidence.

AstraZeneca said an independent safety committee conducted a specific review of the blood clots in the U.S. trial, as well as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), which is an extremely rare blood clot in the brain, with the help of an independent neurologist.

The London-listed company said the panel found “no increased risk of thrombosis or events characterized by thrombosis among the 21,583 participants receiving at least one dose of the vaccine. The specific search for CVST found no events in this trial.”

“These results are great news as they show the remarkable efficacy of the vaccine in a new population and are consistent with the results from Oxford-led trials,” Andrew Pollard, who runs the Oxford Vaccine Group, said.

AstraZeneca said it was preparing to submit the data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and for a launch in the United States should it win Emergency Use Authorization.

University of Oxford professor Sarah Gilbert told BBC radio that work to prepare the submission will take a few weeks.

The efficacy read-out was above a rate of about 60%, cited by the European Union’s drugs regulator in its December recommendation.

It was, however, in line with the maximum efficacy found by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), based on cases with a three-month gap between the first and the second dose.

In the trial, participants received either two standard doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine or a placebo vaccine, at a four-week interval.

Amongst participants in the interim analysis, about 79% were white/Caucasian, 8% black/African American, 4% native American and 4% Asian, and 22% of participants were Hispanic, the company said.

About 20% of participants were 65 years and over, and approximately 60% had co-morbidities associated with an increased risk for progression of severe COVID-19, such as diabetes, severe obesity or cardiac disease.

(Reporting by Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt, Pushkala Aripaka and Muvija M in Bengaluru; Editing by Josephine Mason, Mark Potter, Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Edmund Blair)

Keep using AstraZeneca vaccine, WHO urges world

By Emma Farge

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) exhorted the world to keep administering AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 shots on Friday, adding its endorsement to that of European and British regulators after concerns over blood clotting.

“We urge countries to continue using this important COVID-19 vaccine,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva.

He was speaking after the global health body’s vaccine safety panel said available data about the AstraZeneca shot did not point to any overall increase in clotting conditions.

European and British regulators also said this week that the benefits of AstraZeneca’s shot outweighed the risks, prompting various nations to lift their suspensions.

“The AstraZeneca vaccine is especially important because it accounts for more than 90% of the vaccines being distributed through COVAX,” Tedros added, referring to a WHO-led global vaccine-sharing scheme.

“There is no question. COVID-19 is a deadly disease, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine can prevent it. It’s also important to remember that COVID-19 itself can cause blood clots and low platelets.”

The WHO’s global advisory committee on vaccine safety said in a statement that the AstraZeneca vaccine had a “positive benefit-risk profile” and “tremendous potential” to prevent infections and reduce deaths.

The WHO panel of 12 independent experts, who met virtually on Tuesday and on Thursday, reviewed safety data from Europe, the United Kingdom, India, and WHO’s global database.

“While very rare and unique thromboembolic events in combination with thrombocytopenia, such as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), have also been reported following vaccination with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in Europe, it is not certain that they have been caused by vaccination,” it said.

(Reporting by Michael Shields, Emma Farge and Stephanie Nebehay; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

U.S. administers 118.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines: CDC

(Reuters) – The United States has administered 118,313,818 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country as of Friday morning and distributed 154,199,235 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The tally is for Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Friday, the agency said.

According to the tally posted on March 18, the agency had administered 115,730,008 doses of the vaccines, and distributed 151,108,445 doses.

The agency said 77,230,061 people had received at least one dose while 41,934,629 people are fully vaccinated as of Friday.

A total of 7,630,706 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.

(Reporting by Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

U.S. backs distance of three feet between students, which may help schools open

By Carl O’Donnell

(Reuters) – The U.S. government on Friday updated its COVID-19 mitigation guidance to narrow the acceptable distance between students who are wearing masks to at least three feet from at least six feet, potentially easing the path for schools that have struggled to reopen under previous recommendations.

The new recommendation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a boost to the Biden administration’s goal of reopening in-person learning for millions of public school students without sparking outbreaks of the virus.

Many schools continue to teach students remotely more than a year after the novel coronavirus prompted widespread closures across the United States.

The new guidance applies to students from kindergarten through high school and in areas with low, moderate, and substantial community transmission of COVID-19. Middle and high school students in communities with high levels of COVID-19 should stay six feet apart unless their school day contact can be limited to a single small group of students and staff.

Students should continue to maintain six feet of distance when interacting with teachers and other school staff and when eating, the CDC said.

The CDC has been under pressure to relax its guidance to schools and Director Rochelle Walensky said this week that the agency was looking at data in part from a recent study in Massachusetts which suggested tighter spacing had not impacted COVID-19 transmission.

Many schools do not have the space in classrooms to maintain six feet between students, and outside of the United States public health agency recommendations for social distancing start at about three feet and range to more than six.

The guidance urged schools to conduct widespread COVID-19 testing of students and said such regular use of screening tests offers added protection for schools that require fewer than six feet of separation.

School districts should expand screenings for students participating in sports or other extracurricular activities, and consider universal screening prior to athletic events.

The agency continues to recommend quarantines for anyone who has been within six feet of someone sick with COVID-19 for more than 15 minutes within a 24-hour period.

The White House said Wednesday said it would allocate $10 billion to states to support COVID-19 screening testing for teachers, staff and students to assist schools resume in-person instruction.

The CDC said students are required to wear masks on school buses and any other forms of public transit they use to get to school. The agency issued an order in February requiring travelers to wear masks when using public transit.

The Biden administration has urged states to vaccinate teachers and childcare workers, with the goal of getting all of them inoculated by the end of March.

Sweden reports 5,735 new COVID-19 cases, 26 deaths on Friday

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Sweden, which has shunned lockdowns throughout the pandemic, registered 5,735 new coronavirus cases on Friday, health agency statistics showed.

The country of 10 million inhabitants registered 26 new deaths, taking the total to 13,262. The deaths registered have occurred over several days and sometimes weeks.

Sweden’s death rate per capita is many times higher than that of its Nordic neighbors’ but lower than in several European countries that opted for lockdowns.

(Reporting by Johan Ahlander, Editing by Helena Soderpalm)