HomeCorona VirusCoronavirus daily news updates, September 30: What to know today about COVID-19 in the Seattle area, Washington state and the world – The Seattle Times
Coronavirus daily news updates, September 30: What to know today about COVID-19 in the Seattle area, Washington state and the world – The Seattle Times
COVID-19 vaccination rates in Washington have risen significantly in the last month, adding to hospital and health officials’ wary optimism about recent virus trends as winter approaches. Still, they warned Wednesday, hurdles remain.
Meanwhile, the expansion of vaccine eligibility to about 28 million U.S. kids appears closer than ever — expected within weeks, possibly before October’s end — and it could improve the pandemic outlook for everyone. Vaccinations in kids could boost population immunity, quash cases in schools, and help fend off a severe fall or winter surge. Most important, pediatricians said, the vaccine offers long-awaited protection for children from the real danger of catching the virus.
In Washington, D.C., the Biden administration is striving to insulate the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic from a shutdown that looms if Congress cannot agree on a plan to keep the government funded past midnight Thursday.
We’re updating this page with the latest news about the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the Seattle area, the U.S. and the world. Click here to see previous days’ live updates and all our other coronavirus coverage, and here to see how we track the daily spread across Washington.
Australian state’s 50% jump in COVID-19 blamed on sport fans
Australia’s Victoria state on Thursday reported a jump of more than 50% in daily COVID-19 cases, which authorities largely blame on Australian Rules Football parties last weekend that breached pandemic regulations.
State capital Melbourne traditionally hosts the annual grand final which the football-obsessed city celebrates with a long weekend.
Because of Melbourne’s lockdown, two Melbourne teams played for the national premiership on Saturday in the coronavirus-free west coast city of Perth.
Contact tracers found a third of Victoria’s 1,438 new infections reported on Thursday had broken pandemic rules by attending social gatherings on the Friday public holiday and on game day, officials said.
Jeroen Weimar, commander of Victoria’s COVID-19 response, said time would tell whether the infection jump was “one big rogue day” or part of a grave new trend.
“This is a direct consequence of hundreds of decisions made on Friday and Saturday last week and the question now is how we manage this going forward,” he added.
Melbourne’s lockdown is set to end on Oct. 26 when 70% of the state’s population aged 16 and older is expected to be fully vaccinated.
West Virginia’s governor wants residents to get vaccinated for his dog. But not enough are getting the shot.
Before she gathered her staff for a Zoom meeting two weeks ago, Laura Jones wrestled over how to tell them that everyone must receive a coronavirus vaccination by Oct. 1.
“I avoided calling it a mandate; I said it was a requirement,” said Jones, executive director of Milan Puskar Health Right, a free clinic in Morgantown, W.Va., whose board of directors made the call.
Right after Jones’s announcement, two out of a handful of holdouts got their shots – a couple more small victories in West Virginia’s uphill battle against the rampaging virus.
The rural, heavily Republican state now has one of the nation’s highest case counts and lowest vaccination rates. As the Biden administration is forcing companies with more than 100 employees to require coronavirus vaccinations or mandatory testing, the notion of imposing mandates is fraught in West Virginia – even in Democratic-leaning places like Morgantown and with a staunchly pro-vaccine Republican governor.
The governor, Jim Justice, has forcefully and plainly urged his residents to get vaccinated but has railed against top-down enforcement. He has put his political weight instead behind a quirky vaccination sweepstakes named after his bulldog. It’s a calculated risk, designed to unite fiercely independent Appalachian residents – one by one – behind a common goal. And it leaves school districts, businesses and health-care providers like Jones to navigate local politics – and sometimes protests – as they decide what measures will best protect their populations.
At Idaho hospitals, COVID-19 patients are sucking up oxygen at ‘astounding rates’
Add oxygen to the list of resources Idaho health care providers must manage closely as COVID-19 continues to surge through the state.
One major regional supplier has expressed concern to hospital leaders about the mounting need for oxygen, which is often used to treat COVID-19 patients who have issues breathing.
Elias Margonis, the president of Norco Inc. — which is based in Boise and supplies oxygen to hospitals in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West — sent a letter to customers Monday noting that oxygen is being used at “astounding rates.” He asked hospital customers to conserve the resource where possible.
“While there is not an immediate shortage of oxygen, there is a tremendous amount of growing stress to the supply chain network,” the letter said. “Many hospitals have already pushed their bulk storage systems to limits of requiring emergency upgrades.”
“The hospitals in the Treasure Valley are probably in their highest mode of oxygen consumption that we’ve ever seen,” he said. “… it’s just amazing how much of it is being used to treat patients that chose not to get vaccinated. It’s unfortunate.”
It’s flu vaccine time, even if you’ve had your COVID shots
Amid all the focus on COVID-19 vaccinations, U.S. health experts have another plea: Don’t skip your flu shot.
Flu cases have dropped to historically low levels during the pandemic. The U.S. and Europe experienced hardly any flu last winter, and the Southern Hemisphere just ended its second flu season of the coronavirus pandemic with little to report.
But with U.S. schools and businesses reopened, international travel resuming and far less masking this fall, flu could make a comeback. The big question is whether it will trickle in or roar back and put extra pressure on hospitals already struggling with COVID-19 surges.
“People are sick to death of hearing about having to roll on out and get vaccines of any sort,” said flu specialist Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
Yet after 18 months of little influenza exposure, “we probably as a population don’t have as much immunity against this virus as we typically might,” Webby said. “It makes absolute sense to go on out and get that vaccine and at least prepare for something that, you know, could be quite severe.”
Biden vaccine mandate splits US on party lines: AP-NORC poll
A survey of Americans on President Joe Biden’s plan to require most workers to get either vaccinated or regularly tested for COVID-19 finds a deep and familiar divide: Democrats are overwhelmingly for it, while most Republicans are against it.
With the highly contagious delta variant driving deaths up to around 2,000 per day, the poll released Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that overall, 51% say they approve of the Biden requirement, 34% disapprove and 14% hold neither opinion.
About three quarters of Democrats, but only about a quarter of Republicans, approve. Roughly 6 in 10 Republicans say they disapprove. Over the course of the outbreak, Democrats and Republicans in many places have also found themselves divided over masks and other precautions.
Sixty-four percent of vaccinated Americans say they approve of the mandate, while 23% disapprove. Among unvaccinated Americans, just 14% are in support, while 67% are opposed. Most remote employees approve, but in-person workers are about evenly divided.
Lynden Christian Schools to go to remote learning amid surge in COVID-19 cases
Lynden Christian Schools is switching back to remote learning for two weeks in the midst of an outbreak of COVID-19 cases to avoid being shut down by the Whatcom County Health Department.
An email was sent to parents this week informing them that in-person classes would be canceled this week and and that remote learning would begin on Thursday, The Bellingham Herald reported after obtaining a screenshot of the email.
The school closed classrooms voluntarily to avoid being shut down by the county health department, which found that the school had multiple cases or exposures in nearly every grade and classroom, and that several classrooms and grades met the health department’s operating definition of a school-associated outbreak.
“The temporary closure of Lynden Christian Schools is an unfortunate but necessary step to halt the spread of COVID-19 in the school environment and prevent further risk to the whole community,” said Dr. Amy Harley, co-health officer for Whatcom County, in a health department statement. “We support the school board’s decision to temporarily close in-person instruction and extracurricular activities in order to quickly curtail the current outbreak so that the school can reopen for in-person learning when it’s safe to do so.”
Vietnam to end virus lockdown in largest city after 3 months
Vietnam will lift the lockdown in its largest city on Friday, ending nearly three months of restrictions on movement to curb a coronavirus surge.
People in Ho Chi Minh City, a metropolis of 10 million, will be able to leave their homes, restaurants can serve take-away meals and other essential businesses can open, the city said on its website Thursday.
Ho Chi Minh City along with 18 southern provinces went into lockdown in mid-July when cases started to surge.
In the past three months, the delta variant of the virus has infected 770,000 people and killed over 19,000, according to the health ministry. Most of Vietnam’s COVID-19 deaths occurred in this wave, with Ho Chi Minh City accounting for the majority of them.
In a letter to the editor, a man said his relative ‘is past’ COVID and ‘completely immune,’ then came the absurd twist
Over the years, Charles Chamberlain has fired off dozens of letters to the editor of his local newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times. The Spring Hill, Fla., man has pontificated on oil prices, Social Security and the influence of money in politics. He has railed against former president Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims and the “cold, calculating and cynical” ethics of herd immunity.
Chamberlain, 81, is no fan of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who he said has sacrificed public health for partisan politics amid a pandemic that has killed more than 54,000 Floridians. So when DeSantis appointed Joseph Ladapo — a controversial physician who has questioned the safety of the coronavirus vaccines — to serve as the state’s new surgeon general, Chamberlain was, naturally, peeved.
Nevertheless, he was interested in what Ladapo had to say about natural immunity, particularly the surgeon general’s comment that a previous coronavirus infection “protects people from getting very ill and also protects people from being infected again.”
So Chamberlain cast off another letter to the Times.
“Florida’s new surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, is spot-on with his observation that the best form of prevention from COVID-19 is for persons to have an infection because this will provide the best immunity,” Chamberlain wrote. “I am aware that he is correct because of a recent experience with a member of my family. He had a severe infection from COVID-19. He is past that now and is completely immune — not only for COVID-19 but flu and other respiratory infections as well.”
Chamberlain concluded that “Dr. Ladapo’s recommendation works.” Then, he ended the letter with an absurdist twist: “Of course we are burying this family member next week.”
The letter, which was published Sept. 23, quickly gained traction online, including in one tweet that amassed more than 4,300 retweets and 21,000 likes.
“This may be the only newspaper letter to the editor worth reading until the end,” one person remarked.
Jackie Whited, a Wenatchee intensive care director, got COVID-19 before vaccines were available. She wound up with what may be a lifelong health problem — but she’s back to working long hours to help a flood of desperately ill COVID-19 patients who are still “fighting with you to say this is not real.” A look inside her hospital tells a story that’s playing out across rural Washington, with medical centers so swamped that they’re sending hundreds of patients to King County.
Primetta Giacopini, age 105, survived two world wars and the Spanish flu, which killed her mother when Primetta was a toddler. But this month, her remarkable life ended the way it began — in a pandemic, as she died of COVID-19.
No comments:
Post a Comment