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Cuomo to Testify Before House Committee That Accused Him of COVID-19 Cover up
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is scheduled to testify publicly Tuesday before a congressional subcommittee critical of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as it began to spread through the state’s nursing homes in 2020.
Members of the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report ahead of Cuomo’s testimony that accused the Democrat of staging a “cover up” to hide mistakes that endangered nursing home residents.
“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19,” U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the Ohio Republican who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said in a statement Monday.
Cuomo’s spokesperson accused the committee of wasting taxpayer dollars on an investigation that found “no evidence of wrongdoing.”
On the COVID ‘off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.
COVID-19?
The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.
“Six months ago, we would have tested for COVID,” said Moyer, 41, of Ohio. This time they did not.
Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.
As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Moyer, COVID-19 has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines.
Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a COVID-19 surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.
Caseload Strain Linked to Patient Survival During Delta Wave of COVID-19
Across hospital types, there is a comparably detrimental relationship between COVID-19 caseload and patient survival, according to a study published online Sept. 10 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Maniraj Neupane, M.D., Ph.D., from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study to examine whether hospital type classified by capabilities and resources influenced COVID-19 volume-outcome relationships during the delta wave.
The study included adult inpatients with COVID-19 admitted to 620 U.S. hospitals during July to Nov. 2021.
Of the 620 hospitals recording 223,380 inpatients with COVID-19, 208 were extracorporeal membrane oxygenation-capable, 216 had multiple intensive care units (ICUs), 36 had large (≥200 beds) single ICUs, and 160 had small (<200 beds) single ICUs.
The researchers found that 23% of the patients required admission to the ICU and 15.3% died. Per unit increase in the log surge index, the marginally adjusted probability for mortality was 5.51% (strain-attributable mortality: 7,375 or one in five COVID-19 deaths).
Across the four hospital types, the test for interaction showed no difference in the log surge index-mortality relationship.
Long-COVID Rate Among Disabled People Double That of Able-Bodied
Over 40% of COVID-19 survivors who had disabilities before the pandemic had symptoms for three months or longer in 2022, compared with 19% of those without disabilities, further widening health disparities, finds a new report published in the American Journal of Public Health.
University of Kansas (KU) researchers compared rates of long COVID among 2,262 KU National Survey on Health and Disability respondents disabled before 2020 — of whom 581 reported testing positive for COVID-19 — with those among 2,725 nondisabled participants in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS).
The estimated prevalence of long COVID was higher among COVID-positive participants with disabilities (40.6%) than among previously infected, non-disabled participants (18.9%) and HPS respondents who reported ever having long-COVID symptoms (31.5%).
The prevalence in summer 2022 was 10.4% of participants with disabilities, compared with 7.5% of non-disabled respondents.
New Report: COVID More Severe, Longer-Lasting Than Other Respiratory Diseases
Healthcare workers (HCWs) with COVID-19 had more severe symptoms that lasted longer than those with other respiratory diseases, and a higher proportion met the World Health Organization (WHO) or U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) definitions of long COVID, according to a report published in Viruses and Viral Diseases.
A team led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute investigators in Parkville, Australia, also identified older age, chronic respiratory disease, and pre-existing symptoms as risk factors for long COVID, also known as post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS).
The researchers analyzed data on long-COVID symptoms, duration, and pre-existing symptoms from the multinational randomized controlled trial (RCT) BRACE trial on HCWs diagnosed as having COVID-19 or another respiratory illness for one year after diagnosis.
New Study Highlights Importance of Targeting Unchanging Parts of COVID-19 Virus
For the past three years, Corewell Health researchers have been studying the genetic code of the virus that causes COVID-19 to better understand how it is changing and how to avoid another pandemic.
Much of the world’s focus has been on the development of vaccines to prevent the spread of the virus; however, vaccines primarily target the portion of the virus that constantly changes, requiring vaccines to be regularly updated.
The new research, published in the journal Microorganisms, highlights that it is the unchanging parts of the virus that may provide reliable targets for new treatment strategies.
The key findings of the study, which evaluated COVID-19 samples from western areas of Michigan, were:
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- Most of the critical parts of the virus that causes COVID-19 have stayed the same throughout the entire pandemic.
- The spike protein is a component of the virus that is used to get into human cells; however, it has constantly changed throughout the pandemic. Vaccines have been the mainstay of combating coronavirus by reducing transmission and severity of infection; yet because vaccines only target the spike protein, many studies neglect discussing the unchanging parts of the virus.
- Small molecule drugs, including antivirals that target parts of the virus that do not change, such as the enzymes that allow the virus to replicate, can provide effective treatment strategies in future outbreaks and play a key role in complementing vaccination strategies.
- Surveillance efforts are critical for understanding which parts of the virus change over time, how quickly those changes occur, and how consistently the virus changes in various parts of the world to inform public health efforts and development of treatments.
Covid Inquiry: Johnson and Hancock Accused of Making ‘False’ NHS Claims
Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have been criticized by bereaved families at the Covid inquiry for trying to mislead the public by “brazenly” claiming “things went reasonably well” in the National Health Service (NHS).
On the opening day of 10 weeks of evidence in a module focused on the impact of the pandemic on the health service, Pete Weatherby KC, representing the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice U.K., said claims that the NHS had coped were “false”.
The inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, heard on Monday that the NHS had entered the pandemic with far fewer intensive care equipped beds than many developed countries and that there had been high levels of nursing vacancies.
Figures provided by the Intensive Care Society indicate the U.K. entered the pandemic with 7.3 critical care beds per 100,000 people, while Germany had 28.2 beds per 100,000 and the Czech Republic had 43.2.
As a result of a lack of capacity, a survey carried out by the inquiry of 1,683 healthcare professionals found that 71% of A&E doctors and 62% of paramedics found themselves unable to escalate the care of those they were treating.
