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As Many as 40% of Those Who Died of COVID Had Diabetes and Experts Hope That Will Lead Policymakers to Address the Disease
Somewhere between 30% to 40% of those who died from COVID-19 in the U.S. had diabetes, and health experts are hoping that could lead policymakers to pay more attention to the disease, The New York Times reported.
“It’s hard to overstate just how devastating the pandemic has been for Americans with diabetes,” Dr. Giuseppina Imperatore, who oversees diabetes prevention and treatment at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the paper in a story published on Sunday.
According to data from the National Institute of Health, diabetes draws less funding than diseases like cancer and heart disease despite impacting 37 million Americans.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that the number of adults diagnosed with diabetes more than doubled in the past 20 years and 96 million Americans have prediabetes.
‘Not Surprising to See, but Sad’: Experts Alarmed by Large Number of Teens Experiencing Emotional Abuse
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new statistics on high school students’ mental health. Among its findings was an alarmingly high number of U.S. teens reporting emotional abuse at home: more than half.
Defined by the survey as being sworn at, insulted or put down by a parent or other adult in their home, 55 percent of the more than 7,700 high school students polled said they had experienced emotional abuse.
The survey responses, which were collected in the first half of 2021, asked about experiences in 2020, which included the height of pandemic-related lockdowns.
FDA Says COVID Vaccines May Need to Be Updated to Ensure High Level of Effectiveness Against Virus
The currently approved COVID-19 vaccines may need an update to ensure a high level of protection as the virus continues to evolve, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA, in a briefing document published ahead of an advisory committee meeting this week, said scientists still don’t entirely understand COVID variants and the effectiveness of the vaccines. For example, mutations to the spike protein, which is used by the virus to invade human cells, have reduced the effectiveness of current vaccines. That’s because today’s COVID shots were developed to target the spike protein in the original strain of the virus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
The FDA’s advisory committee of outside vaccine experts on Wednesday will discuss how the U.S. can develop a transparent process to make recommendations about changing the composition of the current ones if needed. Pfizer and Moderna are conducting clinical trials on vaccines based on the Omicron variant, the dominant version of the virus worldwide.
The effectiveness of Pfizer or Moderna’s two-dose vaccines against mild illness from Omicron dropped from 70% to just 10% 25 weeks after the second shot, according to the U.K. Health Security Agency.
U.S. FDA Advisers to Discuss Additional COVID Vaccine Shots, Booster Design
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s expert advisers will discuss the timing of additional COVID-19 vaccine boosters and the people eligible for the extra shots in a meeting later this week, the health agency said on Monday.
The independent advisers will also discuss at the April 6 meeting the FDA’s role in how future versions of COVID vaccines are created to help fight new variants. It could be similar to the current process of selecting the composition of the seasonal flu shot, where regulators pick the strain to use for the coming year’s vaccines, FDA staff said in briefing documents ahead of the meeting.
The FDA’s staff said on Monday that new variants are often more infectious, transmissible and distinct from earlier virus strains.
We Need to Be Developing Vaccines for the Next Pandemic — Right Now
While the COVID-19 vaccines were developed in record time — Moderna’s mRNA shot took just a weekend for its initial design — and extraordinary, innovative studies found effective treatments quickly as well, neither was fast enough to outrun the virus’s exponential growth.
COVID-19 will not be the last disease with the potential to grow into a pandemic. To fight the next one, we need to have a game plan to speed up the search for and deployment of vaccines and treatments.
Such a plan would launch research and development efforts targeting pathogens with pandemic potential, stand up an infrastructure to accelerate the testing of candidate vaccines and antivirals, and pump funding into both.
With Students in Turmoil, U.S. Teachers Train in Mental Health
As Benito Luna-Herrera teaches his 7th-grade social studies classes, he is on alert for signs of inner turmoil. And there is so much of it these days.
Luna-Herrera is just one teacher, in one Southern California middle school, but stories of students in distress are increasingly common around the country. The silver lining is that special training helped him know what to look for and how to respond when he saw the signs of a mental emergency.
Since the pandemic started, experts have warned of a mental health crisis facing American children. That is now playing out at schools in the form of increased childhood depression, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders, fights and thoughts of suicide at alarming levels, according to interviews with teachers, administrators, education officials and mental health experts.
COVID Pandemic Has Impacted Kids’ Writing and Social Skills, Study Finds
Kids continue to struggle with basic skills such as writing and speaking in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study by the U.K. government’s education authority has found.
These were among the findings of a series of reports published on Monday by Ofsted, which were based on evidence from around 280 inspections of educational institutions across different age groups, as well as focus groups with the government department’s inspectors.
In the “early years” group, Ofsted found that education providers had noted delays in young children’s development of speech and language. Some providers also found that babies had struggled to respond to basic facial expressions, which they said could be due to reduced social interaction amid the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns.
Providers also noticed how the pandemic had affected young children’s physical development, such as a delay in babies learning to crawl and walk. Some reported that children had regressed in their independence and self-care skills, prompting providers to spend longer with kids on physical activities, in order to help develop gross motor skills.
Some Hesitant Parents Warming to COVID Shots, Poll Finds
A growing segment of the wait-and-see crowd may be warming to the idea of getting a COVID-19 shot for kids 5 and under, according to a poll provided exclusively to Axios from The Harris Poll.
In particular, Harris found nearly half of parents who were unvaccinated themselves said they’d get the vaccine for their little kids, up from 35% in early February.
While many polls tend to generalize the unvaccinated as partisan and unwilling to change their minds, this data shows more nuance to how parents weigh what’s best for their kids, said John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll.
More than one in four parents with kids 5 and under said they were unvaccinated and 46% of those parents said they would be likely to vaccinate their kids.
Biden Admin Cuts Off 14 More States From COVID Treatment as BA.2 Variant Spreads
President Joe Biden’s administration has ordered 14 additional states to stop using a COVID-19 treatment made by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on March 30 it has paused shipments of the drug, sotrovimab, to the states, bringing the total number of states that are no longer receiving doses to 22.
The states are Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin in the midwest; Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington state in the west; and Alaska and Hawaii.
Sotrovimab, a monoclonal antibody, was granted emergency use authorization for treating patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who are designated as high-risk for progressing to severe cases. But emerging data suggest the drug does not work against BA.2, a subvariant of the Omicron virus variant, U.S. regulators say.
States Are Ready to Live With COVID. Congress’ Funding Fight Is Making That Hard.
States are eager to transition to a long-term COVID response strategy, but Congress’ failure to provide new pandemic dollars is leaving them instead grappling with an acute crisis.
A POLITICO review of more than a half-dozen preparedness plans reveals how reliant states remain on the federal government to fund vaccination, testing and treatments for the uninsured and to support manufacturing those key COVID-fighting tools.
Health officials from Alabama to Washington state say that congressional gridlock over providing billions in new money has undermined efforts to transition to a steady, long-term approach to COVID-19.
Roche Says U.S. FDA Grants Priority Review to Actemra for COVID
Roche (ROG.S) said on Monday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted priority review to its Actemra/RoActemra for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized adults.
“If approved, Actemra/RoActemra would be the first U.S. FDA-approved immunomodulator for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients,” Roche said in a statement, adding that more than 1 million people hospitalized with COVID-19 had been treated with Actemra/RoActemra worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic.
UK Hits Record COVID Levels, Nearly 5 Million Infected
Some 4.9 million people were estimated to have the coronavirus in the week ending March 26, up from 4.3 million recorded in the previous week, the Office for National Statistics said Friday. The latest surge is driven by the more transmissible Omicron variant BA.2, which is the dominant variant across the U.K.
The figures came on the same day the government ended free rapid COVID-19 tests for most people in England, under Johnson’s “living with COVID” plan. People who do not have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to the virus now need to pay for tests to find out if they are infected.
China Reports Record-High Five-Digit Daily Infections With Shanghai Worst Hit, New Variant Found in Suzhou
While one of the severest-hit regions in Northeast China’s Jilin Province successfully curbed the epidemic, the infection curve has not seen signs of decline, and a new Omicron variant mutation was detected in East China’s Jiangsu Province, neighboring Shanghai, where the mass majority of cases in China have been found in recent days.
Chinese Vice Premier, Sun Chunlan, stressed that the dynamic zero-COVID strategy must be upheld with resolute and swift action, while recognizing the enormous challenges that the megacity of 25 million faces in both maintaining the normal operation of its core functions and battling the Omicron variant outbreak.
