The surgeon general said that covid misinformation is an "urgent threat to public health ... It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people's health, and undermine public health efforts." It may help that some Republican governors who previously did not push people to get vaccinated are now doing just that. We could always try what the French did. They announced that people would soon need to be vaccinated in order to go to a cafe. Within 72 hours, over three million people had booked appointments, and France broke its vaccination record, giving 800,000 shots in one day.
The covid vaccines are not the only vaccines having problems. Some 23 million kids missed their basic childhood vaccines last year, the highest number since 2009. Measles is more contagious than the coronavirus. I do not want to think about a measles outbreak and a covid one overlapping. Can you say "catastrophe"?
Covid vaccines are headed to Indonesia, the new Asian covid epicenter. They set a new national record yesterday with 54,517 new cases, more than India had. Thursday afternoon, 1.5 million Moderna doses arrived; another three million will arrive on Sunday. Since March, they've gotten 11.7 million doses of AstraZeneca. Clearly those numbers could and should be higher, but it's a start unlike in Haiti. Haiti just got its very first shipment of vaccines, 500,000 doses from the US.
WHO says that proof of vaccination should not be a requirement for international travel. Vaccination status, they say, should not be the only condition given limited global access to vaccines and their inequitable distribution. I go back and forth on this not to mention that the view is different depending on whether we're talking going somewhere else or having a person from somewhere else come here.
The outlook for the US is better than earlier in the pandemic, but we still have some distance to go. Almost half of Americans are fully vaccinated. Think about that, and the flip side: More than half of Americans are not fully vaccinated. Cases and hospitalizations are well below their peaks, and deaths are at some of the lowest levels since the very start of the pandemic. At the same time, though, infections are up in almost every state. Daily cases are up at least 15 percent over the last two weeks in 49 states. Nineteen states are showing twice as many new cases per day. New cases actually bottomed out at about 11,000 daily less than a month ago; now, they number about 26,000.
A new study suggests that long covid has over 200 symptoms, some of which can last for over a year. Among the symptoms mentioned are (take a deep breath) memory loss, brain fog, tinnitus, hallucinations, tremors, malaise, diarrhea, heart palpitations, loss of bladder control, shingles, blurred vision, itchy skin, menstrual changes, and sexual dysfunction. (You may now exhale.) The symptoms cited span 10 of the body's organ systems.
Getting bored with the coronavirus? A Chinese man has been hospitalized after getting the H5N6 strain of avian flu. This is not a cause for panic, at least not yet, but a reminder that there are other potential diseases out there that could turn into new pandemics. There are now, and there always will be.
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