Although the pandemic has ended, staffing shortages and employee burnout still plague U.S. nursing homes, a new government report finds.
But the problems didn’t end there: The report, issued Thursday by the Inspector General’s Office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, showed that infection-control procedures were still sorely lacking at many facilities.
Not only that, COVID-19 booster vaccination rates remain far lower than they should be, with only 38% of residents and 15% of staff up-to-date on their shots, according to a recent KFF report.
After close to 30,000 infections, 15 reported deaths, and more than one million doses of vaccine, it appears as though the widespread nature of the U.S. monkeypox outbreak may be nearing an end.
The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a seven-day average of seven new monkeypox cases per day. This is a massive decline from the more than 400 cases per day reported during the height of the outbreak in late July and early August. Though, to be clear, it may be some time before we have no cases of monkeypox in the U.S. at all.
There are several explanations for this success, some more obvious than others. The most obvious: This strain of monkeypox was overwhelmingly spread between men who have sex with other men. While monkeypox is technically not a sexually transmitted infection—it can be spread through physical contact with rashes and sores of an infected person—this particular strain seemed stubbornly resistant to nonsexual spread. Los Angeles County data, for example, shows that only 43 of the 2,388 confirmed cases were in women. So, the number of demographic groups at risk of infection was much lower than the number at risk of catching COVID-19.
At least 169 cases of acute hepatitis in children aged one month to 16 years old have been identified in an outbreak that now involves 11 countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday.
Among the cases of acute hepatitis, at least one child has died and 17 children have required liver transplants, the WHO said in a news release.
“It is not yet clear if there has been an increase in hepatitis cases, or an increase in awareness of hepatitis cases that occur at the expected rate but go undetected,” the WHO said in a statement. “While adenovirus is a possible hypothesis, investigations are ongoing for the causative agent.”
As the coronavirus pandemic approaches the end of a second year, the United States stands on the cusp of surpassing 800,000 deaths from the virus, and no group has suffered more than older Americans. All along, older people have been known to be more vulnerable, but the scale of loss is only now coming into full view.
Seventy-five percent of people who have died of the virus in the United States — or about 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 who have perished so far — have been 65 or older. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus. For people younger than 65, that ratio is closer to 1 in 1,400.
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After the first known coronavirus death in the United States in February 2020, the virus’s death toll in this country reached 100,000 people in only three months. The pace of deaths slowed throughout summer 2020, then quickened throughout the fall and winter, and then slowed again this spring and summer.
Throughout the summer, most people dying from the virus were concentrated in the South. But the most recent 100,000 deaths — beginning in early October — have spread out across the nation, in a broad belt across the middle of the country from Pennsylvania to Texas, the Mountain West and Michigan.
These most recent 100,000 deaths, too, have all occurred in less than 11 weeks, a sign that the pace of deaths is moving more quickly once again — faster than at any time other than last winter’s surge.
By now, Covid-19 has become the third leading cause of death among Americans 65 and older, after heart disease and cancer. It is responsible for about 13 percent of all deaths in that age group since the beginning of 2020, more than diabetes, accidents, Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
Author(s): Julie Bosman, Amy Harmon and Albert Sun
