Here’s a social distancing strategy that really worked in the early days of the pandemic: New research shows that providing hotel rooms to homeless people at high risk for severe COVID-19 significantly lowered their chance of infection. In early April 2020, the city of Chicago made 200 rooms at a hotel available to homeless people… read on > read on >
Compared to previous coronavirus variants, Omicron appears to cause less severe illness, but is more resistant to the Pfizer vaccine, researchers at South Africa’s largest health insurer report. The team at Discovery Health analyzed 211,000 positive coronavirus cases during the country’s fourth wave, including 78,000 attributed to Omicron. It’s the first major private study since… read on > read on >
Pfizer Inc. announced Tuesday that a final analysis shows its experimental antiviral pill Paxlovid sharply reduced hospitalizations and deaths among people at high risk for severe illness. The latest results, which reinforce an earlier analysis released in November, show that Pfizer’s drug cut hospitalizations and deaths by nearly 90 percent when taken within three to… read on > read on >
A new study confirms yet another consequence of the pandemic for children and teenagers: Eating disorders, and hospitalizations for them, rose sharply in 2020. The study of six hospitals across Canada found new diagnoses of anorexia nearly doubled during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the rate of hospitalization among those patients was… read on > read on >
The COVID-19 death toll in the United States reached 800,000 on Monday, and one expert believes it will likely hit 1 million at some point in 2022. The 800,156 confirmed deaths in the nearly two years since the first known U.S. victims of the coronavirus were confirmed in February 2020 is more than any other… read on > read on >
The ability of two-dose COVID-19 vaccines to protect against symptomatic infection by the Omicron variant falls significantly short, but a booster shot provides considerable protection, according to the first real-world study of how effective vaccines are against the rapidly spreading new form of the coronavirus. Four months after their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,… read on > read on >
The sound of mom’s voice can soothe a fussy baby like nothing else, but now new research suggests that an infant is also calmed by the scent of its mother. Prior animal studies had already shown that olfaction — smell — “is very important, that mother’s smell is very critical for attachment,” noted study author… read on > read on >
You may feel silly doing it, but baby talk helps your infant learn the basics of human language, a new study suggests. By mimicking the sound of a smaller vocal tract, baby talk guides babies on how words should sound coming out of their own mouths, the researchers explained. “It seems to stimulate motor production… read on > read on >
Long COVID can be tough to diagnose in children, but there are a number of things to look for. “Many children don’t have any symptoms when they have a COVID infection,” said Dr. Sindhu Mohandas, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and attending physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “So if the symptoms of long COVID… read on > read on >
