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Two studies published Wednesday show Covid-19 vaccines do not increase the risk of miscarriage for pregnant women.
A team at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied data from the agency’s v-safe vaccine safety reporting program covering more than 2,000 pregnant women who got vaccinated. They found no higher risk among these women than for pregnant women in general. Miscarriages are common – between 11% and 22% of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriages before 20 weeks of gestation, they said. This rate did not go up among vaccinated women, they found.
In a second letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Elyse Kharbanda of HealthPartners Institute in Minneapolis and colleagues said they looked at different CDC data and came to the same conclusion – Covid-19 vaccines do not raise the risk of miscarriage.
They looked at data from eight health systems across the US covering 105,000 pregnancies through June. Those women who suffered miscarriages were no more likely to have been vaccinated, they found. The findings were the same whether women got Pfizer’s or Moderna’s vaccine. Too few pregnant women got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be able to assess the risk, they said.
The CDC has urged pregnant people to get vaccinated.
According to Mississippi’s department of health data,18,825 students and 3,616 employees have tested positive for Covid-19 since schools began in August.
At least 2,869 students and 476 employees tested positive for the virus between Aug. 30 and Sept. 3, according to the health department.
Quarantine numbers that had been skyrocketing have finally begun a slight downward trend. Health data from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3 shows there have been 15,398 students in Mississippi that have had to quarantine due to potential Covid-19 exposures. At least 23,450 students were quarantined from Aug. 23 to 27, though school reporting numbers and school openings were impacted due to Hurricane Ida.
Note: The case data comes from 72 out of 82 Mississippi counties that submitted reporting.
The pace of new Covid-19 vaccinations in the US is ticking down, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The current pace of vaccinations (seven-day average) shows 356,662 people initiating vaccination each day, the latest data shows. This is an 18% drop from last week and a 26% drop from a month earlier.
An average of 810,715 doses are being administered each day.
Here’s more of the latest data on vaccination efforts in the United States, published Wednesday by the CDC:
President Biden will “outline the next phase in the fight against the virus,” during his Covid-19 remarks on Thursday, the White House said Wednesday.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who noted she was speaking as the President was meeting with his Covid-19 team “to talk about a range of steps,” said the President would “be specific about what we’re trying to accomplish.”
“We know that increasing vaccinations will stop the spread of the pandemic, we’ll get the pandemic under control. We’ll return people to normal life. That’s what our objective is, so we want to be specific about what we’re trying to achieve,” she continued, adding she would “just note that what you’re going to hear from the President tomorrow is going to build on some of the steps that the President announced over the course of last few months.”
Psaki said the country still has more work to do and is still at war with the virus and the Delta variant. She said Biden is “speaking to it now, because this issue, of course, is on front of mind, top of mind, to Americans across the country.”
“He’s going to outline the next phase in the fight against the virus and what that looks like, including measures to work with the public and private sector, building on the steps that we’ve already announced.”
Those steps, she said, include requiring more vaccinations, boosting testing measures, and “making it safer for kids to go to school.”
The steps will be implemented over the months ahead, she added.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated the White House’s view that the US can offer Covid-19 booster shots to Americans this fall while at the same time working to provide vaccines to people around the world who have not yet received a shot.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday asked wealthy nations to wait until the end of the year to provide booster vaccines to their populations in order to prioritize those who have not yet received their first dose. He had previously asked wealthy nations to wait until the end of September.
White House officials, including White House Covid-19 response director Jeff Zients and US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, have stressed the importance of both offering booster shots and also donating vaccines in order to end the pandemic.
#Boosters##
In anticipation of New York City schools starting their school year next Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that 72% of teachers are vaccinated and 65% of students 12 through 17 have had a least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
He said that the city is still in negotiations with the teachers union regarding mandatory Covid-19 vaccination, but that it appears like there will be a very small percentage of employees who qualify for medical or religious exemptions. He wouldn’t comment on what discussions look like for those who refuse to get vaccinated and don’t qualify for an exemption.
The mayor also emphasized that the school system has the “gold standard of cleaning” and that students will be very safe going back to school despite Covid-19.
Several city officials went over the various layers of cleaning and ventilation that are currently in place for every school, including technology that can measure airflow in each space, disinfection tools and large-scale air purifiers for bigger spaces like cafeterias. There will also be personal protective equipment (PPE) available for anyone to use at the schools, including a 30 day supply of masks, they said.
When asked about why the city is only testing people on a bi-weekly basis instead of weekly like other school districts, de Blasio said that they found during the last school year that this testing approach worked well and they are going to continue on that path.
He also emphasized earlier in the new conference that there were very low levels of Covid-19 in schools last year, hitting around a .03% positivity rate.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said hospitals in the state “are still overwhelmingly inundated with [Covid-19] cases of people that are not vaccinated.”
“For the most part, our whole state is red and orange,” Justice said on Wednesday referring to the state’s Covid-19 county map.
West Virginia currently has 813 people hospitalized. The state reached an all-time record of 252 Covid-19 patients in the ICU Wednesday as well as a record 132 patients on ventilators, Justice said.
As of Wednesday, the state has “68 school outbreaks in 31 counties, [while] 10 schools and one entire county, Clay, are closed due to Covid,” the governor said.
He added that 29 of the state’s 55 county school systems have mandated face masks for students.
When asked why he’s against a statewide mask mandate, Justice responded: “It’s not that I am opposed to a mask mandate…I’m opposed to mandates.”
“The very second that we start to fragment, and we start to run in all kinds of different directions, it will get worse, it won’t get better, it’ll get worse,” he said alluding to debates on mask mandates.
“We just need to use good sense, and get ourselves vaccinated, and then we’ll stop this,” Justice said.
Second Circuit Judge John Cooper has ruled against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ appeal, allowing Florida schools to continue to have mask mandates while the case is appealed at a higher level.
Effective immediately, the state of Florida must stop their enforcement of a mask ban, which ends sanctions against several school districts who have implemented mask mandates.
DeSantis had appealed Cooper’s earlier ruling that that stated the governor overreached and did not have the authority to ban school districts from implementing mask mandates without a parent opt-out.
That appeal led to an immediate pause on mask mandates while a ruling was made. Thirteen Florida school districts have now implemented a mask mandate, without a parent opt out, defying an earlier executive order by the governor.
Cooper ruled he believed there was not enough irreparable harm to set aside the automatic stay triggered by the appeal.
Cooper added that based on expert witnesses it is clear the only way to protect children who are unable to be vaccinated is to keep children isolated home, which would cause additional harm.
“It’s undisputed that the Delta variant is far more infectious than the prior to their prior version of the virus, and that children are more susceptible to the Delta variant than to the form from a year ago,” Cooper said. “In particular for children under 12, they cannot be vaccinated. Therefore, there’s really only one or two means to protect them against the virus as either stay at home, or mask.”
Cooper added that based on the evidence young students “arguably have no way to avoid this, except to stay home and isolate themselves.”
“I think everybody agrees, that’s not good for them,” Cooper said.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear laid out the severity of the Covid-19 spread in his state on CNN Wednesday saying that while hospitals are not yet at the point of needing to make tough choices about rationing care, “we are right at” or “quickly approaching that point.”
“We are in a really tough place, Kate” he told CNN anchor Kate Bolduan.
“But we’ve had more people test positive than ever before. We have more people in the hospital because of Covid than ever before. We are at record numbers or near record numbers we set just days ago of people in the ICU or on a ventilator,” the governor continued.
Asked whether doctors and hospitals were at a point where tough choices needed to be made about rationing care, Beshear said “At the moment we are still able to move patients from one hospital to another but we are right at, or quickly approaching that point.”
The governor said Saint Claire hospital in Moorehead has closed three operating rooms to expand ICU bed space.
A Danville, Kentucky hospital not used to treating really sick patients and has a morgue big enough for two people saw seven deaths over the weekend, he said.
Tents are set up outside of Pikeville Medical Center for patients to be triaged and health officials to determine “whether people really need to be in the hospital or not.”
More than two-thirds of hospitals have critical staffing shortages and ventilators had to be delivered to hospitals around the state that “almost never have to use” them.
“It’s not just big urban hospitals that that fill up, its regional hospitals that typically don’t treat incredibly sick patients who are filled with those sick patients,” he said.
“So we are at a very precarious situation,” he said.
A new forecast from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States will remain stable or have an uncertain trend for the next four weeks, marking the third week that this forecast is stable or uncertain.
The projection, released Wednesday, shows an estimated 6,400 to 19,500 new hospitalizations by Oct. 4. This is a slightly smaller upper range than was predicted last week for Sept. 27.
Another forecast predicts deaths will increase over the next four weeks, with the nation’s total Covid-19 death count estimated to be between 683,000 and 710,000 by Oct. 2, 2021.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the US is currently reporting over 650,000 deaths from Covid-19, with an average of 1,239 new deaths per day.
CDC again warned that its forecast for future cases “should be interpreted with caution,” as case numbers in previous weeks have diverged unexpectedly from forecast numbers.
This newest forecast predicts between 430,000 and 1,520,000 new cases will be reported in the week ending October 2, 2021. In the last four weeks, the US has averaged 1,041,714 new cases per week.
As of Labor Day, the US had 3.5 times as many Covid-19 cases, 2.5 times as many hospitalizations and nearly two times as many deaths as compared to Labor Day 2020, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta said, citing data from Johns Hopkins and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“Truth is, we have a vaccine. These numbers should be a lot lower,” he said.
And with the school year starting, “you’re adding another…variable into the mix here that might make it challenging,” Gupta added.
Children now represent more than a quarter of weekly Covid-19 cases in the US, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Adults can help keep kids from getting ill simply by getting vaccinated, he said.
“The problem is we have just so much viral spread. So even though kids … are less likely to get infected, less likely to get hospitalized, [if] you just increase viral spread in the country by that much, kids are inadvertently going to get infected. This Delta virus is not as forgiving,” Gupta said.
Watch:
America has more job openings than it can fill. That has been a truth of the pandemic recovery. Now the Delta variant is threatening to make that even worse.
In July, the number of jobs available in the United States climbed to 10.9 million, a new record high, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Wednesday.
Health care and social assistance added the most positions, followed by finance and insurance, as well as hotels and restaurants.
America’s tight labor market continues to face a staggering disconnect between the number of jobs available and the number of people out of work.
Even as managers across the board are looking for workers, the number of hires stood at just 6.7 million in July.
While companies are ramping up efforts to rehire staff to meet demand and reopen fully, workers remain worried about the virus risk and child care availability. The generous pandemic-era jobless benefits, along with the sheer number of jobs available, also create conditions in which workers can afford to wait for a better job rather than taking the first one that comes along.
But now the Delta variant is threatening to exacerbate the mismatch.
In August, the economy added just 235,000 jobs, far fewer than economists had expected. Restaurants and bars even lost jobs as rising Covid-19 cases are on the rise due to the more infectious Delta variant.
But the BLS report on job openings lags the government’s monthly jobs tally. So it will take a little longer until the full scale of Delta’s impact on this summer will become clear.
Thirteen school employees from Miami-Dade County Public Schools have died from Covid-19 since Aug.16, the school district and local teacher union told CNN on Tuesday.
Among the 13 were teachers, a security monitor, a cafeteria worker and school bus drivers, United Teachers of Dade President Karla Hernandez-Mats said. All were unvaccinated.
To honor those the district lost, Hernandez-Mats helped coordinate a pop-up vaccination site for Miami-Dade employees Tuesday. Just a few hours into the event, 40 people had come to receive their first shot, she said. While that number may not seem large, she said it gives her hope.
The 13 employees who died were African American, she said.
The pop-up site will be running a second time in a few weeks to give out the second dose of the vaccine.
School started in Miami-Dade on Aug. 23. Miami-Dade is the largest school district in the state and one of a handful there that has enacted a mask mandate in defiance of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Watch the interview:
A University of Georgia associate professor with a 5-year-old who has Rett syndrome says she fears for her daughter’s life as the school doesn’t mandate masks or vaccines. This weekend, the Georgia Bulldogs football team will play its first home game in a stadium that seats more than 92,000 fans.
“Every time I’m walking into a classroom or encountering somebody walking right beside me or entering an elevator not wearing a mask, that’s my daughter’s life on the line,” Ursee Bhattacharya told CNN’s Brianna Keilar.
“The football season descending upon us is a cause for a great deal of terror,” Bhattacharya said.
She pleaded for students and the school board to keep people like her daughter in mind and take actions to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Bhattacharya said respiratory issues are a leading cause of death in Rett syndrome, a rare genetic neurological disorder.
“We live hostage to a disease every single day called Rett syndrome. We cannot be hostage to yet another, which is easily preventable. All it takes is a few inches of face covering to do the right thing. And that’s all that stands between my daughter and Covid-19 right now,” she said.
Watch:
President Biden’s six-pronged approach to combatting Covid-19 will include new announcements on mandates and testing, according to a person familiar with the matter, with particular emphasis on schools and private sector workplaces.
Biden is set to unveil the approach in a speech on Thursday afternoon.
The precise outlines of Biden’s announcement were still being finalized, and the President was expected to receive an update on the plan during a Wednesday afternoon meeting with his Covid-19 team.
Officials say they hope the new approach will provide Americans a clearer view of how the pandemic will end. The White House has watched as the President’s approval ratings on Covid have slipped. They feel part of the problem is the backwards-motion felt this summer: a return to masks, continued working from home, a spike in cases.
Part of the goal of Thursday’s speech will be describing the path forward out of the pandemic, which officials feel has become obscured during the Delta variant.
While Biden has encouraged businesses to require vaccines for workers, officials said they believe there is more the private sector can do to encourage people to get the shot. That includes requiring proof of vaccination at restaurants, bars and other venues.
Administration officials have been working over the past few weeks to determine ways the government could make it easier for businesses to apply those requirements.
Vaccinated people who get infected with coronavirus anyway and suffer severe symptoms tend to be older – 80 on average – and also suffer from other conditions such as obesity or diabetes, researchers said Tuesday.
Dr. Hyung Chang at the Yale School of Medicine and colleagues studied close to 1,000 patients hospitalized between the end of March and July of this year. Everyone admitted to the hospital got tested for coronavirus, whether that was the reason for admission or not.
About 18% of the patients who tested positive had been given at least one dose of vaccine, they found, and about a third of these were fully vaccinated, Chang and colleagues said in a commentary in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
“We found that nearly a fifth of patients had received at least one dose of the vaccine, and we observed that many patients had not completed the full vaccine course,” they added.
The median age of those with severe illness was 80, they said. More than half were overweight, most had cardiovascular disease, half had lung disease and half had diabetes.
Note: The patients would not be fully representative of everyone with breakthrough cases, as everyone studied was sick enough to show up to the hospital for treatment. Plus the study did not cover the time when the Delta variant was the dominant circulating strain of virus.
Now that most US schools have reopened after the Labor Day holiday, many are facing a new set of challenges as a result of the pandemic. Thousands of students have already had to quarantine in some states because of new Covid-19 cases.
Here’s where things stand:
Up to 5.2 million people may be eligible to receive a booster shot, or third dose, of a Covid-19 vaccine during the week of Sept. 20 when the White House’s booster plan is expected to kick off.
The Biden administration announced a plan that would make United States residents eligible for a third dose of Covid-19 vaccine eight months after receiving their second dose.
Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that about 3.4 million United States residents were fully vaccinated by January 20, which would make them eligible for a booster shot eight months later on Sept. 20. Up to 5.2 million people may be eligible for their booster shot by the end of the week.
The initial rollout is on track to include Pfizer/BioNTech doses – pending authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration – but it may take a few weeks longer to move forward with boosters of Moderna’s vaccine.
More than half (56%) of the doses administered by January 20 were Pfizer/BioNTech doses, data from the CDC shows. The FDA authorized the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for emergency use about a week before the Moderna vaccine.
More than 1.4 million people have already received an additional dose since mid-August, according to the CDC.
Back to school after the Labor Day weekend could mean fresh spread of coronavirus unless schools take strong action to keep the virus in check, doctors and education experts are warning.
August saw an explosion of Covid-19 cases when some schools resumed in-person classes without mask measures in place and tens of thousands of students and staff were forced into quarantine in some states. Some classrooms even returned to online learning temporarily.
It could happen again.
There’s been no slowing in the circulation of virus in most communities across the country, with the Delta variant causing more than 98% of all infections nationwide.
Therefore, the risk of Covid-19 outbreaks again within schools this week appears to be the same unless schools put mitigation measures in place, Dr. Tina Tan, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and a former board member for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told CNN.
“One thing we saw earlier in the month of August is that there were many schools that opened but didn’t have mask mandates in place and were not using protective mitigation protocols, and we saw a number of outbreaks that happened in those situations where the school opened and then closed like a week later because there were so many teachers and students that got infected,” Tan said.
The chances of a school staying open safely amid the ongoing pandemic do not just depend on what mitigation measures the school has in place – but also how much coronavirus spread is in the surrounding community and whether the community practices mitigation strategies, Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of advocacy and governance for the School Superintendents Association, told CNN.
“It is about the decisions the schools are making, and whether or not they’re going to be able to do any physical or social distancing, or whether or not they have masks in place. But schools are a microcosm of the broader community too,” Ng said. “What’s your vaccination rate in the eligible population? What is the general practice of broader mitigation strategies in the community? All of that is interrelated. The work of opening schools doesn’t occur in a silo.”
