The message prompted White House officials to quickly clarify that Biden’s comments did not signal a change in strategy: The US government still calls COVID-19 a public health emergency, although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC ) relaxed their guidance last month to allow people to return to most forms of normalcy. But the elderly, the immunocompromised, people with certain disabilities or underlying health conditions are still at higher risk for serious illness and may need to take more precautions. Biden’s statements have already taken some political blow. It comes just two weeks after his administration launched a campaign urging Americans to step up and renew efforts to get Congress to spend another $22.4 billion on COVID mitigation efforts. But Republican leaders told CNN they would be less willing to provide funds for a pandemic that is now “over.” While some interpreted Biden’s comments as a cynical intervention ahead of the upcoming US midterm elections, it follows a trend of other upbeat comments from global health leaders. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, suggested last week that the end of the pandemic “is in sight”, noting that the number of weekly deaths reported was the lowest since March 2020. “We have never been in better position to end the pandemic,” he said. But what does “end of the pandemic” mean? Pandemics are not like sports games — they don’t start and end with the referee’s whistle. The WHO, however, has an official way to determine the start and end of a pandemic: An 18-member panel of experts makes the decision, as it has done in the past with influenza, polio and other diseases. But it’s easier to tell when a pandemic begins than when it ends, according to Caroline Buckee, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There’s not going to be a scientific boundary. There’s going to be consensus based on opinion,” Buckee told the online journal Science. Meanwhile, China continues to pursue its zero-covid-19 strategy, a policy that came under heavy scrutiny again this week after a bus carrying residents to a COVID quarantine facility crashed, killing at least 27 people . Authorities said the bus was carrying 47 people from Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, to a remote county more than 150 miles away. It overturned on a mountainous section of the highway around 02:40 Shortly after, a photo widely circulated on social media showed the bus driving at night, with the driver wearing a full hazmat suit with only his eyes uncovered. Another photo shows the crushed truck being sprayed with disinfectant by a fit worker. According to government figures, only two people have died from the virus in the province since the pandemic began, raising further questions about China’s intransigent policy. And while China and the US continue to take radically different approaches to the pandemic, a Lancet COVID-19 panel report condemned the world’s response to the disease, calling the death toll — which the WHO says is more than 6, 4 million — “Both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure on multiple levels.” They cited poor government preparation, poor global cooperation and the influence of misinformation on citizens who resisted public health precautions.
IN OTHER NEWS
• A recent study of more than 6 million people 65 and older found that those who had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease within a year of contracting the virus. The study does not prove that COVID is a cause of Alzheimer’s disease, but advances previous research linking Covid infection and cognitive function. • Former first lady Melania Trump was “troubled by the coronavirus and convinced Trump was screwing it up,” according to a forthcoming book. Trump recalled telling her husband, “You’re blowing this,” as she tried to get him to take the pandemic more seriously. “This is serious. It’s going to be very bad,” he said, according to the book by New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN Global affairs analyst Susan Glasser. “You worry too much,” she recalled saying the President, who dismissed her concerns and said, “Forget it.”
QUESTIONS. WE ANSWERED.
Q: Is there a link between COVID and mental health? A: You may have up to a 50% higher risk of developing long-term COVID if you suffer from common psychiatric problems, according to a recent study. People who self-identified as having anxiety, depression or loneliness, or who felt extremely stressed, were more likely to develop long-term COVID-19, according to the study published this month in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry. Symptoms of long-term COVID can include breathing problems, brain fog, chronic cough, extreme fatigue, changes in taste and smell, and difficulty performing daily functions that can last months — even years — after the infection has cleared the body .
TOP TIP
Stay current on your COVID vaccines this fall, especially if you’re 50 or older. This is because the virus continues to pose a risk to people in this age group, who have been disproportionately affected by severe COVID effects. Between April and June, people 50 and older accounted for the vast majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations (86%) and in-hospital deaths (96%), according to a CDC study released Thursday. Additional CDC data show that even for people age 50 and older who received two of the original boosters, the risk of hospitalization was less than a quarter of the risk for those not vaccinated in July. A single dose of the updated COVID-19 vaccine is recommended at least two months after completing the initial two-dose vaccine series or your most recent booster.
