Posts tagged with 'covid'
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What’s the Difference Between the COVID Vaccines?
Read the rest of this entry »With the approval last month of the Moderna vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration, we now have two COVID-19 vaccines available. Two more – one from Johnson & Johnson the other from AstraZeneca – are on the way and could be approved as soon as February.
Healthcare workers, residents of nursing facilities and some first responders have already received the Pfizer vaccine, the first one approved by the FDA. …
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COVID Is Prompting Youthful Vapers to Quit
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COVID-19 has had at least one positive effect on health: Vaping, the use of e-cigarettes, among teens and young adults has decreased markedly since the beginning of the pandemic.
A survey reported Dec. 3 on the JAMA Network Open says almost a third -- 32.8% -- of young adult users 13-24 that changed their e-cigarette use since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic quit vaping. Another 35.3% reduced their use …
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Better COVID Treatments Are Saving Lives
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We interrupt all the bad news about COVID with this from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation: surviving the virus has improved dramatically since the early days of the pandemic.
The likelihood of someone dying from COVID-19 has declined by a third.
In an interview with Reuters news agency, IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray said 0.6% of those infected with the virus die, compared to 0.9% last spring. …
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Neanderthal Genes Make COVID Worse for Some
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An impaired immune system, age, obesity and underlying medical issues are the well-known risk factors for becoming seriously ill with COVID-19.
Genetics, too, play a role, helping to explain why some young and otherwise healthy individuals will have a severe reaction and most others don’t. Variants on one region of the human chromosome are behind the increased risk.
But why do some people have the variant and others don’t? Blame …
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COVID Saving Added $1 Trillion to Bank Deposits
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Banks are awash in money as consumers at record rates socked away the money they didn’t spend during the early stages of the COVID-19 shutdown.
A Mass Mutual survey discovered one in five of us put away at least $1,000. An ambitious 10% say they’ve saved more than $5,000 since the start of the pandemic. So much money has poured into the nation’s banks that the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund …
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How COVID Is Changing Clinical Trials
Read the rest of this entry »Amidst all the uncertainty about a COVID vaccine, at least this one thing is certain: it is changing how clinical trials are conducted.
Instead of taking years to move a potential vaccine from laboratory to trial, the US’s Operation Warp Speed has moved two of six prospective COVID vaccines into Phase 3 recruitment in under six months. Two more are expected to begin Phase 3 recruitment this month.
In the …
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How the World of Work Is Changing
Read the rest of this entry »“The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed employment,” declares this year’s Labor Day Report from Littler Mendelson, one of the largest employment law firms in the world.
“The challenges employees and employers continue to face this Labor Day are enormous and unprecedented. Even when the coronavirus is finally behind us, many of these challenges will remain," says the report, released on Labor Day.
In five, to-the-point parts the report lays out …
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In Honor of Our Essential Workers, Happy Labor Day
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This Labor Day we at Green Key Resources say "Thank You" to all the nation's essential workers.
Thank you to the postal carriers and drivers who brought us the mail and delivered our packages.
Thank you healthcare professionals who braved the coronavirus to care for the sick and provide comfort to their families.
Thank you farmers and farm workers, grocery clerks, cashiers, butchers and the many other food workers and …
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Hospitals Ready In Case of ‘Second Wave’ This Fall
Read the rest of this entry »Six months into the global coronavirus pandemic, health care experts across the US feel much better prepared to handle a potential “second wave” should it occur this fall.
"We've evolved. We're in a much better state now than we were in the beginning of the pandemic," Michael Calderwood, associate chief quality officer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, told Healthcare Dive. "There's been a lot of learning."
In a survey reported …
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AI Chatbots Could Ease Demand on COVID-19 Hotlines
Read the rest of this entry »A solution to overtaxed COVID-19 hotlines could be only a chatbot away.
Researchers from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business found that when callers felt comfortable in the chatbot’s ability they considered the bot at least as good as a human.
"The primary factor driving user response to screening hotlines -- human or chatbot -- is perceptions of the agent's ability," said Alan Dennis, chair of internet systems at …
