Still, the country continues to experience an average of almost 190,000 new cases per day, more than any point in the pandemic before December. Coronavirus deaths are still extraordinarily high, with more than 4,300 deaths announced on Wednesday, the pandemic’s second highest daily total. And in some places, there has been no progress.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most are likely to put medical professionals and residents of long-term care institutions first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. So for now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will be no different than the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none have reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including pain and flu symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a break from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before being destroyed.
Virginia is reporting some of its highest infection numbers to date. New outbreaks are occurring in South Carolina. And in parts of Texas, including San Antonio and along parts of the Mexican border, the number of cases is the highest ever. The county that includes Laredo is reporting more than 500 cases a day, a number per capita more than double that of Los Angeles County, which is also struggling.
In places that have seen a drop in the number of new cases in the past few days, local and state health officials are sharing positive – but tentative – news about the virus.
“Everything is going the right way,” smiling Dr. Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner, said at a news conference on Thursday, noting that, due to encouraging metrics in the city, museums have reopened and the gyms are allowing group classes and more restrictions may be loosened in the coming days. Epidemiologists say that cases increase and decrease in cycles controlled almost entirely by human behavior, and some experts fear that new start-ups, allowed due to the ever-decreasing number of cases, may trigger new outbreaks once again.
Gretchen Musicant, the Minneapolis health commissioner, said state officials are “encouraged but cautious” about the situation and that they continue to be vigilant as Minnesota begins to reopen certain sectors of the economy once again.
“We are careful to ensure that these reopenings do not raise our rates again,” said Musicant.
While epidemiologists warn of the spread of new variants, health officials are rushing to vaccinate as many people as possible. As of Thursday, nearly 2.4 million people have been fully vaccinated. More than half of the states administered less than 50% of the doses sent to them.