Idaho moves to start rationing medical care amid surge in covid hospitalizations

Miami-Dade County Public Schools are reporting at least 13 employee deaths from covid-19 since mid-August, a tally that forecasts what could be a grim autumn for Florida educators.

Spokesperson Jaquelyn Calzadilla told The Washington Post in an email that the district is aware of 13 deaths of employees since Aug. 16 but that the figure is based on what families report.

“When relatives of employees apply for death benefits, they are not asked to disclose cause of death, so we only know about employee covid deaths anecdotally,” Calzadilla said.

The average number of children hospitalized each week with covid-19 is steadily rising as the delta variant’s surge collides with the start of the school year and vaccines have yet to be approved for youth under 12.

The seven-day average of children currently hospitalized with the virus has been increasing since July and reached just shy of 2,400 on Tuesday, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. That is higher than the previous peak of 2,386 recorded in early August 2020, shortly after the Department of Health and Human Services began reporting pediatric hospitalizations.

Covid-19-related hospitalizations among people 17 or younger remain rare but have spiked in recent weeks, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the United States, the report said, between 1 and 2 children per 100,000 had a virus-related hospitalization during the week ending Aug. 14 — five times the rate observed in the week ending June 26.

In late June and July, unvaccinated adolescents between 12 and 17 years old were 10 times more likely to have a covid-19-related hospitalization than fully vaccinated members of the same age group.

“Implementation of preventive measures to reduce transmission and severe outcomes in children is critical,” researchers argued in the CDC report, advocating vaccination of those who are eligible; “universal” mask-wearing in schools; and face coverings for everyone 2 and older in child-care centers and other indoor public spaces.

The Food and Drug Administration has given full approval to Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, granting doctors new flexibility to distribute shots and fueling mounting requests to immunize children under 12. But the FDA has yet to authorize coronavirus vaccines for younger children and may not weigh in until next year.

The CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics have discouraged doctors from giving the vaccines to that younger group for whom the shots have yet to be fully tested.

‘This is real’: Fear and hope in an Arkansas pediatric ICU

Jacqueline Dupree contributed to this report.

Kavita Patel, a primary care physician at Mary’s Center in the District, routinely throws away perfectly good doses of coronavirus vaccine. When she opens a new multidose vial, any shots that don’t go into arms that day have to be discarded.

In recent days, she was tempted to do something different: use one of those soon-to-be wasted doses to boost her own immunity.

It might seem a no-brainer, but nothing is simple when it comes to coronavirus vaccine boosters. The Biden administration’s coronavirus task force wants to roll out boosters the week of Sept. 20. Too soon, some experts have declared. Not soon enough, others say.

Here’s what to know about the top coronavirus stories around the globe from news service reports.

• In Afghanistan, fears that the pandemic may worsen are intensifying. About 90 percent of 2,300 medical facilities nationally are at risk of closure, some as soon as this week, as international humanitarian donors struggle to operate and get funding into the country under Taliban leadership, the World Health Organization said.
• Indonesia’s daily coronavirus positivity rate this week dropped below the World Health Organization’s benchmark of 5 percent for the first time in the pandemic, an indicator that the country’s devastating second wave could be easing. The positivity rate, or the proportion of people tested who are positive, peaked at 33.4 percent in July, when Indonesia became Asia’s coronavirus epicenter.
• Government workers in Zimbabwe who do not want to be vaccinated against the coronavirus should resign, the country’s justice minister said. The southern African nation has vaccinated 2.7 million people, against a target of inoculating two-thirds of its 15 million population by the end of the year.
• Vietnam on Monday jailed a 28-year-old man for five years for breaking strict quarantine rules and spreading the virus, state media reported. The country is battling a delta variant surge.
• Chile has approved a coronavirus vaccine for children over 6, with its health regulator giving the green light to China’s Sinovac shot. A handful of countries, including the United States, have approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children over 12. Cuba on Monday also began vaccinating children as young as 2 with a domestically developed vaccine, as schools reopen.

At a time when the delta variant’s summer surge has renewed the nation’s divisions surrounding the coronavirus vaccines, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Monday that mandates enforcing vaccination did not reflect what it meant to be an American.

“Vaccine mandates are un-American,” Jordan tweeted.

But critics were quick to pan the lawmaker’s Labor Day message as being off — way off — by nearly 2½ centuries. History shows that George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, made the bold decision in 1777 to require his troops to be immunized after a smallpox outbreak devastated the nation.

The act would be repeated by presidents and military leaders throughout U.S. history — including just last month by the Defense Department — and a 1905 decision by the Supreme Court upheld mandatory vaccinations as American.

Three-quarters of adults in the United States have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine as of Tuesday, according to tracking by The Washington Post.

As the country headed into Labor Day, 74.9 percent of people 18 and older had received at least their first shot, The Post’s data shows. On Tuesday, the White House said an additional 1.5 million doses were administered over the holiday weekend, pushing adult vaccinations to 75 percent.

The figure marks a milestone in the country’s efforts to stop the spread of the virus and its highly infectious delta variant, which has caused infections to surge nationwide, but it masks some broad disparities in state vaccination rates.

States across the South and in the West lag behind the national average in adult vaccinations, while Northeastern states lead the country in the percentage of adults immunized. Though the shots are more accessible than ever, millions of Americans remain unvaccinated and vaccine hesitancy remains a challenge for health officials.

Still, the pace of vaccinations has ticked up from a mid-July low of about a half-million doses per day on average to an average of more than 900,000 daily shots in arms over the past week, according to tracking by The Post. Officials have attributed the rise in part to concerns about the delta variant, as well as the adoption of vaccine mandates by employers, school districts and some major metropolitan areas.

Recent polling by The Post and ABC News shows that more Americans are warming up to vaccines, including conservatives. The poll, conducted Aug. 29-Sept. 1, found that younger Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have become more willing to get vaccinated since this spring, a significant shift for one of the country’s most vaccine-hesitant groups.

Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

Last month, an Ohio judge ordered a hospital to treat covid patient Jeffrey Smith with ivermectin after his wife sued, alleging that the facility refused to give her husband the drug, despite him having a doctor’s prescription.

Since mid-July, Smith has been in West Chester Hospital’s intensive care unit, battling a severe case of covid-19, according to court records. Ivermectin — a deworming drug that some people are using to prevent or treat covid, despite several public health agencies advising against it — was Smith’s last shot at survival, his wife and guardian, Julie Smith, argued.

But on Monday, after Smith’s wife and the doctor who prescribed him the ivermectin failed to provide “convincing evidence” at a court hearing to show that the drug could significantly improve his condition, a different judge reversed course. Butler County Judge Michael A. Oster Jr. ordered the hospital to cease administering Smith, 51, the unproven treatment, arguing that “judges are not doctors or nurses.”

As Florida’s summer coronavirus surge takes the state into the fall with one of the nation’s highest rates of infections and hospitalizations, a physician in South Miami has told patients that she can no longer see them in person for their regular care if they are unvaccinated.

Linda Marraccini, a primary care doctor specializing in family medicine, sent a letter to her patients this month informing them that they could not be treated in person if they were not vaccinated by Sept. 15, according to WTVJ. She said she could still treat unvaccinated patients via telemedicine if they refused to get immunized at a time when the highly transmissible delta variant of the novel coronavirus has ravaged the state.

“We will no longer subject our patients and staff to unnecessary risk,” Marraccini wrote to patients, noting that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is now fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration. “This is a public health emergency — the health of the public takes priority over the rights of any given individual in this situation. It appears that there is a lack of selflessness and concern for the burden on the health and well-being of our society from our encounters.”