Coronavirus Updates in News stories

Washington Post

From email newsletter on 3/9/22

The latest
Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, many long-haul covid-19 patients who are unable to work are being denied disability benefits for a condition that is not well understood. Doctors have estimated that as many as 1.3 million Americans are too sick to return to work. Still, many are unable to prove it with medical test results, which many insurers require for disability claims.

Florida is discouraging parents from vaccinating healthy children against the coronavirus, contradicting guidance from federal health authorities. The state released official guidance Tuesday that said the risks of administering the coronavirus vaccine may outweigh the benefits. The guidance comes a day after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced the new state policy, prompting outcry from public health experts who called it “reckless” and “dangerous.”

Although federal health authorities no longer recommend masking for the vast majority of the country now that coronavirus cases are declining, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that mask requirements in schools did reduce cases of covid-19 during the delta surge. In a large study released Tuesday, the CDC looked at 233 school districts in the United States and found that those with mask requirements had a 23 percent lower incidence of cases of covid-19. The authors concluded that masks remain an important tool to prevent the spread in schools, particularly in communities with high levels of disease.

The omicron surge is over in the United States, but the variant is still infecting tens of thousands of Americans each day and made up 100 percent of new infections during the week ending March 5, the CDC stated.

Internationally, Hong Kong, which had kept coronavirus cases low, is now struggling with the highest covid-19 death rate in the developed world. The highly transmissible omicron variant has hit the city’s unvaccinated and elderly residents especially hard, and more than 2,300 people have died since the start of the most recent wave.

Other important news
As some popular vacation spots are reopening to the world, the CDC is recommending Americans avoid traveling to New Zealand, Hong Kong and Thailand as covid-19 is currently surging in those countries.

A funeral director in Baltimore has been seeing so many deaths related to covid-19, particularly in the Black community he serves, that he spent his 61st birthday at work, embalming bodies and counseling their grieving family members.

Leaders of the “People’s Convoy,” a caravan of truckers protesting pandemic restrictions, met Tuesday with Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who encouraged them to keep pushing Democrats in Congress.