“In general, things are definitely going better,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Vaccine Center at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, told CNN on Friday.
An FDA advisory committee will meet on the Feb. 26 request. The panel will make a recommendation that the FDA will consider when deciding whether to authorize it.
And experts have pointed to potential benefits: Unlike the Pfizer and Modern vaccines, Johnson & Johnson’s only take one chance; it does not need to be stored in freezers; and it can be stored for three months at refrigerator temperatures.
The addition of a new vaccine will increase supply and enable more people to vaccinate faster, Offit and other experts said.
And “the weather is going to get warmer, and if that happens, it’s making the transmission of this virus less easy,” Offit said.
“I really think we’ll help it in the summer or late summer because I think everything is moving in the right direction now,” Offit said.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s public health school, also said Friday the vaccination situation in the US “is getting better.”
New York to offer vaccinations to people with underlying conditions
New York may be the first state to provide access to vaccines to people with comorbidity, or the simultaneous presence of two or more medical conditions, regardless of their age.
The governor’s office listed cancer, chronic kidney disease, lung disease and heart disease as some of the carry-on conditions and underlying conditions the state will use to be eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine.
From February 15, doses reserved for hospital workers will be re-allocated to those with medical conditions if hospital workers did not use them, Cuomo said Friday.
About 75% of hospital workers have been vaccinated, and those who have not yet will have their chance to gain access to others by then.
Health departments will work with the state and the CDC to further determine which medical conditions qualify.
The model predicts that the mortality rate will gradually decrease – unless variants intervene
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Institute at the University of Washington, how quickly the variants spread across the rate of vaccinations will be the most important factor in the number of coronavirus deaths in the coming months.
At the moment, IHME projects that the country’s death toll per day in Covid-19 per day will drop to June 1, in part due to the rollout of vaccines and polls showing that increasing percentages of Americans say they are willing to get vaccinated .
The United States averaged more than 3,230 Covid-19 deaths a day in the past week, not far from the record-high 3,357 set on Jan. 13, according to Johns Hopkins University.
But in a worst-case scenario, including unbridled distribution, the daily mortality rate could rise again by March – and even more than 2,600 a day in mid-April before being dipped, the IHME says.
“As the variants spread more widely and people return more quickly to their previous lives” after being vaccinated, “you get closer to our worst-case scenario,” Chris Murray, director of the IHME, told Anderson Cooper, CNN, Said Friday night.
Genetic tests showed that the patient, who had an underlying condition that weakened his immunity, was infected with the same virus all the time, but that it developed as it repeated.
“It was incredible,” said Dr. Jonathan Li, who runs a lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, studied to study viruses and their mutations and was called in to help study the patient’s case.
For now, Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations in the U.S. are declining following a boom in the holiday season.
The country had an average of about 130,402 new Covid-19 cases per day in the past week – according to Johns Hopkins data, it has declined more than 47% since a peak average of more than 249,000 per day on January 8th.
The number of people in American hospitals on Thursday was 88,688 – the lowest since November 24.
CDC director: Guidance on reopening schools will be launched in the coming week
“Our goal is to get kids back to school,” Walensky said Friday. “Schools should be the last places that are closed and the first places that are open. Our goal is to make sure that our children get back to school, with the safety of the children and the safety of the teachers”.
“Among the things we need to do to make sure schools are safe is to make sure the spread of the disease in the community is down,” Walensky said. “We are actively working on the guidance, the official guidance, which will be announced in the coming week.”
So far, 24 states and Washington, DC, have explicitly allowed some teachers or school staff to receive the vaccine.
Biden administration plans to make 60 million home tests available this summer
The Biden government announced on Friday that under the Defense Production Act, by the end of this summer, about 60 million Covid-19 tests will be available to the public.
These tests will be in addition to the home tests of the company Ellume that the administration announced earlier, Covid-19 supply coordinator Tim Manning said during a news conference in the White House.
“The country is well behind where we need to be to test,” Manning said.
“In the coming weeks, the U.S. government plans to invest in another six vendors to test the ability to test quickly,” Manning said.
Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the Covid response in the Biden White House, said during an information session in the White House on Monday that the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Health and Human Services were working with the Australian company Ellume to of his full at- home Covid-19 tests to the United States and sends from February to July 100,000 test kits per month to the United States.
“Having 60 million more home tests available over the course of the summer is exactly what the country needs,” Slavitt said during Friday’s briefing.
CNN’s Michael Nedelman, Maggie Fox, Andrea Diaz, Jacqueline Howard, Sara Murray, Naomi Thomas, Kristina Sgueglia and Theresa Waldrop contributed to this report.