Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
People Who Got Flu Vaccine Less Likely To Get Covid, New Study Shows
CIDRAP: Flu Vaccine Associated With Lower COVID Likelihood, Hospitalizations
People who received their flu vaccine were less likely to test positive for COVID-19, and if they were infected with the virus, they were less likely to need hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, or a longer hospital stay, according to a study published today in the American Journal of Infection Control. The researchers created a retrospective cohort of 27,201 patients who were tested for COVID-19 from Feb 27 to Jul 15, 2020, in the Michigan Medicine healthcare system. Of those, they found that 12,997 (47.8%) were vaccinated against the flu between Aug 1, 2019, to Jul 15, 2020. Of that number, 525 (4.0%) tested positive for coronavirus. Of the 14,204 (52.%) not vaccinated, 693 (4.9%) got COVID-19. (2/22)
CBS New York: Mayo Clinic Study: Many Common Childhood And Adult Vaccines May Offer Protection From COVID-19
Normally, we think of vaccines as teaching the immune system to react and protect against very specific invaders, like measles, polio, mumps, pneumonia, flu and so on. It turns out, the immune system can learn from vaccines in unanticipated ways. “If you have received a number of different vaccines previously, your risk of having a positive SARS-COV-2 diagnosis was less. So the rate of positive tests in the vaccinated people were about 60-80% the rate of positive tests,” said Dr. Andrew Badley of the Mayo Clinic. Immune training has now cropped up as protective against COVID-19. In a not-yet-peer-reviewed study, Badley and Mayo Clinic colleagues analyzed more that 137,000 medical records and found an interesting correlation. (Gomez, 2/17)
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Salt Lake Tribune: Two Childhood Viruses At Near Zero, A ‘Good Side Effect Of COVID-19,’ A Utah Pediatrician Says
Two diseases that usually hit children hard in the winter — pediatric flu and RSV — are practically nonexistent this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a leading Utah pediatrician says. The bad news: Both could come back with a vengeance next year. At Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital, doctors have not hospitalized any children with RSV this season — and only one child in Utah has been hospitalized with the flu, said Dr. Andrew Pavia, director of epidemiology at Primary Children’s and chief of pediatric infectious diseases at University of Utah Health. Most years, Pavia said, 80 children a week would be admitted to Primary Children’s with RSV, with a third of them needing to go into the intensive care unit. (Means, 2/22)
