Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: What Does Covid Do To The Brain?; How To Create A Broadly Protective Covid Vaccine
Bloomberg: Does Mild Covid Really Damage Your Brain? A Closer Look At That Study
Scary headlines about the long-term effects of Covid gain traction easily. Recent news reports have warned that “even mild Covid can cause brain shrinkage,” “memory loss” and “long term” “brain damage” that “greatly” changes the brain “as much as a decade of aging.” Over time, that fear is likely to wear no better than fears that the virus could spread outdoors at beaches or on pieces of mail. (Faye Flam, 3/19)
Los Angeles Times: What Will It Take To Make A Universal COVID Vaccine?
As California emerges from Omicron, other places are again in lockdown or facing record caseloads after trying and failing to avoid the variant. Many of us who did everything right, getting every shot and booster and avoiding crowds, nonetheless got infected. (Erica Ollmann Saphire and Edward Scolnick, 3/20)
The Boston Globe: Wastewater Monitoring Must Be Used As A Tool To Mitigate Future COVID Surges
Municipalities all over the United States, and in the Northeast in particular, have been tracking the level of SARS-CoV-2 viral material in wastewater since the beginning of the pandemic. The study of pathogens and chemicals in water, called wastewater-based epidemiology, has been used to monitor illicit drug use in communities and to track outbreaks of intestinal viruses for many years. (Catherine Klapperich and Rebecca Weintraub, 3/21)
The Star Tribune: Feds Offer More Free COVID Tests
The Biden administration launched the COVID test program in mid-January, announcing it would send four free tests via the U.S. Postal Service to households requesting them. On March 8, officials said households can place a second order for four tests (two per box) through the same program. The second order again costs nothing and is delivered directly to your home. (3/20)
The New York Times: Why Omicron Is So Deadly In Hong Kong
For most of the Covid pandemic, life in Hong Kong remained a simulacrum of normal. The city maintained one of the world’s strictest border control measures, requiring inbound travelers to undergo quarantine in hotels for up to three weeks. Small waves of cases were quickly stopped with exhaustive contact tracing, strict hospital-based isolation and supervised quarantine in designated facilities. Mask mandates were introduced but were hardly necessary; masks, for the most part, have been spontaneously adopted by the general public since early 2020. This frenetic city of 7.5 million never locked down. (Siddharth Sridhar, 3/18)
Stat: Ventilation, Healthy Buildings Elevated In National Covid-19 Strategy
The White House announcement on Thursday that it is elevating “clean air in buildings” as a key pillar in the national Covid-19 response is nothing short of a landmark shift in the response. How so? The country has made enormous gains in its Covid fight along several axes — vaccines and boosters, rapid tests and treatments, and the recent release of N95 masks to the public. But there was one element that was still lacking more than two years into the pandemic: ventilation and filtration. That has now changed. (Joseph G. Allen, 3/18)
The Star Tribune: Shift From COVID To The 'Next Normal'
As its name suggests, a new, book-length report entitled "Getting to and Sustaining the Next Normal: A Roadmap for Living with COVID" offers a detailed guide for exiting the COVID-19 crisis. But as valuable as the precise advice is from experts such as Minnesota's Mike Osterholm, one of the report's key contributions is spotlighting a broader principle that should galvanize our response to this viral threat. That critical concept: "biosecurity." (3/18)
