University of California requires vaccines; Los Angeles County to mandate masks indoors: Live COVID-19 updates
Elinor Aspegren, USA TODAY 18 Opinion: America's West is drying out. Here's w
hat we can do about it .Hubble Space Telescope lives: NASA gets backup hardware up and runningThe University of California said Thursday that COVID-19 vaccinations will be required before the fall term begins for all students and faculty, amid rising cases in the state. “Vaccination is by far the most effective way to prevent severe disease and death after exposure to the virus and to reduce spread of the disease to those who are not able, or not yet eligible, to receive the vaccine,” UC President Michael V. Drake said in a letter to the system’s 10 chancellors, reported the Los Angeles Times. The announcement makes them the largest university system to mandate vaccinations. They previously proposed to mandate them only after the Food and Drug Administration fully approved a vaccine.College students pose a high risk to efforts to control the pandemic. Last September, counties home to universities suffered many of the nation’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks. As of late May, 400 colleges and universities plan to require vaccines for students.
The announcement also comes as several counties in California have reported rising cases. Los Angeles County reported 1,000 cases daily for most of the week, and San Diego County reported 2,000 cases for the whole week.
The U.S. is also reporting more than 1,000 new coronavirus infections every hour, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data for the week ending Wednesday.College students pose a high risk to efforts to control the pandemic. Last September, counties home to universities suffered many of the nation’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks. As of late May, 400 colleges and universities plan to require vaccines for students.
The announcement also comes as several counties in California have reported rising cases. Los Angeles County reported 1,000 cases daily for most of the week, and San Diego County reported 2,000 cases for the whole week. A County To Require Masks Indoors Starting Saturday Regardless Of Vaccination Status (CBS
Los Angeles). The fourth wave of COVID is here. Will the US escape the UK's fate?A doubling of COVID-19 cases in the last two weeks suggests the United States has entered a fourth wave of the pandemic.
No one knows what the next month or two will bring, but the example of the United Kingdom suggests the infection rate could get quite high, while hospitalizations and deaths stay relatively low.
Instead of the virus raging through entire communities, it is expected to target the unvaccinated, including children, and if rates are high enough, also the most vulnerable of the vaccinated – the elderly and the immunocompromised.Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said it was "unlikely" to see a return of COVID to the levels experienced in January. But major outbreaks can still occur, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates.
"We're going to be living in two pandemic worlds, the world that's vaccinated and the world that's unvaccinated," said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston.
– Karen WeintraubProtesters at Idaho Capitol fight hospitals’ COVID-19 vaccine mandates
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Idaho Capitol on Thursday to oppose the COVID-19 employee vaccine mandates of a few state health care systems.
Kayla Dunn, organizer of Thursday’s Stop the Mandate Idaho Rally, said the protest “was not an argument over whether the ‘vaccine is good or bad,’” but a demand for bodily autonomy, according to the Idaho Statesman.
“Don’t get me wrong, evidence-based practice shows us that vaccinations do work,” another nurse said. “But it should never, ever be forced upon (us), especially since there have been no long-term studies.”Saint Alphonsus and St. Luke’s, two of Idaho’s largest health systems, both announced in early July that they’d be requiring COVID-19 vaccinations of all staff members. Both hospitals said they would allow exemptions for individuals with religious objections or medical conditions; employees who don’t meet exemption criteria, however, could be terminated if they don’t get vaccinated.
– Edward Segarra
Los Angeles County to require masks indoors – regardless of COVID-19 vaccination status
Los Angeles County, the most populated county in the U.S., will once again require people to wear masks indoors – regardless of vaccination status – due to a recent surge in new COVID-19 cases.
The startling change, announced exactly a month after Californiabecame one of the last in the country to reopen and drop coronavirus mandates, aims to stunt an uptick in new cases combined with the spread of the highly infectious delta variant. It will go into effect at 11:59 p.m. Saturday.
"This is an all-hands-on-deck moment," the county‘s health officer, Dr. Muntu Davis, said during a Thursday afternoon news briefing.
WHO asks China to give access to raw data on origins
The head of the World Health Organization says he’s hoping for better cooperation and access to data from China in the search for the origins of the coronavirus.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international expert team that traveled to China this year to investigate the cause of the outbreak, which was first reported from Wuhan.
Tedros says the Geneva-based body is “asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic.”
He also says there had been a “premature push” to rule out the theory that the coronavirus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan.
“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” he said. “It’s common. Checking what happened, especially in our labs, is important and we need information, direct information on what the situation of this lab was before and at the start of the pandemic, then, if we get full information, we can exclude that.”
Tedros says the world owed it to the millions who had died “to know what happened and to prevent the same crisis from happening again. And that’s why we need cooperation.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: University of California requires vaccines; Los Angeles County to mandate masks indoors: Live COVID-19 updates
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