Taking a flight home after the holidays An expert says that getting vaccinated or getting it boosted is the first step to having a Travel safety.
Before the holidays, there was a big spike in cases across the country because of the Omicron coronavirus variant. Some parts of the country are seeing more hospitalizations and deaths because of this. People also need to be prepared for an increased risk of infection when they travel, says Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the school of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. This is because people can get sick when they travel.
If you’ve only had two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, even though that officially means you’ve been fully vaccinated, we know that it doesn’t have much of an effect on people who get sick again after they’ve been fully vaccinated.
If you want to be safe while travelling, you’ll still need to get an extra dose of the first two doses. “Better for serious illness,” said the doctor.
Doctors say that it may take two weeks for a booster shot to give the best protection, which means that the sooner you get vaccinated, the better. Other things, like wearing a good mask, can help reduce the risk of infection.
As a precaution, millions of Americans who are immunocompromised should postpone future travel plans for at least two weeks if possible, says Hotez. He hopes the current surge won’t go on for as long as the last one did.
“Even if you’re boosted, there’s a chance that you could get a symptomatic breakthrough illness going through airports and taking Ubers,” he said.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US has vaccinated almost 62% of its population. This means that millions of people who haven’t been vaccinated are more likely to get sick or die from Covid-19. More than 31% of people who have been vaccinated have had extra doses or boosters.
Because early research suggests that Omicron may not cause as much damage to people as Delta, officials and experts have warned that the recently found strain is highly contagious and could strain health care resources. Covid-19 testing kits, which are needed to try to stop the virus from spreading quickly, have been hard to come by this season.
Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says that even though there is always a chance that you will get the virus while travelling, there are ways to lessen the risk.
“In other words, if someone has been exposed in your circle, you don’t have to think everyone else has it. Don’t stop doing things like wearing masks when you’re around people or doing tests “On Saturday, Faust told CNN’s Boris Sanchez.
Faust also says to look for “weak links in the chain” when you’re on the road.
“It’s not always the plane itself that’s the problem. It might be in the bathroom at the airport where you need to be extra careful with masks and other things to keep you safe “He said that. “And I think that depending on how much you can handle, you have to adjust accordingly.”
Omicron was partly to blame for the cancellations of about 1,700 flights over the Christmas weekend in the US, FlightAware, an aviation tracking website, said.
Delta and United, two of the biggest airlines in the US, say they are having to cut back on staff because of the spread of Omicron, which became the most common strain in the country last week as officials took new steps to stop it.
As for Omicron, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that there is still one monoclonal antibody treatment that should work against the strain.
It is “unlikely” that REGEN-COV or the combination of bamlanivimab and etesevimab “will keep working” against Omicron, according to the statement from the company that makes the drugs. That means sotrovimab is the only monoclonal antibody treatment that can fight the Omicron variant of the disease right now.
Sotrovimab will be given to 300,000 more people in January, according to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. The other monoclonal antibody therapies will not be given out anymore, the Office said.
The monoclonal antibody treatment Evusheld is also in short supply in the United States. It will only be given to people who have weak immune systems and don’t have active Covid-19 infections, so they can get it. Up to 700,000 doses of the drug have been bought by the federal government. That’s enough to help only one-tenth of the estimated seven million people who are eligible.
From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, racial and ethnic minorities have been bearing the brunt of Covid-19, whether they’ve been sick, died, or had trouble making money.
A study published Thursday in JAMA Health Forum found that racial and ethnic minorities who had other health problems and got Covid-19 were more likely to die in the hospital than white people who got Covid-19.
During the study, which looked at data from more than 14 million hospitalizations in Medicare beneficiaries between January 2019 and February 2021, there was a big drop in non-Covid-19-related hospitalizations and a big rise in Covid-19-related hospitalizations all over.
The rate of Black and Hispanic Covid-19 hospitalizations through February 2021 was higher than the rate of White beneficiaries.
“Beneficiaries who were hospitalised with Covid-19 were more likely to be from racial and ethnic minority groups than those who were hospitalised before they got Covid-19.”
It may be because there are different levels of access to Covid-19 testing, different levels of access to care, and changes in the case mix and care quality caused by pandemic factors, the authors wrote.
Covid-19 hospitalizations did not have a big effect on mortality for Black patients compared to White patients. Hispanic patients, on the other hand, had a 3.5 percentage point rise in mortality.
A “spillover effect,” which led to more Covid-19 hospitalizations, may have changed the distribution of hospital resources, “potentially widening racial and ethnic disparities in outcomes.”
Hospitalizations that were not related to Covid-19 had a higher mortality rate for Black patients than White patients. This was “a 17.5 percent increase over the pre-Covid-19 mortality rate for Black inpatients.”
