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During a three-week stretch at the height of this winter’s devastating omicron case surge, Santa Cruz County health officials lost 10 patients to COVID-19. All but one were vaccinated, and five had received booster shots. As the omicron wave recedes, California data reveal an unsettling trend. Compared to the delta variant case surge last summer, deaths among the vaccinated rose sharply with omicron, a variant said by many experts to cause milder illness. A Bay Area News Group analysis of state COVID-19 deaths found that in the four deadliest weeks of the delta and omicron surges, the number of unvaccinated people who died were nearly identical, and far higher than the totals for the vaccinated. Even so, three times more vaccinated people died during the omicron peak than during delta’s heyday. (Woolfolk, Blair Rowan and DeRuy, 3/6)

Philadelphia health officials have said for weeks that more than half of the city’s 5-to-11-year-olds have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. The city’s own data, though, suggest that the vaccination rate might be far lower, closer to a third in that age group. City officials said Friday they were looking at the numbers as part of a routine review, but declined to shed light on apparent discrepancies. “It matters because we need to know how far we’re trying to achieve,” said Ala Stanford, the pediatric surgeon and founder of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium who has had a focus on vaccinating schoolchildren. Accurate data “just helps me know what goal I’m going toward.” (Laughlin and Graham, 3/4)

As COVID-19 metrics decline to new lows for the year, society begins to adapt to its new normal. Health officials have said the omicron surge is nearing an end and the post-omicron variants haven't had an impact on Wisconsin. Health officials and advisers have said that despite pandemic fatigue, it is their mission to increase the state's vaccination rate, which trails behind the national average. As of Friday, 64% of Wisconsin residents have received at least one dose, while 60.5% of residents are fully vaccinated, according to state Department of Health Services data. Nearly 33% of residents have received a booster dose. (Bentley, 3/4)

As soon as the vaccine mandate went into effect, people began to rebel. Some saw it as government overreach — what right did faraway lawmakers have to tell people what to do with their bodies? Others worried that the vaccine was dangerous, or that they were being used as guinea pigs — what proof was there that this concoction even worked? Protests were staged, opinion pieces written, and parents resorted to subterfuge to avoid vaccinating their kids — they changed addresses to confuse officials, got fake vaccine certificates, and even tried to reverse the process once their kids had already been vaccinated. ... all of the above also happened in 19th-century England, when the government mandated the smallpox vaccine for children. (North, 3/4)

A doctor gives a pep talk to some two dozen women sitting in a hall of a medical center. "We've got Pfizer. We've got Moderna. We've got Sinovac," says Dr. Kishwar Tanwir, who oversees vaccinations in the Pehlwan Goth district of the Pakistani city of Karachi. The women were about to go door-to-door to offer COVID-19 jabs on a recent February day – part of some 13,000 teams led by women that were dispatched across the southern province of Sindh to vaccinate some 12 million people over the age of 12. (Hadid and Sattar, 3/5)