Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Different Takes: The Future Of Covid Is Not Promising; Is It Time To Start Masking Again?
It may surprise you to learn, given the mood of the country — and indeed the world — about the pandemic that probably half of all Covid infections have happened this calendar year — and it’s only July. (David Wallace-Wells, 7/20)
It’s the summer of the subvariants. The summer you or at least someone you know got COVID. The summer masks were off all over town, but not for much longer. (Nina Shapiro, 7/21)
Alpha. Beta. Delta. Omicron. BA.5. The list of COVID variants and subvariants continues to grow. And the threat of prolonged symptoms from long COVID becomes clearer every day. Our best defense — research to produce new and effective treatments — must keep advancing. But our clinical research system has a problem, and the Food and Drug Administration is only now making some headway in trying to fix it. (Tom Rico Pamukcu, 7/19)
Also —
As monkeypox cases multiply in the US, more research is needed to assess how well existing treatments work. Unfortunately, no efforts are yet underway to conduct the kind of clinical trials that might let doctors know how much antiviral drugs improve patients’ lives. (Lisa Jarvis, 7/20)
In some ways, the current outbreak of monkeypox closely resembles two other public health crises of the last 40 years — COVID-19 and AIDS. (7/21)
Back in 1985, as a reliable blood test for HIV was first becoming available, I plunged headlong into medical residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Half of my patients had AIDS, and the challenge quickly became managing opportunistic infections with multi-organ involvement. (Dr. Marc Siegel, 7/20)
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the dire state of nursing has been grist for endless headlines, studies, and think pieces, as has the epidemic of clinician mental health problems. (Danielle Bowie, 7/21)
The death of a grandmother can have severe and lasting mental-health consequences for both her adult children and grandchildren, according to our recently published study. (Emily Smith-Greenaway, Ashton Verdery, Michelle Livings and Rachel Margolis, 7/20)
