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COVID-19 is still killing hundreds of Americans each day, but is not nearly as dangerous as it was last fall and winter. “It’s going to be a good summer and we deserve this break,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. With more Americans shielded from severe illness through vaccination and infection, COVID-19 has transformed — for now at least — into an unpleasant, inconvenient nuisance for many. (Johnson, 7/3)

The new BA.5 strain of the COVID-causing virus is “a different beast” from ones we’ve already seen — more infectious and better able to evade immune responses — and “we need to change our thinking” about how to defend against it, according to a data-packed Twitter thread posted today by Dr. Bob Wachter, UCSF’s chair of medicine. (Fagone, 7/4)

In a sign of how the new coronavirus wave continues to spread across California, two-thirds of the state’s counties are now in the high COVID-19 community level, in which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal masking in indoor public spaces. This comes as health officials are warning of concerning weeks ahead as two new ultra-contagious Omicron subvariants — BA.4 and BA.5 — spread. ... (Lin II and Money, 7/4)

Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease doctor at Stanford, suffered the same fate as many people in January. Despite being vaccinated and boosted, he got infected with COVID during the surge of the highly infectious omicron variant. Then, just a few months later in May, he performed a routine COVID test one day before work and found himself infected with the coronavirus yet again. (Echeverria, 7/4)

People in six Washington counties should begin wearing masks indoors in public and on public transportation again, according to recommendations from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The latest information from the CDC shows that Lewis County, Pacific County, Thurston County, Grays Harbor County, Garfield County and Spokane County all have COVID-19 community levels rated “high,” meaning they have had 200 or more new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days, or they’ve had more than 20 new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people within a seven-day period. (7/2)

In the early 1990s, long before P.P.E., N95 and asymptomatic transmission became household terms, federal health officials issued guidelines for how medical workers should protect themselves from tuberculosis during a resurgence of the highly infectious respiratory disease. Their recommendation, elastomeric respirators, an industrial-grade face mask familiar to car painters and construction workers, would in the decades that followed become the gold standard for infection-control specialists focused on the dangers of airborne pathogens. (Jacobs, 7/3)

The owner of a West Palm Beach nursing home will pay $1.75 million to settle claims that it improperly diverted doses of COVID-19 vaccine to members of its board of directors and donors. (7/5)

GSK Plc is planning to launch a Covid shot that comes almost two years after Pfizer Inc. took the world by storm. For Phil Dormitzer, it’s a reminder of why he was hired at the UK drugmaker: to help return its immunization business to the top after it stumbled during the pandemic. (Paton, 7/3)

KHN: How Pfizer Won The Pandemic, Reaping Outsize Profit And Influence 

The grinding two-plus years of the pandemic have yielded outsize benefits for one company — Pfizer — making it both highly influential and hugely profitable as covid-19 continues to infect tens of thousands of people and kill hundreds each day. Its success in developing covid medicines has given the drugmaker unusual weight in determining U.S. health policy. Based on internal research, the company’s executives have frequently announced the next stage in the fight against the pandemic before government officials have had time to study the issue, annoying many experts in the medical field and leaving some patients unsure whom to trust. (Allen, 7/5)