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The World Health Organization chief on Wednesday said a nearly 90% drop in recent COVID-19 deaths globally compared to nine months ago provides “cause for optimism,” but still urged vigilance against the pandemic as variants continue to crop up. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that last week just over 9,400 deaths linked to the coronavirus were reported to the WHO. In February of this year, he said, weekly deaths had topped 75,000 globally. (Keaten, 11/9)

Weekly COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to drop in most of the world, except for in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, which saw modest rises, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today in its weekly update on the pandemic. The WHO received reports of more than 2.1 million cases last week, reflecting a 15% drop from the previous week. Countries reported more than 9,400 deaths, down 10% from the week before. (Schnirring, 11/9)

High blood pressure is a known risk factor for a bout of Covid-19 severe enough to raise the specter of hospitalization and death. In fact, research has shown having high blood pressure doubles the risk of having a severe case of Covid, even if you are fully vaccinated and boosted. (LaMotte, 11/9)

An FDA advisory panel voted 5-to-8 to recommend rejecting a new drug for patients hospitalized with Covid-19, ruling that a glimmer of potential life-saving benefit couldn’t make up for a long list of questions around the company’s main trial. (Mast, 11/9)

Six months ago, Dr. Joseph Boselli said he was prescribing the antiviral drug Paxlovid to nearly everyone who turned up at his practice with COVID. Now, the internal medicine physician at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia said he's reserving it mostly for people who are 60-plus, with serious health problems, or who aren't up-to-date on their vaccines. (Abdelmalek and Flahrerty, 11/10)

The country is heading into its third Covid winter without crucial tools we’ve relied on at previous points in the pandemic, both as governments roll back their responses and as the virus outruns some of our most important medicine-cabinet defenses. (Joseph and Mast, 11/10)

A study today in JAMA Network Open reveals disparities in access to COVID-19 Test to Treat sites—and thus to illness-limiting oral antivirals—with 15% of the US population living more than an hour from the nearest center. A team led by researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the University of Virginia used HealthData.gov information to identify the locations of 2,227 Test to Treat sites across the United States as of May 4, 2022. They also calculated drive times from the population center of each US Census region to the 10 nearest testing sites. (Van Beusekom, 11/9)

By this point in the pandemic, a lot of people must be losing track. “I actually think this is a good thing,” says Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford, and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Now that so many Americans have racked up several shots or infections, she told me, the question is no longer “‘How many doses have you gotten cumulatively?’ It’s ‘Are you up to date for the season?’” (Wu, 11/8)