Tag Archives: Lung disease

US

Biden leaves White House for 1st time since getting COVID-19

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REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Ending his most recent COVID-19 isolation, President Joe Biden on Sunday left the White House for the first time since becoming infected with the coronavirus last month, settling in for a reunion with first lady Jill Biden in their home state of Delaware.

The president tested negative Saturday and Sunday, according to his doctor, clearing the way for him to emerge from an isolation that lasted longer than expected because of a rebound case of the virus. “He will safety return to public engagement and presidential travel,” Dr. Kevin O’Connor wrote.

“I’m feeling great,” Biden said before boarding Marine One outside the White House.

The Bidens were expected to spend the day in Rehoboth Beach, a popular vacation destination.

Biden originally tested positive on July 21, and he began taking the anti-viral medication Paxlovid, which is intended to decrease the likelihood of serious illness from the virus. According to his doctor, Biden’s vital signs remained normal throughout his infection, but he his symptoms included a runny nose, cough, sore throat and body aches.

After isolating for several days, Biden tested negative on July 26 and July 27, when he gave a speech in the Rose Garden, telling Americans they can “live without fear” of the virus if they get booster shots, test themselves for the virus if they become sick and seek out treatments.

But Biden caught a rare rebound case of COVID-19 on July 30, forcing him to isolate again. He occasionally gave speeches from a White House balcony, such as when he marked the killing of an al-Qaida leader or a strong jobs report.

He continued to test positive until Saturday, when he received his first negative result. While the president was isolating in the White House residence, the first lady remained in Delaware.

The Bidens are scheduled to visit Kentucky on Monday to view flood damage and meet with families.

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Health

Melatonin poisoning reports are up in kids, study says

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NEW YORK — Researchers are drawing attention to a rise in poisonings in children involving the sleep aid melatonin — including a big jump during the pandemic.

Last year, U.S. poison control centers received more than 52,000 calls about children consuming worrisome amounts of the dietary supplement — a six-fold increase from about a decade earlier. Most such calls are about young children who accidentally got into bottles of melatonin, some of which come in the form of gummies for kids.

Parents may think of melatonin as the equivalent of a vitamin and leave it on a nightstand, said Dr. Karima Lelak, an emergency physician at Children’s Hospital of Michigan and the lead author of the study published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But really it’s a medication that has the potential to cause harm, and should be put way in the medicine cabinet,” Lelak said.

WHAT IS MELATONIN?

Melatonin is a hormone that helps control the body’s sleep cycle. It has become a popular over-the-counter sleeping aid, with sales increasing 150% between 2016 and 2020, the authors said.

In the U.S., melatonin is sold as a supplement, not regulated as a drug. Because melatonin is unregulated, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have oversight over the purity of ingredients or the accuracy of dosage claims.

Other researchers have found that what’s on the label may not match what’s actually in the bottle, and some countries have banned the sale of over-the-counter melatonin.

HOW ARE MELATONIN OVERDOSES TREATED?

Many people can tolerate even relatively large doses of melatonin without significant harm, experts say. But there is no antidote for an overdose. In cases of a child accidentally ingesting melatonin, experts often ask a reliable adult to monitor them at home.

But slowed breathing or other worrisome signs can mean a child should be taken to a hospital.

WHAT DID THE RESEARCHERS FIND?

Lelak and her colleagues looked at reports to poison control centers from 2012 to 2021, counting more than 260,000 calls about kids taking too much melatonin. They represented 0.6% of all poison control calls in 2012 and about 5% in 2021.

In about 83% of those calls, the children did not show any symptoms. But other children endured vomiting, had altered breathing or showed other symptoms. Over the 10 years studied, more than 4,000 kids were hospitalized, five needed to be put on machines to help them breathe, and two — both younger than 2 — died.

Most of the hospitalized children were teenagers, and many of those were believed to be suicide attempts.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE PANDEMIC?

Reported melatonin poisonings have been increasing for at least a decade, but the largest increases happened after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in 2020. Between 2019 and 2020, the count shot up 38%.

There may be several reasons, Lelak said. Because of lockdowns and virtual learning, more children were at home all day, meaning there were more opportunities for kids to access melatonin. Also, the pandemic caused sleep-disrupting stress and anxiety that may have caused more families to consider melatonin.

“Children were upset about being home, teenagers were closed off from friends. And on top of all that everyone’s looking at screens for hours and hours a day,” Lelak said.

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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Health

Puzzling outbreak of liver disease in kids spreads to EU, US

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Health officials say they have detected more cases of a mysterious liver disease in children that was first identified in Britain, with new infections in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain

19 April 2022, 14:28

3 min read

LONDON — Health officials say they have detected more cases of a mysterious liver disease in children that was first identified in Britain, with new infections spreading to Europe and the U.S.

Last week, British officials reported 74 cases of hepatitis, or liver inflammation, found in children since January. The usual viruses that cause infectious hepatitis were not seen in the cases, and scientists and doctors are considering other possible sources.

Additional cases of hepatitis had been identified in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in a statement Tuesday without specifying exactly how many cases were found.

U.S. officials have spotted nine cases in Alabama in children aged 1 to 6.

“Mild hepatitis is very common in children following a range of viral infections, but what is being seen at the moment is quite different,” said Graham Cooke, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London. Some of the children in the U.K. have required specialist care at liver units and a few have needed a liver transplant.

The liver processes nutrients, filters the blood and fights infections. The infections caused symptoms like jaundice, diarrhea and abdominal pain. Hepatitis can be life-threatening if left untreated.

While it’s unclear what’s causing the illnesses, a leading suspect is an adenovirus. Only some of the children tested positive for coronavirus, but the World Health Organization said genetic analysis of the virus was needed to determine if there were any connections among the cases.

There are dozens of adenoviruses, many of them associated with cold-like symptoms, fever, sore throat and pink eye. U.S. authorities said the nine Alabama children tested positive for adenovirus and officials there are exploring a link to one particular version — adenovirus 41 — that’s normally associated with gut inflammation.

Public health officials ruled out any links to COVID-19 vaccines, saying none of the affected children was vaccinated.

The WHO noted that although there has been an increase in adenovirus in Britain, the potential role of those viruses in triggering hepatitis is unclear. WHO said there were fewer than five possible cases in Ireland and three confirmed cases in Spain, in children aged 22 months to 13 years.

The U.N. health agency said that given the jump in cases in the past month and heightened surveillance, it was “very likely” more cases will be detected.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Health

COVID-19, overdoses pushed US to highest death total ever

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NEW YORK — 2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research are offering more insights into how it got that bad.

The main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work on death statistics.

The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally. It showed there were 3.465 million deaths last year, or about 80,000 more than 2020’s record-setting total.

Early last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic — partly because effective COVID-19 vaccines had finally become available.

“We were wrong, unfortunately,” said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher.

COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000 the year before — as new coronavirus variants emerged and an unexpectedly large numbers of Americans refused to get vaccinated or were hesitant to wear masks, experts said.

The coronavirus is not solely to blame. Preliminary CDC data also shows the crude death rate for cancer rose slightly, and rates continued to increase for diabetes, chronic liver disease and stroke.

Drug overdose deaths also continued to rise. The CDC does not yet have a tally for 2021 overdose deaths, because it can take weeks of lab work and investigation to identify them. But provisional data through October suggests the nation is on track to see at least 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021 — up from 93,000 the year before.

New research released Tuesday showed a particularly large jump in overdose deaths among 14- to 18-year-olds.

Adolescent overdose death counts were fairly constant for most of the last decade, at around 500 a year, according to the paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. They almost doubled in 2020, to 954, and the researchers estimated that the total hit nearly 1,150 last year.

Joseph Friedman, a UCLA researcher who was the paper’s lead author, called the spike “unprecedented.”

Those teen overdose deaths were only around 1% of the U.S. total. But adolescents experienced a greater relative increase than the overall population, even though surveys suggest drug use among teens is down.

Experts attributed the spike to fentanyl, a highly lethal drug that has been cut into heroin for several years. More recently it’s also been pressed into counterfeit pills resembling prescription drugs that teens sometimes abuse.

The total number of U.S. deaths often increases year to year as the U.S. population grows. But 2020 and 2021 saw extraordinary jumps in death numbers and rates, due largely to the pandemic.

Those national death trends affect life expectancy — an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live.

With rare exceptions, U.S. life expectancy has reliably inched up year after year. But the CDC’s life expectancy estimate for 2020 was about 77 years — more than a year and a half lower than what it was in 2019.

The CDC has not yet reported its calculation for 2021. But Goldman and some other researchers have been making their own estimates, presented in papers that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Those researchers think U.S. life expectancy dropped another five or six months in 2021 — putting it back to where it was 20 years ago.

A loss of more than two years of life expectancy over the last two years “is mammoth,” Goldman said.

One study looked at death data in the U.S. and 19 other high-income countries. The U.S. fared the worst.

“What happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the levels of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices, such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement.

Some experts are skeptical that life expectancy will quickly bounce back. They worry about long-term complications of COVID-19 that may hasten the deaths of people with chronic health problems.

Preliminary — and incomplete — CDC data suggest there were at least 805,000 U.S. deaths in about the first three months of this year. That’s well below the same period last year, but higher than the comparable period in 2020.

“We may end up with a ‘new normal’ that’s a little higher than it was before,” Anderson said.

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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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US

Minneapolis teachers strike after failing to reach contract

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ST. PAUL, Minn. — Teachers in the Minneapolis School District walked off the job on Tuesday in a dispute over wages, class sizes and mental health support for students coping with two years of the coronavirus pandemic, at least temporarily pausing classes for about 29,000 students in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts.

Union members said they could not reach agreement on wages, especially a “living wage” for education support professionals, as well as caps on class sizes and more mental health services for students.

“We are on strike for safe and stable schools, we’re on strike for systemic change, we’re on strike for our students, the future of our city and the future of Minneapolis public schools,” Greta Cunningham, president of the teachers’ chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, said Tuesday outside a south Minneapolis elementary school where more than 100 union members and supporters launched a morning picket line in freezing weather.

The school district called the news disappointing but pledged to keep negotiating. Callahan said the union was also willing to resume bargaining, but no talks were scheduled.

Teachers in the neighboring St. Paul School District, with about 34,000 students, announced a tentative agreement late Monday night to avert a strike that had also been scheduled to start Tuesday.

Union officials in both cities said the issues were largely the same. The St. Paul teachers union said their tentative agreement — subject to approval by members — includes maintaining caps on class sizes, increased mental health supports and pay increases.

“This agreement could have been reached much earlier. It shouldn’t have taken a strike vote, but we got there,” local union President Leah VanDassor said in an announcement of the deal.

St. Paul Superintendent Joe Gothard said the agreements were fair while working within the district’s budget limitations.

State mediators facilitated the negotiations between administrators and union leaders in both districts.

National labor leaders say teachers and support staff across the country are experiencing the same sorts of overload and burnout challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but no other large districts were on the verge of a strike. School district officials have said they’re already facing budget shortfalls due to enrollment losses stemming from the pandemic and can’t spend money they don’t have.

The possibility of a strike earlier weighed on parents already stretched by the disruption of the pandemic.

Erin Zielinski’s daughter, Sybil, is a first-grader at Armatage Community School in southwest Minneapolis. She and her husband support the teachers, though she said she worries whether the union’s requests are sustainable.

Zielinski said her family is fortunate. She and her husband can count on support from their parents during a strike, and while he has had to return to the office, she still has some flexibility to work remotely. Her plan if teachers strike? “Survival,” she said and laughed.

“You kind of become immune to it, between distance learning, and home school, it’s now a way of life, unfortunately,” she said. “My husband and I will piece it together.”

For St. Paul schools, Gothard outlined the proposals in a statement Sunday night, saying the district offered to add language to the contract to keep average class sizes at their current levels, hire an additional four school psychologists, one-time cash payment of $2,000 for every union employee using federal stimulus funds, and to increase pay for the lowest-paid educational assistants.

“This comprehensive settlement offer addresses the union’s priorities, does not add to the projected $42 million budget shortfall next year, and most importantly, keeps our students, teachers and staff in the classroom,” Gothard wrote.

Minneapolis has about 3,265 teachers, while St. Paul has roughly 3,250 educators. The average annual salary for St. Paul teachers is more than $85,000, while it’s more than $71,000 in Minneapolis. However, the districts also employ hundreds of lower-paid support staffers who often say they don’t earn a living wage, and those workers have been a major focus of the talks. The Minneapolis union is seeking a starting salary of $35,000 for education support professionals, with union officials saying it’s essential to hire and retain people of color.

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Associated Press writer Doug Glass contributed from Minneapolis.

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Health

Omicron may be headed for a rapid drop in US and Britain

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Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19′s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically.

The reason: The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected in South Africa.

“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic might unfold. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or at the same pace. And weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes to pass.

“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.

The University of Washington’s own highly influential model projects that the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. will crest at 1.2 million by Jan. 19 and will then fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” according to Mokdad.

In fact, he said, by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6.

In Britain, meanwhile, new COVID-19 cases dropped to about 140,000 a day in the last week, after skyrocketing to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data.

Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London.

The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.

“We are seeing a definite falling-off of cases in the U.K., but I’d like to see them fall much further before we know if what happened in South Africa will happen here,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Differences between Britain and South Africa, including Britain’s older population and the tendency of its people to spend more time indoors in the winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak for the country and other nations like it.

On the other hand, British authorities’ decision to adopt minimal restrictions against omicron could enable the virus to rip through the population and run its course much faster than it might in Western European countries that have imposed tougher COVID-19 controls, such as France, Spain and Italy.

Shabir Mahdi, dean of health sciences at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said European countries that impose lockdowns won’t necessarily come through the omicron wave with fewer infections; the cases may just be spread out over a longer period of time.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said there have been 7 million new COVID-19 cases across Europe in the past week, calling it a “tidal wave sweeping across the region.” WHO cited modeling from Mokdad’s group that predicts half of Europe’s population will be infected with omicron within about eight weeks.

By that time, however, Hunter and others expect the world to be past the omicron surge.

“There will probably be some ups and downs along the way, but I would hope that by Easter, we will be out of this,” Hunter said.

Still, the sheer numbers of people infected could prove overwhelming to fragile health systems, said Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

“The next few weeks are going to be brutal because in absolute numbers, there are so many people being infected that it will spill over into ICUs,” Jha said.

Mokdad likewise warned in the U.S.: “It’s going to be a tough two or three weeks. We have to make hard decisions to let certain essential workers continue working, knowing they could be infectious.”

Omicron could one day be seen as a turning point in the pandemic, said Meyers, at the University of Texas. Immunity gained from all the new infections, along with new drugs and continued vaccination, could render the coronavirus something with which we can more easily coexist.

“At the end of this wave, far more people will have been infected by some variant of COVID,” Meyers said. “At some point, we’ll be able to draw a line — and omicron may be that point — where we transition from what is a catastrophic global threat to something that’s a much more manageable disease.”

That’s one plausible future, she said, but there is also the possibility of a new variant — one that is far worse than omicron — arising.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World

With Christmas in the balance, nations eye UK omicron surge

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LONDON — Britain’s main nurses’ union warned Monday that exhaustion and surging coronavirus cases among medical staff are pushing them to the breaking point, adding to pressure on the government for new restrictions to curb record numbers of infections driven by the omicron variant.

The warning throws into stark relief the unpalatable choice Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces: wreck holiday plans for millions for a second year running, or face a potential tidal wave of cases and disruption.

Many governments in Europe and the U.S. are confronting similar dilemmas over how hard to come down in the face of omicron, which scientists say spreads more easily than other coronavirus strains, including delta, which itself led to surges in many parts of the world. Early evidence suggests omicron may also produce less serious illness — though experts caution it is too soon to say — and that it could better evade vaccine protection.

Even if it is milder, the new variant could still overwhelm health systems because of the sheer number of infections. Confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.K. have surged by 60% in a week as omicron overtook delta as the dominant variant.

Patricia Marquis, England director for the Royal College of Nursing union, said the situation over the next few weeks looks “very bleak,” as growing absences from sickness and self-isolation hit hospitals already struggling to clear a backlog of postponed procedures and treat normal winter sicknesses alongside coronavirus cases.

“In many places they’re already under immense stress and pressure, and so they are starting to go off sick themselves with COVID, but also mental and physical exhaustion,” she told the BBC. “So, staff are looking forward now thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what is coming?’”

But many political leaders are reluctant to impose the stiff measures they resorted to earlier in the pandemic — often because they promised their people that vaccines would offer a way out of such restrictions and it may be politically untenable to impose them again.

In the U.S., the prospect of a winter chilled by a wave of coronavirus infections is a severe reversal from the optimism projected by President Joe Biden some 10 months ago, when he suggested that the country would essentially be back to normal by Christmas.

Cases are surging in parts of the U.S., particularly the Northeast and Midwest, though it’s not always clear which variant is driving the upswing.

In New York City, where the mayor has said the new variant is already in “full force,” a spike is scuttling Broadway shows and spurring long lines at testing centers, but so far new hospitalizations and deaths are averaging well below their spring 2020 peak.

France, meanwhile, is desperately trying to avoid a new lockdown that would hurt the economy and cloud President Emmanuel Macron’s expected re-election campaign.

Britain’s Johnson, whose authority has been hammered by weeks of political scandals, is caught between calls from scientific advisers for new limits on social interaction now, and vociferous opposition within his Conservative Party to any such restrictions.

After a special Cabinet meeting on Monday to discuss the latest figures, Johnson said ministers had decided against immediate restrictions, but added that “the arguments either way are very, very finely balanced.”

“We will have to reserve the possibility of taking further action to protect the public,” he said.

Ministers are weighing several options, ranging from non-binding guidance for people to limit festive gatherings to mandatory social distancing and curfews for bars and restaurants.

Earlier this month, Johnson’s government reinstated rules requiring face masks in shops and ordered people to show proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test before entering nightclubs and other crowded venues.

The government is hoping vaccine boosters will offer more protection against omicron, as the data suggests, and has set a goal of offering everyone 18 and up an extra shot by the end of December. More than 900,000 booster shots were delivered on Sunday, as soccer stadiums, shopping centers and cathedrals were turned into temporary inoculation clinics.

U.S. vaccine maker Moderna said Monday that a lab tests suggested that a booster dose of its vaccine should offer protection against omicron. Pfizer’s testing also found a booster triggered a big jump in omicron-fighting antibodies.

But many scientists say boosters along are not enough and tougher action is needed.

The speed of omicron’s spread in the U.K., where cases of the variant are doubling about every two days, is decimating the economy in the busy pre-Christmas period.

Usually teeming theaters and restaurants are being hit by cancellations. Some eateries and pubs have closed until after the holidays because so many staff are off sick or self-isolating. The Natural History Museum, one of London’s leading attractions, said Monday it was closing for a week because of “front-of-house staff shortages.”

Other countries are warily watching the U.K., which reported 91,743 more lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases on Monday, close to the record high for a single day set last week.

The Dutch government began a tough nationwide lockdown on Sunday to rein in sharply rising infections. The World Economic Forum, meanwhile, announced Monday it is again delaying its annual meeting of world leaders, business executives and other elites in Davos, Switzerland, because of omicron uncertainty.

But many European leaders have opted for something less.

France and Germany have barred most British travelers from entering, and the government in Paris has also banned public concerts and fireworks displays at New Year’s celebrations. Ireland imposed an 8 p.m. curfew on pubs and bars and limited attendance at indoor and outdoor events, while Greece will have 10,000 police officers on duty over the holidays to carry out COVID pass checks.

In Spain, the national average of new cases is double what it was a year ago. But authorities in the country with one of Europe’s highest vaccination rates are betting primarily on mandatory mask-wearing indoors and the rollout of booster shots, with no further restrictions planned.

Neighboring Portugal is telling most nonessential workers to work from home for a week in January, but has no other new measures in the pipeline.

Tiago Correia, an associate professor of global health at Lisbon’s New University, said European public opinion will accept a lockdown only when pressure on health services makes it inevitable.

“There is no political or social support for a Christmas lockdown,” he said.

But Hendrik Wuest, governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, said more restrictions could be on the horizon shortly after Christmas.

“I don’t think big New Year parties can happen this year — unfortunately, again,” he added. “Omicron won’t forgive us any carelessness if we aren’t cautious.”

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Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Aritz Parra in Madrid, Barry Hatton in Lisbon and Derek Gatopoulos in Athens contributed to this story.

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Follow all AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.

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World

Austrian leader says lockdown for the unvaccinated is likely

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Austria’s chancellor has stepped up threats of lockdown measures for unvaccinated people as new coronavirus cases in the Alpine country are soaring

November 11, 2021, 6:53 PM

2 min read

BERLIN — Austria’s chancellor on Thursday stepped up threats of lockdown measures for unvaccinated people, as new coronavirus cases in the Alpine nation are soaring. The country’s worst-affected province said it plans to take that step next week.

Austria has taken a series of measures in recent weeks in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19 and encourage more people to get vaccinated. On Monday, new rules took effect barring unvaccinated people who haven’t recovered from an infection from restaurants, hotels, hairdressing salons and large public events.

Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said late last month that unvaccinated people in Austria could face new lockdown restrictions if infection numbers continue to rise — which they have. On Thursday, official figures showed 760.6 reported new cases per 100,000 residents over the previous seven days — a rate three times that of neighboring Germany, where record numbers also are causing alarm.

During a visit Thursday to Bregenz in western Austria, Schallenberg said that a lockdown for the unvaccinated is “probably unavoidable” and that the unvaccinated face an “uncomfortable” winter and Christmas, the Austria Press Agency reported.

“I don’t see why two-thirds should lose their freedom because one-third is dithering,” Schallenberg said. “For me, it is clear that there should be no lockdown for the vaccinated out of solidarity for the unvaccinated.”

Upper Austria province, the country’s worst-affected region with nearly 1,200 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past week, said later Thursday that it plans to take the lead.

Officials there “plan a lockdown for unvaccinated people from Monday, provided that there is a legal green light from the federal government, or rather that the federal government creates the legal basis,” governor Thomas Stelzer said.

Schallenberg said authorities would consider a vaccine mandate for some professional groups. He added that the country’s vaccination rate is “shamefully low.” About 65% of the population is fully inoculated.

The chancellor insisted that “we can break this wave together.”

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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

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World

UK readies soldiers to help ease gas shortages at pumps

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LONDON — The British government put dozens of soldiers on standby Monday to help easy fuel supply problems caused by a shortage of truck drivers, a situation that has spurred panic buying of gasoline across the country.

As unions called for emergency workers to be given priority for fuel supplies, the government said it was placing British army tanker drivers in “a state of readiness in order to be deployed if required to deliver fuel to where it is needed most.”

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said Britain had “strong supplies of fuel.”

“However, we are aware of supply chain issues at fuel station forecourts and are taking steps to ease these as a matter of priority,” he said.

Long lines of vehicles have formed at many gas stations around Britain since Friday, causing spillover traffic jams on busy roads. Tempers have frayed as some drivers waited for hours.

The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents almost 5,500 independent outlets, said Sunday that about two-thirds of its members had run out of fuel, as the truck driver shortage set off rounds of gas panic-buying.

The Conservative government insisted blamed the problems on consumer behavior.

“The only reason we don’t have petrol on the forecourts is that people are buying petrol they don’t need,” said Environment Secretary George Eustice.

Major fuel firms, including BP, Shell and Esso, said in a joint statement that they expected demand for gas to “return to its normal levels in the coming days.”

“We would encourage people to buy fuel as they usually would,” the statement said.

But critics urged the government to get fuel flowing so the shortage does not have damaging spillover effects on health care, police operations and other crucial sectors.

Dr. Chaand Nagpaul at the British Medical Association said health care workers and other essential services staff should be “given priority access to fuel so they can continue their crucial work and guarantee care to patients.”

Christina McAnea, general secretary of the Unison trade union, urged the government to use its emergency powers to designate gas stations for key workers.

“Ambulance crews, nurses, care workers, teaching assistants, police staff and other key workers mustn’t be left stranded or forced to queue for hours simply to get to a pump,” she said.

The haulage industry says the U.K. is short as many as 100,000 truckers, due to a perfect storm of factors including the coronavirus pandemic, an aging workforce and an exodus of foreign workers following Britain’s departure from the European Union last year. Post-Brexit immigration rules mean EU citizens can no longer live and work visa-free in Britain, as they could when the U.K. was a member of the bloc.

Several other countries, including the United States and Germany, also are experiencing a shortage of truck drivers, but the problem has been especially visible in Britain, where it has contributed to empty supermarket shelves and shuttered gas pumps.

Roland McKibbin, an electrician in London, said he has had to cancel jobs because he couldn’t get gas.

“No fuel means I can’t drive, which means I can’t get to jobs with my tools,” he said. “So, basically, the panic-buying idiots have lost me income and directly taken food off the table for my wife and 5-year-old son, because I can’t wire people’s houses from home.”

In an effort to ease the gas crunch, the government said it was temporarily suspending competition laws so fuel firms can share information and target areas where supplies are running low.

It is also bringing in military driving examiners to help clear a backlog of new truckers awaiting tests,

And, after weeks of mounting pressure over shortages, the U.K.’s Conservative government announced Saturday that it will issue 5,000 emergency visas to foreign truck drivers to help prevent a Christmas without turkey or toys for many British families.

But that falls far short of the number needed, and critics also said the 3-month visas were too short to entice European truck drivers.

Ruby McGregor-Smith, president of the Confederation of British Industry, said the visas were “the equivalent of throwing a thimble of water on a bonfire.”

Radu Dinescu, general secretary of the National Union of Road Transporters in Romania, said Romanian drivers — who worked in the U.K. in large numbers before Brexit — now “prefer EU stability.” Romania is a member of the EU and Dinescu said its drivers can earn high salaries working in France or Germany.

“The U.K. seems to be experiencing a paradox … British citizens do not want to practice the job of truck driver, while at the same time they do not want other non-U.K. citizens to come to do this job,” he told The Associated Press.

Olaf Scholz, leader of Germany’s Social Democrats, the party that came first in the country’s election on Sunday, also linked Britain’s worker shortages to Brexit.

“The free movement of labor is part of the European Union, and we worked very hard to convince the British to not leave the union,” he said. “Now they decided different, and I hope they will manage the problems coming from that.”

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Associated Press writer Stephen McGrath in Bucharest contributed to this report.

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Health

COVID vaccine creator says mass boosters may be unnecessary

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A leading scientist behind the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine says booster shots may be unnecessary for many people

September 10, 2021, 10:17 AM

2 min read

LONDON — Booster shots to extend the protection of COVID-19 vaccines may be unnecessary for many people, a leading scientist behind the AstraZeneca vaccine said on Friday.

Oxford University Professor Sarah Gilbert told The Telegraph newspaper that immunity from the vaccine was holding up well — even against the delta variant. While the elderly and those who are immune-compromised may need boosters, the standard two-dose regimen is providing lasting protection for most people, she said.

“We will look at each situation; the immuno-compromised and elderly will receive boosters,” she said. “But I don’t think we need to boost everybody. Immunity is lasting well in the majority of people.”

The comments come as the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, a panel of experts that advises the British government, is expected to make recommendations in the coming days on the scale of any booster program. Britain’s medical regulator on Thursday said the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines were safe to use as boosters.

U.K. Health Secretary Sajid Javid has said he expects a booster program to start later this month.

Gilbert said the world’s priority should be to get more vaccines to countries that have received limited supplies.

“We need to get vaccines to countries where few of the population have been vaccinated so far,’’ Gilbert said. “We have to do better in this regard. The first dose has the most impact.”

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https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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