With more than 2,300 people a day dying from COVID-19 in the U.S., we’re all still deep in the pandemic woods. But with the first of several promising vaccines now authorized for use, we have at least entered a new, more hopeful phase: the end of the beginning.
And thanks to the thousands of volunteers who agreed to go first over the last year -- getting an experimental shot in the arm as part of a research study -- the rest of us can feel assured that whichever vaccine we get in the next several months will be safe and effective.
This week 66-year-old Howard Berkes, an NPR alum and longtime investigations correspondent, tells us why he volunteered to take the risk of getting one of those early, experimental shots.
It all goes back to family, Berkes says. His ancestors “did what needed to be done” when facing a personal or community crisis, and taught him to do the same.
This week, the U.S. government released data on the ways COVID-19 is putting a dangerous strain on hospitals as it decreases the average number of beds available in each facility.
NPR has created a tool to help you find out how your county and local hospital are faring. It focuses on one key metric: the percentage of a hospital’s beds that are occupied by COVID-19 patients.
While there is no magic threshold, most experts keeping an eye on hospital capacity agree that it’s a concern if that ratio rises above 10%. Anything above 20% shows “extreme stress.”
When that ratio gets to 50%, "it means the hospital is overloaded,” says Ali Mokdad of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “It means other services in that hospital are being delayed. The hospital becomes a nightmare."
For decades psychedelic drugs, including ketamine and psilocybin, have shown promise in treating people with certain mental health problems such as addiction, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
But doctors and researchers have been wary of using the drugs in treatment because of their side effects.
This week NPR’s Jon Hamilton reports on a chemically tweaked version of the psychedelic drug ibogaine that seems to relieve depression and addiction symptoms without producing hallucinations or other dangerous side effects -- at least in rodents.
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