It’s official: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun easing some long-standing COVID-19 safety precautions for those lucky folks who are now fully vaccinated.
If it’s been two weeks or longer since your final Pfizer or Moderna shot (or two weeks out from the single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine), it’s OK to visit indoors with other fully vaccinated people without wearing masks, the CDC announced this week. It’s also pretty safe to gather indoors with another household that hasn't been vaccinated -- as long everyone there is at low risk for serious illness if they catch the virus.
That advice (and the caveat) are science-based: There’s good evidence that by a couple weeks after immunization, people are less likely to become infected if exposed to the virus and are “potentially” less likely to spread it to others.
Consider the shift in guidance a first step toward normalcy. "We know that people want to get vaccinated so they can get back to doing the things they enjoy with the people they love," says CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. Still, with risky variants widely circulating, and many people not yet vaccinated, we all need to continue to wear masks in public, she says, and avoid crowds for now.
After advanced age, obesity is the second-greatest predictor worldwide of whether someone will get severely sick or die from an infection with the coronavirus, according to a report published this month by the World Obesity Federation.
But why? Health reporter Sarah Varney talked to researchers this week who say they think the coronavirus “may exploit underlying metabolic and physiological impairments that often exist in concert with obesity.”
Extra body fat, especially a BMI of 30 or higher, can lead to a cascade of metabolic disruptions, chronic systemic inflammation and hormonal dysregulation that may thwart the body's response to infection.
Given the health risk, at least 29 states have greenlighted obesity as a factor for inclusion in prioritized phases of the vaccine rollout.
Locked-down cities, a deadly, infectious disease, and a preventive approach that had to cut through fear, suspicion and local politics to stop the outbreak. That sounds like a story ripped from today’s headlines about COVID-19, but it also describes the situation facing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a British aristocrat who helped stop a smallpox epidemic in England in 1721.
Lady Mary faced a lot of pushback as she tried to convince London doctors to experiment with a form of inoculation she’d learned from women in the Ottoman Empire.
The technique, which she convinced the physicians to try on her own children, ultimately helped give rise to the much safer vaccination process we know today.
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