Category:

Health

Latest

Centre releases Rs 890 cr as 2nd tranche of package for COVID-19 health system preparedness

The second instalment of the aid will be used to strengthen public health infrastructure for testing, including procurement and installation of RT-PCR machines, RNA extraction kits, TrueNat and CB-NAAT machines, bolster infrastructure for treatment and development of ICU beds, installation of oxygen generators and procurement of bedside oxygen concentrators among others.

It would also be used for engagement, training and capacity building of necessary human resources and incentives to healthcare workforce and volunteers, including ASHA workers on COVID-19 duties, the health ministry said

read more

Obama’s Medicaid expansion keeps gaining ground under Trump

Medicaid expansion is a central feature of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, covering about 12 million people, while nearly 10 million others get subsidised private insurance.
If present trends continue, it’s only a matter of time until all states expand Medicaid, acknowledged Brian Blase, a former health care adviser in the Trump White House, who remains opposed to the expansion.
Medicaid expansion is terrible policy, but it is attractive to states because it’s almost all federal spending and the insurance companies and hospitals get lots of dollars when a state expands Medicaid, he said.
The federal government pays 90 per cent of the cost of covering people through the expansion, a much higher matching share than for low-income disabled and elderly people traditionally covered by Medicaid. Blase argues that’s an incentive to waste federal dollars.

read more

Global recovery could be faster if COVID vaccine made available to all:WHO chief

“Sharing vaccines or sharing other tools actually helps the world to recover together. The economic recovery can be faster and the damage from COVID-19 could be less,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus .

“Vaccine nationalism is not good, it will not help us,” he said in an allusion to the competitive scramble of nations and pharmaceutical researchers to come up with an effective vaccine and order as many doses as possible in advance.

read more

It’s not for me:speed of COVID-19 vaccine race raises safety concerns

Regulators around the world have repeatedly said speed will not compromise safety, as quicker results would stem from conducting in parallel trials that are usually done in sequence.

However, these reassurances have failed to convince many, including in Western countries where scepticism about vaccinations was already growing before the pandemic.

Preliminary results of a survey conducted over the last three months in 19 countries showed that only about 70% of British and U.S. respondents would take a COVID-19 vaccine if available, Scott Ratzan, co-leader of ‘Business Partners to CONVINCE’, told Reuters.

read more

Over 56,000 COVID-19 cases in country in single day

There are 5,95,501 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country presently which contribute to 30.31 per cent of the total cases.

The fatality rate has further dropped to 2.07 per cent, the data stated.

This is the eighth consecutive day that COVID-19 cases have increased by more than 50,000.
Of the 904 fresh deaths reported, 334 are from Maharashtra, 112 from Tamil Nadu, 100 from Karnataka, 77 from Andhra Pradesh, 61 from West Bengal, 40 from Uttar Pradesh, 29 from Punjab, 23 from Gujarat, 17 from Madhya Pradesh, 13 each from Rajasthan and Telangana, 11 from Delhi and Nine each from Jammu and Kashmir and Odisha.

read more

Global coronavirus deaths exceed 700,000, one person dies every 15 seconds on average

Even in parts of the world that had appeared to have curbed the spread of the virus, countries have recently seen single-day records in new cases, signaling the battle is far from over. Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Bolivia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Uzbekistan and Israel all recently had record increases in cases.

read more

Proportion of youth with COVID-19 triples in five months: WHO

An analysis by the WHO of 6 million infections between Feb. 24 and July 12 found that the share of people aged 15-24 years rose to 15% from 4.5%.

Apart from the United States which leads a global tally with 4.8 million total cases, European countries including Spain, Germany and France, and Asian countries such as Japan, have said that many of the newly infected are young people.

“Younger people tend to be less vigilant about masking and social distancing,” Neysa Ernst, nurse manager at Johns Hopkins Hospital’s biocontainment unit in Baltimore, Maryland told Reuters in an email.

read more

Zydus Cadila’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate found safe in early-stage human trial

Zydus plans to complete late-stage trials for ZyCoV-D by February or March and could produce up to 100 million doses a year initially, the company’s chairman told Reuters last month.
India reported a daily jump of more than 50,000 coronavirus infections for the seventh straight day on Wednesday.Total cases now stand at 1.91 million, the third biggest, after the United States and Brazil

read more