States drafted plans Thursday for who will go to the front of the line when the first doses of COVID-19 vaccine become available later this month, as U.S. deaths from the outbreak eclipsed 3,100 in a single day, obliterating the record set last spring.
With initial supplies of the vaccine certain to be limited, governors and other state officials are weighing both health and economic concerns in deciding the order in which the shots will be dispensed.
States face a Friday deadline to submit requests for doses of the Pfizer vaccine and specify where they should be shipped, and many appear to be heeding nonbinding guidelines adopted this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put health care workers and nursing home patients first.
But they’re also facing a multitude of decisions about other categories of residents — some specific to their states; some vital to their
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Sweeping the right-wing media ecosystem, amplified by massively viral tweets, is the claim that Johns Hopkins released — and quickly deleted — a study showing COVID-19 hasn’t led to an increase in deaths in the U.S. this year.
It’s being used to justify false narratives that the pandemic isn’t deadly and that lockdowns are tyrannical overreach by state governments. One often-linked write-up on PJ Media, a right-wing political site, describes the story thusly:
“According to the study, ‘in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.’ Wait, what? Really? That’s what it says. And, it should come as no surprise that the study was deleted within days.”
There are, however, major issues with this so-called study.
For one, calling it a “Johns Hopkins study” is inaccurate. The now-broken URL didn’t
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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas on Wednesday reported spikes in COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations as dozens of nursing homes experienced outbreaks and the state prepared to see that health care workers received the first available vaccines.
The state Department of Health and Environment added 119 deaths since Monday, raising the state’s COVID-19 death toll since the start of the pandemic to 1,679.
Kansas also had a record-high daily average of 53 new COVID-19 hospitalizations during the seven-day period that ended Wednesday. Hospitals have been stressed for weeks, with many facing staffing shortages and having to convert space into rooms for COVID-19 patients.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month will consider authorizing the emergency use of coronavirus vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, but the doses will be rationed in the early stages and it will likely be months before it is available to most people. A federal government
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