(NEW YORK) — Millions of Americans traveled for Memorial Day weekend at levels not seen since before the onset of the pandemic.
It marked a return to normalcy for many and a chance to gather with family and friends.
But in reality, the situation was far from normal — with confirmed COVID-19 cases nearly six times higher than last Memorial Day, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And case totals are likely even higher than are being reported this year with the widespread availability of at-home testing.
This week also marks the eighth consecutive week of increasing COVID-19 cases in the U.S., the data shows.
On average, the U.S. is reporting nearly 110,000 new cases every day, and for the seventh consecutive week, COVID-19 cases among children have also increased. Last week, 112,000 additional pediatric COVID-19 cases were reported, a doubling of case counts from the four weeks prior, according to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA). Last year, at this time, the U.S. was reporting around 10,000 pediatric cases a week.
The U.S. also continues to see an increase in the overall number of patients requiring care for COVID-19. On average, more than 3,500 virus-positive Americans are being admitted to the hospital each day.
However, the hospitalization level is nowhere near its peak, and while virus-related deaths are ticking up, they are not near peak levels either.
Last week, updated CDC data also revealed that more than half of the U.S. population is now living in a county that has a high or medium community risk level for COVID-19.
A total of 55.7% of Americans are currently living in a high or medium community risk county. Nearly a quarter of those people — 23.1% — are living in a high-risk community, while just under a third — 32.6% — are living in a medium risk county.
The high community level suggests there is a “high potential for healthcare system strain” and a “high level of severe disease” and thus, the CDC recommends that people wear a mask in public indoor settings, including schools, while under the medium risk level, if an individual is considered at “increased risk,” they are recommended to speak with their healthcare provider about whether or not they should wear a mask.
There are signs that some areas of the country may be seeing a slow of infections. In New England, new case rates have declined by 18% in the last week, according to CDC.
However, many areas of the region — including counties in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, as well as the northern part of Pennsylvania — are still considered high risk.
Amid the rise in infections, a growing list of school districts and universities are now moving to bring back mask requirements.
Last week, students in Philadelphia and Providence, Rhode Island, were made to put their masks back on, ahead of the end of the school year amidst increasing infection rates in the community.
In Delaware, where every county is currently considered “high” risk for COVID-19, according to the CDC’s definition, the University of Delaware reinstated its masking requirement for all indoor spaces, and across the country, in California, officials at the University of California Los Angeles and University of Hawaiʻi both recently brought back their face covering requirements.
(NEW YORK) — COVID-19 cases in New York City have plateaued, signaling that the latest surge is at least slowing, if not over.
An ABC News analysis of city data shows 4,204 confirmed and probable cases were recorded on May 24 — the latest date for which data is available — with a seven-day rolling average of 3,312.
This is the lowest average recorded in the last two weeks.
Other key metrics also indicate the latest wave may be subsiding.
The percent positivity rate — the percentage of tests that come back positive — is currently at 8.64%, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. This is a drop from the average of 10.95% over the last 28 days.
Additionally, the seven-day average of hospitalizations has dropped 15.4% from 84 to 71.
“In all likelihood, we’re on the other side of this particular surge, but at the same time it’s not dropping dramatically because of…behavior,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor. “We essentially have two opposing forces, one where we have a lot of immunity in the population from vaccination and infection.”
He continued, “On the other hand, people are starting to enjoy congregating and going to indoor concerts, festivals, sporting events. These will create opportunities for the virus to spread.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unvaccinated population has made up the largest share of COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the city.
As of May 14, unvaccinated New York City residents were recording 1,826.25 cases per 100,000 people, data from the health department shows.
By comparison, those who are vaccinated but not boosted were recording 183.02 cases per 100,000 and those who are boosted were recording 310.69 cases per 100,000.
In addition, the unvaccinated were hospitalized with COVID-19 at a rate of 188.55 per 100,000 compared to 5.65 per 100,000 for those vaccinated but not yet boosted and 4.96 per 100,000 for those boosted.
“Of course, we know that there’s the probability of breakthrough infections with vaccination, but the outcomes of those breakthroughs are drastically different,” Brownstein said. “As we look at the severe outcomes, the hospitalizations and the deaths as a result of infection, those who are unvaccinated bear a far greater burden of that risk.”
He added, “Despite us being quite far into the vaccination campaign, the urgency to get people vaccinated and boosted is still there and will continue to be there, especially as we see surges in the coming months.”
Even as New York City and the Northeast appear to be plateauing, cases are rising in other parts of the country.
Hawaii is currently leading the U.S in cumulative cases per 100,000 over the last seven days at 623 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Additionally, over the last two weeks, the seven-day rolling average of COVID-19 infections has increased 78.7% in California and 33.2% in Washington state, CDC data shows.
“We’ve seen a pattern emerge where the Northeast has often been a leading indicator of surges that will take place in other parts of the country,” Brownstein said. “Surges are not uniform across the country. Surges happen at the local level and they’re not necessarily happening.at the exact same time.”
He continued, “What we experience in one part of the country, another part may experience weeks or months later.”
Brownstein also said testing totals could be undercounted because of the number of people who are testing at home and not reporting positive results to health authorities.
“It’s possible we could hit a surge and be well in the midst of it before we know it’s happening,” he said.
He encouraged people to exercise caution and, if case counts rise in their areas, to follow mitigation measures that reduce the risk of spread, such as wearing masks.
“We’re in a much better place and we have wide availability of therapeutics now, so we have better ways of managing this pandemic, but clearly people can still play a role in helping reduce any surges in communities in the coming months,” Brownstein said.
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(NEW YORK) — The World Health Organization said Monday it doesn’t believe the monkeypox outbreak currently spreading around the world will turn into a pandemic.
Since May 13, at least 257 cases of the rare disease have been confirmed in 23 countries where the virus is not endemic — mostly in Europe and North America — and 120 are suspected.
Of those infections, 14 are confirmed or suspected across eight states in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So far, no deaths have been reported in non-endemic countries.
The disease is not typically found outside of countries in central and western Africa, which has raised fears of community transmission.
According to the WHO, at the present time, there is no clear link between the cases reported and travel from endemic countries.
When asked during a public session Monday if the recent outbreak could turn into a pandemic, Dr. Rosamund Lewis, the WHO’s technical lead for monkeypox, replied, “The answer is we don’t know, but we don’t think so.”
“At the moment, we are not concerned about a global pandemic,” Lewis continued.
Other public health officials have said the risk for spread is generally low.
The WHO stated the majority of cases have been reported among men who identify as gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men. Monkeypox can still be transmitted to anyone with exposure to it.
“We are concerned that individuals may acquire this infection through high-risk exposure if they don’t have the information they need to protect themselves,” Lewis said.
She offered recommendations for people to lower their risk of infection, including avoiding those with confirmed or suspected cases of monkeypox and — if caring for someone with the disease — avoiding skin-to-skin contact, washing hands regularly, wearing a mask and cleaning contaminated surfaces.
“Collectively, the world has an opportunity to stop this outbreak,” Lewis said. “There’s a window of opportunity where this can be contained.”
When people are infected with monkeypox, it is generally a mild illness with the most common symptoms being fever, headache, fatigue, muscle aches, backache and swollen lymph nodes.
Patients can develop a rash and lesions that often begin on the face and extremities before spreading to the rest of the body. Symptoms usually last two to four weeks before dissipating.
Animals pass the disease to humans either through a bite or a scratch, and people can also catch monkeypox from preparing and consuming infected bush meat.
Human-to-human transmission occurs either through hugging, touching or prolonged face-to-face contact as well as by touching an infected person’s clothing or bedsheets.
The WHO said there are many “unknowns” about the outbreak including if the virus is being sexually transmitted or via close contact when engaging in sex. It’s also unclear whether monkeypox can spread if a person is asymptomatic.
However, officials stressed the risk to the general public remains low and shouldn’t be compared to COVID-19.
“Monkeypox is very different from COVID-19,” Dr. Sylvie Briand, the director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at WHO, said during the public session. “We don’t want people to panic or be afraid and maybe think that it’s like COVID but worse.”
She added, “This monkeypox disease is not COVID-19. It is a different virus; it’s a different disease.”
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating an outbreak of hepatitis A that is possibly linked to two brands of organic strawberries that were sold at several retailers in the U.S. and Canada.
FreshKampo and HEB branded strawberries purchased by consumers between March 5 and April 25 should not be eaten, according to the FDA.
The affected strawberries, which are past their shelf life, were sold at retailers nationwide, including Aldi, HEB, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Weis Market and WinCo Foods.
Cases of hepatitis A have been reported by consumers in California, Minnesota and Canada, all of whom purchased strawberries before falling ill. At least 17 illnesses and 12 hospitalizations have been recorded so far nationwide, according to the FDA.
Hepatitis A is a contagious virus that can ultimately cause liver disease, according to the FDA. Symptoms include fatigue, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, jaundice, dark urine and pale stools. Infections typically recover within one to two weeks, though in rare cases, it may become chronic.
Strawberries should be thrown away if you are unsure what brand was purchased, or when and where they were bought, the FDA recommended. Frozen strawberries should also be thrown away.
Anyone experiencing symptoms of hepatitis A after consuming strawberries should contact their health care provider.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Despite widespread vaccination and several available treatments, the U.S. is recording as many COVID-19 cases now at the tail end of the omicron peak as it was last summer during the delta surge.
On Wednesday, the latest date for which data is available, 181,000 new infections were reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over the last seven days, the country has recorded a total of 766,949 cases of the virus, although the true caseload is likely much higher.
This is on par with late August 2021, when the U.S. was recording between 182,000 and 187,000 new infections every day.
However, mitigation measures in the U.S. looked very different at the time. Although there were no lockdowns, several indoor venues mandated masks, vaccine passports were in effect in many large cities and one state even required proof of vaccination or a negative test to enter.
After the omicron wave that swept the country this past winter, an estimated 60% of Americans has been left infected since the start of the pandemic, many with much milder cases — even though studies suggest omicron is more infectious than delta — so communities started loosening restrictions.
Although the latest omicron subvariants appear to be even more transmissible than the original variant, a combination of vaccination, boosters and effective and readily available therapeutics appear to have muted the impact of severe disease.
Masking indoors
“When we think about summer 2021, we were in a different place in many ways,” Dr. Stuart Ray, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, told ABC News. “We’d had vaccines for only about six months … The delta variant became the predominant variant in the U.S. mid-summer.”
The delta variant was first identified in March 2021 and quickly took over as the dominant variant, accounting for most U.S. cases during the summer. Before that, the country had been seeing encouraging declines in infections.
By late July 2021, the CDC was urging all Americans in COVID hot spots regardless of vaccination status to wear masks indoors.
At the time, states with high transmissions were mostly in the Southeast, Midwest and Southwest, including Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas.
Through summer and fall 2021, some states were still imposing face coverings indoors including schools and even for the vaccinated; however, masks were also still required on public transportation, including in airports and on planes — a measure that has since been lifted.
Amid increasing COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, some school districts have reimposed mask mandates including in Philadelphia; Brookline, Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island as well as universities such as the University of Delaware and the University of Hawaii, though the vast majority have not.
“Each district and each local health department is going to have to look at their own metrics and decide what the trigger is for bringing back mask mandates,” Dr. Michael Smith, a professor of pediatrics and medical director of the pediatric antimicrobial stewardship program at Duke University School of Medicine, told ABC News. “I wish we never had to do it, but they work.”
Vaccine passports
Starting in August 2021, New York City became the first city in the U.S. to require venues — including restaurants, gyms and movie theaters — to check for proof of vaccination.
Several cities followed suit including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and St. Paul, New Orleans, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
Currently, no cities have vaccine mandates in place restricting indoor activities and some states have banned requiring vaccination proof altogether.
Florida was the first state to do so in April 2021 and several GOP-led states followed including Arizona, Georgia, Montana and Wyoming.
Ray said even with COVID-19 cases rising, he doesn’t see vaccine passports making a return.
“I don’t think it’s likely that vaccine passports are going to become a widespread measure, in part because they’re hard to implement,” he said.
He added that people can get around the passport requirement by showing forged vaccination cards and that there is not standardized electronic system to prevent it from happening.
Ray continued, “You would think that we could, but we don’t have an electronic system where people could display a QR code on their phone that shows that they have a verifiable vaccine history. Without technology like that, the system is not really in place logistically.”
Hawaii’s COVID-19 travel restrictions
Long after states had dropped their COVID-19 measures for domestic travelers in 2020, Hawaii kept its restrictions in place.
American visitors to the islands needed to show either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test taken one to three days before their departure.
Those who didn’t have either were subject to a mandatory 10-day quarantine.
Gov. David Ige announced the state would drop its so-called Safe Travels Program for domestic travelers on March 26 due to lower cases and hospitalizations but keep rules in place for international travelers.
Dr. Vandana Madhavan, clinical director of pediatric infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that even though increasing COVID infections may lead to the return of mask mandates, not all restrictions will need to return because the country has learned how to better treat and prevent the virus over the last two years.
“We’re at a very different point with other preventative measures,” she told ABC News. “More people are eligible to get vaccinated and a number of populations are eligible for boosters.”
She continued. “Also, we have a number of different options for therapeutics. We have oral and IV options, and options for both people who are at high risk before they get to the hospital and once, they get to the hospital.”
Madhavan added that COVID restrictions can be viewed as a “dimmer” that gets “dialed up” when cases rise and “dialed down” once cases fall.
“I view it not as an on and off switch at this point but a dimmer dial,” she said. “And so, we may have to dial up for a while, make sure that we’re not at the point where we’re stressing resources and then we can dial back.”
(NEW YORK) — A New York man who was born prematurely 27 years ago and spent 40 days in a neonatal intensive care unit says he plans to go back to the NICU, this time as a doctor specializing in infant care.
It’s a full-circle moment for Marcus Mosley, who graduated from the CUNY School of Medicine at City College of New York Thursday.
Mosley’s mother, Pauline Mosley said she remembers what it was like right after her oldest son was born at 26 weeks in December 1995.
“It was very frightening when he was born and they told me that he was in the NICU,” the 57-year-old mom of two recalled to “Good Morning America.” “The doctors told me, they just kept giving me all these different percentages of very slim chance of him being normal, like less than 10% chance. They kept saying 90%, he might not be able to see. Eighty to 90%, he would have developmental delays. They didn’t know.”
But despite all the scary-sounding statistics and early prognosis, Mosley overcame the odds and thrived.
When he was 13, his parents took him back to the NICU at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, where he was born, for a visit. His mother said they had no idea the visit would become a major turning point in the boy’s life.
That’s where Mosley would meet Dr. Edmund LaGamma, the chief of neonatology at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at WMC.
“He had called and said that he was a former patient of the Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Center and he was in high school and wanted to know if he could do a shadowing program over the summer,” LaGamma recollected.
“The more we spoke, the more I realized that although he was a patient … that was a particularly important era when a lot of advances had been made. So I said, ‘Oh, great. Yes. Why don’t you come and join us on rounds and that’ll be kind of an interesting experience for you to see what you were like when you were 1000 grams. [approximately 2.2 pounds]”
For Mosley, the shadowing experience left an indelible impression.
“I was looking for research opportunities and I contacted him and that’s when I then began to shadow in the NICU,” Mosley told “GMA.” “That is what really piqued my interest and then solidified my interest in wanting to go into medicine.”
LaGamma would become a mentor to Mosley who was enrolled in an accelerated B.S./M.D. program at City College, LaGamma’s alma mater a few years after the pivotal NICU visit.
Now, Mosley will embark on a pediatrics residency at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.
“I’m really excited and looking forward to starting residency and to be able to take care of patients now,” Mosley said. “I’ll be responsible for patients and involved in patient care and treating families.”
LaGamma says he thinks his mentee is well on his way to achieving everything he’s set out to do. “I think he has that personality which comes across as engaging and inviting so that he’ll do well as a pediatrician,” LaGamma said. “I joke with him that I’ll be interviewing him in a couple of years for his fellowship position here in Westchester and he thought that was a good idea.”
(NEW YORK) — Sandy Austin was in her second year working as a school counselor in Colorado in 1999 when two students opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, killing 12 of their fellow students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
Responding to a district-wide call for counselors, Austin drove to a nearby elementary school where parents and caregivers were gathered to hear whether their children were alive. She spent the next nearly 10 months counseling students, teachers, school staff, parents and community members in the wake of the shooting.
On Tuesday, when a gunman burst into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed at least 19 children as well as two adults, Austin said she immediately thought of the mental health support that the survivors, parents, teachers and community will need in the days, weeks and years ahead.
“It takes me right back to that day at Columbine,” Austin, who later worked as a crisis facilitator for the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), told ABC News’ Good Morning America in a recent interview. “I think of those little ones, all their life, they’re going to need that counseling. It’ll always be hanging over those kids.”
Among those killed were a pair of fourth-grade teachers who were longtime staff members at Robb Elementary School. The 19 slain children were students aged 10 and 11, including several who were cousins.
Tuesday’s massacre was the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. While public attention in the aftermath of such a tragedy may turn to the school’s security plan or the local law enforcement response, mental health experts like Austin say the attention for them turns to the mental health plan that every school should have in place. This includes ensuring teachers and staff know how to talk to students about the trauma they just suffered in a developmentally appropriate way and having extra counselors ready to help, Austin said.
Austin noted at the time of the Columbine shooting, there was no real plan in place for how to help the school community cope.
In the two decades since, as the number of school shootings has risen dramatically in the United States, more schools now have plans in place. But, sadly, it’s become overwhelming for schools to try to keep pace with the growing scale of crises, according to Dr. David Schonfeld, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
“I’m finding that the response is getting better, but the challenge is getting harder,” Schonfeld told GMA, explaining that shootings today “generally overwhelm any plan that’s in place with the resources that any school or district has.”
Schonfeld was one of the first mental health professionals on site in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were gunned down. Less than six years later, Schonfeld helped a grieving community in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman shot and killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
In the immediate aftermath of both the Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas shootings, grief counselors were made available to the school community, as they have also been in Uvalde after Tuesday’s shooting, according to local ABC affiliate KSAT-TV.
The work of the grief counselors, according to Schonfeld, is to listen to kids and adults alike, to validate their feelings, make them feel as safe as possible and support the community as it moves from a state of shock to realizing the permanency of the event.
“When I arrive in communities, one of the first questions I get is: ‘When we will go back to normal?’ And I say: ‘You will never go back to what you were. We don’t go back in time. We don’t forget life-changing events,'” Schonfeld told GMA. “It will change the community. That doesn’t mean they’re permanently damaged, it just means they’re altered.”
“The kids who are in the community are forever changed,” he added. “They will never go back to a childhood that didn’t have a mass shooting. That will define them.”
Austin said her grief counseling role in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shooting was to bring water to parents to help them with the task of taking care of themselves.
“Everyone is just in a daze,” she said. “People don’t know what to think. They’re so shocked.”
As time goes on, a community like Uvalde will likely focus on bringing in mental health professionals who can offer support for the long-term, according to Schonfeld.
“Usually there is an outpouring of volunteers that want to assist and provide support, but that also has its own issues because you end up with a turnover of these volunteers so children may be talking about their distress and then going back and having to talk with someone else,” he said. “When we come, we try to provide systems-level solutions.”
In Parkland, grant funding allowed Broward County school officials to hire over 100 mental health professionals after the 2018 shooting, according to Rachel Kusher, a counseling specialist at Stoneman Douglas who was hired through the grant.
The newly-hired counselors were sent not just to Stoneman Douglas, where the shooting took place, but also to the five elementary schools and two middle schools that feed into the high school.
“At the high school, we had three full grade levels here that had been on campus the day of shooting. We had students who were injured in the shooting, we had siblings,” Kusher told GMA. “And then at the middle and elementary schools, a lot of students were on what we call ‘code red’ during the event, so a lot of those students also had been traumatized or had siblings that were here on campus at [Stoneman Douglas] the day of it, or neighbors, family members.”
“The difference between the shooting that occurs at a school versus a shooting that might occur elsewhere is that kids don’t really have a choice whether or not to come back — and the same thing for teachers,” she added. “They have to return to the site of the trauma.”
Recovery for survivors of school shootings is often even harder than for those impacted by other traumas, according to a research analysis published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Research shows students may experience survivors’ guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and they may also struggle with grades and school attendance.
Kusher said that after the Stoneman Douglas shooting, counselors used a tiered-approach to reach students based on their need. At the most basic level, counselors went into classrooms at all eight schools to talk about resiliency and coping strategies.
For students who were on campus the day of the shooting, counselors helped on a more one-on-one basis with reactions like anxiety, PTSD, avoidance of school and making accommodation plans for students who wanted to, for example, sit in a certain seat in a classroom based on their experience that day, according to Kusher.
Students who were directly impacted by the shooting — whether through injury or the death of a loved one, friend or teacher — received even more direct attention.
“A lot of what I did personally as their school-assigned counselor was just really helped them with anything they needed, sit with them, sit with their family,” Kusher recalled. “They all have my personal cell phone number. They know how to reach me, and I still am in contact with a lot of them.”
Mental health counselors also provided long-term support for parents of students as well as for teachers and staff members across the school district. They also had to implement new ways to do things like fire drills and shooter response drills so that students would not be re-traumatized, according to Kusher and her colleague Tonia Summers, a middle school-level guidance counselor.
“What we found is, like a year later, people were now having different types of issues with PTSD. So for some it was right away, for some it was a few months and for some it was a year,” Summers told GMA. “There were all different levels of trauma that were happening and you have to be on top of all of it.”
Over the past four years, part of the job of counselors across the Broward County School District has also been responding to a “huge uptick” in 504 plans — support plans schools develop for students with disabilities — due to a sharp rise in anxiety diagnoses, according to Christine Ross, a guidance counselor who works with the elementary schools that feed into Stoneman Douglas.
And when another school shooting happens, like the one on Tuesday, counselors nationwide brace for new mental health traumas.
“It’s almost like ripping a Band-Aid off. It takes you right back to being there,” Ross told GMA. “You never know what the students are going to be like when they walk through the doors.”
Summers agreed, adding: “When you have dealt with some type of trauma, you’re more susceptible to other types of trauma, so something like this happens and they’re retraumatized again.”
The long-term and far-reaching effects that a school shooting can have on survivors were seen tragically three years ago, when a Stoneman Douglas student, a former student and the father of a Sandy Hook victim each died by suicide within the span of a few weeks in 2019.
Even in schools across the country where shootings are not part of their past, counselors responded to support students in the wake of Tuesday’s massacre, showing the even wider ripple effects a mass trauma can have.
“If there’s a big traumatic national event, like a school shooting, school counselors know to make themselves available and that’s what is happening,” Olivia Carter, a school counselor support specialist for Cape Girardeau Public Schools in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, told GMA.
“It really digs into a deep fear for a lot of people,” she added. “There’s a lot of fear and a lot of dysregulation, and there’s a need to have resources available.”
For Kusher and other counselors who have lived through a school shooting or its aftermath, they said they want those in Uvalde to know that they are there for them and are supporting them.
“Those school counselors at Robb Elementary School need to help themselves too,” Kusher said. “They’re part of this club that nobody wants to be a part of.”
(NEW YORK) — The mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday left 21 people dead — including 19 students and two teachers — and 17 additional people injured.
As of Thursday, at least six people remain hospitalized including three children and one adult at University Hospital in San Antonio and two adults at Brooke Army Medical Center in Fort Sam Houston.
And while all gunshot victims receive the same core care, there are differences when it comes to treating pediatric patients compared to adults.
Dr. Michael Rodriguez, a family physician and a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said child patients may require different types of medication, or different doses depending on their weights and heights, as well as different levels of fluids.
“The fact of whether they are adults or children is a major issue,” he told ABC News. “Partially because it requires a different level of expertise so, with children, you need to have some pediatric expertise.”
This means a child gunshot patient will need to be treated by emergency providers who specialize in pediatrics, including pediatric surgeons, pediatric anesthesiologists, pediatric nurses and so on.
All gunshot patients are checked to make sure their airways are clear, that they are breathing on their own and have good circulation, medical experts who spoke with ABC News said.
But one unique aspect of many pediatric trauma centers is the availability of a child life specialist, according to Dr. Katherine Hoops, a pediatric intensive care physician at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
Child life specialists are health care professionals who help children and families handle the challenges of hospitalization, illness and injury, including by psychologically preparing them for certain procedures, offering therapeutic play and coordinating support services.
“They specialize in child development and helping the child to cope with that injury from their early presentation to the hospital,” she told ABC News.
Hoops, who is also core faculty at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, added pediatric patients admitted with gunshot wounds are often some of the most severely ill patients.
“Many of [them] will have the highest rates of readmission to the hospital for complications for their injuries and they do unfortunately have some of the highest mortality rates of pediatric trauma patients,” she said.
According to police, the gunman arrived at the school wielding a Daniel Defense AR-15-style assault rifle.
AR-15s have been used in several mass shootings including at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2011; a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017; and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.
Doctors explained that, traditionally, injuries from handguns leave clean entry and exit wounds or just become lodged in the skin and, because they are traveling at a low velocity, do not cause life-threatening bleeding unless a major organ or artery is hit.
But bullets from AR-15s exit the barrel at three times the speed that handgun bullets exit the barrel. This means that when AR-15 bullets hit the skin, they often leave huge entry and exit wounds that are not clean.
“When a high-velocity firearm enters a body, it basically creates a wave and a blast,” Dr. Lillian Liao, a pediatric trauma surgeon at University Hospital in San Antonio — treating four patients from the Uvalde shooting — told “Nightline.” “So it looks like a body part got blown up … A handgun may create one small hole, whereas a high-velocity firearm will create a giant hole in the body that is with missing tissue.”
She added all the patients had “large destructive wounds.”
“By that, I mean that there were not only a small hole in the body part, but large areas of tissue missing in various body parts that sustained injuries from the firearm,” Liao said.
Rodriguez said that because assault weapons are designed to shoot more rounds of bullets than handguns, pistols or revolvers, people are more likely to have life-threatening injuries.
“As a result, people don’t just get one wound, they may get numerous wounds and the more bullets that hit a person, the more likely vital organs they could hit or arteries or vessels that could lose greater amounts of blood,” he said.
This can be particularly devastating when it comes to a child with a gunshot wound.
“When you’re talking about a small child, that firearm that’s high velocity will just destroy a significant portion of tissue and is more likely to hit major organs,” Liao said. “And a child or an adult can bleed to death in as little as five minutes.”
While medical and surgical advances have helped lower the number of shootings that result in fatalities, the doctors said they want efforts to focus on driving down gun violence overall.
“We need to take into account that there are things that we know that work and prevent these events … licensing minimum age requirements, large capacity magazine restrictions, safe storage and safe handling requirements,” Hoops said. “We — as clinicians, pediatricians, our surgical colleagues — we support those initiatives that prevent patients from ever coming to our care.”
ABC News’ Lucien Bruggeman and Jennifer Watts contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Nearly a decade since a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, cut the lives of 20 children and six adults short, American families, parents, caregivers, teachers, and school staffers are grappling with yet another mass shooting. This week, it happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and at least 19 children and two adults died in the aftermath.
It’s a subject Andrea Burns has talked about with her fourth grade classes for the last eight years at an elementary school in Kansas City, Kansas.
Burns stepped aside from teaching this year, but she recalls how she and other teachers at her former school would conduct intruder drills with students regularly. She told Good Morning America that she wouldn’t shy away from speaking about a topic such as a school shooting when it was appropriate and timely.
“I’m very up front with my students, even if they’re in fourth grade. I’m like, ‘This is real life and we have to talk about this,” Burns said. “‘I don’t want to scare you, not saying this is going to happen but we have to be prepared in case it ever does.”
“I would bring up this is what happened. This is what we would do if it were us. This is where we would hide. This is what I would do. This is what you guys would do. This is the direction we would go in. This is what you would hear,” Burns said.
The educator-turned-book buyer said she used picture books to guide conversations with students on difficult topics.
“So anytime it happens, honestly, that same conversation gets brought up every single time, unfortunately. But the reason why I’m bringing out these books is because when big topics like this happen, I 100% use literacy to help kids relate to it,” Burns said.
To help adults start or continue conversations with young children about the emotions surrounding a tragedy, Burns suggests using books as a key tool.
Here are her top six book picks as a starting point (especially suitable for kindergarteners through fifth graders):
On grief and sadness
“There Was a Hole” by Adam Lehrhaupt
“‘There Was a Hole’ is incredible because it doesn’t just cover grief. It covers sadness, when you have that emptiness in your heart, whether you’re upset about something, [or] you’re missing someone,” Burns said.
Published last month, Burns added: “It’s all about how there’s a hole in this girl’s heart and her friend teaches her how to patch up the hole. It’s very, very sweet and timely and beautiful.”
On breaking news and mixed emotions
“The Breaking News” by Sarah Lynne Reul
“‘The Breaking News’ is probably the most popular in [this] category, because it’s literally about you hear something on the news and how do you react?” Burns said.
“Catching Thoughts” by Bonnie Clark
“This one is about all your different unwelcome thoughts in your head,” according to Burns. “So whether you’re feeling anxious or you have just a bunch of different feelings, sadness, anxiety. It’s about a girl who has thoughts and simply cannot lose these unwanted thoughts and they’re all represented in these different balloons and she ends up letting go of the balloons. It’s very, very special.”
On worries
“Kids Can Cope: Put Your Worries Away” by Gill Hasson
“This one talks about worrying and anxiety. How do you feel when you’re worried? Getting help with your worries, so it’s really more of a good informational book for either teachers to share with kids or adults,” Burns said.
For finding the good in times of distress
“Most People” by Michael Leannah
“It’s about the people helping people. You always want to find the good people in the bad situations,” Burns said of the 2017 book, published by Tilbury House.
On school shootings specifically
“I’m Not Scared…I’m Prepared!” by Julia Cook
This picture book, published by National Center for Youth Issues, focuses on what happens when a “dangerous someone” enters a school.
When it comes to difficult subjects, Burns recommends that adults talk to children honestly and give them the opportunity to discuss them.
“I think a lot of people try to hide the bad news from kids, but in reality, we have social media these days. They’re going to see this on TikTok. They’re gonna see it on Instagram. They’re going to see it anywhere anyway, so they might as well hear it from a trusted adult first,” Burns said.
“I just think being truthful is the first thing and I know we want to protect our kids, but there’s a way to do it, where you could have those meaningful conversations because this is going to happen throughout life. This isn’t just a one-time deal.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — Americans have turned their attention to Uvalde, Texas, after the devastating shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 children and two adults dead on Tuesday.
The mass shooting marked the second-deadliest school shooting in recent U.S. history behind the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut that left 26 victims dead.
As onlookers search for ways to get involved and help those affected, local and national efforts are in place to support the victims, families and others coping with the trauma of yet another mass shooting in this country.
Blood Drives
Even for people not in the immediate local area, organizations like the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center are able to connect blood donors with those in need at local Uvalde hospitals.
“Thanks to generous blood donors, we were able to send 15 units of blood to Uvalde via helicopter to be available at the site of the shooting and at the area hospitals,” the organization announced Wednesday morning. “Later this afternoon, we received a request and sent an additional 10 units of blood to a hospital in Uvalde.”
The critical need comes on the heels of a months-long blood supply shortage.
With the center’s supply is running low, the organization said, “This tragedy highlights the importance of always having blood available on the shelf and before it’s needed.”
An emergency blood drive was scheduled for Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time at the Herby Ham Activity Center in Uvalde. As of time of publication, all appointments were booked through Saturday but the center stressed that help would still be needed and encouraged people to reserve appointments through Memorial Day.
Verified Fundraisers
Online and virtual donations are highly-visible, immediate ways to financially support victims’ families, first responders and local communities impacted by mass shootings, but it’s vital to ensure the source is trusted, vetted and honestly managing funds.
According to the school’s website, First State Bank of Uvalde has set up a memorial fund account for the victims of Tuesday’s shooting. Those looking to donate may contribute funds at any First State Bank branch or mail checks to P.O. Box 1908, Uvalde, TX, 78802, with checks payable to the Robb School Memorial Fund.
VictimsFirst is a nonprofit network of families of the deceased and survivors from the last two decades of mass shootings. It originated in 2012 to protect victims, educate communities and fund first responders and victims.
The VictimsFirst fund created in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy is supported by the National Compassion Fund in partnership with GoFundMe and the San Antonio Area Foundation. The National Compassion Fund is a subsidiary of the National Center for Victims of Crime, and states on its website that it collects donations and is in charge of forming a “local Steering Committee to determine eligibility and distribution of funds.”
Anita Busch, president of VictimsFirst and co-founder of the National Compassion Fund, whose own family has suffered through two mass shootings — the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting — helped create a new model for charitable giving to ensure that 100% of donations collected for victims of mass casualty crime actually go directly to the victims.
“For Uvalde, we’ll continue to collect and set it up very similar to El Paso,” she told ABC News, referencing the group’s work after the 2019 Walmart shooting. “The National Compassion Fund will also be administering those funds. We will make sure that it’s a separate bank account, that everything is transparent and once we’re satisfied as victims of previous mass shootings, we’ll go ahead and put the funds into the NCF.”
“We’re very transparent about what we collect and if there’s any question [about what someone gives], we ask and get that in writing — put that in the correct bank accounts and go from there,” she said. “We are so grateful that public intent will be very transparent.”
Busch added that donors could “give to the victims or you can give to the community or both, just as we did in Buffalo,” referring to the May 14 mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets grocery store in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 people dead.
Busch also serves as a Mass Violence Relief Specialist and adviser to the National Compassion Fund, and has personally helped victims, survivors and communities behind the scenes in more than 30 mass casualty crimes.
There are also two Uvalde area funeral homes that posted on social media about covering the cost of services for families of the shooting victims.
“For over 60 years, we have supported Uvalde and beyond,” Rushing-Estes Mortuary Uvalde wrote in a Facebook post. “Today, our resolve is stronger than ever. We are here for the people of Uvalde and our professionals are currently at Robb Elementary assisting law enforcement. As the situation develops and we have the opportunity to assist our community, not one family will be charged for our services.”
Hillcrest Memorial Funeral Home also said in a Facebook post that it would handle any services for victims free of charge.
“We have fought together as a community and we will pull together as one now in our time of need,” the post read. “Hillcrest will be assisting families with NO COST for funerals for all involved in today’s horrific events. Prayer for our small amazing town.”
Grief Counseling
There are also resources available for people not in the immediate Uvalde area who may be caring for others coping with anxiety and residual trauma, or who may be affected themselves.
The National Disaster Distress Helpline, a year-round disaster crisis counseling hotline, is available to anyone in the U.S. experiencing distress or other mental health concerns related to recent mass shootings.
The free, confidential services are available 24/7 and offered in over 100 languages, including Spanish and American Sign Language (ASL) for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
“It is common to feel distress before, during, and after a disaster. Emotional distress is second only to death and injury in terms of the toll disasters take within impacted communities,” the organization said in a press release. “Most distress symptoms are temporary, but for some individuals and families these symptoms may last for weeks or months after a natural or human-caused disaster, including incidents of mass violence.”
Anyone experiencing distress or other mental health concerns related to disaster can call or text 1-800-985-5990 to connect with a trained counselor. Spanish-speakers can call or text the hotline and press “2” for 24/7 bilingual support.
Deaf or hard of hearing American Sign Language users experiencing disaster distress can contact the hotline by dialing 1-800-985-5990 through a direct videophone option via any videophone-enabled device, or by selecting the “ASL Now” option on the hotline’s website at disasterdistress.samhsa.gov. Videophone calls are answered 24/7 by trained crisis workers fluent in ASL from the hotline’s crisis center partner DeafLEAD.
The National Disaster Distress Helpline also has Online Peer Support Communities for survivors of mass violence in the U.S.
Victims’ loved ones and emergency responders with experience from mass violence can connect with one another in a private, moderated Facebook group to offer or receive emotional support in the aftermath of a mass shooting. This can include methods to cope, memorial dates, self-care strategies and support through daily living challenges.
