(NEW YORK) — A mom of four from Indiana went from giving drawing prompts to her daughters to thousands of strangers online, inadvertently creating a community of what she describes as “amazing people” who have turned to art for a mental health break amid the pandemic.
In March 2020, Angie Carel’s job came to a standstill as the coronavirus pandemic upended her life.
“My business was shut down due to COVID and that’s when my daughter came home from college. My other daughters were doing remote learning, so everybody was in my house and that’s when we started drawing,” Carel, a marketing agency owner, told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “It started with just myself and my daughters doing the drawings. And then we were sharing our drawings on social media and then that built up into a following on social media.”
Two years later, Simple Daily Drawing now boasts more than 30,000 followers and Carel has posted over 625 daily drawing prompts since April 2020. About 8,000 members worldwide also post their creations in a separate, private group every day, sharing stories to go along with their illustrations.
“It organically grew into what it is,” Carel said. “I wasn’t going to continue drawing past the COVID shutdown. It was something that I was just doing while we were shut down to disconnect, get out of my own head, get my daughters out of their own heads.”
“But then, so many people started joining and posting why they were drawing and how it was helping them and so that’s why I continued to do it. And now, almost every single day, somebody posts how much the daily drawings are helping them,” Carel said.
In the beginning, Carel asked her children to draw amusing, lighthearted sketches — a smiling turtle, a sunbathing hippo, and a thirsty camel.
“We were just drawing to have fun,” the 43-year-old mom said, adding that her husband and 3-year-old son also joined in on the drawing sessions.
The daily drawing prompts have grown more diverse, with abstract suggestions and ideas open for interpretation. Recent prompts have ranged from “Perspective: From Above” to “Nostalgia,” and one of Carel’s latest favorites includes a close-up drawing of a green eye.
Carel said she’s heard from all sorts of members who find their way to the drawing group and commented on how it has made a difference in their lives.
However, she’s also encountered unexpected stories from members as well about how art has helped them work through trauma.
“I get emotional about it because it’s like, I’m just giving you something to draw, but these stories that come out of it with mental health, in particular, are shocking and amazing,” said Carel. “And people, they’re vulnerable in the group and they share the stories with others. “
Carel, who has a graphic design background, added that she feels motivated to keep the drawing group going.
“I started drawing because of the way it helped me cope with COVID, but that translates into so many people’s lives for so many other reasons. And they started posting these stories and then I was like, I can’t just shut this group down,” she said.
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(WASHINGTON) — Nationwide distribution of one of the last remaining monoclonal antibody treatments is being paused “effective immediately” since it has shown to be ineffective against the COVID-19 BA.2 subvariant now dominating every region of the country, an internal letter sent Tuesday afternoon from the federal government to states and obtained by ABC News said.
States and stakeholders should not expect any further shipments of sotrovimab, from GSK and Vir Biotechnology, from which the Food and Drug Administration has pulled authorization nationwide.
Sotrovimab was one of two monoclonal therapies in the U.S. arsenal that worked against previous variants. Now, the omicron subvariant has shown to chip away at its efficacy.
The government and FDA had already been incrementally limiting sotrovimab distribution in pockets of the country where BA.2 had been creeping up as the prevailing COVID strain. Tuesday, the FDA announced it would pull back authorization completely.
The agency said it will continue to monitor BA.2’s spread across the country, and that doctors and patients should use one of the other treatments that have held up against BA.2 — the one other monoclonal that still works, bebtelovimab from Eli Lilly; Paxlovid, or the antiviral pills from Pfizer; or molnupiravir from Merck.
Monoclonals have become a mainstay in our COVID medicine cabinet. Their ability to curb hospitalization rates, particularly among unvaccinated high-risk patients, has made them a key component in Biden’s COVID plan.
But new evolving strains of the virus have forced health care officials to recalibrate existing treatments — and this is not the first time the U.S. has seen COVID treatments get shut down when a new variant of concern stymies its efficacy.
GSK tells ABC it is prepping further data on whether a higher dose would hold up better against the omicron subvariant, which it’s sharing with relevant health and regulatory bodies.
The internal letter urges health care providers to make sure they are up to date with which variants impact what treatments, since it’s constantly shifting — and for providers to be aware of the variant makeup in their region in order to “guide treatment decisions” in an optimal way for their patients.
Meanwhile, the national COVID-19 medicine cabinet is once again getting whittled down by new variants and by limited supplies.
Weekly allocations of many COVID therapies had already been scaled down while further COVID relief funding stalled in Congress, and the government cut back on the amount of treatments shipped to states.
Though Senate negotiators had struck a deal for $10 billion in additional funding, its passage is far from guaranteed. It is unclear if this slimmed-down version of what the White House wanted will cover the country’s needs should another infection surge emerge. Without sufficient funding, the White House previously said the U.S. supply of the antiviral pills like Paxlovid could run out by September.
(NEW YORK) — As the nation approaches the grim milestone of 1 million lives confirmed lost to COVID-19, a new report reveals the “devastating and disproportionate” impact of the virus on low-income communities in the U.S., offering an initial analysis of the deadly consequences of poverty, economic insecurity and systemic racism.
“Poverty was not tangential to the pandemic, but deeply embedded in its geography,” researchers wrote. “Poverty and widespread inequality increases vulnerability to crises. While vaccines will prevent the worst impacts of COVID-19, they will not inoculate against poverty.”
The report, produced by the The Poor People’s Campaign in collaboration with the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, found that death rates in the lowest income group were double the death rates of those in the highest income group.
In addition, counties with disproportionately more Black residents had a significantly higher COVID-19 death rate than counties that did not.
The pandemic exacerbated preexisting social and economic disparities that existed prior to the emergence of COVID-19, the report found.
“Crises do not unfold independently of the conditions from which they arise,” researchers said. “The pandemic exacerbated preexisting social and economic disparities that have long festered in the US, including a deeply divided society, widespread poverty, a weak social safety net, inadequate living conditions, and a lack of trust in science that predated COVID-19.”
Prior to the onset of the pandemic, there were 140 million low-income people living in the U.S., accounting for approximately 40% of the population — including more than half of children in the country.
“Widespread and unequal distribution of wealth, income and resources prior to the pandemic created the conditions for many of the negative outcomes associated with the virus,” researchers wrote.
Death rates have varied throughout the pandemic, in each of the various surges. Researchers found that the two deadliest waves were the winter surge of 2020-2021, accounting for nearly 40% of all deaths to date, and the recent omicron surge, accounting for nearly 20% of deaths so far, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
With the exception of the first COVID-19 surge, U.S. counties with the “lowest median income had death rates at least two times higher than that of the counties with the highest income.”
Preexisting disparities in health care access, wealth distribution and housing insecurity created “disastrous effects” for some Americans, as the virus exacerbated gaps in access that “caused increased harm to populations based on their class, race, gender, geography, and ability.”
Findings also suggested that pandemic job losses were concentrated among low-income workers, and that Americans living in poverty were the most likely to miss work due to COVID-19. Furthermore, Black and Hispanic women were most likely to lose full-time jobs.
Researchers stressed that adequate living wages, shared economic prosperity and inclusive welfare programs can address some of the concerns discussed in the report. In addition, ensuring universal and affordable health care, housing, water, access to utilities, quality public education and guaranteeing a robust democracy “will establish a more equitable foundation upon which we can build back better from the pandemic.”
(NEW YORK) –Through lockdowns, remote working, travel restrictions and school closures — many have not had a cold in two years. Now cold and flu rates appear to be on the rise as Americans return to pre-COVID activities sans masks.
Dr. Peter Chin Hong at UC San Francisco says his hospital is seeing an influx of cold and flu complaints.
“Usually we’ve gotten several colds a year for most people,” he told ABC News. “I think not having them means when you do get one it lasts a little bit longer.”
While cold and flu symptoms can often resemble COVID-19 symptoms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says testing may be necessary to confirm a diagnosis.
Dr. Hong stressed the importance of returning to public life with caution.
“It’s really crucial to keep up your street smarts not just about COVID, but these other pathogens that you can transmit,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — In the seven months since Texas enacted a law that bans nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, its northern neighbor, Oklahoma, has felt the impact.
“We are essentially having to turn the vast majority of people away from getting abortions because we just cannot keep up with the volume,” said Dr. Christina Bourne, the medical director of Trust Women, which operates an abortion care clinic in Oklahoma City and one in Wichita, Kansas. “We could be doing abortions 24 hours a day and not keep up with the volume that is demanded of us.”
Now, Oklahoma appears close to enacting its own abortion ban, which providers like Bourne and others in surrounding states say could lead to a whole region of the country lacking adequate abortion access.
In late March, the Oklahoma House passed a measure, House Bill 4327, that would ban abortion at any point in the pregnancy unless it is “to save the life” of the pregnant person or if the pregnancy is the result of “rape, sexual assault or incest that has been reported to law enforcement.”
Like Texas’ law, HB 4327 also allows for citizens to sue for up to $10,000 anyone who performs or “aids and abets” an abortion.
Earlier last month, the Oklahoma Senate passed a similar bill, SB 1503.
“We know that patients who need abortion are not going to stop seeking it, it’s just going to get harder and harder for them to access,” said Emily Wales, the interim CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which covers Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and parts of Missouri. “Right now, patients may be traveling a few hundred miles from home, five or six hours, they’re going to add another five or six hours to get to the Kansas City area or to Wichita, and for some patients, that won’t be feasible.”
So far in 2022, the two Planned Parenthood clinics in Oklahoma that offer abortion services have seen more patients from Texas than from Oklahoma, according to Wales.
If the anti-abortion bills in Oklahoma are signed into law as expected, experts say women who have the means will have to travel further for abortion care, while those who don’t will not get care.
“We expect that the facilities that remain open in other states will be overwhelmed, as we have already seen with Senate Bill 8, with residents from other states coming in to get care,” said Dr. Kari White, an associate professor and faculty research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. “And there are some people for whom these longer distances are are just going to be impossible, and they will consider either other ways to try to end their pregnancies by ordering medications online or potentially doing something unsafe, and other people will be forced to continue their pregnancies.”
White, who is also the lead investigator of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, has studied the impact of Texas’ six-week abortion ban. According to her research, around 1,400 Texans have gone to another state for abortion care each month since SB8 went into effect in September, with 45% traveling to Oklahoma.
“We’ve certainly heard from some of the people we’ve interviewed in our study that they were willing to wait a little bit longer to get an abortion in Oklahoma because they could travel to Oklahoma, but it was too far for them to go to a state like New Mexico,” she said. “They just couldn’t make it work in terms of the additional cost, the time away from work or their child care responsibilities.”
New Mexico and Colorado, which have less stringent abortion restrictions, are likely to become hotspots for women in the region who have the means to travel for abortion care.
Those states have also felt the impact from SB8, according to Planned Parenthood, which reported a more than 1,000% increase in abortion patients with Texas zip codes at Planned Parenthood health centers in Colorado and a more than 100% increase at Planned Parenthood health centers in New Mexico compared to the previous year.
Other states that surround Oklahoma — Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas — face their own restrictions on abortion access and are dealing with already overwhelmed systems, experts say.
The two Planned Parenthood clinics that provided abortion care in Missouri have been closed in the last few years due to state restrictions, according to Wales, who added, “Missourians for a long time have been living the Texas crisis, where the majority of them are forced to flee their home state for care already.”
Arkansas has around three abortion clinics statewide currently, while Kansas has four, according to Sandy Brown, president of the Kansas Abortion Fund, a volunteer-run, nonprofit organization that helps fund Kansan women seeking abortion care.
“Our clinics here have been swamped,” Brown said. “They just can’t absorb the volume of people coming in from other states. Now, if Oklahoma happens, it’s really, really going to be bad, because we already can’t almost handle the patients that are coming in now.”
In May or June, the Supreme Court will announce its ruling on a 15-week ban in Mississippi and whether or not it is constitutional. If the Supreme Court determines the ban is constitutional, it could mean Roe v. Wade is either overturned or fundamentally weakened.
More than half of the nation’s 50 states are prepared to ban abortion if Roe is overturned, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization.
If that happens, another factor to watch will be whether states that have banned abortion make it increasingly difficult for their residents to obtain abortions in other states, Mary Ziegler, visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and author of Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present, told ABC News earlier this year.
In the meantime, abortion rights advocates and providers say they worry that the far distances people are having to travel to seek abortion care means the most vulnerable people, such as those without the financial resources to travel, are being left behind.
“Traveling is an option and has always been an option for affluent white people,” Bourne said. “Through abortion restrictions, we are legislating people who experience intersecting identities, poverty, people of color, queer folks, people with many children, people with busy lives who are going to be left out of that and forced to carry a pregnancy to term that perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have.”
Wales, of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said that as clinics in Oklahoma and Kansas have seen increased demand for abortion services, that has resulted in a delay in services for the type of general reproductive health care, like contraception and cancer screening, that makes up the majority of the clinics’ work.
“The increased need in abortion and the restrictions from the states … those things have pushed family planning patients and other types of care back,” Wales said. “It also means our family planning patients are coming in more concerned, more confused about what is available to them, because they just understand that rights are being restricted.”
“It has created a great deal of fear, I think, among the people we see,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — A new COVID-19 variant has been identified in the United Kingdom, but experts say there is no cause for alarm yet.
The variant, known as XE, is a combination of the original BA.1 omicron variant and its subvariant BA.2. This type of combination is known as a “recombinant” variant.
Public health experts say that recombinant variants are very common and often crop up and disappear on their own.
“Right now, there’s really no public health concern,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor. “Recombinant variants happen over and over. In fact, the reason that this is the XE variant recombinant is that we’ve had XA, XB, XC, XD already, and none of those have turned out to be any real concern.”
According to an update last week from the U.K. Health Security Agency, 637 cases of XE have been identified as of March 22, with the earliest detected Jan. 19.
An early indication from the U.K. suggests XE could be slightly more transmissible than BA.2, but the World Health Organization said more research is needed.
Meanwhile, XE makes up less than 1% of total COVID-19 cases that have undergone genomic sequencing in the U.K., and there is no evidence to suggest that the variant can escape vaccines, cause more severe disease or is more deadly.
“This particular recombinant, XE, has shown a variable growth rate, and we cannot yet confirm whether it has a true growth advantage,” Professor Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser for UKHSA, said in a statement.
So far, no cases of the recombinant variant have been reported in any other country, including the United States.
Brownstein said there are still a lot of unanswered questions surrounding XE, but that — in the U.S. — there is a high level of protection both from vaccines and from natural immunity during the omicron wave.
“It’s possible it may be more transmissible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more severe,” he said. “And given the sheer number of infections we’ve already seen with omicron, it’s really unclear whether even being slightly more transmissible means we’ll see any impact of this variant whatsoever.”
Brownstein said one of the reasons the U.K. was able to pick up on the variant as quickly as it did is because of its robust surveillance system.
According to the global database GISAID, the U.K. has submitted more than 1 million omicron samples for genomic surveillance. The U.S. has submitted more than 781,000.
“The U.K. has done a phenomenal job of sequencing a large number of cases, doing analyses and producing the output of that work,” he said. “So you could see the identification of XE actually as a positive because it shows that our public health systems are working, identifying new variants even when the case numbers are super small.”
Brownstein added, “This shows that some of these variants can be needles in a haystack, and here we have an example of one being identified very early on.”
The World Health Organization released its own report saying it is monitoring XE, but there is no evidence yet that it is a variant of concern like alpha, delta and omicron.
“WHO will continue to closely monitor and assess the public health risk associated with recombinant variants” and will “provide updates as further evidence becomes available,” the organization said in a report published March 29.
Brownstein said variants will continue to emerge, but it is important for people to follow COVID-19 mitigation measures so they don’t get a chance to spread.
“Being vaccinated and boosted, as well as practicing good hygiene and following public health recommendations all help to drive transmission down in the community,” he said. “When we have uncontrolled spread, that’s when the virus is given chances to mutate.”
The UKHSA said it is also monitoring two other recombinant variants known as XD and XF, both of which are a combination of the delta variant and BA.1.
To date, only 38 cases of XF have been identified in the U.K. and none since mid-February while the XD variant has only been identified in global databases in 49 cases, mostly in France.
(NEW YORK) — California was the first state to mandate that high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Pediatrician Dr. Bert Mandelbaum hopes New Jersey will be the second.
New Jersey is one of several states exploring later school start times, as educators and health professionals grapple with concerns about the pandemic’s impact on youth’s mental health.
“I think we’re at the right time that people are willing to listen and do the right thing for kids,” Mandelbaum, who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics New Jersey chapter’s Task Force on Adolescent Sleep & School Start Times, told ABC News. “I think the pandemic heightened everyone’s awareness of the mental health needs.”
The task force has advocated for later start times for several years as a way to promote healthy sleep habits among adolescents, though Mandelbaum believes the pandemic’s toll helped lead to state lawmakers last month introducing legislation that proposes pushing statewide high school start times in New Jersey to no earlier than 8.30 a.m., starting in the 2024-2025 school year. State Democrats said the bill was “beginning the work of addressing this national youth mental health crisis.”
At a ‘tipping point’
Other states that have introduced similar bills during the pandemic include New York, where the proposal is at the committee level, and Tennessee, where it’s been referred to summer study. The Tennessee AAP chapter voiced its support for the bill amid a “national emergency in children’s mental health.”
Several school districts are also shifting to later start times, including Denver and Philadelphia.
“I feel like we have reached a tipping point,” Phyllis Payne, implementation director for Start School Later, an organization that advocates for later school start times, told ABC News.
The AAP, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine are among several health authorities that support later start times to allow students to get optimal sleep — which for teenagers is between 8 and 10 hours a night.
The CDC has found that most middle and high school students don’t get enough sleep, making them more likely to have poor school performance, engage in unhealthy risk behaviors and suffer from depressive symptoms, it said.
Later school start times would better align with adolescents’ biological sleep rhythms, which cause them to go to bed later, experts say.
Research has found that in high schools with delayed start times, from 8:30 a.m. on, students got more sleep, academic outcomes and attendance rates improved, and car crashes involving teen drivers decreased.
“A lot of high schools start at 7 a.m. or 7:30 — that puts these kids in this really terrible position,” Kimberly Fenn, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Sleep and Learning Lab at Michigan State University, told ABC News. “Any amount they can shift back is going to benefit the students.”
Early start times also often limit light exposure in the morning, which can have an impact on student learning, according to Rebecca Spencer, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“When we’re instead waking up to darkness, we lack that external alerting signal, that bright light that it takes to signal it is time to be awake and helps you focus,” Spencer told ABC News. “So if you take that away from kids, it presents as grogginess and inattentiveness, but it has broad ramifications. It’s gonna tell you how they’re going to perform cognitively. It’s gonna tell you how their behavior is going to be, behavior and mood in the classroom.”
For this reason, among others, many sleep experts have spoken out against a potential move to permanent daylight saving time, which Congress is currently considering instead of changing the clocks twice a year.
“My guess is that sleep scientists as a whole would say, OK, we should stop the bouncing back and forth. But going with standard time, from a sleep perspective, is the better way to go so that you have that light in the morning more often,” Spencer said. “That helps their cognitive function.”
‘Change is challenging’
The Edina School District was the first district in the U.S. to change to a later starting time for their high school, shifting from 7:20 am. to 8:30 a.m. in the 1996-1997 school year, according to research from the University of Minnesota.
Since then other school districts throughout the country have made similar shifts, though advocates for later start times believe tackling the issue at the state level will help address logistical concerns around making the move, such as for parents’ work schedules and programming school athletics.
“I think that we are at a point now where we’re recognizing that this really is the right thing to do,” Payne said. “But change is challenging. People don’t like change.”
The California School Boards Association had opposed California’s law due to logistical concerns for families when it passed in 2019. Ahead of the state’s shift to a later school start time, which goes into effect in July, one teacher argued in CalMatters that the policy is a “disaster in the making” for an already overwhelmed education system. In response, a physician specializing in sleep medicine and an advocate for student health argued that the shift “has never been more urgent” due to the pandemic’s toll on youth mental health.
Mandelbaum, who said he got involved in advocating for later school start times to promote the science behind the policy, has only heard of one instance where a school district that made the shift reverted to its old, earlier schedule. But it “failed because of poor implementation” — highlighting the need for all stakeholders to be involved early on in the proposal process, he said.
For Mandelbaum, the pandemic has shown that schools can adapt quickly to change.
“Schools went virtual within a weekend,” he said. “The idea that we can do big things is there.”
(CHICAGO) — A baby girl who has been living in a Chicago hospital with her parents for the last six months while waiting for a new heart finally received one last week.
Elodie Carmen Baker received a heart transplant at The Heart Center at Lurie Children’s Hospital on March 27. Elodie was about 7 weeks old when she was diagnosed with a rare heart condition in August 2021 called dilated cardiomyopathy. She had been on the waitlist for a new heart for over 200 days.
Elodie’s mother, Kate Baker, still remembers the moment she knew something was wrong.
“Our pregnancy was normal and we had an uncomplicated delivery and actually went home with Elodie,” the first-time mom said in an interview with Good Morning America. “So she was with us in Minnesota at home for seven weeks and one night, she wouldn’t feed. I was nursing and she let out this cry and my heart just sank and I said to (my husband) Collin, ‘Something’s wrong. We need to take her in.'”
At the emergency room, Baker said doctors initially didn’t see anything that stood out to them.
“I think they were considering maybe sending us home but they said, ‘Let’s just get an X-ray to be sure,'” she said. “Then the X-ray came back. They saw her heart was enlarged and that was on Aug. 21. And we haven’t been home since.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children and adults with dilated cardiomyopathy have an enlarged heart chamber (ventricle), which can make the muscle unable to pump blood throughout the body sufficiently. There are other types of cardiomyopathy as well as varying symptoms of disease, and some may not even see symptoms arise during their lifetime.
Dr. Anna Joong, the medical director of the pediatric ventricular assist device program at Lurie Children’s, has been caring for Elodie for the past several months.
“In Elodie’s case, the genetic test did not reveal an answer for why she developed this kind of cardiomyopathy and in that situation, it’s called idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, meaning at this point in time, we don’t really know why this happened to her,” Joong told GMA.
Doctors would later tell the Bakers that their daughter would need a new heart. “The muscle in hers is really weak. And so it’s expanded over time, it hasn’t been able to push the blood out, pump it out to the rest of the body and so it’s dilated, and now hers looks more like a pancake,” Baker said.
Two months after the diagnosis, Elodie was flown to Lurie Children’s Hospital in Illinois from her home state of Minnesota, where she underwent surgery to have a Berlin EXCOR pediatric ventricular assist device (VAD) placed.
The VAD essentially acted as a heart for Elodie, pumping blood for her while she waited for a transplant.
“Her heart was so sick, that the IV medicines just weren’t enough and she needed a VAD,” Joong said. “We use this device as a way to bridge her to transplant so it’s a way to support her heart, to help get her stronger in the time that she’s waiting for her donor heart.”
As Elodie waited for a new heart, she started eating more, both with and without a feeding tube. Nora Hammond, a nurse practitioner at Lurie’s who has also cared for Elodie, explained to GMA, “Post-VAD, Elodie was able to tolerate feeds through a feeding tube to provide her with the calories she needed to grow, but also was able to try a lot of foods by mouth which she loved! Lots of avocado.”
Elodie also participated in various therapies to help her get stronger day by day — from occupational and physical to speech therapy — and along the way, she has reached many of the milestones typical for a baby her age.
“She has learned how to sit. She’s starting to crawl. She’s starting to stand … and she’s done all those things on the Berlin, which is truly incredible,” her mother said.
Dr. Michael Mongé, surgical director of the Heart Failure/Heart Transplant Program at Lurie Children’s, operated on Elodie and noted that Elodie’s care has been an enormous collective effort. “The entire team of physical therapists, hematologists, cardiologists, intensive care doctors, surgeons, all participated in her care, which I think really contributed to how well she has done both since arrival here at Lurie and following VAD implant.”
Elodie has been recovering following her transplant and is receiving medication as well.
“She will continue to use a (feeding) tube after transplant but after she recovers, will slowly try to decrease the amount of food through the tube to encourage her to be able to meet caloric needs by mouth,” Hammond told GMA.
“The breathing tube was able to come out within hours of coming out of the operating room. Her new heart works beautifully and is really strong,” Joong added. “She is getting routine immunosuppression medications to prevent rejection. She has already been transferred out of ICU level care and is sitting up. She is one strong kid and we are so grateful to the donor family.”
Joong, Mongé and the Bakers all hope that Elodie’s story will inspire others to consider organ donation, especially since April is National Donate Life Month, an initiative by the nonprofit Donate Life America to raise awareness about giving the gift of an organ or tissue.
“We’ve both been donors our whole lives. But I’ve never thought much about it. It’s just a box that I’ve checked when I renewed my driver’s license,” Kate Baker said. “Now, we spend a lot of time educating ourselves on the subject and we try to use our CaringBridge site to raise awareness.”
“(Elodie’s story) highlights the importance of organ donation and people being organ donors. The waitlist times have increased over time,” Mongé added.
“The number of organs available each year is relatively constant whereas more and more children continue to get admitted to the hospital and in heart failure. So it really is important to stress the need for people to be organ donors so that people like Elodie can receive a transplant,” Mongé said.
(NEW YORK) — As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in England, the country is also experiencing a surge in reinfections.
Provisional data shows that, as of the week ending March 20, 2022, laboratory-confirmed reinfections — two positive tests taken more than 90 days apart — have surpassed 50,000 per week in England, 10.7% of all cases, according to a weekly report from the U.K. Health Security Agency published Thursday.
This is a jump from the less than 20,000 weekly reinfections recorded during the last week of February in England.
The weekly rate is increasing in all age groups and has nearly doubled in one week among those aged 30 and older, the report shows.
Vaccination rates are high in England with 85.8% of those aged 12 and older fully vaccinated and 66.8% boosted.
Additionally, as of Friday, 99% of the adult population in England is estimated to have detectable COVID-19 antibodies either from previous infection or from vaccination, according to the U.K. government.
There were only 7,093 reinfections reported in Scotland, 10.4 percent of all cases, in the week ending March 27. Recent data on reinfections were not readily available for Wales and Northern Ireland.
So, with such high coverage, why have so many in England been reinfected with COVID-19?
Experts said there are a few reasons for the uptick including the spread of the BA.2 variant, waning immunity and the further relaxing of COVID-19 mitigation measures in England.
BA.2 is more transmissible
Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, told ABC News the spread of the BA.2 variant is undoubtedly playing a role in the rise of reinfections in England.
“BA.2 is more infectious so more people can be infected by being exposed to it,” he said. “The time needed for you and me to sit close together to get the infection is much shorter.”
BA.2, which is a subvariant of the original omicron variant, has become the dominant variant in England.
Data from the UKHSA estimates BA.2 currently accounts for 93.7% of all COVID-19 cases in England. Less than two months ago, it made up less than 5% of cases
A preprint from Sweden, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggests BA.2 may be more contagious due to higher viral loads in the nose and throat than the original BA.1 variant.
Early data from the U.K. and Denmark also suggests it is possible to be infected with BA.2 after having been infected with BA.1, although this is less likely.
Mokdad said the numbers from these studies are too low to warrant any serious concern.
It is unclear from the U.K. data how many of the reinfected cases are among those who are fully vaccinated and those who are boosted.
However, several studies have shown booster shots lower the risk of reinfection.
An Israeli study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in November 2021 found 1.8% of COVID-19 tests were positive in adults that were boosted compared to 6.6% in adults that had two shots.
While BA.2 is more transmissible than BA.1, it does not appear to increase the risk of hospitalization.
Professor David Heymann, from the department of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the rise of reinfections should not concern people because the number of hospitalizations and deaths remains low.
“The vaccines are suppressing serious illness and death, even if you get reinfected,” he told ABC News. “What we do know is there’s no cause for real alarm at present because the hospital surveillance is showing COVID remains a minor disease” for the vaccinated.
Waning immunity
Mokdad said many people who got their second dose, or even their third dose, received it five to six months ago so their immunity will have waned by now.
“What we know from the data — and we have a lot of evidence, including from the UK — is that, starting at three months your immunity, especially against infection, drops rapidly,” Mokdad said. “And by five months, your immunity against infection is basically 20%.”
A January report from the UKHSA found the effectiveness of two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is what most people in the U.K. have received, dropped from 50% against omicron to virtually no effect 20 weeks later.
A booster from either Pfizer or Moderna raised the protection against omicron to around 60%, but it fell to as low as 40% 10 weeks later.
Mokdad said for those who weren’t infected with the original omicron variant during the last wave, this also increases the risk of reinfection because contracting the virus will have acted like a natural booster shot for most healthy individuals.
Behavioral changes
Experts say behavioral changes after restrictions were lifted are also likely playing a role in the rise of reinfections.
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been lifting COVID restrictions in England since the beginning of the year and, on Feb. 25 dropped all remaining rules for the country, including the requirement to self-isolate after testing positive, contact tracing and free administration of rapid tests.
This means many people are no longer wearing masks or staying home from work or school, or self-isolating if they are ill.
“Suddenly, they lifted these mandates,” Mokdad said. “People are tired and have changed their behavior. Suddenly, you have 30% or 40% susceptible because of waning immunity and the fact they have not been exposed to BA.1, and BA.2 is circulating, then you see this rapid increase in cases.
When Johnson lifted the mandates, he gave a speech to the House of Commons in which he stated he wanted England to pivot away from preventing COVID-19 and “learn to live with this virus.”
Professor Daniel Altmann, from the department of immunology and inflammation at Imperial College London, said this has led to “confusion” about how to prevent reinfection.
“This means that people are confused about safety — many are going out to work and school when knowingly infected, fewer wearing masks,” he told ABC News. “It looks like an untenable policy when one considers … omicron, somewhat milder but poorly immunogenic and able to reinfect people sometimes over and over at intervals of a few weeks.”
(WASHINGTON) — Congress could soon send to the president’s desk a bill that would cap the cost of the lifesaving drug insulin at $35 per month — a move that could significantly reduce and rein in out-of-pocket drug costs for millions of Americans with diabetes.
The House approved the bill Thursday by a vote of 232-193, with 12 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
The bill now heads to the Senate, and it could be taken up in the upper chamber in a matter of weeks if there is bipartisan agreement.
Experts say it costs less than $10 a vial to manufacture, yet there are still American families with insurance paying hundreds of dollars per vial of insulin.
Currently, costs for patients can range from $334 to $1,000 a month for insulin, according to a 2020 Kaiser Family Foundation report.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 37.3 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, which is about 11% of the U.S. population. Out of the nearly 40 million people who have diabetes — about 25% or 7.4 million Americans need insulin. Many people with diabetes are prescribed insulin, either because their bodies do not produce insulin (Type 1 diabetes) or do not use insulin properly (Type 2 diabetes).
The bill to cap the cost of insulin was originally a part of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” domestic policy agenda, but since that massive piece of legislation is stalled in the Senate, lawmakers decided to move unilaterally on this standalone bill specifically addressing insulin.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters on Wednesday that it is “inexcusable” people are being charged exorbitant prices for “a lifesaving and life-sustaining drug whose costs [have] not increased and whose research costs have been amortized a very long period of time ago.”
Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, one of the authors of the House bill, said it’s “outrageous that a single vial of insulin costs up to $1,000, when the medication costs just a few dollars to make.”
The bill caps cost-sharing for a month’s supply of insulin starting in 2023 at whichever amount is lower: $35, or 25% of a plan’s negotiated price, according to the bill’s text. The bill does not lower the overall price of insulin; it would likely shift more of the cost onto insurers and employers.
Supporters of the bill say it will save lives by making insulin affordable for millions of Americans, many of whom now reduce the amount they take or skip doses, resulting in far more costly visits to emergency rooms and the hospital.
