News Room

The US continues to struggle with insufficient COVID-19 testing capacity. At the same time, US laboratories use ultrasensitive diagnostic criteria in their tests, leading to a large proportion of positive diagnoses associated with negligible viral loads. This column seeks to construct a theory that explains both undertesting and overdiagnosis. The theory predicts both phenomena may arise in the absence of mandatory viral load reporting. Despite the obvious clinical advantages of viral load reporting, mandating such reporting may not be optimal when considering laboratories’ capacity building decisions and potential benefits of widespread quarantining. 

Claps, whoops and cheers erupted outside the Franklin Woods Center in Rossville on Wednesday after three staffers and two residents volunteered to get vaccinated during a brief news conference attended by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. The five participants were the first among the state’s nursing home community to get vaccinated. “Yeah, man, perfect!” yipped Brian Klausmeyer, the center’s executive director, after he got his shot. ”That was it?” laughed Davenia Kemp, Franklin Woods’ geriatric nurse assistant, after the needle went in. She’d kept herself up all night, anticipating pain, discomfort or worse.

Will you get a text from your doctor? Will you read about it online? Or will you have to check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website to know when it's your turn in line? As COVID-19 vaccines roll out to limited groups of people across the United States, how people learn they are eligible to get their shots won't be as clear while supplies remain limited, according to public health and policy experts and state vaccination plans. "I think it's going to be a little bit murky," said Katie Greene, a visiting policy associate at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy.

Mass vaccination offers hope for a return to the prepandemic normal. But the distribution process also comes with some potentially nasty side effects: Vaccination without a careful plan could inadvertently make the world even more unequal than a year ago. The two initial vaccine candidates, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, may have particularly problematic consequences for inequality. But the candidate that may have seemed like a runner-up in the vaccine race, from Oxford- AstraZeneca, has strong potential to finish as the most essential vaccine to end the pandemic.

Immunization of health-care workers and residents of long-term care facilities has begun.  With each day bringing over 250,000 new confirmed cases and well over 2,000 additional deaths in the U.S., help is on the way to curb the COVID-19 momentum plaguing our nation. The full benefits of the vaccine will not be realized until tens of millions of people receive their two-dose regimen, which will likely not occur until the summer of 2021.