COVID-19 Round-up: What the summer could bring; rural upswing; vaccine updates

Deadly trends in rural U.S. counties shown by enhanced COVID-19 map

Perception Health, a provider of market-predictive intelligence for the health care industry, this week released an enhanced version of its map “COVID-19 Cases in U.S. Counties” showing hot spots for the coronavirus among small, close-knit communities.

Some of the U.S. counties have a higher ratio of cases per 1,000 population than New York City. The new version of the map also lists the numbers of tests conducted, patients hospitalized, patients recovered from the coronavirus, and a calculation of the number of cases per 1,000 population, for each county.

“Take for example Blaine County in Idaho, which has a population of only 21,551,” said says J. Tod Fetherling, CEO of Perception Health. “The county recently reported 454 COVID-19 cases, which works out to 21.07 cases per 1,000 population. That’s a higher ratio than any of the boroughs in New York City. Other examples include three counties in Georgia…[and] that the coronavirus can escalate quickly in small towns and close-knit communities because of the familiarity of the people who live there.”

For more info go to go.perceptionhealth.com/covid19.

What ‘Our Pandemic Summer’ could bring with proper testing and tracking

Prospective targets for sufficiently suppressing COVID-19 and opening the country back up have ranged from next month to this summer to this fall or even 2022. Science writer Ed Yong of The Atlantic says “the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months.”

“I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”

When sufficiently braced, Yong says, states could begin lifting their sweeping restrictions and focus on finding and helping people who are actually infected. But the conditions for making that switch are not clear. Heavily reliant on testing and tracking, Yong outlines the scenarios for how the U.S. could slowly reopen this summer or fall.

“These problems might be surmountable,” he writes. “The U.S. is still a scientific and biomedical powerhouse. To marshal that power, it needs a massive, coordinated, government-led initiative to find the cleverest ways of controlling COVID-19 — a modern-day Apollo program. No such program is afoot.”

To read the full story go to theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-summer-coronavirus-reopening-back-normal/609940.

Kentucky the only state to deem chiropractors non-essential

Joseph Jeffries was forced to shutdown his Nicholasville, Ky., chiropractic office almost a month ago after the chiropractors in the state were deemed non-essential. “We had received a previous letter that said we were part of healthcare,” Jeffries told Lex18 in Lexington. “And then we received a second letter that said, no, you need to close your offices.”

According to the American Chiropractic Association, Kentucky is the only state to deem chiropractors as non-essential in the midst of the U.S. government listing it among essential national health care services.

“Chiropractors treat about 35 million people a year and we are a part of the health care system.” Jeffries says. “We have patients that have debilitating lower-back pain who are stuck in bed. Patients are missing work, including first responders. Like I said, it’s troubling to hear the voicemails.”

COVID-19 vaccine updates and mutation possibilities

Kizzmekia Corbett, the National Institute of Health’s lead scientist for coronavirus vaccine research tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta that a vaccine for coronavirus could possibly be available to the general public by next spring, according to CNN.

Johnson & Johnson says it aims to have more than half a billion coronavirus vaccines ready early next year. The pharmaceutical giant will have 600-800 million vaccines available in early 2021, when it expects the U.S. government to approve the drug it plans to start testing in humans this September, chief financial officer Joe Wolk said Tuesday as reported by the New York Post.

The New York Times meanwhile reports on the possibility of the virus “mutating around” a vaccine: “A successful vaccine could stop the virus dead in its tracks, but only if the virus doesn’t mutate its way around the shot. Here’s what scientists are watching for…”

For the latest COVID-19 info for doctors of chiropractic, including upcoming webinars, updates, resources and articles from Chiropractic Economics, go to chiroeco.com/coronavirus-covid-19.