In March 2020, New York City’s hospitals filled up with patients desperately ill with Covid-19. In many cases, when their fluid-filled lungs could no longer give them oxygen, doctors sedated them and put them on ventilators.

The patients who recovered were taken off the machines and anesthesia. Within a day or so, their doctors expected them to wake up.

Two early US programs successfully traced COVID case contacts One report details a massive NYC effort to probe 941,035 COVID-19 cases and follow up with their contacts. CIDRAP

A pair of new studies describe how two US jurisdictions quickly mobilized teams of contact tracers to identify and isolate people exposed to SARS-CoV-2, with a massive New York City effort finding 1.4 contacts per case and a college student-led Central Pennsylvania initiative that may have led to fewer symptomatic household infections.

U.S. faces pandemic crossroads with Covid deaths still too high and new omicron variants emerging, Fauci says

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday said the U.S. is at a crossroads in the Covid-19 pandemic as new omicron subvariants are gaining ground across the country.

Fauci, in a radio interview Thursday, said the pandemic has clearly eased since last winter, but deaths, which average more than 2,600 per week, remain far too high. At the same time, the new omicron variants are knocking out key tools used to protect the most vulnerable.

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