Medical - global

There's no place like home for getting the Covid-19 vaccine - STAT Delivering the Covid-19 vaccine to people in their homes can help achieve the national distribution necessary to stop the pandemic. Patrick Skerrett STAT

Staying at home has never been so vital for older Americans and those with compromised health. After nine months of the coronavirus pandemic, sheltering in place is still the most effective protection against Covid-19 for many older adults, and likely will be until an effective vaccine helps stop the pandemic.

'He has blood on his hands': Columbia University study shows that Trump could have avoided over 130,000 COVID-19 deaths with a more robust pandemic response "The U.S. should have – and could have – done better to protect the nation," researchers wrote in the study. Oma Seddiq Business Insider

Upwards of 130,000 coronavirus deaths were "avoidable" if President Donald Trump and his administration had acted sooner and implemented widespread public health precautions, according to a new Columbia University report released on Wednesday. 

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness.

"We find that the death rate has gone down substantially," says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August.

The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.