Treatments

The Covid-19 pandemic killed off one strain of the flu, and that will change the next vaccines | CNN For 10 years, Americans have had access to flu shots that protect against four strains of the virus: two A strains and two B strains. Brenda Goodman CNN

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In 2020, all the precautions that helped people avoid Covid had an unexpected benefit: An entire branch of the flu’s family tree, a B strain that geneticists call the Yamagata clade, disappeared, and it hasn’t been detected since.

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Many Americans postpone surgeries due to cost, job worries - UPI.com Older adults frequently delay needed surgery because of financial concerns, a new study finds. UPI

...Nearly half of people ages 50 and older who were very concerned about the cost of surgery wound up not having an operation they had considered, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. 

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At-risk patients often not offered antivirals for COVID-19, analysis shows Jenni Konrad/ Flickr cc CIDRAP

Four out of five Veterans Affairs (VA) patients who had mild COVID-19 but had compromised immune systems were not offered the use of COVID antivirals, according to a study today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Oral antiviral simnotrelvir shows promise for treating mild COVID-19 The length of COVID-19 symptoms was on average 36 hours shorter in the simnotrelvir group. CIDRAP

..in the New England Journal of Medicine Chinese researchers have published positive trial results of simnotrelvir, an oral antiviral that can shorten the duration of mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms.