COVID-19 (Page 20)

Kamil Macniak/Shutterstock Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine became available for children aged five to 11 in the UK in April 2022. Those aged 12 and up had already been eligible since 2021. But if you have a child aged under five, you might be wondering, when will they be able to be vaccinated against COVID-19? Children under five represent the only age group yet to have a COVID-19 vaccine approved for use. There could be a number of reasons for this, including the fact children don’t tend to be as seriously affected if they contract COVID-19, so other groups have possibly been prioritised. But both Pfizer and Moderna have been testing their COVID-19 vaccines in this age group and, based on theseContinue Reading

Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock After two long, difficult years of the pandemic, life has started to return to normal – or at least something resembling normal – for many people. With all major COVID restrictions now removed in the UK, recorded cases at their lowest rate in about a year, and vaccines and booster coverage relatively high, many people are keenly settling back into old habits. Mobility data suggests that – with the exception of travel on public transport and travel to workplaces, which are still below average – we are starting to get out and about as much as we did before the pandemic. This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us inContinue Reading

bbernard/Shutterstock Graham was a healthy 34-year-old until he developed COVID in July 2020. Along with his wife and children, he had a fever, a cough, breathlessness, profound fatigue and he lost his sense of smell. But instead of getting better like the rest of his family, Graham found that his breathlessness persisted. Even minor physical exertion or intellectual tasks like making shopping lists left him exhausted. Against his better judgment, Graham returned to his job as a schoolteacher after six weeks. But he quickly crashed – essentially he became so tired he could barely get out of bed – and had to go on sick leave again. Graham is fictitious but his story is typical of someone with long COVIDContinue Reading

PhotobyTawat/Shutterstock The AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in partnership with the University of Oxford, was one of the first vaccines available for use in the UK and around the world during the COVID pandemic. More than two billion doses have been distributed to at least 170 countries, with around 50 million doses administered in the UK. But most of those were first and second doses – only a little over 56,000 doses of AstraZeneca had been given as booster doses as of May 2022. The vast majority of third doses administered in the UK have been Pfizer (30.1 million doses) and Moderna (9.4 million). So despite being an excellent vaccine, the use of AstraZeneca in the UK has declined across the pandemic.Continue Reading

Josep Suria/Shutterstock As new waves of omicron infections continue to hit around the world, it’s becoming clearer that COVID is here to stay. As such, in the years to come, vaccination – both first courses and booster doses – will likely remain necessary to brace global communities against the worst health outcomes wrought by the virus. But what if the current crop of vaccines could be improved? Recent advances in vaccine technology and delivery systems suggest there could be gains to be made. In particular, scientists are working on vaccines that activate your “mucosal” immune system, which may be better able to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And rather than being delivered into your arm (intramuscularContinue Reading

Basicdog/Shutterstock While we might not be hearing the daily COVID numbers anymore, the virus hasn’t gone away. In the UK alone, thousands of new cases continue to be recorded every day. Meanwhile, there’s a very large group of people for whom the virus hasn’t gone away in a different sense – those suffering with long COVID. For these people, symptoms persist after the infection itself has passed (technically, beyond 12 weeks after infection). The most common long COVID symptoms include fatigue, breathlessness and loss of sense of smell. But people experiencing long COVID report a whole range of symptoms. Long COVID symptoms Office for National Statistics, May 2022 dataset, Author provided This article is part of Quarter Life, a seriesContinue Reading