Tag: students

Categories
Health

Some Medical College students Wait in Line for Covid Vaccine, Whereas Others Share Selfies of Photographs

Some Medical Students Wait in Line for Covid Vaccine, While Others Share Selfies of Shots

In early January, Nali Gillespie watched her social media feed fill with vaccine selfies: photo after photo of peers at other medical schools across the country proudly posing next to a syringe with their dose of either Moderna or Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine .

But Ms. Gillespie, who is in her third year at Duke University School of Medicine and focused more on research than clinical training, knew she wouldn’t be able to join them just yet.

Since she only volunteers to go to an ambulance once a week, she is less exposed to Covid patients and waits in line behind classmates who work in intensive care units and emergency rooms.

“You hear that in some schools, students are getting their second dose and then there are some of us who are not even scheduled for our first,” said Ms Gillespie.

When she does her weekly shift, she knows that she is still prone to exposure to the coronavirus. “You are becoming increasingly aware that an asymptomatic patient can come into the clinic and you see them in a small exam room,” she said. “The risk is very real.”

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced guidelines prioritizing who should receive vaccines first at the start of the rollout. Although the guidelines were broad, medical students learned that they could join the first wave of healthcare workers, particularly those involved in caring for Covid patients. However, the rollout has varied widely across the country’s 155 medical schools, each of which has prioritized based on the availability of vaccine doses in their state.

This has created stress for some medical students as they continue their clinical rotations. Although some schools prohibit students from treating Covid patients, enforcing this rule can be difficult, especially in asymptomatic cases.

Covid19 vaccinations>

Answers to your vaccine questions

If I live in the US, when can I get the vaccine?

While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary from state to state, most doctors and residents of long-term care facilities will come first. If you want to understand how this decision is made, this article will help.

When can I get back to normal life after the vaccination?

Life will only get back to normal once society as a whole receives adequate protection against the coronavirus. Once countries have approved a vaccine, they can only vaccinate a few percent of their citizens in the first few months. The unvaccinated majority remain susceptible to infection. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines show robust protection against disease. However, it is also possible that people spread the virus without knowing they are infected because they have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Scientists don’t yet know whether the vaccines will also block the transmission of the coronavirus. Even vaccinated people have to wear masks for the time being, avoid the crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it becomes very difficult for the coronavirus to find people at risk to become infected. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve this goal, life could approach a normal state in autumn 2021.

Do I still have to wear a mask after the vaccination?

Yeah, but not forever. The two vaccines that may be approved this month clearly protect people from contracting Covid-19. However, the clinical trials that produced these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected with the coronavirus can spread it without experiencing a cough or other symptoms. Researchers will study this question intensively when the vaccines are introduced. In the meantime, self-vaccinated people need to think of themselves as potential spreaders.

Will it hurt What are the side effects?

The vaccine against Pfizer and BioNTech, like other typical vaccines, is delivered as a shot in the arm. The injection is no different from the ones you received before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported serious health problems. However, some of them have experienced short-lived symptoms, including pain and flu-like symptoms that usually last a day. It is possible that people will have to plan to take a day off or go to school after the second shot. While these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system’s encounter with the vaccine and a strong response that ensures lasting immunity.

Will mRNA vaccines change my genes?

No. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to boost the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inside. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus that can stimulate the immune system. At any given moment, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules that they produce to make their own proteins. As soon as these proteins are made, our cells use special enzymes to break down the mRNA. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can only survive a few minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a little longer, so the cells can make extra viral proteins and trigger a stronger immune response. However, the mRNA can hold for a few days at most before it is destroyed.

In some facilities, such as the Duke School of Medicine, students working in intensive care units and emergency rooms were placed in priority group 1A with the highest level, while everyone else was told they would be vaccinated under group 1B. At the Yale School of Medicine, all medical students, regardless of their exposure to patients, were told that they would be vaccinated in reverse alphabetical order (“by the first letter of their last name starting at the end of the alphabet”).

“Those in the later stages of the alphabet were happy, but a little confused by how arbitrary it was,” said Sumun Khetpal, a fourth-year student.

Students at Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Worth said they had received no notice from the school for weeks when they would receive their vaccines. Some drove around the state for hours looking for private pharmacists who would give them shots. And at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, students said they also had to “take matters into their own hands” and contact private pharmacies to inquire about a vaccination since they were not told until last weekend how to get vaccines their school.

“The CDC guidelines did not have the granularity that hospitals and schools need to make decisions,” said Dr. Alison Whelan, Scientific Director, Association of American Medical Colleges. “There was considerable variability in the absence of a national plan.”

In addition to the confusion, vaccines have been assigned to states based on population, which does not always reflect the population of health care workers, added Dr. Janis Orlowski, Chief Health Care Officer of the association, added. There are 21,000 medical students in the country.

There is a sense of guilty relief for some of them to have received the vaccine knowing that some of their colleagues have not yet done so.

“One of my close friends is a dentist and has a regular mouth, but she didn’t get the Covid vaccine,” said Azan Virji, a sophomore at Harvard who got his first dose late December. “It feels like there is an inequality.”

Even so, Mr Virji said he had treated Covid-19 patients many times and felt a weight lift because he knew he was now vaccinated.

“My parents in Tanzania may not have access to this vaccine until 2022, and now I’ll be one of the first to have access,” he said. “It’s bittersweet, but it’s important that I feel calmer in the hospital.”

Categories
World News

Extra Than 300 Kidnapped College students Launched in Nigeria, Governor Says

More Than 300 Abducted Students Released in Nigeria, Governor Says

DAKAR, Senegal – For six days, parents held a vigil at the school in northwestern Nigeria, where their boys, more than 300 of them, were taken away by armed men at night.

The armed men’s attack on their town of Kankara was a painful replica of the kidnapping of 276 school girls in Chibok in 2014 by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram of the Chibok girls were not registered years later.

Families gathered at Government Science Secondary School, praying, and fearing the worst.

“We do not know whether he has eaten, whether he is sick, dead or alive,” said Abdulkadir Musbau, whose son Abdullahi was among the abductees.

But just as suddenly, when the families’ ordeal began, it seemed to end, and with the best possible news: late Thursday night, the governor of their state announced that all of the kidnapped boys had been released and would be reunited with their parents the next day.

It was unclear under what conditions the boys’ freedom had been secured. Governor Aminu Bello Masari told a Deutsche Welle television reporter that the government had not paid a ransom and that negotiations had been conducted with a group of men he described as “bandits” rather than Boko Haram.

Boko Haram had claimed the kidnappings from the start, but the group’s level of involvement was murky. Kankara is in northwest Nigeria, where the group was not known. Among terrorist experts, this opened up the possibility that the group might want to expand by making common cause with militant and criminal groups already established in the region.

The group seemed to confirm this idea when they posted a video showing some of the kidnapped boys. A boy who said he was from Kankara is shown asking the government to call the army, disband support groups and close schools. “We were caught by a gang from Abu Shekau,” he said, referring to the Boko Haram chief. “Some of us were killed.”

“You have to send them the money,” he added.

A dozen smaller boys crowded around him and added their voices. “Help us,” they called into the camera.

An audio message from a representative of Boko Haram was pinned to the end, implying some kind of collaboration between the kidnappers and the militant Islamists.

In a BBC interview that was taped before news of the release, Mr Masari said the kidnappers had contacted the father of one of the boys and asked the government to send them money.

“We have an idea where they are, but we try to make sure there is no collateral damage, that the children are brought back safely,” he said. “That’s why we step forward carefully and quietly.”

President Muhammadu Buhari won the 2015 election and pledged to take action against Boko Haram and other militant and bandit groups in northern Nigeria. And he has repeatedly promised to take every chibok student home.

“The Chibok girls are still fresh in our minds,” said Bulama Bukarti, an expert on extremist groups in Africa at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “The difference now is that Boko Haram has fighters from outside the Northeast, they have people from the Northwest.”

The abductions have remarkable similarities. As in the Chibok attack, armed men stormed the boarding school at night, took hundreds of children, in this case all boys, and took them to hiding in the country. They were then divided into groups, according to students questioned by local media outlets who managed to escape their captors, making it difficult for security forces to conduct a rescue operation.

Mr Musbau said he was out shopping for pasta for his children’s Saturday breakfast when heavy gunfire broke out. People were running in all directions around him, so he sprinted home, passing police officers and guards on the way.

When he heard that their children’s boarding school was the focus of the attack, he and other parents ran there at dawn.

When he got to school, “I saw his neatly made bed and his box and hat over it,” said Mr. Musbau. “But not him.”

Mr. Musbau was delighted when Abdullahi, the oldest of his six children, got a place at the state science school. In elementary school he had reached the top of his class and was hoping to become a doctor when he got older.

“The reality became clear to us that our children were indeed abducted,” he said in a school phone interview he had barely left since the attack. “Everyone was hysterical. Nobody thought the bandits could do this. You have never done anything like this before. “

The attack in Kankara was the third mass kidnapping by a Nigerian school in six years: in 2018, more than 100 girls were kidnapped in the rural community of Dapchi, a northeastern town, although most of them returned home after a few days.

The kidnapping was significant both because it took place outside the known sphere of influence of Boko Haram and because it took place in the president’s home state, Katsina, when he arrived on a week-long visit.

Mr Buhari released a statement late Thursday evening welcoming the kidnapped students’ return and the cooperation between the security forces and the government of Katsina and Zamfara states.

In the statement, Mr. Buhari urged patience with his administration as they tried to clean up security incidents across the country and reiterated his promise to lobby for the release of other detainees.

Many northern Nigerians voted for Mr Buhari in 2015, thinking he would use his credentials as a former general and one-time dictator to encourage discipline and bring peace to Africa’s most populous nation.

Despite government claims, Boko Haram and other militant groups still pose a grave threat. And these recent attacks, following a nationwide uprising against police violence, insecurity and bad governance, have exposed the growing public dissatisfaction with a Nigerian government that cannot protect its people.

In the northeast, the government has pursued a strategy of building heavily protected garrison towns and largely leaving the land to the militants. More than 70 farmers trapped between the government and the extremists were killed there last month.

In Kankara, a local official said the government was aware of the worsening situation but had done nothing to resolve it.

“These bandits are well known, as are their families,” said the official, who asked for anonymity because he had been instructed not to speak to journalists. “Why were they treated with children’s gloves until they were monstrous and difficult to contain?”

Categories
Health

If academics get vaccinated rapidly, can college students return to highschool?

If teachers get vaccinated quickly, can students go back to school?

In Arizona, where several schools have gone online in the past few weeks due to a flood of viruses, Governor Doug Ducey said teachers would be among the first to be vaccinated. “Teachers are essential to our state,” he said. Utah Governor Gary Herbert spoke about the possibility of educators being shot this month. And Los Angeles officials urged teachers to be given priority over firefighters and prison guards.

But in areas where kids spent much of the fall staring at laptop screens, it can be too early for parents to hope that public schools will open their doors soon or that students will return before the next time all day in the classroom are falling.

Given the limited number of vaccines available to the states and the logistical hurdles to distribute them, including the fact that two doses are needed several weeks apart, experts said that vaccination of the three million school teachers in the United States would States could be a slow process that lasts well into the US spring.

And even if enough educators are vaccinated for school officials and teacher unions, who have considerable power in many large districts, to hold classroom reopenings safe, schools will most likely need masks and detached students for many months to come, experts say the community’s expansion has decreased significantly, possibly by summer.

“I think some people have in mind that when we get the vaccine we will start and all of these other things will go away,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. represents public health authorities.

But in schools as in everyday life there will be no quick fix. “I have a feeling we will all be wearing masks and keeping our distance and trying to be careful with each other for probably most of 2021.”