News Room

We all thought we knew what kinds of places to avoid: the ballparks, the Sunday services, the packed train cars. If we didn’t want to catch COVID-19, we should stay away from crowds. That was the mantra. So we skipped the summer street parties and we did virtual church. We had a nice little evening at home, ordering takeout and maybe inviting our closest friends and family over.

A study on Medicaid-enrolled children with asthma found that implementing several widely available interventions could reduce health care expenditures and utilization of hospital services, according to the results published in Journal of Asthma. "This work shows that you can improve the quality of life for children with asthma and you can reduce government spending by implementing these proactive interventions," said Julie Swann, PhD, MS, lead author of the study and head of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University, in a statement.

Two drug companies have now reported highly successful results from phase III trials of COVID-19 vaccines. On November 18 Pfizer and partner BioNTech said their vaccine was 95 percent effective at preventing the disease, based on full trial results. Two days earlier Moderna reported its vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, based on interim data.

When Timothy Nuvangyaoma, chairman of the Hopi Tribe, heard there were two coronavirus vaccines that both showed promising data of more than 90 percent efficacy, he felt initial relief that soon transitioned to cautious skepticism.

Hospitals across the country are ramping up their efforts to figure out how to store, track and administer coronavirus vaccine doses following the recent news that an effective vaccine could be on its way within weeks or months. Hospitals will play a key role once a vaccine receives an emergency use authorization from the FDA, which could happen as soon as next month. They will move quickly to vaccinate their front-line healthcare workers and then their patients and surrounding communities.