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A COVID-19 patient in Oregon has died while waiting for an ICU bed to open up amid overrun hospitals across the U.S. due to the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant... "It had been several hours because other COVID positive patients had filled those beds. Even after expanding ICU care onto other floors, there weren't any beds available for this patient. We didn't have enough. This patient died in the Emergency Department waiting for an Intensive Care Unit bed."... ...The state only has 41 ICU beds and 310 non-ICU beds available for patients, while 870 COVID-19 patients are currently...

North Texas doctors have quietly developed a plan that seeks to prepare for the possibility that due to the COVID-19 surge the region will run out of intensive-care beds. If that happens, for the first time, doctors officially will be allowed to take vaccination status of sick patients into account along with other triage factors to see who gets a bed. A copy of an internal memo written by Dr. Robert Fine, co-chair of the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guideline Task Force, was sent to members of the task force -- and leaked to The Watchdog. It summarizes the...

A subset of COVID survivors are suffering from an unexpected side effect known as parosmia, a condition that causes their sense of smell to go haywire. Coffee smells like sewage and chicken smells like rotting garbage. Yara set out to learn how COVID is doing this to people, and what life is like when you smell and taste all the wrong things with no end in sight

The U.S. recorded more than 1,000 COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday as numbers reach levels last seen in April, largely due to the highly infectious delta variant spreading rapidly throughout the country. The 1,017 coronavirus deaths reported on Tuesday equate to roughly 42 fatalities an hour, according to a Reuters tally of state data. The U.S. has recorded more than 620,000 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A British man said he lost his health-obsessed brother and both their parents from COVID-19 within a week of each other — blaming “misinformation” for leaving them fearful of the vaccine. Francis Goncalves told Wales Online that dad Basil, 73, is thought to have first got infected on July 6 when he went to a hospital for kidney stones while with his wife and their other son in Portugal. Two days later, the dad had a family meal — which is when he likely also infected his wife, Charmagne, 65, and their son Shaul, 40, who lives with his girlfriend...

A Florida pastor is imploring his parishioners to get vaccinated — after six members of the church recently died from COVID-19 within 10 days. “Four of them were under the age of 35. All of them were healthy, and the only thing they had in common was they were not vaccinated,” Impact Church senior pastor George Davis told told WJXT-TV. One of the victims was a woman who was recently married and had a young daughter, he added to WFLA-TV. “It’s definitely taken a toll on us,” Davis said of the deaths. “Some of [the victims] have been extremely close...

... a large-scale new study in the Journals of Gerontology provides a timely warning: Covid can look different in older patients..... ...when the researchers combed through the electronic health records of nearly 5,000 people, all over the age of 65, who were hospitalized for Covid at a dozen Northwell hospitals in March and April of 2020, they found that one-third had arrived with other symptoms, unexpected ones. The team, searching through records using language software, found that about one-quarter of older patients reported a functional decline. “This was falls, fatigue, weakness, difficulty walking or getting out of bed,” Dr. Marziliano...

Young people are more likely to suffer heart inflammation from COVID-19 infection than they are from the vaccines, a new study finds. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, analyzed data from COVID-19 patients and vaccine recipients aged 12 to 17. They found heart inflammation, also known as myocarditis, after contracting the virus was six times more likely than after receiving the vaccine among teen boys, and 21 times higher among girls. Our results suggest that, even for this high-risk subgroup [young males], the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 infection is about 5.9 times as great, at a...

A Tennessee lawmaker who battled COVID-19 for nearly eight months is encouraging the public to “consider getting vaccinated.” Republican Rep. David Byrd detailed his struggle with the virus in a lengthy statement Friday, describing how the disease put him in an intensive care unit on a ventilator for 55 days. He says his family began planning his funeral. “I have no memories of this time, but my family will certainly never forget it. They were traumatized daily by the distressing updates on my status,” Byrd wrote. Byrd, 63, added that eventually his liver began to fail after he was taken...

BRETT GIROIR: Anyone who’s not vaccinated and who did not have COVID previously, the Delta variant is so contagious that you’re going to get it. It is just a matter of time. If you have prior immunity you do have some protection, but more and more data are telling us that that protection is not so good against Delta. Remember, you can get the Flu every year. It’s not because your immunity isn’t good. It’s because the Flu changes and Delta is really a new strain that is different than everything we’ve seen. So, I am really concerned that natural...

Texas reported 4,320 COVID-19-related hospitalizations on Saturday, a high not seen since mid-March, when the state’s numbers began trending downward. The total marks an increase of over 1,000 hospitalizations from the prior week, when the state reported just shy of 3,000. Last week, the state’s health commissioner noted a 150 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations between June 27 and July 20. Dr. John Hellerstedt, the commissioner of the department of state health services, noted that the delta variant makes up most new cases in Texas. He urged residents who haven’t yet received a COVID-19 vaccine to seek out the shot.

California and its big coastal cities have embraced vaccines to beat back the COVID-19 pandemic. But a Bay Area News Group analysis shows not only are cases rising fast in much of the Golden State, they are soaring in many urban counties that boast high vaccination rates. Five California counties have both a higher percentage of their eligible residents fully vaccinated and a higher average daily case rate than the statewide average: Los Angeles, San Diego, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco. The five counties with falling case rates — Modoc, Glenn, Lassen, Del Norte, San Benito — have below-average...

An Alabama doctor has warned that it’s “too late” to administer the COVID-19 vaccine when patients are in the hospital fighting for their lives. Dr. Brytney Cobia, who works at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, said she’s forced to turn down desperate pleas from COVID-19 patients to be given the vaccine before they’re placed on ventilators. “I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections,” wrote Cobia on Facebook on Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m...

A study of adults in Switzerland who had contracted COVID-19 found that a quarter of them still had symptoms for six to eight months following their illness. Fatigue, shortness of breath and depression were the most common long-term symptoms reported among the group, which the study authors said highlights the need for post-COVID-19 care. “This cohort study based on a representative, population-based sample of SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals found that 26 percent did not fully recover within 6-8 months after diagnosis and 40 percent had at least one further health care contact related to COVID-19,” the study authors, from University of...

Diabetics are at heightened risk for COVID-19 complications, it's known. But the connection might run in two directions: COVID-19 may itself kick off or exacerbate diabetes. A new study shows that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, selectively attacks the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the critical hormone that regulates our circulating blood-sugar levels. The loss of these pancreatic cells, known as beta cells, is the defining feature of type 1 diabetes, understood to be triggered when the body's immune system, for unknown reasons, launches an unprovoked attack on those cells.

At Atlanta's Grady Hospital, all 100 beds in the intensive care unit were full. Then COVID-19 hit. Viral patients are now quarantined wherever the hospital finds space. "The stress is not just capacity," Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Jansen told CBS News. "It's not just stress of supplies, but on the individuals taking care of the patients. Because so much is not known." At all of Atlanta's four major hospitals, every ICU bed is taken. "Just kinda deteriorated," said Justin Anthony, whose cousin is in one of those hospitals. "By Sunday, the fever had not broken and she started coughing....

The Air Force, at California’s request, has assigned 160 doctors, nurses and other health care specialists to the state. Some teams deployed Thursday, including 20 people each to Eisenhower Health Hospital in Riverside County and Adventist Health Lodi Memorial Hospital in San Joaquin County. Both hospitals had beds available for extra patients, but they did not have the staff to care for them. It’s highlighting a growing problem across the state as coronavirus cases increase.

It’s a scene playing out across California. According to state data Friday, all of Southern California and the 12-county San Joaquin Valley to the north had exhausted their regular intensive care unit capacity and some hospitals have begun using "surge" space. In hard-hit Fresno County in central California, a new 50-bed alternate care site opened Friday near the community Regional Medical Center. The beds for COVID-19-negative patients will free up space in area hospitals, where just 13 of some 150 ICU beds were available Friday, said Dan Lynch, the county’s emergency medical services director. Lynch said he expects they will...

Hospitals across the US are being inundated with COVID-19 patients, as the number of people admitted to intensive care units reaches alarming levels, new data shows. There were 129,748 people being cared for at hospitals for the virus Monday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. It marked the 41st consecutive day that COVID-19 hospitalizations had topped 100,000.

India's tally of total infections is second only to the United States, with experts blaming everything from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government has blamed failure to practice physical distancing. The country has been producing oxygen at full capacity for each of the last two days but will have to turn to imports, with the health ministry saying it was planning to import 50,000 metric tons. "The situation is horrible," said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur that was battling a flood of patients, as were hospitals in neighboring Gujarat state...