Daily COVID Tracker: Biden launches plan to help Americans struggling with long-term effects of illness

US President Joe Biden has launched a plan to help Americans struggling with long-term COVID effects. Here are five updates about the pandemic this Wednesday.

Quebec extends mask mandate

Quebec, the second most populous province in Canada, says it will require masks to be worn in indoor public spaces for all of April.

This delays an earlier plan to relax the measure by the middle of the month.

“We do not expect the mask will be needed after the month of April,” Luc Boileau, the province’s interim public health director, said on Tuesday.

“But we have to wait and see how the progression of this wave will be.”

Quebec on Tuesday reported 1,479 people were hospitalised for COVID-19, up 72 compared from the previous day.

Second booster shields elderly from COVID — but protection wanes quickly, says study

A large study in Israel has found that a fourth dose of the Pfizer vaccine lowered rates of COVID-19 among the elderly but the protection against infection appeared short-lived.

The researchers said a second booster’s protection against infection dwindled after four weeks.

The study was based on 1.3 million people aged 60 and older and looked at data from the Israeli ministry of health database between January 10 and March 2, when the Omicron variant was predominant.

The study said protection against severe illness did not wane during the six weeks after the dose but more follow-up study was needed to evaluate its longer-term protection.

Whole of Shanghai enters COVID lockdown

Chinese authorities on Tuesday extended a lockdown in Shanghai to cover all of the city.

The government had initially widened the broader lockdown to eastern and western districts after testing saw asymptomatic COVID-19 cases surge to more than 13,000. Symptomatic cases reportedly fell on Monday to 268, from 425 the previous day.

“Shanghai’s epidemic prevention and control is at the most difficult and most critical stage,” Wu Qianyu, an official with the municipal health commission, said.

“We must adhere to the general policy of dynamic clearance without hesitation, without wavering.”

Biden launches US plan to help Americans struggling with long-term COVID effects

US President Joe Biden has launched a national action plan to tackle long COVID, a term used to describe the effects of COVID-19 that continue for weeks or months beyond the initial illness.

Under the new plan, $20 million will be invested next year to investigate how healthcare systems can best help those with long COVID and develop multi-specialty clinics across the country.

The plan calls for allocating an additional $25 million to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from Biden’s 2023 budget to better understand and find solutions to characteristics, risk factors, underlying mechanisms, and health impacts of long COVID.

‘China Kintor’s COVID drug candidate cuts hospital, death risk in trial’

China’s Kintor Pharmaceutical has announced that its potential COVID-19 treatment proxalutamide effectively reduced the risk of hospitalisation and death in a clinical trial involving outpatients with mild to moderate symptoms.

The company said results came from a multi-national clinical trial with over 700 subjects across the world, mostly from the United States, recruited during April-December, 2021, who were given either proxalutamide or a placebo.

Six in the placebo group were hospitalised, including one death, versus no death or hospitalisation in the group taking proxalutamide.

For all subjects who took at least one day of treatment, Proxalutamide reduced the risk of hospitalisation or death by 50% while for subjects with more than one day of treatment, the risk was reduced by 71%.