Some Good News About COVID and Vaccines

The good news about COVID-19 to start out the week is welcome news.

It helps to brunt the impact of all the bad news we’ve been hearing since the Delta variant of the virus started filling up emergency rooms and hospital beds.

For us, here in California, the best news to start the week is the fact that our state now has the lowest case rate of infections in the entire country. 25 new confirmed cases per 100,000 in California as of Sunday. With us being the most populated state, that is good news.

There was more good news that came this morning when Pfizer announced that it its trials of a COVID vaccine for children from 5 to 11 years old, showed that it was safe and produced what they called a robust anti-body response in the more than two thousand kids in the trial.

The news from Pfizer was expected, and the other vaccine makers are doing trials that are probably going to result in the same findings. While the Pfizer data will still have to be reviewed and approved by the FDA, a vaccine for these elementary age kids who are back at school, it has been anxiously anticipated by a lot of parents.

And school administrators have been looking at a vaccine for these 5–11-year-old kids as being the way to really help things get back to normal more quickly this school year. Having had a vaccine for kids 12 and older already into the arms of lots of those junior high and high school students has already made a difference.

But as one school district superintendent told a reporter this weekend, what schools are still facing right now is “recovering from a pandemic, while still going through a pandemic.”

So, the sooner these vaccines are approved for younger children and as more and more adults keep getting vaccinated now to help protect the kids, the sooner things will get back to normal in schools and everywhere.

(Photo Getty Images)