Data Snapshot
UW Medicine Hospitals:
King County: The county reported 302 new positive cases and 2 new deaths on April 1.
Washington: The state reported 341,361 cases and 5,247 deaths as of March 30.
United States: The CDC reports 30,213,759 cases and 548,162 deaths as of March 31.
Global: WHO reports 128,540,982 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 2,808,308 deaths as of March. 31.
Numbers update frequently, please follow links for most up-to-date numbers.
UW Medicine COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Update
Total Vaccine Doses Administered: 172,078
- Total first dose: 97,653
- Total second dose: 74,425
As of March 30, 2021.
UW Medicine in the News
The Seattle Times: Health care workers at the bat
Featuring: UW Medicine
“The outlook is brilliant for the Seattle nine this day. This year! This year our heroes will triumph. They will defeat the evil San Francisco Giants. But the players won’t be the only heroes at Thursday’s season opener, the first fan-attended one in two years. The Mariners and Major League Baseball want all fans to join them in celebrating other heroes who have stepped to the fore during this pandemic year. Doctors, nurses and other health care workers have toiled to keep people safe, healthy and alive. They risked their own lives treating patients who carried the coronavirus, never hesitating to serve. In the early days of the pandemic, Puget Sound communities rang with the public’s joyful evening noise in appreciation of front-line workers, but that practice soon faded. It returns tonight, with a smaller crowd under state pandemic rules. The chief pediatric resident from Seattle Children’s Hospital, Dr. Jonathan Awori, will perform the national anthem before the Mariners game. Dozens of doctors will appear on video. Karen Dykes, clinical infectious disease specialist at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, will throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Meanwhile, the Mariners are partnering with UW Medicine to make COVID-19 vaccines available in underserved communities. The team is contributing $2 million to the partnership, and some current and former players, coaches and broadcasters are participating in a public awareness campaign to encourage vaccinations.”
GeekWire: Microsoft gives $5M to UW Medicine to use AI to accelerate response to next pandemic
Featuring: David Baker, UW Medicine Institute of Protein Design
“The speed of the creation of vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was a modern marvel. You might already have already gotten yours, a little more than a year after the virus overtook the planet. But what if vaccines and therapeutics could emerge even faster in response to the next pandemic? That’s one of the goals of a $5 million gift from Microsoft to the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The funding will be used to find new ways to apply artificial intelligence to protein design. One result, they hope, will be faster creation of therapeutics and vaccines in the next pandemic.”
CNN: It’s possible to reach herd immunity, then lose it. Here’s how to prevent that from happening.
Featuring: Christopher Murray, IHME
“If you think herd immunity is the finish line to this pandemic, it’s time for a reality check. Herd immunity with Covid-19 could come and go, scientists say. Or we might never reach it at all. ‘There’s a lot of things that have to go our way to actually get to herd immunity,’ said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. But don’t panic. Here’s why it’s possible to dip in and out of herd immunity, and what you can do now to maximize the chances of snuffing out Covid-19 for good.”
COVID-19 Literature Report
COVID-19 Literature Situation Report is a daily (M-F) newsletter put together by the Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness that provides a succinct summary of the latest scientific literature related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key Takeaways: COVID-19 Literature Situation Report March 30, 2021
- 93% of the largest 50 private and 50 public US institutions of higher education offered some in-person teaching for the Fall 2020 semester, 71% of which offered a hybrid reopening structure (≥25% students on campus). Nearly all institutions employing mitigation strategies adopted masking and physical distancing mandates, and over half reduced the density of on-campus housing and classroom density. Over half required entry testing for SARS-CoV-2, and 32% required testing at regular intervals. More.
- There was preliminary evidence of possible vaccination-induced herd immunity based on the strong association between increases in the proportion of the community aged 16-50 years who had receive the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Israel and decreases in the SARS-CoV-2 positivity rate among a bystander unvaccinated cohort of people under 16 years old (January to March 2021). The authors caution that these findings could also be a result of increased acquired immunity from prior infection or compliance to public policy guidelines. More.
COVID-19 Literature Surveillance Team, is an affiliated group of medical students, PhDs and physicians keeping up with the latest research on SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 by finding the newest articles, reading them, grading their level of evidence and bringing you the bottom line.
Read the latest report: March 30 | Daily COVID-19 LST Report.
Tweet of the Week
“It’s really elegant mechanism that that we’ve evolved, basically, to be able to handle things like #variants,” said @PepperMarion @UW_Immunology. #COVID19 https://t.co/2mNDscMD6m
— UW Medicine Newsroom (@uwmnewsroom) March 31, 2021
