Author: Amaury Abreu

Casting Notice Walnut Street Theatre is casting local Philadelphia-based Spanish speaking singers and dancers for its spring 2022 production of “ON YOUR FEET! The Story of Emilio & Gloria Estefan.” Performers of ALL Latinx backgrounds encouraged to apply. Alex Sanchez, whose staging has been seen Off-Broadway, nationally and internationally, will be directing and choreographing the production. This production will be a joint co-production between two theatres – Riverside Theatre in Vero Beach, Florida, and Walnut Street Theatre here in Philadelphia. Some of the cast will do both productions and some of the cast will do only Philadelphia based on the…

It’s clear that the Delta variant is more contagious than previous COVID-19 strains, as evidenced by the soaring case counts in the U.S. and around the world. But the big question has been whether it causes more severe disease than earlier versions of the virus that causes COVID-19. A peer-reviewed study published Friday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases suggests it can. According to the paper, people in England who got infected with the Delta variant were more likely to be hospitalized than those who got infected with the Alpha variant. The vast majority of the more than 43,000 COVID-positive people…

As the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic continues, more companies are starting to require coronavirus vaccines for their employees. But this week, Delta Air Lines chose a different tactic when it became the first major U.S. company to say it will charge more for health insurance if employees do not get vaccinated. Some may see this as a compromise between vaccine mandates and more positive incentives, but experts say it could be complicated to execute and that there’s no way to tell how effective it will be. The move represents the tricky calculus employers are being forced to make…

In the largest long-term study of COVID-19 patients yet to be published, researchers in China report in the Lancet worrying results of the disease’s lingering impact on people’s health. The scientists, led by Dr. Bin Cao from the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing, studied 1,276 people discharged between January to May 2020 from Jin Yin-Tan Hospital in Wuhan after being hospitalized for COVID-19. The patients all agreed to health visits at six and 12 months after their symptoms first appeared; at each of those points, the researchers compared the health status of the study participants with that of comparable people…

Aug. 20 was a good day in the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. Carvase Perrilloux, a two-month-old baby who’d come in about a week earlier with respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19, was finally ready to breathe without the ventilator keeping his tiny body alive. “You did it!” nurses in PPE cooed as they removed the tube from his airway and he took his first solo gasp, bare toes kicking. Downstairs, Quintetta Edwards was preparing for her 17-year-old son, Nelson Alexis III, to be discharged after spending more than two weeks in the hospital with COVID-19—first in…

(NEW YORK) — Half of American workers are in favor of vaccine requirements at their workplaces, according to a new poll, at a time when such mandates gain traction following the federal government’s full approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that about 59% of remote workers favor vaccine requirements in their own workplaces, compared with 47% of those who are currently working in person. About one-quarter of workers — in person and remote — are opposed. The sentiment is similar for workplace mask mandates, with 50% of Americans working…

Some two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Aug. 18 that nursing homes must require their staff to get vaccinated or risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding, Genesis HealthCare, which manages about 250 facilities nationwide that offer long-term care and other services, had said its workers would need to be vaccinated. “The growing spread of the Delta variant makes clear that we need to increase our vaccination rates substantially to better protect our patients, residents and employees,” read an Aug. 2 memo to employees, noting that 65% of staffers were vaccinated at that point; employees had until…

Well hello! I’m so glad you’re here. A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition every Saturday. After another week of searing headlines about just about everything—global climate issues, the unfurling tragedies in Afghanistan, in Louisiana and parts south, the pandemic—all of it left me sleepless and sad and cynical. The latter is the most corrosive emotion I can think of right now, and when I’m not that ditch, it’s getting harder to imagine what our future looks like as the sands continue to sink and shift…

On Thursday, as Hurricane Ida loomed as a Category 4 storm that threatened massive flooding, high winds and power outages along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, health administrators at Marrero Healthcare Center, located just northeast of where Ida made landfall, decided to evacuate upwards of 80 residents to safer ground. Two days of hurried packing later, the residents, most of whom are ambulatory, piled onto two school buses from LaFourche Parish for the expected four hour and 40 minute ride inland. Another bus transported medical supplies and equipment as well as food for the trip. Twenty one of the bed-bound residents were…

In March, when President Biden announced that COVID-19 vaccines would soon be available to all Americans, my husband and I decided to press pause on the whole maybe-getting-pregnant-soon thing. We would get our vaccines first, have a Hot Vaxxed Summer full of booze and parties, and then go back to the kids question once we had shaken off the COVID cobwebs. Lucky for us, it was too late: it turned out I was already pregnant. I was thrilled, but also anxious. I had been all-in on getting the vaccine; getting it while pregnant was a different story. At the time,…