Public Health

The overdose mortality rate among Black Americans in 2020 was higher than that of white Americans for the first time since 1999, according to a March 2 research letter published in JAMA Psychiatry. 

Cases of the highly transmissible omicron subvariant appear to be doubling every week in the U.S., but there isn't clear evidence BA.2 will cause another major surge, epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, PhD, told Becker's March 2.

The national suicide rate peaked in 2018, and then declined in both 2019 and 2020, according to CDC data released Feb. 25.

The National Institutes of Health has ordered an advisory committee to conduct a broad review of federal policies for experiments that involve potentially dangerous pathogens, The Washington Post reported March 1.

The CDC no longer recommends universal COVID-19 case investigation and contact tracing, instead encouraging health departments to now prioritize those efforts for high-risk settings.

Cases of the omicron subvariant BA.2 are doubling every week in the U.S., according to variant proportion estimates from the CDC.

Maine is seeing a higher average rate of daily COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people than any other state, while West Virginia is reporting the highest rate of daily COVID-19 hospitalizations, according to federal data cited by The New York Times.

Researchers believe they have documented the first instance of a human contracting COVID-19 from white-tailed deer in Ontario, Canada, according to findings published Feb. 25 in the preprint server BioRxiv. 

More than 140 million Americans — about 43 percent of the nation's population — have had COVID-19, according to CDC estimates cited by The Washington Post. 

New data from the height of New York state's omicron surge suggests Pfizer's vaccine offers significantly less protection against infection in children ages 5 to 11 compared to older kids and adults.