Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

  Vidcast:  https://youtu.be/wuj8VZo_4Ac   Ramping up America’s current rather dismal CoVid booster vaccination rate could prevent more than half a million hospitalizations and save at least 70,000 lives.  The CDC reports that, as of last week, only 47% of booster-eligible Americans have received the shot that will offer significant Omicron protection.  The rate of booster vaccination nationwide is only 750,000 persons per day.  Adding the booster to a 2 dose Pfizer vaccination regimen more than doubles the protection against symptomatic Omicron infection and is 90% effective in preventing the need for hospitalization.    Public health specialists at Yale, Toronto’s York University, and the University of Maryland issue this challenge after creating computer models to project the impact of CoVid Omicron’s spread.  Using historical data, a mathematical model predicts that doubling the rate of booster administration to 1.5 million doses/day would prevent 401,897 CoVid hospitalizations and 48,358 deaths.  Triplin