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As the coronavirus pandemic moves into what the White House hopes is a “new normal,” the Biden administration has introduced covid.gov, a federal website meant to help Americans who are infected with the virus find the treatment they need quickly and at no cost.
“This website is part of our effort — our continued and ongoing effort — to make sure that people have what they need to deal with Covid as we move into potentially the next phase of this disease,” the White House said on Wednesday.
This new phase, aimed at helping the United States transition to “living with the virus,” has four main goals: protecting against and treating Covid-19, preparing for new variants, avoiding shutdowns and fighting the virus abroad.
During his State of the Union address, President Biden promised to establish a “test-to-treat” program “so people can get tested at a pharmacy, and if they’re positive, receive antiviral pills on the spot at no cost.”
That initiative began on March 8, but few Americans knew where to find one of the 2,000 participating sites, David Leonhardt writes in The New York Times’s The Morning newsletter.
Treatments like Evusheld (a drug that appears to bolster immunity among the immunocompromised) and antiviral pills like Paxlovid from Pfizer (which is highly effective at preventing hospitalization and death among people who are at high risk of severe disease from Covid infection) “are widely available, yet many people remain unaware of them,” he writes. Covid.gov seeks to make the treatments more accessible.
On the website, people can also find the locations of vaccination and testing sites and places to acquire high-quality masks; fill out a form to order eight free at-home coronavirus tests per household; view their community’s risk level according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and get general information on Covid symptoms, treatment, testing and travel.
Much of this information, such as C.D.C. community risk levels and test order forms, was already available elsewhere, but this website is intended to make it more convenient to get coronavirus-related information and supplies all in one place, the White House said in a statement.
“We could not have done this six or eight months ago, because we didn’t have all the tools we have now,” Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said in an interview with NPR.
The website is available in English, Spanish and Chinese. The administration is also making all of these tools available over the phone through the national vaccine hotline at 1-800-232-0233 (TTY 1-888-720-7489), which supports over 150 languages.
The White House also said that people can still be tested and treated by their own health care providers, who can prescribe Covid antivirals at locations where they are being distributed.
In the past two weeks, the United States has seen a 12 percent decrease in average daily cases, according to a New York Times database. In the same time period, hospitalizations have decreased by 33 percent and deaths have decreased by 44 percent.
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Taiwanese officials, who have confirmed the island’s first death linked to a coronavirus vaccine, announced a compensation package of about $209,000 for the relatives of the patient, a woman who had taken the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The payment, announced on Tuesday, was the highest vaccine injury compensation awarded in the self-governing island during the pandemic, officials said.
A spokesman for Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control said it was the first time that experts on the island had been able to identify a direct link between the death of a Covid patient and a Covid vaccine.
In the past, such correlations had been unclear, and compensation for suspected vaccine-related deaths had been considerably smaller, about $17,500. Eligible recipients include victims and their family members.
After receiving her vaccine shot, the patient — a woman in her 50s from Taipei who was identified only by her surname, Yu — experienced an episode of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, according to the health ministry.
According to the case description released by the ministry, the woman had no known history of chronic disease or any other past episodes that could have caused thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, a side effect that can impair clotting and cause internal bleeding.
Millions of people in dozens of countries have received the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine with few reports of ill effects. Last year, Europe’s top drug regulator conducted a review after several countries paused the use of the vaccine. The agency said it considered the vaccine safe, although it would continue to watch for any connections to blood disorders. It noted that any threat would be very small, and that the shots would prevent vastly more deaths than they might cause.
AstraZeneca did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.
Taiwan has kept its total Covid death count relatively low, 853, and reported an average daily case count of 138 over the past week, according to the