By Tyler Greer
UAB News
The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced Friday that it will soon offer three appointment-only COVID-19 vaccination sites in Jefferson County with new locations at Parker High School and the Hoover Met joining the current downtown UAB Hospital-Highlands site as community vaccination locations.
The Highlands drive-through location has been vaccinating UAB patients 75 and older since it launched on Jan. 18 and will also welcome patients from Cooper Green Mercy Health Services. The Hoover Met drive-through location is scheduled to begin vaccinating those 75 and older on Tuesday, Feb. 2. The details on the Parker High School location opening and site logistics will be announced soon.
UAB opening two larger sites for more COVID-19 vaccinations in Birmingham area
Updated Jan 30, 2021;
The University of Alabama at Birmingham will open two new sites in coming weeks to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to eligible people in Alabama, said Dr. Sarah Nafziger, vice president of clinical support services at UAB Medicine.
A site at the Hoover Met will open Feb. 2 by appointment for people age 75 and older. Another site at A.H. Parker High School will also open soon. Nafziger said officials at UAB are still working out the details about the Parker High School location.
Both sites will join the health system’s existing drive-through vaccine clinic at UAB Highlands, which has been vaccinating eligible UAB patients against COVID since Jan. 18. UAB announced the additional clinics on the same day Alabama State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris announced increased eligibility to some essential workers and people between the ages of 65 and 74. That starts on Feb. 8.
Ksenia Shestakova/iStock
By DR. MISHAL REJA, ABC News
(NEW YORK) As new COVID-19 variants emerge that are potentially more contagious, specialists say that masks are more important than ever because they will lower the spread of the virus regardless of the variant.
“The variants do not affect the type of mask you need to wear. It does affect the importance of wearing a mask and ensuring that you have a good fit,” Dr. Stanley Weiss, epidemiologist and professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Rutgers School of Public Health, told ABC News.
They key, experts say, is to wear a mask that fits well, and wear it consistently. In some cases, this could mean wearing an extra mask if it’s tolerable, but for most it’s not necessary. So keep it simple and make sure your mask completely covers you mouth and nose and keep it on when you can’t adequately distance.
New tool offers data-driven, precision medicine approach to help scientists better understand COVID-19
It is called PAGER-CoV, and it promises to be an important tool in finding therapies for COVID-19. Simply put, PAGER-CoV is a database packed with nearly 12,000 (so far) pieces of genetic information on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, information that researchers and physicians can use to tailor treatments against the disease.
PAGER-CoV is an extension of PAGER, a database of gene sets created by Jake Chen, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and associate director of the Informatics Institute in the UAB School of Medicine. Chen created PAGER some 10 years ago while he was at Indiana University. As the pandemic spread in early 2020, Chen and his UAB colleagues created a similar system, PAGER-CoV, in response.