Tom Wolf Joe Biden Andy Carter state Pennsylvania city Harrisburg hospital patient Health Tom Wolf Joe Biden Andy Carter state Pennsylvania city Harrisburg

Gov. Wolf signs fast-tracked $225M for health care workers

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HARRISBURG - Two months after the omicron variant of the coronavirus slammed hospitals with unvaccinated patients, Gov.

Tom Wolf signed fast-tracked legislation Wednesday to help keep burned-out health care workers on board during a staffing crisis.The House unanimously approved the bill earlier Wednesday just before Wolf signed it.

It authorizes $225 million, mostly for hospitals to give workers retention and recruitment payments.Of that, about $36 million will go to facilities that provide inpatient behavioral health services.Another $15 million will go to an oversubscribed program promising nurses up to $7,500 in student loan-debt relief, although officials acknowledged that the extra money still will not satisfy all of the more than 8,000 applications it has received.The money is from federal pandemic relief signed by President Joe Biden last March.The 14-day moving average of hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients hit an all-time high of above 7,000 in recent days.

The surge in unvaccinated patients came during what Andy Carter, the CEO of the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, called "the most severe health care staffing shortage in recent memory."MORE CORONAVIRUS HEADLINESNeither lawmakers nor Wolf administration officials could estimate how many health care workers will be eligible for an increase in pay.

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Omicron 75% less likely to cause death than Delta COVID-19 variant: South Korean data
Omicron coronavirus variant are nearly 75% less likely to develop serious illness or die than those who contract the Delta variant, real world data released on Monday by South Korea’s health authorities showed.A study by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) of some 67,200 infections confirmed since December showed the Omicron variant’s severity and death rates averaged 0.38% and 0.18%, respectively, compared with 1.4% and 0.7% for the Delta cases.The KDCA classed severe cases as people who were hospitalised in intensive care units. COVID cases exceed 400 million globally as Omicrons spreads Around 56% of 1,073 people who died over the past five weeks were either unvaccinated or had received only one dose, the study showed, with people aged 60 or older accounting for 94% of deaths.More than 86% of South Korea’s 52 million population have been double vaccinated and nearly 60% have received a booster shot.South Korea had kept cases and deaths relatively low thanks to widespread social distancing measures and aggressive testing and tracing.The Omicron variant has led to a surge in cases — daily new infections topped a record 100,000 last week — but authorities have pushed ahead with slightly easing social distancing rules amid the lower fatality rate and ahead of a presidential election next month.Contact tracing and mandatory isolation for vaccinated people was scrapped in favour of self diagnosis and at-home treatment to free up medical resources.
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