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The sooner a pregnant woman gets a COVID-19 vaccine, the more likely she is to transfer protective antibodies to her baby, a new, small study suggests. “This just gives extra fuel for people who are on the fence or just think, ‘Maybe I’ll wait until after I deliver,'” said study co-author Dr. Emily Miller. She’s an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and a maternal fetal medicine physician at Northwestern University School of Medicine.

“The challenge is that high cholesterol is often asymptomatic,” says Dr. Kunal Karmali, a cardiologist with Northwestern Medicine. He continued: “People only feel symptoms when they have blockages in those arteries. “I think tingling, particularly in the legs, or achiness, can sometimes be symptoms of leg arteries having blockages. “Those blockages could have formed because of high levels of cholesterol, and so that brings us back to the importance of prevention.”

“Now we’re seeing a plateau, and the reason we have this plateau is that the populations who are now more likely to contract and spread it weren’t in the initial phases of vaccination,” said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist and vice chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “With the virus itself mutating to become more infectious, it is now infecting younger adults and children, who are more exposed and circulating right now.”

The brain fog that patients describe shares similarities with post-traumatic brain injuries as well as the brain fog associated with chemotherapy and chronic fatigue syndrome, says Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. He oversees the Neuro Covid-19 Clinic at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and is senior author of the recent study looking at neurologic symptoms in long Covid patients.

When juveniles are arrested with psychiatric disorders that remain untreated, they can struggle with mental health for many years to come, according to research from Northwestern Medicine.

Altogether, four prominent teaching hospitals – U of C, University of Illinois Hospital, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Rush University Medical Center – received almost 240,000 doses, or almost 30% of the nearly one million doses shipped to providers in Chicago. Each of these hospitals is now receiving more than 5,000 doses a week – up to 10 times what Heartland’s been recently getting.

“We know the recipe for a surge,” said Dr. Khalilah Gates, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “It is traveling, vacationing, gathering.” Gates noted there was also a surge around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

“If the finding can be translated in humans, they have to show that cortisol can push growing hair follicles into the rest phase,” said Rui Yi, a professor in the departments of pathology and dermatology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who was not involved in the study.

It’s already been established that more research into coronavirus vaccination and transmission is needed, but experts believe equity could be an additional concern with vaccine passports. “It is hard to imagine how vaccine passports could be put into place in a way that would make travel safer around the world in an equitable manner,” Mercedes Carnethon, vice chairwoman of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, says in an email.

Still, stories like Higgins’s are rare in the United States for a number of reasons, including the tiny market for patients in their 50s and older who want to carry a pregnancy, and certain medical guidelines that discourage IVF in patients older than 55, said Eve Feinberg, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University. “I’m inspired by the miracle of science,” Feinberg told The Washington Post. “They took a really big gamble; they luckily ended up on the favorable side of things.”