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Category: Health

Why walking helps us think

Why walking helps us think

Ferris Jabr writes: In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by…

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Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Peter G. Lurie writes: In striking testimony before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in December 2020, Pierre Kory, a critical care physician who formerly worked for the University of Wisconsin Health University Hospital, described the “immense potency” of ivermectin, characterizing it as effectively a “miracle drug.” “All studies are positive,” he testified, “with considerable magnitude benefits, with the vast majority reaching strong statistical significance.” Unfortunately, and not for the first time in the Covid-19 pandemic, the…

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Vaccinated Democratic counties are leading the U.S. economic recovery

Vaccinated Democratic counties are leading the U.S. economic recovery

Joshua Green writes: With Covid-19 cases once again rising across the country, the U.S. is struggling to curb the latest, delta-driven surge, as hospitalizations and deaths have steadily climbed. But at least so far, the economy has proved highly resilient. There are many reasons for this, ranging from generous stimulus checks to the Federal Reserve’s commitment to buying bonds and holding interest rates low. But some interesting new data on the overlap of electoral politics and economic dynamism suggest another…

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Arkansas runs out of intensive care beds for Covid patients

Arkansas runs out of intensive care beds for Covid patients

The Associated Press reports: Arkansas on Tuesday ran out of intensive care unit beds for COVID-19 patients for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began, Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced, as a surge in cases continued overwhelming hospitals in the state. The state’s ICU capacity for COVID patients barely eased hours after Hutchinson’s announcement, with only one hospital in southeast Arkansas showing availability, according to the state’s system for coordinating coronavirus patients. Virus patients make up about half of the…

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Costa Ricans live longer than Americans. What’s their secret?

Costa Ricans live longer than Americans. What’s their secret?

Atul Gawande writes: Life expectancy tends to track national income closely. Costa Rica has emerged as an exception. Searching a newer section of the cemetery that afternoon, I found only one grave for a child. Across all age cohorts, the country’s increase in health has far outpaced its increase in wealth. Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States—and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours—life expectancy there is approaching eighty-one years. In…

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A lucky few seem ‘resistant’ to Covid-19. Scientists want to know why

A lucky few seem ‘resistant’ to Covid-19. Scientists want to know why

STAT reports: Her husband collapsed just before reaching the top of the stairs in their small one-bedroom house in São Paulo, Brazil. Frantic, Thais Andrade grabbed the portable pulse oximeter she had purchased after hearing that a low oxygen reading could be the first sign of the novel coronavirus. Erik’s reading was hovering eight points lower than it had that morning. He also looked feverish. “When he hit 90% [on the oximeter], I said we can’t wait anymore,” Andrade recalled….

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In Texas, hundreds of patients are waiting to be admitted into hospitals, but there are no beds

In Texas, hundreds of patients are waiting to be admitted into hospitals, but there are no beds

Click2Houston.com reports: Emergency room doctors in Southeast Texas say they are running out of hospital beds, and some patients are waiting hours, sometimes days to be admitted into a hospital. “Are there patients dying because of this that might not have died? Absolutely, yes,” said Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council CEO, Darrell Pile. “I am very concerned about the fatalities that are about to happen.” As of Friday afternoon, Pile says 482 patients were waiting for hospital beds in his…

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Why the coronavirus has changed as it has, and what it means going forward

Why the coronavirus has changed as it has, and what it means going forward

STAT reports: It’s impossible to say how the coronavirus will continue to evolve. Those changes, after all, are a result of random mutations. But there are some fundamental principles that explain why the virus has morphed as it has, principles that could guide our understanding of its ongoing evolution — and what that means for our future with the pathogen. The great fear is that nature could spit out some new variant that completely saps the power of vaccines and…

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Work is a false idol

Work is a false idol

Cassady Rosenblum writes: In China this April, a 31-year-old former factory worker named Luo Huazhong drew the curtains and crawled into bed. Then he posted a picture of himself there to the Chinese website Baidu along with a message: “Lying Flat Is Justice.” “Lying flat is my sophistic movement,” Mr. Luo wrote, tipping his hat to Diogenes the Cynic, a Greek philosopher who is said to have lived inside a barrel to criticize the excesses of Athenian aristocrats. On Chinese…

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Monoclonal antibodies are free and effective against Covid-19, but few people are getting them

Monoclonal antibodies are free and effective against Covid-19, but few people are getting them

The Washington Post reports: When Mike Burton came down with a breakthrough case of covid-19 earlier this month, the infection posed a double threat to his family. At 73, the retired surgeon faced elevated risk of serious illness. His wife, Linda, has a suppressed immune system, the result of drugs she takes after two liver transplants that put her in greater danger of life-threatening illness. The Burtons, both vaccinated, moved to separate parts of their Mount Sterling, Ky., home, masked…

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New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

The Guardian reports: To overseas eyes, going into national lockdown over a single case should have been a hard sell, even for an extraordinarily popular prime minister such as Jacinda Ardern. But a disastrous outbreak of the Delta variant in Sydney has helped galvanise New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” – and across the country, the government’s tough strategy on Covid-19 has enjoyed widespread popular support. On Tuesday, New Zealand was plunged into a national, level 4 lockdown – the…

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U.S. to advise boosters for most Americans eight months after vaccination

U.S. to advise boosters for most Americans eight months after vaccination

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration has decided that most Americans should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, and could begin offering third shots as early as mid-September, according to administration officials familiar with the discussions. Officials are planning to announce the decision as early as this week. Their goal is to let Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines know now that they will need additional protection against the…

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As Delta surges, Covid breakthrough cases among vaccinated people remain uncommon

As Delta surges, Covid breakthrough cases among vaccinated people remain uncommon

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus appears to be breaking through the protection vaccines provide at a higher rate than previous strains, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, though infections among the fully inoculated remain a tiny fraction of overall cases, and symptoms tend to be milder. U.S. states counted at least 193,204 so-called breakthrough cases among vaccinated people between Jan. 1 and early August, according to data that health departments in 44 states…

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How will the coronavirus evolve?

How will the coronavirus evolve?

Dhruv Khullar writes: In 1988, Richard Lenski, a thirty-one-year-old biologist at UC Irvine, started an experiment. He divided a population of a common bacterium, E. coli, into twelve flasks. Each flask was kept at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and contained an identical cocktail of water, glucose, and other nutrients. Each day, as the bacteria replicated, Lenski transferred several drops of each cocktail to a new flask, and every so often he stored samples away in a freezer. His goal was to…

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Surge in the South places U.S. among nations with highest rate of new Covid-19 cases

Surge in the South places U.S. among nations with highest rate of new Covid-19 cases

CNN reports: The US remains among nations with the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases, driven mostly by a surge in the South, where many states are lagging in getting people vaccinated against the coronavirus. “This is starting to look really ominous in the South. … If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they’re actually probably the highest in the world,” Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College…

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Massive new analysis confirms just how many Covid cases are truly asymptomatic

Massive new analysis confirms just how many Covid cases are truly asymptomatic

Science Alert reports: Within months of SARS-CoV-2’s emergence as a global catastrophe it was becoming clear that many who spread the disease did so unwittingly, experiencing not so much as a tickle in their throat to alert them of the danger within. Distinguishing those who are truly asymptomatic from those who are simply yet to show signs of the virus has made it hard to calculate a precise figure on the risks of succumbing to the illness. Now an analysis…

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