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Category: Health

Trump administration falls far short of vaccination goals as new virus variant looms

Trump administration falls far short of vaccination goals as new virus variant looms

The Washington Post reports: Logistical problems at the heart of the federal government’s faltering rollout of coronavirus vaccines came into sharper view Thursday as the Trump administration fell vastly short of its goal of delivering an initial shot to 20 million people by the end of December. On the final day of a bleak year, only about 2.8 million people had received the shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the first of two doses needed…

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The mutated coronavirus variant is a ticking time bomb

The mutated coronavirus variant is a ticking time bomb

Zeynep Tufekci writes: A new variant of the coronavirus is spreading across the globe. It was first identified in the United Kingdom, where it is rapidly spreading, and has been found in multiple countries. Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a…

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Trump’s failure to rise to the Covid challenge

Trump’s failure to rise to the Covid challenge

The New York Times reports: It was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic. “You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a…

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The worst idea of 2020: Natural herd immunity

The worst idea of 2020: Natural herd immunity

Brian Resnick writes: It’s year-end-list season. Usually, the Vox science team has some fun and compiles a year-end list of bad ideas in health and science that ought to die with the end of the year. In the past, we’ve targeted homeopathic medicine, declared it was time to end the relevance of the fatally flawed Stanford Prison Experiment, and dispelled myths about climate change. This year, though, we have only one target for intellectual demolition. With the end of 2020,…

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How getting vaccinated will and won’t change my behavior

How getting vaccinated will and won’t change my behavior

Dhruv Khullar writes: Beyond the dread that I feel for my patients, my work as a physician on the coronavirus wards has instilled in me two related fears. The first fear, which surges each time I learn about another of the nearly two thousand health-care workers who have died of Covid-19, is that I will get infected and fall seriously ill. A second, deeper and more persistent, fear is that I will pass the virus to my family. It’s because…

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Whether slow or fast, here’s how your metabolism influences how many calories you burn each day

Whether slow or fast, here’s how your metabolism influences how many calories you burn each day

Why does it seem like some people can eat anything and not gain a pound while others are the opposite? Heide Benser/The Image Bank via Getty Images Terezie Tolar-Peterson, Mississippi State University It’s a common dieter’s lament: “Ugh, my metabolism is so slow, I’m never going to lose any weight.” When people talk about a fast or slow metabolism, what they’re really getting at is how many calories their body burns as they go about their day. The idea is…

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U.S. confirms first case of the new Covid strain discovered in UK

U.S. confirms first case of the new Covid strain discovered in UK

CNBC reports: The first case of a new and potentially more infectious strain of Covid-19 has been confirmed in the United States, Colorado health officials said Tuesday. Colorado health officials confirmed the case and notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infected individual is in isolation in Elbert County, about an hour and a half south of Denver. Officials said the man, who is in his 20s, does not have a travel history. “There is a lot we…

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Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

NBC News reports: The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday. The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of…

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‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

NPR reports: The virus infecting thousands of Americans a day is also attacking the country’s social fabric. The coronavirus has exposed a weakness in many rural communities, where divisive pandemic politics are alienating some of their most critical residents — health care workers. A wave of departing medical professionals would leave gaping holes in the rural health care system, and small-town economies, triggering a death spiral in some of these areas that may be hard to stop. Ten years ago,…

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L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong

L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong

The Los Angeles Times reports: Los Angeles is careening toward catastrophe. An explosion of COVID-19 patients has begun to flood hospitals and may soon force doctors to ration care. The number of available beds in intensive care units is rapidly dropping to zero, as healthcare providers plead with people not to come to emergency rooms unless it’s a matter of life or death. “Ambulances are circling hospitals for hours trying to find one that has a bed open so they…

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Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

AFP reports: Russia said on Monday that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities. For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries. But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government…

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Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

The New York Times reports: A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic. Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of…

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Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals

Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals

The Wall Street Journal reports: As the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices walloped U.S. frackers this spring, Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks got a $35 million relief loan to help one of their fracking companies stay afloat. At the same time, they were on a buying spree in the country’s oil patch. Since spring, businesses controlled by the Wilks brothers have hunted for deals among fracking firms going through bankruptcy and taken or increased stakes in at least…

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A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

The New York Times reports: In the top echelons of classical music, the violinist Jennifer Koh is by any measure a star. With a dazzling technique, she has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about — appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Now, nine months into a contagion that has halted most public gatherings and decimated the performing arts, Ms. Koh, who watched a year’s…

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The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

James Hamblin writes: The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human…

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The U.K. coronavirus mutation is worrying but not terrifying

The U.K. coronavirus mutation is worrying but not terrifying

Sara Reardon writes: A new mutated form of the novel coronavirus that appears more transmissible than the original has raised alarm in the U.K. and around the world. It does not appear to cause more severe disease, and the newly available vaccines do seem to protect people against it. Yet on December 19—after an announcement that the variant, dubbed B.1.1.7, had suddenly accumulated 17 mutations and was spreading rapidly in the U.K.—the nation’s prime minister Boris Johnson announced stricter lockdowns…

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