Month: May 2021

As per the new evaluation by experts, the B1617 Covid-19 variant is spreading global-wide at a ‘frightening speed’ and could make the pandemic much worse, especially in countries with low vaccination rates. It is also reported that the B1617 strain is rapidly increasing with steeper slopes than many other variants and this will not be the last time that the virus mutates. “The terrifying thing is the unimaginable pace at which this variant is able to spread and circulate widely within the community, often surpassing the capability of contact-tracing units to track and isolate exposed contacts to break the transmission chains,” a Professor Teo Yik Ying, Dean of the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health sai...

BACK UP TO 50 BY 5:00 P.M. WITH A FEW ISOLATED SHOWERS. ALYX: RIGHT NOW, MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE GETTING READY OR ARE ALREADY TRAVELING FOR THE HOLIDAY WEEKEND. THIS IS A LIVE LOOK AT LAX. DARK AND EARLY, JUST ABOUT 4:00. ERIC: AAA EXPECTS 60% MORE PEOPLE ON THE ROAD THIS YEAR AS WE MARK THE UNOFFICIAL START TO SUMMER. ALYX: COVID-19 RESTRICTIONS HAVE EASED UP ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY BUT THERE ARE STILL REQUIREMENTS IF YOU WANT TO TRAVEL. KCCI’S TOMMIE CLARK IS LIVE AT THE DES MOINES INTERNATIALON AIRPORT WITH THE DETAILS. TOMMIE: LIKE YOU SAID, TRAVEL REALLY IS KICKING .UP WE ARE STILL SEEING ABOUT 6 MILLION FEWER THAN PRE-PANDEMIC COMPARED TO THE NUMBER YOU SAID. YOU CAN SEE THE DES MOINES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT HERE, WE HAVE PEOPLE GETTING READY FOR MEMORIAL DAY TRAVEL. WE J...

For families of those who are dying now, the entire issue of vaccination has created a new layer of discomfort — and a set of difficult questions no one was asking in the early months of the crisis, before vaccines. Hollie Rivers has been devastated in the weeks since her husband, Antwone, died in Michigan. Mr. Rivers had helped raise their blended family of five children, Ms. Rivers said, and had worked his way up to the manager level at his job at a vehicle logistics company. She said he became her life partner — the “Charlie,” as she called him, to her “Angel.” At his funeral in May, she helped carry the coffin. “I wanted to hold him until the very end, until I couldn’t hold him any longer,” Ms. Rivers, 28, said. But after Ms. Rivers gave an interview to a Detroit-area television stati...

Do you have trouble keeping the names Covid-19 variants straight, and struggle to distinguish B.1.1.7 from B.1.351 or B.1.617.2? The World Health Organization wants to help. On Monday, it announced a new naming system it devised for so-called variants of interest and variants of concern, the forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with important mutations. Each variant will be given a name from the Greek alphabet, in a bid to both simplify the public discussion and to strip some of the stigma from the emergence of new variants. A country may be more willing to report it has found a new variant if it knows the new version of the virus will be identified as Rho or Sigma rather than with the country’s name, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s coronavirus lead, told STAT in an interview. advertisement Under...