Month: August 2020

A woman fighting cancer is speaking up after seeing one too many people breaking public health orders in her El Dorado County community. "It's very scary to me that people are coming up here with no mask," said Tullia Natalia, a Pollock Pines resident. "My thing is, I'm gonna die of COVID, while I'm fighting breast cancer."Natalia was diagnosed around two years ago. She underwent a hysterectomy and lost her second breast last month. As COVID-19 death numbers continue to rise, Natalia is increasingly concerned seeing people not wearing face masks or social distancing. She is especially worried about out-of-town visitors renting the Airbnb property next door to her home. "It makes me feel like I'm being violated as a cancer patient. That's not OK," Natalia said. El Dorado County is now...

August 10, 2020 at 12:25 AM EDT Trump’s executive actions spark confusion among businesses, state officials; Democrats assail them as ‘unworkable’ President Trump’s new executive actions to disburse coronavirus relief without congressional approval sparked confusion and frustration on Sunday among businesses, Democrats and state officials, some of whom lamented the moves would not deliver the necessary relief to cash-strapped Americans. Trump’s directives were aimed at offering new unemployment benefits, protecting renters from eviction and postponing the payment of a federal tax. But some economists and experts faulted these policies as incomplete or legally questionable — raising the prospect that the president’s attempt to boost the economy may have only a muted impact. By Tony Romm,...

Anadolu AgencyGetty Images As if the threat of murder hornets and mosquito-borne illnesses weren't enough, now "zombie cicadas" have arrived in the United States and we've never been more excited to use our canopy chairs with bug guard and hide from this savage insect community. According to CBS News, "zombie cicadas" have been spotted in West Virginia. Fortunately, these mutant critters appear harmless to humans, yet the process in which “zombie cicadas” infect others is quite bizarre. Unlike your average noisy chirping cicadas, these "zombie cicadas" are infected with a fungus called Massospora that basically eats away at their mind and body. A study recently published in PLOS Pathogens compares the transmission of Massospora, known a...

Part of what makes coronavirus so highly contagious is its sneaky, asymptomatic incubation period. Until recently, the rule of thumb was that most cases became apparent between one and 14 days after exposure, with most cases revealing themselves with symptoms sometime around the fourth or fifth day. But one new study published in the journal Science Advances has determined patients may remain asymptomatic for longer than previously believed. As it turns out, patients are most likely to show their first symptoms approaching day eight. While just 10 percent of the infected study subjects remained asymptomatic for a full 14 days, the researchers found that the median incubation period was 7.75 days, three to four...

“If everyone wore a mask, we could stop up to 99% of these droplets before they reach someone else,” study co-author Dr. Eric Westman, a physician at Duke, said in a statement. “In the absence of a vaccine or antiviral medicine, it’s the one proven way to protect others as well as yourself.”