Month: September 2020

A Florida family is sharing their story in hopes that their tragedy can bring awareness to others to know the risk of warm waters after their son died due to a brain-eating amoeba. Tanner Wall loved the water, but his parents believe it's what was in the water at a Florida lake that took his life at just 13 years old. Tanner's parents told WJXT that the teen went on a family trip to a campground in north Florida. Four days later he became sick. SEE ALSO: Brain-eating amoebas: 8 things you need to know His parents said he suffered from nausea, vomiting and bad headaches. When they took Tanner to the emergency room, he was diagnosed with strep throat. But his parents thought it was worse than that. SEE ALSO: 6-year-old boy dies suddenly of brain-eating amoeba "Finally, I got pretty irat...

For five days, the FedEx plane sat on the tarmac in Shanghai. American scientists at Novavax, a biotech company in suburban Maryland, waited with increasing impatience. The plane held a copy of a key gene from the newly discovered coronavirus. Novavax needed the gene to try to develop a vaccine. The scientists had been in similar situations before. Every time a new disease came along – SARS, MERS, Ebola – they made candidate vaccines to see whether they could tame it. They thought of their research as an experiment. But the longer the plane remained stuck, the more they wondered if this time might not be a drill. Race to the vaccine The second of an occasional USA TODAY series about efforts to rapidly develop and deliver a vaccine against the coronavirus. By Jan. 30, the fourth day, th...

On September 8th, as the daily coronavirus case count ticked up to 28,550, the executive editor of The Verge received a strange email. “TC Sottek: We would like to inform you that you have been recorded as leaving your home on 3 occasions yesterday. A fine of $59 has been added to your gov.us account.” The fine had increased from $35 on September 1st, when Andrew J. Hawkins, a transportation reporter, received the same email. Both were told to visit www.gov.us/coronavirus/penalty-payment/tracking for more information. Unsurprisingly, this was not the US government suddenly taking a more active role in the pandemic. It was a scam, one not particularly attuned to the Trump administration’s hands-off approach to solving the coronavirus crisis...

Although nearly 30 states are reporting downward trends in coronavirus cases, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned the nation not to let its collective guard down during the ongoing pandemic with the arrival of the flu season. “We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it’s not going to be easy,” the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases said Thursday during a panel of doctors from Harvard Medical School, NBC News reported. The illness has claimed more than 190,000 lives in the US, which has more than 6 million confirmed cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. But those are just the infections that have been recorded, so the actual number could be far greater. Many may have been infected without knowing, as the...