Month: June 2021

New York City will begin offering in-school Covid-19 vaccinations for kids aged 12 to 17, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday.  The program will start at four schools in the Bronx on Friday and will eventually expand to all five boroughs in the next few weeks. The city is partnering with UFT, a labor union that represents most teachers in the NYC public school system, to get as many kids over 12 years of age vaccinated before the school year ends later this month, de Blasio said. Currently, around 118,000 New York City kids aged 12 through 17 have been vaccinated, comprising about 23% of the city’s kids in that age range, de Blasio said. To date, New York City has administered over 8.3 million vaccine doses, de Blasio said. The mayor also announced that the New York Aquarium will bec...

WASHINGTON: Global land-use changes including forest fragmentation, agricultural expansion and concentrated livestock production are creating 'hot spots' favourable for bats that carry coronaviruses and where conditions are ripe for the diseases to jump from bats to humans, finds a new study. The findings were published by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the Politecnico di Milano (Polytechnic University of Milan) and the Massey University of New Zealand. While the exact origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus remain unclear, scientists believe that the disease likely emerged when a virus that infects horseshoe bats was able to jump to humans, either directly through wildlife-to-human contact, or indirectly by first infecting an intermediate animal host, such as the pango...

The Australian state of Victoria extended on Wednesday a snap coronavirus lockdown in its capital of Melbourne for a second week, as it scrambles to rein in a highly contagious variant first detected in India, but will ease some curbs elsewhere. Last Thursday's lockdown in Australia's second most populous state was to have run until Thursday, following the detection of the first locally acquired cases in three months, but infections rose and the number of close contacts reached several thousand. "If we let this thing run its course, it will explode," the state's acting Premier James Merlino told reporters in Melbourne. "This variant of concern will become uncontrollable and people will die." "No one...wants to repeat last winter," he added, referring to one of the world's strictest and lo...

Adding some movement to your day could lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, according to new guidelines from the American Heart Association. The association advised that people with mild to moderate high blood pressure and high cholesterol can lower them with exercise. People don't need to have an intense session at the gym to achieve the activity level necessary to reap the benefits, said Bethany Barone Gibbs, lead author of the AHA's scientific statement and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Health and Human Development and Clinical and Translational Science. "Though planned exercise is great, just getting more active in your everyday life -- like taking the stairs and picking up the pace while you walk the dog -- can also give you the same benefi...