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White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci is warning vaccinated Americans of a coming “double whammy” as winter approaches and the Delta variant of the Chinese coronavirus spreads, citing “waning immunity” and essentially warning that vaccinated individuals are not fully protected. Speaking in an interview debuted at the 2021 STAT Summit Tuesday, Fauci said: The somewhat unnerving aspect of it is that if you keep the level of dynamics of the virus in the community at a high level — obviously the people who are most most vulnerable are the unvaccinated — but when you have a virus as transmissible...

As the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus gained traction around the world, the World Health Organization urged vaccinated people to continue to wear masks and social distance, according to reports. “Vaccine alone won’t stop community transmission,” Dr. Mariangela Simao, WHO’s assistant director-general for access to medicines and health products, said during a briefing in Geneva, according to CNBC. “People need to continue to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces, hand hygiene … the physical distance, avoid crowding. This still continues to be extremely important, even if you’re vaccinated when you have a community transmission ongoing.”

The worldwide COVID death toll is more than double the official count of 3.24 million, a controversial new study estimates, the U.S. is no exception. More than 905,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S., 57% more than the official tally, researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington said Thursday in a new analysis. That’s more than any other country. The official U.S. toll is about 580,000, according to Johns Hopkins University statistics. Worldwide the total is close to 7 million, which is more than double the official toll of 3.24 million,...

WASHINGTON - Deadly weather will be hitting the U.S. more often, and America had better get better at dealing with it, experts said as Texas and other states battled winter storms that blew past the worst-case planning of utilities, governments and millions of shivering citizens. This week’s storms fit a pattern of worsening extremes under climate change and demonstrate anew that local, state and federal officials have failed to do nearly enough to prepare for greater and more dangerous weather. Power supplies of all sorts failed in the extreme cold, including natural gas-fired power plants that were knocked offline amid...

A variant of the coronavirus that emerged in the U.K. and has now been identified in over 80 countries could become the dominant form of the virus worldwide, according to the head of the U.K.’s genetic surveillance program.

Places with highest daily reported cases per capitaSeven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

The coronavirus pandemic is set to make 2020 the deadliest year in US history. While final data will not be available for months, preliminary numbers suggest the US saw more than 3.2 million deaths this year, which is at least 400,000 more than in 2019 — a figure that could still go higher, according to the Associated Press. It marks a jump of 15%, the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands died of Spanish flu

On Friday night, Bill Maher tore into the liberal media for their apocalyptic coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus. The HBO host believes all the doom-and-gloom headlines are making Trump the optimist, and optimists, Maher warns his fellow liberals, "tend to win American elections." The comedian cited the campaigns of FDR and even Obama who ran and won on messages of hope. "Enough with the life-will-never-be-the-same headlines," Maher implored the liberal media. "Last month, The Washington Post ran the headline 'It Feels Like a Warzone' with this picture." The picture shows a grocery store worker restocking eggs. "This is not a...

One of the most striking developments over the past two weeks is how quickly the estimates of death and hospitalizations from COVID-19 are being reduced... The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is the most influential modeler of the novel coronavirus in the United States, with White House officials and other public health professionals using the group's numbers to plan strategy and policy. On March 26, IHME predicted that if current social-distancing policies stayed in place, there would likely be 81,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States by June 1. In its most recent projection, from...

Below you will find regular, but not daily, updates on medical and political developments.April 12, 2020 New studies Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis concludes in a new study that the risk of death from Covid19 for people under 65 years of age, even in global „hotspots“, is equivalent to the risk of a fatal car accident for daily commuters driving between 9 and 400 miles.In a serological pilot study, the German virologist Hendrick Streeck comes to the interim result that the lethality of Covid19 is at 0.37% and the mortality (based on the total population) at 0.06%. These values...

Continuation of the thread.

An infectious diseases expert at the forefront of the search for a coronavirus vaccine said on Friday that it was the most “frightening disease“ he’s ever encountered, and that “war is an appropriate analogy” for what the country is facing, as “50 – 70 percent of the global population” may become infected. Hatchett, who sat on the White House Homeland Security Council in 2005 – 2006 and was a principal author of the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan, and currently heads the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, told the UK’s Channel 4: “This is the most frightening disease...

Continuation of Live Thread from No 7. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3820821/posts

Continuation of the thread http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3820145/posts

Let me just preface by saying that I don't make a habit of commenting on what other colleagues at CNBC say. It's neither prudent, nor necessary. I also didn't even plan on blogging this week; I'm on vacation for crying out loud! But my BlackBerry was buzzing off the base this weekend, with housing bloggers begging me to respond to Jim Cramer's outcry on Friday about the Fed and the mortgage market. So let me just blog here respectfully. I understand Cramer's passion (you can see it again in the clip below.) I do. I'm not out there in the...

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Summer temperatures in the Arctic have risen at an incredible rate over the past three years and large patches of what should be ice are now open water, a British polar explorer said on Monday. Ben Saunders, forced by the warm weather to abandon an attempt to ski solo from northern Russia across the North Pole to Canada, said he had been amazed at how much of the ice had melted. "It's obvious to me that things are changing a lot and changing very quickly," a sunburned Saunders told Reuters less than two days after being rescued...