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Faye Flam Guest Columnist So are we having a fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. or not? University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm has forecast a COVID “Category 5 hurricane” this spring. To some people, a look at hard-hit Michigan could justify this level of alarm. But Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia could also claim to be right with his much more optimistic view that vaccines will mostly tame the pandemic from this point forward. After all, U.S. death rates and hospitalizations are not spiking and may never return to anything close to the fall/wi...

Middle-East Arab News and Opinion - Asharq Al-Awsat is the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities

Maybe COVID doesn’t cross the caution tape. Joe Nocera: I've just finished a couple of weeks in Delray Beach, Fla., and I have to tell you: It's a whole different pandemic down here. The restaurants are full; the stores are hopping. Waiters and salespeople wear masks, but most other people don't, not even in crowded bars. South Floridians are acting as if the pandemic is over, even though it plainly isn't. Most of my friends in New York tend to view Floridians as idiots, at least when it comes to COVID-19. They're convinced that Gov. Ron DeSantis is hiding the true number of fatalities, and...

Thursday, 8 April 2021, 8:28 am At last! After 10 months working on the issue, New Zealand’s Director-General of Health has graciously decided that Australia is now a sufficiently low-risk Covid19 country that “quarantine free travel is safe to commence” between the two countries – a mere six months after Australia made the same decision in respect of New Zealand. But we still had to endure weeks of Prime Ministerial teasing about when such a decision might be made, and another tediously and unnecessarily long press conference before the announcement occurred. According to Dr Bloomf...

HAKAN NURAL/UNSPLASH SOMETHING SOUNDS FISHY when public health experts advise us to take whatever vaccine is available even though some vaccines show much more promising efficacy numbers than others. And it’s understandable that people would want to shop for the best vaccine. Americans are accustomed to the idea of consumer choice in pharmaceuticals — why else would we have so much direct-to-consumer drug advertising? But cut through the noise and there’s only one thing that really matters: all three FDA-authorized vaccines seem to work equally well — close to 100% — at preventing h...