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In the United States, there have been 17 million reported cases of Covid-19 — about 5 percent of the population. Millions more have been infected and either did not get tested or didn’t have symptoms to begin with. Vaccines are slowly rolling out — first to front-line health care and high-risk people, and next, likely […]

Americans have spent much of the Covid-19 pandemic blaming one another for the coronavirus’s spread. Don’t go to that beach or park. Don’t go to that bar or restaurant. Don’t do anything for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Wear a mask! You don’t want to kill Grandma, do you? Public officials have joined in. Increasingly, they are […]

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency use authorization for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, clearing the way for it to be the second vaccine distributed in the United States. The decision follows a vote on Thursday by an advisory committee to the FDA which found that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh its […]

Jupiter and Saturn are due to converge in their orbits on Monday, appearing as a double planet in the night sky — the first such occurrence in almost 800 years. The two planets have been near one another throughout the year, according to Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan. They will reach their closest approach, passing […]

Many of us dread being alone. We find isolation uncomfortable or downright scary. If you want to know just how eager we are to avoid it, consider a scientific study that offered people a choice between giving themselves electric shocks or being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. Believe it or not, many chose […]

“I am seeing tons of hair loss,” Mona Gohara says. Patients come to Gohara, a dermatologist and professor at the Yale School of Medicine, for all kinds of reasons from skin cancer screenings to cosmetic procedures. But this year more than ever, they’re worried about their hair. It’s not a coincidence. Stress — like, say, […]

Winter and the holidays can be hard even in typical years: short days, cold winds, and family stress, to name a few. But the ongoing US Covid-19 surge, with more than 200,000 new virus cases reported every day since December 7 (about double what they were a month before), is putting the hallmark activities that […]

There are around 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild, and about 460 of them live in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. In the park’s very dense, high-altitude forest (hence the name “impenetrable”), veterinarian Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is working to keep them alive through the Covid-19 pandemic. No gorilla has come down with Covid-19, but […]

The room didn’t spin like they say it does. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I had no difficulty understanding the verdict: It was incurable. They could offer no prognosis. They had some general ideas about how they might treat me; it was considered “manageable” in its normal form, but in my case, there […]

As of mid-December, hospitals on average had just 22 percent of their intensive care unit (ICU) beds available across the country, and many were completely full. As the Covid-19 surge continues to intensify, lack of ICU beds can have dire consequences, including not being able to properly care for the sickest patients, potentially rationing lifesaving […]