President Biden announced that he would reach his goal of having 100 million coronavirus vaccine shots administered to Americans on Friday, well ahead of schedule.
The fear is that America’s vaccine distribution system is too sluggish to stop a raging pandemic driven by new, more transmissible variants.
Despite widespread hesitancy, there are new signs of hope that vaccine uptake will reach the threshold required to decisively slow transmission and end the pandemic in 2021.
Throughout the hard-hit states of the Upper Midwest and northern Plains, coronavirus case counts have been falling for weeks.
By rounding up data from a few sources — previous holiday spikes, current travel patterns, cellphone proximity trackers and various pandemic forecasting models — it’s possible to get a rough start on predicting what to expect in the weeks ahead. The early numbers are worrisome.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds finally issued a mask mandate in response to the state's alarming COVID-19 spread rate. Unfortunately, it's probably too late.
Right now, amid a worsening pandemic, a majority of American voters are at least considering joining friends or family indoors on Nov. 26, which would be an uncomfortable amount of normal in a time we can't really afford it.
The state GOP’s relentless campaign to delegitimize pandemic precautions as partisan overreach has restricted the government’s ability to address a worsening crisis.
Though it might be too soon to say whether a fall wave has begun, it’s not too soon to see the recent rise in U.S. cases for what it is: a warning.
Experts have long feared that colder weather and other factors could create a fall wave of the coronavirus with the potential to dwarf previous peaks — and America’s most prominent COVID-19 modelers are projecting just that. So is it time to freak out about the fall? Maybe not just yet.
In recent days, experts have become increasingly convinced — and alarmed — that President Trump is pushing to cut corners and rush the release of a COVID-19 vaccine before Nov. 3 to improve his chances in the election.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has embraced a false online conspiracy theory that seeks to minimize the danger of COVID-19 by claiming only a few thousand Americans have died from the virus — not the 185,000 reported by health agencies and hospitals.
Although President Trump is correct that the U.S. has conducted more tests than any other country, it’s not testing enough, given the scale of its outbreak. But there might be a simple solution: new tests that prioritize speed over sensitivity.
The outlook for universal vaccination is clouded by political considerations from both sides: skepticism about medical authority and expertise on one side, and suspicions on the other that the administration is cutting corners on safety to rush a vaccine into production before the election.
A report released by the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force warns that 21 states are now in the “red zone” and need to take aggressive steps to slow the spread of COVID-19. But new guidelines from Harvard University show the task force's recommendations may be too weak to suppress the virus.
There’s no evidence from the rest of the world that relying on people to behave themselves can actually suppress the coronavirus to a manageable level, as opposed to merely slowing its spread. So far, only lockdowns have done that.
The problem with President Trump’s new strategy is that his prized data point is a mirage — an illusion that dissolves under closer inspection, revealing the opposite of the “success” it’s supposed to show.
Masks are necessary to combat America’s resurgent coronavirus pandemic. But they may no longer be enough. Patterns from countries that are faring much better than the U.S. suggest we won’t bring the virus to heel until we start locking down hot spots as well.
As the coronavirus has made its alarming American comeback in recent weeks — with dozens of states across the South and West regularly reporting record numbers of new cases and propelling the nationwide total of new daily infections past 50,000 for the first time — President Trump and others have sought to downplay the disturbing data by reciting a simple refrain: Yes, but what about the deaths?
With more tests coming back positive now than ever before — and with infections currently rising in 39 states — lockdowns in some form may be the only way to regain control over the coronavirus.
California locked down aggressively and never dismissed the threat. Yet now it’s being mentioned in the same breath as Florida, Arizona and Texas, states suffering new outbreaks. What went wrong?
The potential ban not only underscores how much worse the U.S. outbreak has gotten in recent days. It also highlights how much better the EU is currently doing than the U.S. But why?
Case counts are climbing in more than 20 states. But so far COVID-19 death counts have not been climbing along with them. Is that because patients are starting to skew younger?
Florida has certainly been finding more cases. On June 1, Florida’s seven-day average stood at 726 cases per day. As of June 15, it had more than doubled to 1,775. However, Florida has been conducting roughly the same average number of COVID-19 tests every day for the last month.
As people across all 50 states continue to gather to protest police brutality and systemic racism, the question is whether this will spark a COVID-19 resurgence right when the U.S. seemed to be getting its epidemic under control.
“It could give millions a chance to finally buy a house or start their business or help their kids get an education, too.”
“You signed a contract…If you don’t want to deal with the financial pressure of debt, don’t take out the loan.”
“Without action from Biden, Black student debt will hinder his agenda with respect to eliminating racial inequities.”
“Blanket relief could end up routing too much relief to those who do not need it and too little to those who do.”
“Unlike a number of other policy issues, student debt relief doesn’t need to be pushed through a narrowly controlled Congress.”