COVID

Despite causing millions of deaths, economic downfall, and worldwide disruption these past few years, the 10th annual World Happiness Report reveals that the covid pandemic hasn’t impacted our overall happiness. The 2023 report published today reveals that happiness levels from self-reported “life evaluations” have been “remarkably resilient” — with global averages between 2020 and 2022 just as high as those reported pre-pandemic.The annual World Happiness Report uses data from studies like the Gallup World Poll, which…

Scientists have uncovered new genetic evidence from the market in Wuhan, China, where COVID cases first clustered in late 2019. The findings add support to an animal origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. They were presented to an advisory group convened by the World Health Organization earlier this week. Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research discovered genetic sequences of the virus that researchers in China—led by George Gao, former head of the…

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For three pandemic years, people with runny noses and fevers have sweated out a tough question: “Is this COVID, which has killed more than a million Americans, or is it a more familiar flu?” Many of the symptoms overlap. But now the first home test that distinguishes between COVID and the flu has been authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. With just one swab, the test can differentiate between three respiratory viruses—the COVID-causing pathogen SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A and B—with high accuracy in 30…

The operators of an upscale Westside care facility for dementia patients were charged Tuesday with felony elder abuse and other criminal counts allegedly related to the deaths of an employee and thirteen residents during the early days of the pandemic.Silverado Beverly Place, near the Fairfax district, specializes in caring for elderly residents with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and was the site of a COVID-19 outbreak in early March 2020.Thirteen residents and one employee died during the outbreak, while 45 employees and…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeTilda Swinton has admitted to defying Covid protocols on the set of her forthcoming project. The 62-year-old actor will be shooting her next film in Ireland, where she claimed she was “told to wear a mask at all times”.“I’m not,” Swinton apparently said during her keynote speech at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival in Austin, Texas, on Monday (13 March).“I’m sure this is…

A study by Scripps Research and eMed digital medicine shows a surprisingly high percentage of COVID-19 rebound cases in both untreated individuals and those treated with Paxlovid.Preliminary results from a Scripps Research and eMed digital medicine study show an unexpectedly high proportion of <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>COVID-19</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>First identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China,…

Three years ago, on March 11, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), announced that the coronavirus that causes COVID was spreading worldwide and that the outbreak was officially a pandemic. At the time, there were more than 118,000 confirmed cases of COVID and 4,291 official deaths. “In the days and weeks ahead,” Ghebreyesus said in a press conference at the time, “we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths and the number of affected countries climb…

The US House of Representatives held the first in a series of public hearings on 8 March aimed at exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledged that the question of where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated has become highly politicized. But they said that both hypotheses describing its emergence — one, that it spread naturally from animals to people; the other, that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — must be explored. “This question is…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Most fines for COVID rule breaches were issued when England was in its third national lockdown and Wales was in its second, research shows. Almost two thirds of the 120,000-plus fixed penalty notices (FPNs) given out by police across the two nations were issued between January and May 2021. COVID…