Covid-19

President Donald Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and that his supporters wouldn't abandon him. While that could be true, it doesn't appear to apply across the board to all of Trump's statements.

Columnist Joel Mathis, writing for The Week, explained, "Trump's undoing might come about because he has inverted the Fifth Avenue scenario: He has urged his supporters to protect their health by getting vaccinated against COVID-19. The former president is trying to save the lives of the people who love him — and that has confused and enraged them."

According to the National Football League (NFL), 96 of its players tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday. There were an additional 10 positive tests among players over the weekend, bringing the total to 106 players on the league's Reserve/Covid-19 list since Christmas.

"We're entering a new phase of the pandemic, different than we've seen before," said the NFL's chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills. "We can't apply 2020 solutions to the 2021 problems we're having."

China put hundreds of thousands more people under lockdown Tuesday to try and stamp out a worsening coronavirus outbreak, as infections hit new highs in multiple US states and Europe.

Covid surges have wreaked havoc around the world, with many nations in Europe and North America trying to strike a balance between economically punishing restrictions and controlling the spread of the virus.

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood praised Donald Trump on Monday for pushing back on anti-vaccine misinformation spread by right-wing provocateur Candice Owens.

"Former President Donald Trump says if you want to stay out of the hospital, you should consider taking the Covid-19 vaccine," CNN's Phil Mattingly reported. "It's responsible, science-based talk from a president who steered often into conspiracies and half-baked 'Hey, I heard this might work' ideas, but one conservative commentator now says Trump is wrong on vaccines. Why? Because he's old and he apparently couldn't pay attention to message boards."

A massive outbreak of bird flu in the Galilee is being tackled by the Israel National Security Council. According to scientists, it could become the next global pandemic, The Daily Beast reports.

Hundreds of millions of migrating birds fly through the region every year, compounding the potentially danger of an outbreak. As The Daily Beast points out, the virus can be deadly to humans. More than half of the confirmed 863 human cases since 2003 have been fatal.

The largest nurses' union in the United States is condemning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's decision to shorten the recommended isolation period for healthcare workers who test positive for Covid-19, saying the move could be "dangerous" for both workers and patients.

National Nurses United (NNU) released a statement Friday, a day after the CDC released new guidelines saying healthcare workers who test positive for the disease will be able to return to work after seven days instead of 10 as long as they are asymptomatic and have a negative test.

With the fast-spreading Omicron variant now driving new Covid-19 cases up in the United States, public health officials are warning that just as South Africa did in early December, the country is seeing a surge in pediatric hospitalizations related to the disease.

The New York Department of Health reported Thursday that Covid-19 hospitalizations among children under the age of 18 began increasing four-fold the week of December 5 through the current week.

In a column published by NBC News, Maggie Siddiqi of the Center for American Progress called out the evangelical leaders for ignoring Covid-19 recommendations regarding masks and vaccines in their pursuit of fighting a cultural war with the left.

As Siddiqi wrote, far-right extremists within the evangelical movement are attempting to use religious exemptions to avoid following sensible health protocols and, in the process, are putting their followers at risk.

The decision by Dr. Mehmet Oz to make a run for the Republican Party's nomination to fill an open Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Pat Toomey (R) has opened the popular television doctor to fresh scrutiny over medical claims he has pushed over the years, reports the New York Times.

Oz, whose surprise decision to jump into the race has disrupted GOP plans, appears to be hoping that his television celebrity will carry him into politics in much the same way that Donald Trump did and, like Trump, Oz carries with him a considerable amount of baggage that could come back to haunt him.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point of modern history, it is nowhere close to being the deadliest pandemic in human history. That dubious distinction belongs to the infamous "Black Death," a bubonic plague that swept through Europe and the Near East in the mid-14th century. Like COVID-19, the bubonic plague was a terrible way to die, but with very different symptoms. The most notorious were the dreaded buboes (hence 'bubonic plague'), severe inflammations of the lymph nodes that oozed pus and broke out over the groin, armpits and neck. A victim's skin and flesh would eventually turn black and rot, although long before this happened they would experience intense nausea, vomiting, fever, headaches and aching joints. Within days — or, at most, a couple weeks — the infected person would die.

This article first appeared in Salon.