Healthcare

To better reduce COVID-19 transmission, the U.S. must learn from Europe. Americans need cheap or free at-home COVID-19 antigen testing kits. According to medical experts, they give a result in 15 minutes and typically identify 98% of infectious cases. Getting millions of at-home tests to Americans is the most important action the government can do.

So far, the variant isn’t expected to significantly dampen holiday travel, as pandemic fatigue and confidence in vaccines remain strong, experts say.

“We are going to see a couple of weeks of every day, new information, new studies,” said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at the WHO. “One study is not going to really prove anything.”

URBANA, Illinois -- As COVID-19 cases soared during Fall 2020, discussions of herd immunity were ubiquitous. Yet, with effective vaccines available, and nearly 50 million confirmed U.S. cases reported, herd immunity is no longer a viable landing runway for COVID-19.

President Joe Biden’s administration has introduced new COVID-19 vaccination requirements for travelers into the United States. Mandated vaccination with an approved set of vaccines remains the easiest pathway into the country, with those who are vaccine-exempt subject to more severe testing requirements.

BOSTON — Doctors say mixing vaccines for the booster is safe, but are you better off sticking with your original shot? You’ve been hearing public health officials say “Go get the booster shot,” but we’ve been hearing three major concerns about doing so.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (7News) — The University of Maryland is closely monitoring an uptick in COVID-19 cases but this is something they say they expected after the Thanksgiving break.

The proliferation of misinformation about the risk of COVID-19 has created headwinds on gaining an upper hand on the virus. Since the delta variant gave the nation a public health body blow in the summer of 2021, and with omicron waiting in the wings to possibly add more weight to this damage, schisms in belief in what is the truth have been ubiquitous. 

Researchers are racing to determine how widespread the Omicron variant might be across the U.S., scouring Covid-19 test samples and in some cases even examining wastewater.

President Joe Biden is down in the polls, beset by rising inflation and struggling to get his message across to voters.