The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is resisting changing its guidance on masking and other measures meant to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 despite cases, hospitalizations, and deaths dropping across the United States in recent weeks. The key factor is the agency’s system for ranking community transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19, which ranks counties as having “substantial” or “high” transmission if there are 50 or more new cases per 100,000 people over a period of 7 days. The ranking system hasn’t been changed since spring 2020, even as the number of tests performed has soared. “We recognize the importance of not just cases, which continue to result in substantial or high community transmission and over 97 percent of our counties in the country, but critically, medically severe disease that leads to hospitalizations,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters in a virtual briefing on Feb. 16. COVID-19 … » Read full article
Sperm Counts Halved, Is This Diet-Switch Triggering an Apocalypse?
Analysis by Ashley Armstrong Story at-a-glance Male fertility is declining sharply, with sperm counts dropping over 50% in the last 50 years The shift from saturated fats to polyunsaturated
