When Will the Delta Surge End?
The New York Times
The variant retreated unexpectedly in Britain and India, but has begun to rebound. The United States may take an even bumpier path, scientists said.
The United States has entered the fourth wave of the pandemic — or fifth, depending on which expert you ask. As the vaccination campaign lags and the contagious Delta variant spreads, cases and hospitalizations are at their highest since last winter. Covid-19 deaths, too, are on a steady incline. After every other peak has come a trough, however, often for reasons that were not immediately obvious. In Britain, where the variant is also the dominant form of the coronavirus, daily cases fell from a peak of 60,000 in mid-July to half that within two weeks, though they have since been climbing again. In India, the numbers spiked to more than 400,000 daily cases this spring; experts estimated that the true figure could be more than 20 times greater. The unimaginable toll shocked many who had declared that the country had successfully eluded the virus. But then, in June, infections fell drastically.
Younger South Asian cooks are riffing on these classics, turning them into cookies, pies and ice cream, and (gasp!) adding salt.
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The company said it would put Quarter Pounders back on the menu, without the raw onions that were considered the likely source of the bacteria.
The billionaire made splashy purchases of The Washington Post and a mansion in Washington. But his status as a power player in the nation’s capital was never realized.
Forecasters will soon be able to use the instrument, a coronagraph, to better monitor the effects of solar storms.
Fossils reveal that prehistoric cicadas’ wings evolved to help them evade hungry predators with feathers and beaks, scientists say.
Kinnon MacKinnon leads the world’s largest study on people who stop or reverse their gender transitions, a group embroiled in intense political fights.
The body’s cooling defenses fail at lower “wet bulb” temperatures than scientists had estimated.
Archaeologists in Norway have confirmed that an ancient set of human remains known as the Well Man were intended to make the locals unwell.
Astronomers offered a new hypothesis for what created pairs of objects nicknamed JuMBOs, while other scientists argue they may not really exist.
A deadly outbreak spurred removal of onions by a major food supplier in the Mountain West. Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King and Pizza Hut have stopped serving onions at various locations.