The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday it is “absolutely” too soon to lift mask mandates, citing daily COVID-19 case numbers that despite recent declines remain more than double the levels seen last summer. https://reut.rs/3jNy3Kc

Anatomy of a conspiracy: With COVID, China took leading role. The rumors began almost as soon as the disease itself. Claims that a foreign adversary had unleashed a bioweapon emerged at the fringes of Chinese social media the same day China first reported the outbreak of a mysterious virus. https://bajanews.site/sWDh2T

The superspreaders behind top COVID-19 conspiracy theories. As the coronavirus spread across the globe, so too did speculation about its origins. Perhaps the virus escaped from a lab. Maybe it was engineered as a bioweapon.
Legitimate questions about the virus created perfect conditions for conspiracy theories. In the absence of knowledge, guesswork and propaganda flourished. https://bajanews.site/v6ZBdw

Rush Limbaugh, American hate monger, the talk radio host who ripped into liberals and laid waste to political correctness with a merry brand of malice has died. No person leaning on facts will miss him! https://apnews.com/article/rush-limbaugh-dead-51c40582a3e89930cd2568aba21a9eed

And ever since the virus mutants began spreading around the globe, even the last motivation for bravery is fading: the hope that the nightmare will soon end thanks to vaccination. Because as incredibly fast as it was possible to find and produce vaccines, the mutants were faster. And they are still faster. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-third-wave-coronavirus-mutants-are-spreading-fast-a-09b88dcd-009d-4e6d-ab00-dd7cd88323fb

The United States is back in the Paris climate accord, just 107 days after it left.
While Friday’s return is heavily symbolic, world leaders say they expect America to prove its seriousness after four years of being pretty much absent. http://wwwizzards.com/3bgLwXc

Russia has registered the first case of a strain of bird flu virus named A(H5N8) being passed to humans from birds and has reported the matter to the World Health Organization (WHO), Anna Popova, head of consumer health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, said on Saturday.
Outbreaks of the H5N8 strain have been reported in Russia, Europe, China, the Middle East and North Africa in recent months but only in poultry. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210220-russia-registers-world-s-first-case-of-human-infection-from-new-h5n8-bird-flu

Grammy-winning electronic music pioneers Daft Punk have announced that they are breaking up after 28 years.
The helmet-wearing French duo shared the news Monday in an 8-minute video called “Epilogue.” Kathryn Frazier, the band’s longtime publicist, confirmed the break up https://apnews.com/article/daft-punk-break-up-after-28-years-f81077591443474ee95e7223d074dd1a

Trained dogs detect COVID 94% of the time, German study finds
The dogs were trained at the Hanover University of Veterinary Medicine and may help prevent the illness from spreading in large crowds. Dogs have already been put to work at airports and sport arenas around the world. https://p.dw.com/p/3oqZm

A new strain of the pandemic coronavirus, first identified and now spreading in California, appears to be somewhat more transmissible and heighten patients’ risk of admission to the intensive care unit (ICU) and death, according to a preprint reporting lab studies and epidemiological data. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/coronavirus-strain-first-identified-california-may-be-more-infectious-and-cause-more

Globally, the latest vaccination rate is 6,141,896 doses per day, on average. At this rate, it will take an estimated 5 years to cover 75% of the population with a two-dose vaccine. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/

Amlo again clashes with women’s rights activists as he dismisses complaints against Félix Salgado Macedonio, candidate for governor.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has doggedly defended Salgado even as demands escalate for the president to dump him as a candidate.
López Obrador initially dismissed the complaints as “politicking” and then alleged that the attacks on Salgado were little more than a ruse against the president himself, saying it was part of a campaign of “media lynching”.
#MexicoNews #AMLO #populist #nomoralbearings
https://bajanews.site/KOGqWT

“The Sturgis Rally was one of the largest in-person gatherings since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States,” said Joseph J. Sabia, one of the study’s authors, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies at San Diego State University. He described the “public health costs” of the rally as “substantial and widespread,” which could have infected as many as 266,796 people. He and his co-authors estimate that dealing with the fallout from the rally will involve more than $12 billion in health care costs.
“The spread of the virus due to the event was large,” the authors write, because it hosted people from all over the country. https://bajanews.site/df0wyY

The 50 most ridiculous lines (ie LIES) from #AgentOrange aka Trump's CPAC speech. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/01/politics/donald-trump-cpac-speech/index.html

Global infections up for first time in weeks, warns WHO
The WHO has urged countries not to relax measures to combat the coronavirus, saying that it’s too early to rely solely on vaccinations. https://p.dw.com/p/3q2e0

The US is at risk of losing all its recent gains in the battle against Covid-19 as highly contagious variants take advantage of Americans getting lax with safety measures.
"Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained," said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/01/health/us-coronavirus-monday/index.html

"Potential fourth surge of cases" in the US, a top health official has warned. Dr Rochelle Walensky said about 70,000 new cases a day had been recorded last week - "a very high number".
There were nearly 2,000 deaths a day in the same period, she added.
"Please hear me clearly: at this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained," Dr Walensky said. "These variants are a very real threat to our people and our progress." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56247656

Chris Murray, a University of Washington disease expert whose projections on COVID-19 infections and deaths are closely followed worldwide had until recently been hopeful that the discovery of several effective vaccines could help countries achieve herd immunity, or nearly eliminate transmission through a combination of inoculation and previous infection. But in the last month, data from a vaccine trial in South Africa showed not only that a rapidly-spreading coronavirus variant could dampen the effect of the vaccine, it could also evade natural immunity in people who had been previously infected.

“I couldn’t sleep” after seeing the data, Murray, director of the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told Reuters. “When will it end?” he asked himself, referring to the pandemic. He is currently updating his model to account for variants’ ability to escape natural immunity and expects to provide new projections as early as this week. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-variants-insight/when-will-it-end-how-a-changing-virus-is-reshaping-scientists-views-on-covid-19-idUSKBN2AV1T1

New Zealand's emergency agency has told residents in some areas to head for higher ground after an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck the nearby Kermadec Islands region early Friday, sparking fears of a tsunami.
The powerful quake was the third to strike the area on Friday morning, according to the New Zealand National Emergency Management Agency. https://www.tsunami.gov/?p=PHEB/2021/03/04/21063003/2/WEGM42

A French billionaire aviation industrialist and member of parliament has died in a helicopter crash along with the pilot, authorities said. https://apnews.com/article/helicopter-crashes-accidents-7846761266db331c01237b011d098022