By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Democrats’ efforts to pass voting rights legislation in Congress appeared in jeopardy on Tuesday, as a centrist Democratic senator said he had little interest in a strategy that would allow the party to bypass Republican opposition.

Senator Joe Manchin told reporters that it was his “preference” to line up Republican support for a rule change that would allow Democrats to pass a voting rights bill on a party-line vote. That could spell doom for the legislation, which Republicans oppose.

“For us to go it alone, no matter what side does it, it just ends up coming back at you pretty hard,” Manchin told reporters.

His remarks came a day after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate would vote to change chamber’s rule known as the filibuster by Jan. 17 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-vote-changing-rules-if-republicans-obstruct-voting-rights-law-schumer-2022-01-03, the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, in order to enact voting rights legislation.

Without Manchin’s support, Senate Democrats would not be able to muster the votes necessary to alter the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote majority to pass most bills. The 100-seat Senate is split 50-50, with Democrats in charge only because Vice President Kamala Harris casts a tie-breaking vote.

Manchin’s objections have also complicated Democratic efforts to pass President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion climate and social policy legislation.

Democrats would need 10 Republicans to support voting rights legislation if Senate rules went unchanged. But Republicans have repeatedly used the filibuster to block the measures.

Manchin and another centrist holdout, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, were due to meet later on Tuesday with fellow Democrats, according to Schumer.

Most Democrats want the filibuster changed to accommodate voting rights legislation after a wave of Republican-led states last year passed new restrictions on voting.

The state laws were inspired by Republican former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election that he lost to Biden by a substantial margin.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and David Morgan;Editing by Andy Sullivan, Tomasz Janowski and Cynthia Osterman)

Andy Cohen revealed that he “really” regrets slamming Ryan Seacrest and his viewers on ABC, however, the damage is done and now Kelly Ripa, ABC’s biggest star is caught between her two friends.

“Kelly likes Andy, but she adores Ryan. Andy is her friend, but Ryan is her work husband, he is family. When you attack Ryan you also attack Kelly, that is how close they are,” sources tell Radar.

“What makes matters worse is that Kelly works for ABC. She is very loyal. She is a class act. Calling ABC viewers “losers” (as Cohen did while co-hosting CNN’s New year’s countdown) isn’t cool. One thing is for sure, it’s going to be very to ever ask Andy to fill in on ABC next to Kelly the next time Ryan is off.”

Andy Cohen ‘Deeply Regrets’ Trashing Ryan Seacrest During Drunken New Year’s Eve Rant After It’s Revealed He Won’t Be Asked Back Next Year

Friends add that Anderson Cooper is also in a difficult position as he is also very close to Kelly.

“Anderson did nothing when Andy went on his rant. He should have stuck up for Kelly and ABC. This circle of friends is so incestuous. It makes everything really awkward.

Andy Cohen Won’t Be Invited Back To CNN New Year’s Special Next Year

Cohen revealed on SiriusXM’sAndy Cohen Live show on Monday, Jan. 3, that he really likes Seacrest and what he said was “just stupid and drunk and feeling it.” Sources tell Radar that Andy also reached out to Ryan privately to apologize.

“It all comes from a place of jealousy. Andy desperately wanted the job on ABC sitting next to Kelly. He is pee-green that Ryan has a super successful radio show and hosts “American Idol.” At the end of the day, Andy created Real Housewives. Yes, his Bravo late-night show is successful, but usually the only time anyone watches is when he has The Housewives’ on,” adds an insider. “Ryan’s name triggers Andy, but without the alcohol, he can pretend it doesn’t.”

As Radar first reported, CNN sources tell us senior staffers are “embarrassed” following Cohen’s drunken appearance. “We claim to be the most trusted network in news and yet CNN hires Andy Cohen to make a fool out of all of us with his New Year’s performance?” a source dished to Radar. “Andy doesn’t even work for CNN and yet he has been the face of our network for the past 48 hours. It is embarrassing and real CNN staffers are very angry.”

By Joseph Ax and Lisa Shumaker

(Reuters) – The United States set a global record of almost 1 million new coronavirus infections reported on Monday, according to a Reuters tally, nearly double the country’s peak of 505,109 hit just a week ago as the highly contagious Omicron variant shows no sign of slowing.

The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has risen nearly 50% in the last week and now exceeds 100,000, a Reuters analysis showed, the first time that threshold has been reached since the winter surge a year ago.

Overall, the United States has seen a daily average of 486,000 cases over the last week, a rate that has doubled in seven days and far outstrips that of any other country. The 978,856 new infections on Monday includes some cases from Saturday and Sunday, when many states do not report.

The average number of U.S. deaths per day has remained fairly steady throughout December and into early January at about 1,300, according to a Reuters tally, though deaths typically lag behind cases and hospitalizations.

Omicron appears to be far more easily transmitted than previous iterations of the virus. The variant was estimated to account for 95.4% of the coronavirus cases identified in the United States as of Jan. 1, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Tuesday.

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that evidence thus far suggests Omicron is causing less severe illness. Nevertheless, public health officials have warned that the sheer volume of Omicron cases threatens to overwhelm hospitals, some of which are already struggling to handle a wave of COVID-19 patients, primarily among the unvaccinated.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a 30-day state of emergency on Tuesday and mobilized 1,000 National Guard members to pandemic response operations as COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state hit a record high of more than 3,000. That is an increase of more than 500% in the last seven weeks, Hogan said.

“The truth is that the next four to six weeks will be the most challenging time of the entire pandemic,” Hogan told reporters. “Our newest projections as of today show that COVID hospitalizations could reach more than 5,000, which would be more than 250% higher than our previous peak of 1,952 last year.”

Delaware, Illinois, Ohio and Washington, D.C., also have reported record numbers of hospitalized COVID patients in recent days.

The unrelenting surge has prompted more than 3,200 schools to close their buildings this week, according to Burbio, a site that tracks school disruptions. Schools that have remained open are facing staff shortages and renewed concerns about virus spread.

In Boston, where more than 54,000 students returned to class on Tuesday following the holiday break, Superintendent of Schools Brenda Cassellius told reporters there were 1,000 staff members out, including 461 teachers and 52 bus drivers.

“It does make for a difficult start to the day,” she said.

In Chicago, the teachers union objected to Monday’s return to schools, saying the district needs stricter protocols such as required testing. Teachers were expected to vote on Tuesday on whether they support working remotely starting on Wednesday.

The Biden administration has continued to emphasize widespread vaccinations and boosters as the best way to protect against severe illness.

The CDC on Tuesday recommended shortening the interval between Pfizer-BioNTech’s second COVID-19 vaccine dose and the booster shot to five months from six, a day after the Food and Drug Administration made a similar move.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax, Lisa Shumaker and Maria Caspani; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Bill Berkrot)

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Richard Leakey, a Kenyan conservationist and paleoanthropologist who spearheaded campaigns against the ivory trade to save the dwindling African elephant population, has died, the Kenyan presidency said on Sunday. He was 77.

For years Leakey served in various roles in the government including as director of the state-run National Museums of Kenya and twice as board chairman at the Kenya Wildlife Service.

President Uhuru Kenyatta said Leakey had “served our country with distinction”.

“Besides his distinguished career in the public service, Dr. Leakey is celebrated for his prominent role in Kenya’s vibrant civil society where he founded and successfully ran a number of institutions.”

Leakey was the son of palaeontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, whose work helped demonstrate that human evolution began in Africa. He was celebrated for his work to save wildlife from poachers and for leading campaigns against the ivory trade.

Paula Kahumbu, a wildlife conservationist who heads WildlifeDirect, told Reuters she had been mentored by Leakey, as had many other young Kenyans.

“Very courageous, he was a person who stood for integrity whether it was in wildlife conservation, whether it was related to archaeological and paleoanthropological research at museums or whether it was related to politics,” she said.

Leakey also served Kenya’s head of civil service from July 1999 to March 2001, at a time when then president Daniel Arap Moi was under pressure from donors to tackle corruption and other inefficiencies in government.

He was a co-founder of the Safina Party in 1995.

At the time of his death, he was serving as chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University in the United States, which works to facilitate research and education in palaeontology and archaeology in northern Kenya.

Leakey was also a fellow of the UK-based Royal Society and an honorary fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.

(Writing by Elias Biryabarema and George Obulutsa; Editing by Alison Williams)

Prince Andrew might lose royal privileges if he fails to win his fight in the sexual assault lawsuit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

The report comes just days after his former associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, was found guilty of grooming and trafficking underage girls for her former boyfriend, convicted sex offenderJeffrey Epstein.

According to the Sunday Times, royal advisers have discussed potential actions to be taken upon the prince if he loses his battle concerning Giuffre’s case.

One of their plans was to ask the Duke of York to stop using his title as a British royal.

An insider reportedly told the outlet, “If [Prince Andrew] loses the case, the question is what do you do with him? You can’t make him resign like you would a normal person, but he would be asked to put his dukedom into abeyance.”

In addition, the courtiers would allegedly request Andrew to give up his remaining links to charities and cast him into a form of “internal exile” by the royal institution.

As Radar previously reported, the prince faces legal troubles after Giuffre filed a lawsuit against him, claiming she was forced to have sex with the royal three times when she was only 17 years old.

Andrew had maintained his innocence and denied the allegations despite some damning evidence, including a picture of them taken from inside Maxwell’s London house in 2001.

However, the source from the palace also revealed it would be difficult to convince the Queen to strip Andrew of the Duke of York title as “it was held by her father, George VI, before he became king and she bestowed it on her favourite son. But he has disgraced that title.”

The outlet also reported the prince is under pressure to surrender his nine military roles. The military chiefs allegedly believe it is no longer appropriate for Andrew to carry his honorary titles if he loses the suit.

A spokesman from Buckingham Palace later responded to the claims regarding the title drop, stating, “This is speculation and the comments are without foundation. We would not comment on an ongoing legal matter.”

Following Maxwell’s guilty verdict last week, Andrew’s legal team reportedly has been in crisis mode and “locked in emergency talks.”

They were allegedly considering reaching out to one of Maxwell’s victims to aid him in his civil case with Giuffre.

“Andrew’s US team immediately seized upon Carolyn‘s testimony,” a legal source claimed. “They believe she holds a smoking gun to any possible role Virginia played in Epstein’s pyramid scheme of abuse.”

This started as a story about what happens after a pandemic ends.

I pitched my editor on the idea in early May. Every adult in America could get a vaccine. Covid-19 numbers started to fall. If the Roaring ’20s came after the Spanish flu a century ago, did that mean we were on track for another Roaring ’20s now? Would “Hot Vax Summer give way to Decadent Gatsby Party Autumn?

I started to dig in. A number of compelling parallels emerged: America 100 years ago had staggering income inequality. A booming stock market. Racial uprisings. Anti-immigrant sentiment. A one-term president plagued by scandals after he left office. Plenty of material for a story.

Then the pandemic didn’t end.

Vaccinations stalled. The delta variant fuelled new waves of infections, hospitalizations and deaths By September, some states had more hospitalized Covid-19 patients than they did during the winter surge. The economic outlook for this decade has gone from “champagne-soaked” to “room temperature.” In late November, the World Health Organization announced a new “variant of concern: omicron

I called a meeting with my editor. I said I didn’t think it was a good time to write a story in which the premise was “this pandemic is over, now what?”

The pandemic wasn’t ending. Would it ever?

This is not humanity’s first time staring down a seemingly unstoppable disease. Pandemics (a disease affecting a large number of people in multiple countries or regions around the world, per the World Health Organization, epidemics (a disease affecting people in a country or region) and outbreaks (a sudden occurrence of an infectious disease) have plagued us throughout history. Just in the past century, we’ve survived a few.

How did those end? And how might we get ourselves out of this one?

Spanish flu

How it started: Unclear, but probably not in Spain. It was a particularly deadly strain of H1N1 influenza and first took root in the U.S. in Kansas.

The disease was so virulent and killed so many young people that if you heard “‘This is just ordinary influenza by another name,’ you knew that was a lie,” said John Barry, the author of “The Great Influenza.”

There was “zero partisanship” over the virus, Barry said.

If the flu did hit your town, it hit hard: A young person could wake up in the morning feeling well and be dead 24 hours later. Half the people who died of the flu in 1918 were in their 20s and 30s.

“It was a spooky time,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

So how did we, as a species, beat the Spanish flu? We didn’t. We survived it. It torched through individual communities until it ran out of people to infect. A third of the world’s population was believed to have contracted the Spanish flu during that pandemic, and it had a case-fatality rate of as high as 10-20 per cent globally.

Roughly 675,000 people in America died out of a population of 103.2 million, a number recently surpassed by Covid-19 victims of a 2020 US population of 329.5 million. Flu vaccines wouldn’t be developed until the 1930s and wouldn’t become widely available for another decade.

Ultimately, the virus went through a process called attenuation. Basically, it got less bad. We still have descendent strains of the Spanish flu floating around today. It’s endemic, not a pandemic.

As a society, we accept a certain amount of death from known diseases. The normal seasonal flu usually kills less than 0.1 per cent of people who contract it. Deaths have been between 12,000 and 52,000 people in the US annually for the past decade.

The regular seasonal flu is both less contagious and less deadly than Covid-19. That people were washing hands, working from home and socially distancing in the winter 2020 flu season likely contributed to the fact that it was a comparably light flu season Though business and school closures weren’t enough to stave off the devastating winter surge of Covid-19, the measures were sufficient to keep the flu at bay. One strain may have been completely extinguished

As places reopen and people feel more confident about socializing and traveling again, the flu could make a calamitous comeback. (By the way, have you gotten your flu shot yet?)

How it ended: Endemic

Polio

How it started:The first documented polio epidemic in the United States was in 1894. Outbreaks occurred throughout the first half of the 20th century, primarily killing children and leaving many more paralyzed.

Polio reached pandemic levels by the 1940s. There were more than 600,000 cases of polio in the United States in the 20th century, and nearly 60,000 deaths — a case fatality rate of 9.8 per cent. In 1952 alone, there were 57,628 reported cases of polio resulting in 3,145 deaths.

“Polio was every mother’s scourge,” Benjamin said. “People were afraid to death of polio.”

Polio was highly contagious: In a household with an infected adult or child, 90 per cent to 100 per cent of susceptible people would develop evidence in their blood of also having been infected. Polio is not spread through the air — transmission occurs from oral-oral infection (say, sharing a drinking glass), or by “what’s nicely called hand-fecal,” Paula Cannon, a virology professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told me. “People poop it out, and people get it on their hands and they make you a sandwich.”

Polio, like Covid-19, could have devastating long-term effects even if you survived the initial infection. President Franklin Roosevelt was among the thousands of people who lived with permanent paralysis from polio. Others spent weeks, years, or the rest of their lives in iron lungs.

Precautions were taken during the polio pandemic. Schools and public pools closed. Then, in 1955, a miracle: a vaccine.

A two-dose course of the polio vaccine proved to be about 90 per cent effective — similar to the effectiveness of our current Covid-19 vaccines. Vaccine technology was still relatively new, and the polio vaccine was not without side effects. A small number of people who got that vaccine got polio from it. Another subset of recipients developed Guillain-Barre syndrome, a noncontagious autoimmune disorder that can cause paralysis or nerve damage. A botched batch killed some of the people who received it.

But there were no masses of polio anti-vaxxers. It was a “whole sense of the greater good, that this was the only way out of this terrible scourge,” Cannon said. “You would have had to have been a psychopathic monster to not want to be part of the solution.”

Benjamin said the polio vaccine campaign became a moment of national unity: “Jonas Salk and the folks that solved the polio problem were national heroes.”

By 1979, polio was eradicated in the United States.

How it ended: Vaccination

Smallpox

How it started:The disease had been observed in the Eastern Hemisphere dating to as early as 1157 B.C., and European colonizers first brought smallpox to North America’s previously unexposed Native population in the early 1500s. A 2019 study suggested smallpox and other viruses introduced by colonizers killed as much as 90 per cent of the indigenous population in some areas. Globally, smallpox is estimated to have killed more than 300 million people just in the 20th century. The case fatality rate of variola major, which caused the majority of smallpox infections, is around 30 per cent.

Outbreaks continued in North America through the centuries after it arrived here, at one point infecting half the population of the city of Boston.

We fought back by trying to infect people with a weakened version of it, long before vaccines existed. An enslaved man named Onesimus is believed to have introduced the concept of smallpox inoculation to North America in 1721 when he told slave owner Cotton Mather that he had undergone it in West Africa.

Mather tried to convince Boston doctors to consider inoculating residents during that outbreak, to limited success. One doctor who inoculated 287 patients reported only 2 per cent of them died of smallpox, compared with a 14.8 per cent death rate among the general population.

In 1777, George Washington ordered troops who had not already had the disease to undergo a version of inoculation in which pus from a smallpox sore was introduced into an open cut. Most people who were inoculated developed a mild case of smallpox, then developed natural immunity. Some died, though at a far lower rate compared with other ways of contracting the disease. The practice of inoculation was controversial enough — some skeptics said it was not sufficiently tested, some argued it was doctors “playing God,” others theorized that it was a conspiracy from slaves to trick white slave owners into killing themselves — that it was banned in several colonies.

Edward Jenner first demonstrated the effectiveness of his newly created smallpox vaccine in England in 1796. Vaccination spread throughout the world, and deaths from smallpox became rarer over time: In a century, smallpox went from being responsible for 1 in 13 deaths in London to about 1 in 100.

But while early vaccines reduced smallpox’s power, it still existed: An outbreak hit New York City in 1947. It demonstrated that the vaccines were not 100 per cent effective in everyone forever: 47-year-old Eugene Le Bar, the first fatality, had a smallpox vaccine scar. Israel Weinstein, the city’s health commissioner, held a news conference urging all New Yorkers to get vaccinated against smallpox, whether for the first time or what we would now call a “booster shot.”

The mayor and President Harry Truman got vaccinated on camera. In less than one month, 6.35 million New Yorkers were vaccinated, in a city of 7.8 million. The final toll of the New York outbreak: 12 cases of smallpox, resulting in 2 deaths.

Our country’s final outbreak affected eight people in the Rio Grande Valley in 1949.

In 1959, the World Health Organization announced a plan to eradicate smallpox globally with vaccinations. The disease was declared eradicated in 1980.

Of all the diseases our species has tackled, “the only one we’ve ever been really successful to totally eradicating is smallpox,” Benjamin said. The only remaining smallpox pathogens exist in laboratories.

How it ended: Vaccination

HIV/AIDS

How it started:In 1981, the CDC announced the first cases of what we would later call AIDS.

Roughly half of Americans who contracted HIV in the early 1980s died of an HIV/AIDS-related condition within two years. Deaths from HIV peaked in the 1990s, with roughly 50,000 in 1995, and have decreased steadily since then: As of 2019, roughly 1.2 million Americans are HIV-positive; there were 5,044 deaths attributed to HIV that year.

The Reagan administration did not take HIV seriously for years. Unlike Covid-19, which was quickly identified as a respiratory disease, HIV spread for years before scientists knew for sure how it was transmitted. Gay activists who encouraged their community to use condoms in the early 1980s were criticized as “sex-negative.”

Today, we know how to prevent the spread of HIV, and treatments for it have progressed to the point where early intervention can make the virus completely undetectable.

“If you’re HIV positive, the HIV pandemic never went away for you,” said Cannon, who’s spent much of her career studying the virus. She described it as a “great irony” that we identified the cause of Covid-19 and developed a vaccine within a year, only to have people refuse it: “Anybody with HIV would tell you that the opposite is true for HIV, where despite decades now of research, we have not been able to come up with vaccines that work against this shapeshifter of a virus that is HIV, and people would be desperately pleased if there were vaccines.”

Around 700,000 people in the U.S. have died of HIV-related illnesses in the 40 years since the disease appeared. In less than two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve surpassed 820,000 Covid-19 deaths.

How it ended: Endemic

SARS

How it started:SARS first appeared in China in 2002 before making its way to the United States and 28 other countries.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome — quickly shortened to SARS in headlines and news coverage — is caused by a coronavirus named SARS-CoV, or SARS-associated coronavirus. Covid-19 is caused by a virus so similar that it’s called SARS-CoV-2.

Globally, more than 8,000 people contracted SARS during the outbreak, and 916 died. (By comparison, there were 10 times more cases of Covid-19 than that registered globally by the end of February 2020.)

One hundred fifteen cases of SARS were suspected in the United States; only eight people had laboratory-confirmed cases of the disease, and none of them died.

Like Covid-19, fatality rates from SARS were very low for young people — less than 1 per cent for people under 25 — up to a more than 50 per cent rate for people over 65. Overall, the case fatality rate was 11 per cent.

Public anxiety was widespread, including in areas unaffected by SARS.

SARS and Covid-19 have a lot in common. But the diseases — and the way the government responded to them — weren’t exactly the same, said Benjamin, who worked for the CDC during the SARS epidemic.

“There wasn’t asymptomatic spread. Early on we had a functional test. We had a public health system that was in much better shape than it is today. All those things went wrong this time,” he said. “And [Covid-19] turned out to be much more infectious, it turned out to have asymptomatic spread. … [In 2020] you had a public health system which wasn’t ready for prime time because it hadn’t been invested in.”

Conversely, he said, the response to SARS was robust and immediate. The WHO issued a global alert about an unknown and severe form of pneumonia in Asia on March 12, 2003. The CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center by March 14, and issued an alert for travelers entering the U.S. from Hong Kong and parts of China the next day. Pandemic planning and guidance went into effect by the end of that month.

“When [public health organizations] had the actual genetic sequence mapped out and then they made a test for it, they rapidly got that test out to state and local health departments, they began screening, doing surveillance, we contained it very quickly, we communicated effectively to the public, and it worked,” he said.

In the case of SARS, the disease stopped spreading before a vaccine or cure could be created. Scientists knew another coronavirus could emerge that was more contagious. They laid the groundwork for developing the Covid-19 vaccines we have now.

How it ended: Died out after being controlled by public health measures

Swine flu

How it started:Both the Spanish flu and swine flu were caused by the same type of virus: influenza A H1N1.

Ultimately, according to the CDC, there were about 60.8 million cases of swine flu in the U.S. from April 2009 to April 2010, with 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths — a case fatality rate of about 0.02 per cent. So there were millions more cases of swine flu than there were of Covid-19 in the same time period, but a fraction of the fatalities. Eighty percent of swine flu deaths were in people younger than 65.

It was first detected in California on April 15, 2009, and the CDC and the Obama administration declared public health emergencies before the end of that month. As with Covid-19, hospital visits spiked. Hundreds of schools closed down temporarily.

In Texas, a children’s hospital set up tents in the parking lot to handle emergency room overflow; several hospitals in North Carolina banned children from visiting. Hospitals near Colorado Springs, Colorado, reported a 30 per cent increase in flu visits. Some 300,000 doses of liquid Tamiflu for children were released from the national pandemic stockpile.

In the same month cases were first detected, the CDC started identifying the virus strain for a potential vaccine. The first flu shots with H1N1 protections went into arms in October 2009. WHO declared the swine flu pandemic over in August 2010. But like Spanish flu, swine flu never completely went away.

How it ended: Endemic

Ebola

How it started: From 2014 to 2016, 28,616 people in West Africa had Ebola, and 11,310 died — a 39.5 per cent case fatality rate. Despite widespread fears about it spreading here — including close to 100 tweets from the man who would be president when the Covid-19 pandemic began — only two people contracted Ebola on U.S. soil, and neither died.

So how did we escape Ebola? Unlike Covid-19, Ebola isn’t transmitted in the air, and there’s no asymptomatic spread. It spreads through the bodily fluids of people actively experiencing symptoms, either directly or through bedding and other objects they’ve touched. If you haven’t been within 3 feet of a person with Ebola, you have almost no risk of getting it.

Part of the problem in Africa, Benjamin said, was that families traditionally washed the bodies of the deceased, exposing themselves to infected fluids. And health care workers who treated patients without proper protective equipment or awareness of heightened safety procedures were at risk. Once adequate equipment was delivered to affected areas and precautions were taken by health care workers and families of the victims, the disease could be controlled. People needed to temporarily change their behavior to respond to the public health crisis, and they did.

While this particular outbreak ended in 2016, it’s very possible we will see another Ebola event in the future. An Ebola vaccine was approved by the FDA in 2019.

How it ended: Subsided after being controlled by public health measures

How will Covid end?

Big picture, “pandemics end because the disease is unable to transmit itself through people or other vectors that allow the transmission of the disease,” Benjamin said.

The most likely outcome at this point is that Covid-19 is here to stay, he said: “I think most people now think that it will be endemic for a while.” On Twitter, his colleagues in epidemiology and public health seem to agree.

Covid-19 has a lot going for it, as far as viruses go: Unlike Ebola and SARS, it can be spread by people who don’t realize they have it. Unlike smallpox, it can jump species, infecting animals and then potentially reinfecting us. Unlike polio, one person can unwittingly spread it to a room full of people, and not enough people are willing to get vaccinated at once to stop it in its tracks.

It’s less contagious than swine flu, and less deadly than Ebola, landing it in a sort of perverse sweet spot where it infects a lot of people but doesn’t kill enough of them to run out of victims. For many people, it’s mild enough that it convinces others they don’t have to take the disease or precautions against it seriously. No one thought that about smallpox or Ebola.

In a conversation I had with Cannon for a different story in May 2020, she told me if someone were designing a virus with the maximum capacity to succeed, it would look a lot like this coronavirus.

“One of the really superpower things about this virus is its stealthiness,” she told me then. “So you can feel fine, you can go hang out with friends and not obey the 6-foot rule and the next morning you feel like death and you’re like, ‘oh crap.'” Back then, she contrasted it with the way we shut down SARS: “The reason we could stop it is everybody who had SARS, you were only infectious while you were sick. You woke up one day feeling like death and that was the day you were infectious. Infected people couldn’t walk among us. … With this coronavirus, they walk amongst us.”

So what happens next? In some populations, enough people will get vaccinated to achieve something like herd immunity. In others, it will burn through the population until everyone’s had it, and either achieves naturally gained immunity (which confers less long-term protection than vaccination) or dies. People still die from influenza and HIV in the United States; a disease becoming endemic isn’t exactly a happy ending.

“We tolerate the tragedy a lot better when it’s a disease that we’ve seen before,” Benjamin said. “It is less scary to us.”

Based on where we are now, “I don’t think Covid-19 will ever go away,” Cannon said.

We’re still learning about the omicron variant. Early reports out of South Africa suggest it may be a more contagious but milder version of the disease, though it’s too early to say for sure.

In a perfect world, Covid-19 would go away entirely; with that possibility almost certainly off the table, an attenuated strain that displaces the delta variant and turns Covid-19 into an illness that rarely requires hospitalization is perhaps the best we can hope for at this point.

How it ends: A combination of vaccine– and naturally gained immunity, attenuation, availability of rapid testing, and improvements in treatment for active cases could turn it into what skeptics wrongly called it to begin with: a bad cold or flu.

Switching to vaping can be a safe first step on the way to giving up smoking, says one vascular physician – provided giving up tobacco does not succeed by other means.

“The e-cigarette route involves an immediate massive risk reduction,” says Professor Martin Storck of the German Society for Vascular Surgery and Vascular Medicine, arguing that the goal should be to stop smoking, even if it means switching to another addiction.

“Smoking is the most important risk factor for the development and progression of atherosclerosis,” says Storck, “with the consequences of stroke, heart attack or amputation – especially in diabetics.”

And yet while they are less harmful than cigarettes, they’re far from harmless, and e-cigarettes are also addictive substances. What’s more, the vapour you inhale also contains substances that are harmful to your health, and little is known about the long-term consequences.

For those considering switching to vaping, vascular physician Storck points to reviews by the Cochrane organisation, which campaigns for evidence-based health care and evaluates available literature.

These studies have shown that the vapour from e-cigarettes and tobacco heaters contains significantly fewer harmful substances than cigarette smoke. “The order of magnitude is 90 to 95 per cent less.”

Therefore, a 100 per cent switch to e-cigarettes would be an option for smokers who otherwise would not be able to quit smoking, Storck says.

“Of course, complete quitting smoking remains the primary goal,” Storck clarifies, and e-cigarettes are only the lesser of two evils.

The problem: “Many smokers don’t even want to quit at first. After decades of smoking in some cases, it is difficult to give up smoking completely overnight – for example after a heart attack or pneumonia.”

In the view of the physician and his professional association, switching to e-cigarettes can at least reduce certain health risks.

A Berlin nightclub launched a week-long vaccination campaign on Monday, making good on a pledge made last year by the German capital’s nightlife venues.

Sage Beach began vaccinating, and other venues would be following suit over the course of the week, Lutz Leichsenring, spokesman for the club committee, said.

The campaign had “started well,” Leichsenring said, with half the 4,500 openings taken up by online reservation.

Dancing is currently banned in Berlin. The capital’s clubs have repeatedly issued calls for the population to get their shots and organized a “long vaccination night” during the summer, with music played in the vaccination centres.

“We want to get through the pandemic together and make our contribution,” Leichsenring said. At least three other clubs are joining the campaign, in which appointments can be booked online, whether for first, second or booster vaccinations.

Many Berlin clubs have closed their doors, taking the view that the ban on dancing has made paying business impossible.

There was considerable unhappiness at government policy, Leichsenring said. He noted that the clubs performed an important social function. The committee has previously called for dancing to be allowed for patrons who have undergone a recent test for the coronavirus.

According to the official disease control body, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 71.8 per cent of the population of the city-state of Berlin have received two shots of vaccine, in line with the national figure of 71.2 per cent.