Another tranche, FWIW.
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Scepticism over Oxford vaccine threatens Europe's immunisation push
German politicians voice support for jab after only 17% of doses delivered to country are administered so far
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/19...
UK scientists highlight 12 criteria for Covid vaccine passports
Royal Society says issues such as certifying immunity and data protection need to be considered
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/19...
Why are cases of Covid in the workplace not being reported in the UK?
In order to truly understand who gets the virus and how, companies must be required to disclose all cases and fatalities
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/202...
'I had no idea about the hidden labour’: has the pandemic changed fatherhood for ever?
For the past year, many men have spent more time with their children than ever before. Could it force a permanent change?
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021...
My thoughts became poisonous’: the toll of lockdown when you live alone
Long-term social isolation is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. What has the last year meant for those who don’t share their homes? ...
In November 2020 the Office for National Statistics released findings that showed acute loneliness had climbed to record levels, with 8% of adults (around 4.2 million people) feeling “always or often lonely”, and 16-29-year-olds twice as likely as the over-70s to experience loneliness in the pandemic. ...
Even those who had previously enjoyed living by themselves found the absence of company almost took on a physical quality. ...
Long-term social isolation is known to carry an increased risk of mortality comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day – and lonely people are more likely to choose coping mechanisms that aren’t good for their health. TJ started drinking more. “It got to the point where I was thinking in bottles ...” ...
For some, the solitude and self-reflection did eventually prove a gift. After two months, TJ stopped drinking. “I woke up one morning and thought: ‘Right, no one’s coming to rescue me, I need to learn how to be on my own, with my own thoughts.’ ”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021...
And Then the Gorillas Started Coughing
Humans are spreading the coronavirus to other animals. What does that mean for all of us? ...
The exposure of wild apes to human respiratory viruses is especially concerning, because those can be transmitted on a puff of breath (unlike blood-borne viruses such as Ebola or H.I.V.) and apes have susceptible respiratory cells very similar to ours. The fateful exposure might come either from field staff involved in primate research or from ecotourists visiting sites such as Taï, Gombe or Volcanoes National Park (with its mountain gorillas) in Rwanda. ...
... there is a big distinction between such respiratory infections and SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Leendertz said, and that’s the “broad species range of this virus”: its capacity to infect and be transmitted among not just primates but also cats and mice and deer or mustelids like mink and ferrets, and not just in zoos, laboratories and farms but possibly also in the wild.
Other scientists have warned about this risk, too, describing it as a low-probability event with a potentially high-impact outcome. SARS-CoV-2 could become established as an endemic infection of wild mustelids or rodents living in forests, national parks and maybe old barns and sheds. Among the millions of mink raised on fur farms in Denmark each year, a few thousand typically escape, and some of those survive in the wild — as exotics, since the farmed species (known as American mink) aren’t native to Denmark. If some of last year’s escapees carry SARS-CoV-2, with or without symptoms, they could pass it to native Danish mustelids like pine marten, European polecat or Eurasian badger, either by falling prey to those animals or via contaminated feces.
That could result in what disease ecologists call a sylvatic cycle (from the Latin word “sylva,” meaning forest), with the virus circulating endlessly in wild animal populations, if they are large and dense, and spilling back into humans when circumstance allows. ...
Five years from now, when much of the world’s population will have been vaccinated against Covid-19 but maybe a billion people won’t, either for lack of opportunity or by stubborn refusal, the virus will still be with us. It will circulate among the unvaccinated, sometimes inconspicuously, sometimes causing severe illness or death, and it could also abide among wildlife populations, mutating and evolving in ways no one can predict. If it crosses back from them to us, it may ignite new outbreaks, start us coughing again and even bring with it some ugly genomic innovations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opinion/co...