Source: Biden sounds alarm over the state of democracy worldwide | News | DW | 09.12.2021

“People working from home makes a lot of sense as it can massively reduce contacts at a population level,” says Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. “Having said that, the other measure that has the largest effect is reducing gathering sizes. For me it makes no sense to be instituting working from home policies and saying go ahead with parties. That is frankly ridiculous.”

The problem is that we are on such a steep trajectory that hospitals could easily be overwhelmed by January, depending on how case numbers translate into severe illness. “What we are doing now is very unlikely to be sufficient,” said Gurdasani.

Source: Stricter measures than plan B may be needed to rein in UK’s Omicron growth | Coronavirus | The Guardian

An international group of researchers has found that tropical forests have the potential to almost fully regrow if they are left untouched by humans for about 20 years. This is due to a multidimensional mechanism whereby old forest flora and fauna help a new generation of forest grow – a natural process known as “secondary succession”.

These new findings, published in Science, could play an important role in climate-breakdown mitigation and provide actionable advice on how to act next. They also suggest that it is not too late to undo the damage that humanity has done through catastrophic climate change over the last few decades.

“That’s good news, because the implication is that, 20 years … that’s a realistic time that I can think of, and that my daughter can think of, and that the policymakers can think of,” said Lourens Poorter, professor in functional ecology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper.

This idea of natural regeneration is frequently disregarded in favour of tree plantations, but according to Poorter, the former yields better results than restoration plantings. “Compared to planting new trees, it performs way better in terms of biodiversity, climate change mitigation and recovering nutrients.”

Source: Tropical forests can regenerate in just 20 years without human interference | Conservation | The Guardian

Edmunds told a Royal Society of Medicine webinar on Thursday that it was “extremely likely” there were many more cases of Omicron in the community than those confirmed by testing, and that the numbers were set to soar in the weeks ahead.

The UK Health Security Agency identified a further 249 Omicron cases on Thursday, almost twice the number announced the day before, bringing the UK total to 817. Edmunds said that if the UK had 1,000 cases today, then a doubling time of two to three days would drive the number up to 8,000 in a week and 64,000 in two weeks. Those would come on top of the continuing wave of Delta infections.

“Nobody wants to have to reintroduce these measures. It’s very damaging for parts of the economy – the hospitality and retail sector, in particular, are going to be affected – but unfortunately we have to do it,” he said.

“With the speed of spread of this virus, we may well have really significant numbers of cases by Christmas,” he added. “I suspect that whatever we do now, we are unlikely to overreact.” Given the rate of community transmission, he said, travel restrictions were “not really going to do much now”.

Source: Omicron could be spreading faster in England than in South Africa, Sage adviser says | Coronavirus | The Guardian

For the Starbucks employees at the union store, this means they’ll begin to negotiate a contract for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. For everyone else, this could spur more unionization across the US — whether at more Starbucks locations or anywhere else — thanks to the company’s high profile.

“Sometimes strikes and union organizing victories can be very contagious,” said Johnnie Kallas, a PhD candidate at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school, which hosted a panel ahead of the vote tally on Thursday. “We saw this in 2018 with teacher strikes. They began in West Virginia; they quickly spread to North Carolina, Arizona, Oklahoma, and other states.”

He added, “[This vote] could inspire a lot of workers across the country in a low-unionized sector to fight for union rights.”

Source: What the first Starbucks union means for workers everywhere – Vox

Source: Trump loses appeal to withhold records from Jan 6 attack – The Jerusalem Post

Denmark, because of its relatively low population, national healthcare system, and superior testing and genetic sequencing of COVID, serves as a bit of a bellwether for us in this pandemic.

Trends that are first picked up in Denmark have a way of showing up elsewhere around the world a few months later.

Yesterday, as we’ve seen this week in the UK and Norway – Denmark announced new, tightened COVID restrictions – including the early closing of schools (by 1 week) for the Christmas holidays, new face mask requirements, the closure of bars, restaurants and nightclubs at midnight, and a reduced validity period (7 months down from 12) for COVID vaccine passports.

Today Denmark’s SSI reports a nearly 10% jump in hospital admissions this week, over last, along with a rapidly increasing number of Omicron variant detections.  Once again, children ages 6-11 are seeing the highest rate of infection.

Source: Avian Flu Diary: Denmark SSI: COVID Infections & Hospitalizations Increased In Epi Week 48

Today the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 booster vaccine in adolescents ages 16 and 17.

The group will be eligible through an emergency use authorization (EUA) for a third dose of the mRNA vaccine 6 months after their initial vaccination series. Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, MD, said the announcement will come in time to protect families during the holidays.

Source: FDA green-lights Pfizer COVID-19 boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds | CIDRAP

As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the future of abortion rights, anti-abortion Congress members are doing everything they can to obstruct abortion access — as of this week, by pressuring Google to push medical disinformation on abortion pills.

Two dozen Republican members of Congress — including the notably very sane Reps. Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — have reportedly hand-delivered a letter addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, telling Pichai to reverse the search engine’s recent ban on advertisements with “life-saving information on abortion pill reversal.”

“Google’s decision to censor Live Action’s abortion pill reversal ads is denying life-saving information to thousands of women who want to save their unborn children’s lives from a tragic decision they regret,” the letter states. It adds that the search engine shouldn’t allow ads for abortion pills, because they don’t meet “Google’s harmful health claims policies,” even though medication abortion has been approved by the FDA since 2000.

“Abortion pill reversal,” of course, is a scientifically unsupported and possibly dangerous treatment to “reverse” a medication abortion that’s underway. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called it “unproven and unethical,” noting that the one study of the treatment wasn’t supervised by an institutional review board and possibly put its human research subjects at risk.

Source: Congress Members Push Google to Share Medical Disinformation