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Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a briefing on Wednesday that, due to the surge in cases thanks to the Omicron variant of COVID-19, Americans should not gather in large groups this Christmas season even if people have received the vaccine and a booster. The reason why Fauci said it is not wise to congregate in large groups even if someone has all the shots is that they would likely not know the vaccination status of other people. "There are many of these parties that have 30, 40, 50 people in which you do not know the vaccination status of individuals,"...

According to White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, Americans "may never shake hands again," we'll all be wearing masks on planes for the rest of our lives, and you definitely need to ask friends and family coming to your house this holiday season for their vaccine papers. His latest advice is also likely to fall on deaf ears. With the more mild Omicron variant sweeping the nation, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it's probably a good idea to go ahead and disinvite those unvaxxed relatives of yours, which will go over...

York’s New Year’s Eve White Rose Drop and the city’s New Year’s Eve Children’s Balloon Drop have been canceled, York Mayor Michael Helfrich announced on Friday. City officials said they are canceling large city-sponsored public events due to the recent rapid increase in COVID-19 caseloads, and York and Memorial hospitals being near or above 100% capacity. “While we know that these events are community favorites, these events have the potential of bringing very large crowds together to celebrate, exacerbating this fourth surge of COVID-19,” city officials said in a news release. “High inpatient volumes create delays in the start of...

A resident doctor on CNN told viewers Thursday that they should all be wearing masks at home around other family members and everyone should wake up on Christmas morning and rather than open presents, take COVID tests. Dr. William Schaffner also said that these restrictions should apply to everyone, even those people who are double and triple vaccinated. “I recommend that we hang our stockings with care,” Schaffner stated, adding “We have to be careful because we are all going to get together, we should all be vaccinated and preferentially boosted. We should wear our masks if we are uncertain.”...

A coming winter surge and the spread of Omicron have made it clear that COVID is everyone’s problem. By Rachel Gutman Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant that appears...

OSLO, Dec 3 (Reuters) - At least 13 people in Oslo have been infected with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus following a corporate Christmas party described as a "super spreader event", and their numbers could rise to over 60 cases, authorities said on Friday. The outbreak took place at a Christmas party on Nov. 26 organised by renewable energy company Scatec , which has operations in South Africa where the variant was first detected. "This party has been a super spreader event," Preben Aavitsland, a senior physician at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, told Reuters by email. "Our...

Ebola’s average mortality rate is 50 per cent.. A top physician says it will be necessary to keep “vaccinating the world for years” in order to prevent a COVID strain as deadly as Ebola from developing. The comments were made earlier today by Frank Ulrich Montgomery, chairman of the global physicians’ society the World Medical Association (WMA). “My great concern is that there could be a variant that is as infectious as Delta and as dangerous as Ebola,” he told the newspapers of the Funke media group. According to Montgomery, “It will be necessary to vaccinate the world for years...

According to the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, there are 23 changes in the virus’s genetic material, an unusually large number that appears to be helping it spread more quickly. British officials have now estimated that “VUI – 202012/01” is as much as 70 percent more transmissible — a number that is based on modeling, but not yet confirmed in lab experiments. Though there is no evidence to-date that the strain causes a more intense illness or leads to a higher fatality rate, faster transmission does mean more cases, which can lead to a higher hospitalization rate... ...Are new...

CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner appeared Saturday on the network to declare that “we just can’t do” Christmas “this year” because of COVID-19. “So the next big holiday is obviously the Christmas, New Year’s holiday where people tend to travel, want to travel, want to be with family, but we just can’t do it this year. We’re going to cause needless deaths and particularly that’s among people we really care about, you know, our most vulnerable, our grandparents, our parents, our neighbors,” Reiner said. “We can’t travel this year. We need to stay home. This is a sacrifice that...

As COVID-19 infection rates have begun surging once again throughout much of the state, the Episcopal Diocese of Central Pennsylvania has issued a statement suspending in-person church services until next year. The statement, issued by Bishop Audrey Scanlan on Nov. 14, stated that COVID-19 infection rates “are as high- and higher- now than ever and they show no sign of decreasing. Pennsylvania’s rates of infection are now four times what they were from our summer’s lowest ebb, and two of the counties in our diocese are among the top ten counties for virus transmission in the Commonwealth.” 59 of Pennsylvania’s...

A Woolworths in Germany will no longer be selling Christmas decoration as staff claim the business has undergone a conversion to Islam. One worker at the Woolworths, located in Dortmund, told German news outlet Bild, “We are a Muslim business. We don’t want to sell Christmas articles.” Word of that statement spread quite quickly and managed to pick up a whole host of negative reactions, many reminiscent of the following. Germany, of course, has seen a major influx in Muslim immigration, as well as crime, over the past year. In the first half of 2016 alone, those migrants were charged...