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NYC to give out free COVID-fighting pills: New York City is launching a program for residents to get antiviral Covid pills delivered directly to their homes for free, though supplies of the drugs remained limited, Mayor Eric Adams announced Sunday. The oral pills will be for same-day at-home delivery as of Sunday for eligible New Yorkers who receive a prescription, the New York Times reported. According to a statement from the mayor’s office, treatments will be prioritized to infected New Yorkers at higher risk for severe illness.
Pandemic exacerbated drug overdoses: Preliminary San Francisco data from last year and 2020 indicates just how much isolation and distancing affected the risks of drug overdose. The city averaged about 64 overdoses per month from March 2020 to February 2021, when the most restrictive stay-at-home rules were in place. Then, from March to December 2021, that number dropped to 51. Overall, 650 people died of accidental drug overdoses in San Francisco for 2021. That’s about 60 fewer than in 2020, when overdose deaths spiked across the U.S. as lockdowns isolated people and disrupted services related to substance abuse. It’s not yet clear if the modest decline in deaths is proof that San Francisco’s various anti-drug programs are making a dent. Read the story here.
Tests are available again: The long lines outside testing sites have shortened. Appointments have opened up. Results are coming back faster. The winter coronavirus testing crisis is over. The omicron surge peaked in early January just at the moment when people needed coronavirus tests the most, and that’s when stores emptied of home test kits and appointments for PCR tests were hard to come by. Read what how the situation now has changed.
Double standard holds for visiting players: After much controversy but no change in outcome,
Kyrie Irving finally took the court at Chase Center against the Warriors on Saturday night, despite being unvaccinated in city where the rules of entry require vaccination against COVID. Irving can’t play at his own Nets’ home games due to New York City’s strict pandemic restrictions, but he can go on the road. And San Francisco gives exceptions to its vaccination rules for visting players. Read more here.
Russia caseload soars: Russia’s daily count of new coronavirus infections surged to more than 121,000 on Sunday, an eightfold increase compared with the beginning of the month, a government task force said. The 121,288 new infections reported over 24 hours was an all-time high and 8,000 more than a day earlier. In early January, before the omicron variant rocketed in, only about 15,000 new cases per day were tallied. Russia’s pandemic death count, at 330,728, is by far the largest in Europe. Still, authorities have avoided imposing any major restrictions to stem the surge, saying the health system has been coping.
Spotify points to vaccine science page: Spotify, the object of protests kicked off by Neil Young over COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on its platform, said Sunday that it will add content advisories before podcasts discussing the virus. Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek Ek said that the advisories will link to Spotify’s fact-based COVID-19 hub in what he described as a “new effort to combat misinformation.” Young kicked up the storm when he had his music removed from Spotify after the tech giant declined to get rid of episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which has been criticized for spreading virus misinformation. “It is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them,” Ek wrote in a post.
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