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The reported incidents range from verbal harassments to physical altercations.

As a man in his late 20s, Kim is not the typical victim of anti-Asian attacks. Chung Joe said that most attacks target the more vulnerable members of the Asian American community.

"Women are targeted more than twice as often as men," she said, and "we are seeing a spate of hate and violence targeted at our seniors."

Nearly 44% of all incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate have come from California. Asian Americans account for roughly 15% of California's estimated 40 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"The Federal Government must recognize that it has played a role in furthering these xenophobic sentiments through the actions of political leaders, including references to the COVID-19 pandemic by the geographic location of its origin," Biden said. "Such statements have stoked unfounded fears and perpetuated stigma about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and have contributed to increasing rates of bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against AAPI persons."

The 2021 report card also had excellent news, Schade said. Despite the pressures and economic uncertainties brought on by the pandemic, some 70% of the companies improved their scores since they were first evaluated, according to the report.

Some of the greatest gains by companies evaluated by the report card were in the beauty and personal care sector. The report named Ulta Beauty as the most improved retailer -- rising from an F result in 2019 to a C grade today. Sephora showed the greatest improvement over time, the report card found, moving from a D in 2017 to an A today.

In an "unprecedented move" in the history of the report card, Target and Rite Aid announced they will now look for toxic chemicals in beauty products marketed to women of color, including skin lightening creams, hair straighteners and relaxers, Schade said.

"Research shows that women of color have higher levels of toxic chemicals related to beauty products in their bodies, and this is linked to higher incidences of cancer, poor infant and maternal health outcomes, learning disabilities, obesity, asthma, and other serious health concerns," said Taylor Morton, director of environmental health and education at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, in a statement.

"In 2018, nearly half of the retailers received failing grades. But that number dropped to nearly one-third in 2019 and to one-quarter this year," Schade said.

Federal action may be forthcoming. When running for office, President Joe Biden pledged to "tackle PFAS pollution by designating PFAS as a hazardous substance, setting enforceable limits for PFAS in the Safe Drinking Water Act, prioritizing substitutes through procurement, and accelerating toxicity studies and research."

The harm done by the trade war has had measurable consequences. As of September 2020, the Tax Foundation reports the tariffs have cost Americans $80 billion in additional taxes and lowered employment by 179,800 jobs.

In essence, we are involved in a seemingly endless trade war being waged by the US government against the American economy. Ending it would honor USTR's stated mission of creating "new opportunities and higher living standards" for Americans.

Usually the number of migrants crossing goes down in the winter, and creeps upward in the spring. The fact that we're already seeing higher numbers could be a sign that we'll keep seeing the number of migrants at the border grow.

But context is also key. Because a pandemic policy remains in place that allows migrants to be swiftly kicked out of the country without going through as many steps, advocates say these statistics can also include repeated crossing attempts by individuals.

Authorities say 25 people were packed inside a Ford Expedition that had the capacity to safely carry eight. And that the same vehicle was earlier spotting going through a hole in the border fence. Verlyn Cardona, a woman who survived the crash, told CNN en Español she doesn't believe the plan was for so many people to pile into the back of the truck. "People were running in and climbing on top of others," she said. "The door closed. We said, 'There's not enough room. Open the door.' The truck was moving."Her daughter, a 23-year-old law student who she said was fleeing threats in Guatemala, was among those who perished.

When President Biden took office, he issued an executive order halting border wall construction until further review. With numbers of migrants crossing the border climbing, critics of illegal immigration are decrying the administration's decision to pause efforts to build a bigger border wall. Immigrants and many who live in border communities argue walls are ineffective and also often push migrants to cross in more dangerous areas.

Many migrants who recently spoke with CNN near the Mexico-Guatemala border mentioned the storms. They also said there were other factors influencing their decision to make the dangerous journey now, too. Among them: economic struggles during the pandemic and hope that the new administration will be more sympathetic to immigration.

The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s.

“You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”

The study controlled for poverty, urbanization, aging, obesity and physical activity. It controlled for other foods and total calories. In short, it controlled for everything controllable, and it satisfied the longstanding “Bradford Hill” criteria for what’s called medical inference of causation by linking dose (the more sugar that’s available, the more occurrences of diabetes); duration (if sugar is available longer, the prevalence of diabetes increases); directionality (not only does diabetes increase with more sugar, it decreases with less sugar); and precedence (diabetics don’t start consuming more sugar; people who consume more sugar are more likely to become diabetics).

for every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverage introduced per person per day into a country’s food system, the rate of diabetes goes up 1 percent. (The study found no significant difference in results between those countries that rely more heavily on high-fructose corn syrup and those that rely primarily on cane sugar.)

the closest thing to causation and a smoking gun that we will see.

just as tobacco companies fought, ignored, lied and obfuscated in the ’60s (and, indeed, through the ’90s), the pushers of sugar will do the same now.

The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list,

Perhaps most important, as a number of scientists have been insisting in recent years, all calories are not created equal. By definition, all calories give off the same amount of energy when burned, but your body treats sugar calories differently, and that difference is damaging.

it’s become clear that obesity itself is not the cause of our dramatic upswing in chronic disease. Rather, it’s metabolic syndrome, which can strike those of “normal” weight as well as those who are obese. Metabolic syndrome is a result of insulin resistance, which appears to be a direct result of consumption of added sugars

it isn’t simply overeating that can make you sick; it’s overeating sugar.

A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade

In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to diabetes.

But as Lustig says, “This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it’s time to do something about it.”

The study found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher rates of diabetes — independent of obesity rates — but stopped short of stating that sugar caused diabetes.

This explains why there’s little argument from scientific quarters about the “obesity won’t kill you” studies; technically, they’re correct, because obesity is a marker for metabolic syndrome, not a cause.

Obesity is, in fact, a major risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, as the study noted.

The New Deal epoch didn't end because the public opposed the federal spending. It ended when millions of working-class White voters abandoned the Democratic Party because of the party's pro-civil rights stance in the 1960s.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the budget deficit in future years is expected to be around 4% of GDP. If we could trim that by one quarter, reducing it to 3% of GDP, we could prevent the debt from rocketing higher compared to size of the overall economy. Keeping the debt stable and also paying for that $600 billion in new spending will require higher taxes, amounting to 4% of GDP -- 1% to cut the deficit and 3% to fund the new spending.

From this vantage, proponents argue that the student debt crisis incurs social costs even in the case of better-off borrowers, like lawyers who have to go into corporate law instead of becoming public defenders because they have $200,000 in law school loans to pay off. And then there are borrowers for whom “affording” payments means being saddled with the depressing obligation to delay or forgo major life milestones like having children, owning a home and saving for retirement.

Virtually everyone in this debate agrees that cancellation would only treat the symptoms of the student debt crisis, not cure its causes. Some say it could make the problem even worse by, in effect, bailing out schools whose value has outstripped their cost, causing tuitions to rise even higher and incentivizing people to take out loans they can’t afford with the expectation they will be forgiven.

“It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.”

The opioid epidemic is a major driver of the worrisome numbers, but far from the sole cause. The study found that improvements in life expectancy, largely because of lower rates of infant mortality, began to slow in the 1980s, long before the opioid epidemic became a national tragedy

Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones

Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”

The risk of death from drug overdoses increased 486 percent for midlife women between 1999 and 2017; the risk increased 351 percent for men in that same period. Women also experienced a bigger relative increase in risk of suicide and alcohol-related liver disease.

The all-cause death rate — meaning deaths per 100,000 people — rose 6 percent from 2010 to 2017 among working-age people in the United States

There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” she said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”

. The general trend: Life expectancy improved a great deal for several decades, particularly in the 1970s, then slowed down, leveled off, and finally reversed course after 2014, decreasing three years in a row.

Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in America today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more

Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose much-publicized report in 2015 highlighted the death rates in middle-aged whites, published a paper in 2017 pointing to a widening gap in health associated with levels of education, a trend dating to the 1970s. Case told reporters their research showed a “sea of despair” in the United States among people with only a high school diploma or less. She declined to comment on the new report.

“When they get up into their 20s, 30s and 40s, they’re carrying the risk factors of obesity that were acquired when they were children. We didn’t see that in previous generations.”

Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population ages 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population ages 2 to 19 is obese.

The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998 and since then, the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as America’s “health disadvantage.”

Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data.

The 33,000 excess deaths are an estimate based on the number of all-cause midlife deaths from 2010 to 2017 that would be expected if mortality was unchanged vs. the number of deaths actually recorded by medical examiners.

Outside researchers praised the study for knitting together so much research into a sweeping look at U.S. mortality trends.“This report has universal relevance. It has broad implications for all of society,” said Howard Koh, a professor of public health at Harvard University who was not part of the research team.

The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998, and since then the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as the United States’ “health disadvantage.”

For example, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, cigarette companies aggressively marketed to women, and the health effects of that push may not show up for decades.

Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more. Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population age 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population age 2 to 19 is obese.

The new CDC guidance says fully vaccinated people can:Read MoreVisit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancingVisit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease.

Skip quarantine and testing if exposed to someone who has Covid-19 but are asymptomatic, but should monitor for symptoms for 14 daysThis means that vaccinated grandparents may finally feel comfortable visiting their unvaccinated grandchildren and giving them a big hug, especially if they're local -- the CDC still says people should avoid travel -- and as long as none of the unvaccinated people in that household are at risk for severe Covid-19.

However, people who are fully vaccinated still need to take precautions in many scenarios. The guidelines say fully vaccinated people must:Wear a mask and keep good physical distance around the unvaccinated who are at increased risk for severe Covid-19, or if the unvaccinated person has a household member who is at higher riskWear masks and physically distance when visiting unvaccinated people who are from multiple households.

If fully vaccinated people live in a non-health care congregate setting, such as a group home or detention facility, they should quarantine for 14 days and get tested if exposed to someone with a suspected or confirmed Covid-19 case.The guidelines say that the risk of infection in social activities like going to the gym or restaurant is lower for the fully vaccinated. However, people should still take precautions, as transmission risk in these settings is higher and increases the more unvaccinated people are involved. So wear that mask on the treadmill, and if dining out, keep it on while waiting for your meal

Walensky said CDC travel guidelines will remain the same for the vaccinated until there is more data about how much or how little vaccinated people can transmit the virus to others. She added that a "larger swath" of the population will also need to be vaccinated before it's really safe. About 90% of the country is still not vaccinated, Walensky said. Travel brings too much exposure to crowds and the spread of variants is also a real concern.

"We are here in no small measure because of the safety protection that many, many Americans have taken with regard to their family, friends and neighbors," Zients said. "We ask people to continue to do that so we can get there, as quickly and as permanently as possible."There are now 30 million people in the United States who are fully vaccinated, but the United States still averaged more than 60,000 cases per day over the last seven days, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"We continue to have high levels of virus around the country, and more readily transmissible variants have now been confirmed in nearly every state, while we work to quickly vaccinate people more and more each day, we have to see this through," Walensky said Monday. "Let's stick together. Please keep wearing a well fitting mask and taking the other public health actions we know work to help stop the spread of this virus."

"A big jump in interest rates would be very costly," said Ugo Panizza, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. "Central banks will face very, very complicated tradeoffs if inflation does go up."

The moves have been triggered in part by growing confidence about the next phase of the pandemic. As vaccination campaigns allow governments to lift some restrictions, consumers are expected to rush to restaurants and hop on planes. That could push up prices, which central banks have pledged to keep under control.

US lawmakers approved a mammoth $1.9 trillion stimulus package on Wednesday that could send prices higher and increase pressure on the Federal Reserve.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that publicly-held government debt in the United States will climb to nearly $22.5 trillion by the end of fiscal 2021. That's equivalent to 102% of annual gross domestic product. In Italy, the ratio stood at 154% at the end of September, while Greece was almost at 200%.

Interest costs are even more sensitive to inflation and rate hikes because of the pandemic response.The UK government borrowed £270.6 billion ($377 billion) between April 2020 and January 2021, and higher interest rates mean increased payments on that debt.

"Just as it would be irresponsible to withdraw [economic] support too soon, it would also be irresponsible to allow future borrowing and debt to be left unchecked," he said.

"It is a real concern," said Randall Kroszner, who served as a Federal Reserve governor from 2006 until 2009. If US debt payments suddenly go "from being quite low to being quite significant," that could weigh on the recovery and slow economic activity, he added.

Panizza said that Italy needs to refinance or extend the due date of about one-seventh of its debt every year. If interest rates were to go up by 2%, that would add about half a point of GDP, or roughly $9.9 billion, to debt servicing costs annually. That's a "substantial" amount, he emphasized.

"This is not something that we have a lot of experience with," Kroszner said.

The Covax distribution plan calls for providing each country with enough vaccine doses for roughly 20 percent of the population. Only after that would countries’ health needs be considered.

Peruvians are at far higher risk right now than Ghanaians of similar age and health — and both are at far higher risk than, say, Canadians or Taiwanese. By ignoring differences in risk between countries, Covax undermines its stated aim of protecting “people most at risk and those most likely to transmit the virus.”

Need should be the principal criterion for distributing vaccines among countries, but not the only one. Before vaccines are sent, countries must be able to distribute and administer them. Vaccinations — not vaccines — are what save lives.

s the global supply of vaccines expands, vaccine manufacturers and nations expecting to have extra doses, including the United States and Britain, must decide which countries to help and how many doses to send to global organizations like Covax.But if Covax’s distribution criteria remain unresponsive to need, countries with spare doses should bypass the organization and distribute them where they will reduce deaths the most.

"If there was no policy across the whole country, it would be difficult to enforce a separate one for poor people and Muslims."

China's birth rate has been falling rapidly since the introduction of the one-child policy more than 40 years ago, which limited couples to one baby in order to alleviate poverty and stem a population boom.

During the one-child policy, ethnic minorities, including Xinjiang's Uyghur population, were allowed to have up to three children, which authorities said was in deference of the group's cultural traditions of large families.

Faced with a demographic crisis, the Chinese government relaxed the policy in 2016 to allow for two children

n 2020, the birth rate fell by almost 15% year on year.

While the policy successfully reined in birth rates as China developed, in more recent years officials have become concerned the country won't have enough young workers to keep powering its economic growth.

Between 1991 and 2017, Xinjiang had a substantially higher birth-rate ratio when compared to the rest of the country, according to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

But when the Chinese government began its crackdown in Xinjiang in 2017, which allegedly involved sending millions of Uyghurs to a vast complex of detention centers, there was a simultaneous tightening of family planning policies.Between 2017 and 2018, birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by a third, from 15.8 per 1,000 people to 10.7 per 1,000 people.

At a time when the Chinese government was desperately trying to raise birth rates, sterilizations in the region surged to 243 per 100,000 people in 2018, according to official government documents referenced in a report by Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz. That is far higher than the rate of 33 per 100,000 people for the rest of the country.

And while the use of IUD birth control devices dropped in China between 2016 and 2018, Zenz quoted documents showing in Xinjiang it rose to 963 per 100,000 people.

"If you lifted the birth restrictions universally, they'd lose their justification for tightening birth control policies against specific sectors of Chinese society that they dislike," said Carl Minzner, professor of law at Fordham University.

Experts said Beijing would be reluctant to find new roles for the tens of thousands of people employed by the government to oversee the country's massive family planning policy.

At the same time, removing the limits would abolish one of the many ways in the Chinese government can monitor its population, Byler said, forcing Beijing to find another reason to carry out intimate domestic surveillance.

for a population of 10.5 million, approximately 1.8 million infections and 8,000 deaths could be prevented during 11 months with more efficacious COVID-19 vaccines, higher vaccination coverage, and maintaining NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions), such as distancing and use of face masks," they wrote.

It would be better to give lower-efficacy vaccines to more people, they calculated. That would reduce the risk of virus spread more than giving higher efficacy vaccines to fewer people.

In keeping with other research, the model showed a greater risk for Covid-19 hospitalization and death among Black people and those living in rural communities. The team noted that combining vaccination with pandemic precautions would lead to reduced infections, hospitalizations and deaths across all groups.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last month that in most cases, it's safe for vaccinated people to go maskless outdoors and indoors. The guidance was met with mixed reviews, with some public health experts arguing that the US is not far enough along in its Covid-19 vaccination effort to relax pandemic precautions.

Just over half of the adult population in the US and about 40% of the total population has been fully vaccinated, according to the latest CDC data.

As Covid-19 vaccination coverage increases, many states are dropping pandemic precautions.

Patel and colleagues say their findings suggest it will take a coordinated effort of maximizing vaccine coverage and practicing pandemic precautions "to reduce COVID-19 burden to a level that could safely allow a resumption of many economic, educational, and social activities."

Miami Beach is spending millions elevating roads, upgrading pumps and changing building codes to allow residents to raise their mansions by five feet. But in working-class, immigrant neighborhoods like Little Haiti, year-to-year sea level rise gets lost in the day-to-day struggle, and most had no idea that they live a lofty three feet higher than the wealthy folks on Miami Beach.

The fickle undulations between city blocks could mean the difference between survival and retreat, and the rising cost of altitude is sparking a noticeable shift in community activism and municipal budgets.

“We used to think that the allure of Little Haiti was the fact that it’s close to downtown, close to both airports and close to the beach. Unbeknownst to us, it’s because we are positioned at a higher altitude.”

After her community center and day school were priced out of three different buildings, she caught wind of plans to build the sprawling $1 billion Magic City development on the edge of Little Haiti, featuring a promenade, high-end retail stores, high rise apartments and imagined by a consortium of local investors, including the founder of Cirque du Soleil.

They promised to preserve the soul of Little Haiti and give $31 million to the community for affordable housing and other programs, but it wasn’t enough for Bastien. “This is a plan to actually erase Little Haiti,” she says. “Because this is the one place where immigration and climate gentrification collide.”

What’s happening in Little Haiti could be just one example of a “climate apartheid” that the United Nations warns is ahead, where there will be a gulf between the rich who can protect themselves from the impact of climate change and the poor who are left behind.

"Japan can meet an even higher goal if the government takes all possible measures to promote investments for renewable energy and energy savings," she said."It would be also important to introduce a carbon pricing mechanism to hasten the exit of coal-fired power plants and to bolster competition among power generators to make their portfolio greener,

But survivors, funeral directors and scientists say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures. The sheer number of patients has all but collapsed the health system in a country that invests less on public health — just above 1% of its gross domestic product — than most of its peers. (Brazil spends more than 9% of its GDP on health; in the U.S., the figure is nearly 18%.)

Each day, he goes to every crematorium and burial ground in his district of the capital, tallying deaths from COVID-19. Of his 11 staff members, five currently have COVID-19, he said.

Last year, at the height of the pandemic's first wave in India, Sirohi said he was counting about 220 COVID-19 deaths a day. When NPR spoke to him Wednesday, he counted 702 for that day. He passes those numbers up the chain of command. But the death figures the government ultimately publishes for his region have been at least 20% lower than what he's seeing on the ground, he said.

He attributed this disparity to administrative chaos.

There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed: hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared that the country was in the "endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic." Daily cases had hit record lows of about 8,000 a day in early February, down from a peak of nearly 100,000 cases a day in September.

But over the winter, as cases began creeping up, some politicians didn't pay attention — or perhaps didn't believe the coronavirus could return.

There have also been allegations that some politicians tried to suppress inconvenient news about rising case numbers.

Fewer positive results mean fewer confirmed infections and fewer deaths attributed to the coronavirus. India's total pandemic deaths this week crossed the 200,000 mark. But that's still lower than the overall death tolls in the United States, Brazil and Mexico, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

There are reasons why fewer Indians might die from COVID-19. India is a very young country. Only 6% of Indians are older than 65. More than half the population is under 25. They're more likely to survive the disease.

By analyzing total excess deaths – i.e., the difference between total deaths in Mumbai one year, compared with the year before — he estimates that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 would have to have been undercounted by at least two-thirds to account for the higher 2020 death tally.

Those calculations are based on data from Mumbai, India's richest major city, where access to health care is better than elsewhere. So the number of undercounted deaths could be even higher in less well-off parts of the country — such as in Santosh Pandey's village.

Scientists said recorded infections are even more of an underestimate. But they have a better idea of how much infections have been undercounted because they have serological data from random antibody tests that authorities conducted across large swaths of the country.

Results of a third national serological survey conducted in December and January showed that roughly a fifth of India's population had been exposed to the virus. That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.

She's a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who's designed models that show India's reported infections will peak in late May. She predicts India could be confirming as many as 1 million new cases a day and 4,500 daily deaths by then.

The institute's director, Chris Murray, told NPR that India may be detecting only 3% or 4% of its daily infections.

India's deaths in this latest wave would peak around the third week of May, according to the institute's model.

That could mean more shortages, fewer hospital beds and more tragedy on top of what India has already endured in recent weeks.

The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily.

But governors cited fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations while lifting measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

Chicago officials earlier this month raised indoor capacity for bars, restaurants and other businesses and Baltimore leaders announced Wednesday they were easing restrictions on places including religious facilities, retail stores and malls, fitness centers and food service establishments -- changes that will go into effect next week.

Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases.

The B.1.1.7 variant, she said this week, is projected to become the dominant variant in the US by the end of this month or early April.Despite the warnings, spring break crowds are gathering -- with Florida officials reporting too many people and not enough masks -- and nationwide, air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records.

Now, as the country inches closer to 30 million reported infections, cases are rising by more than 10% in 14 states this week compared to last week,

We're in a race to get the population vaccinated. At the same time, we're fighting people's exhaustion with the restrictions that public health has put in place and we're fighting the move by so many governors to remove the restrictions that are keeping us all safe."

Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last,

All that while cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- climbed. The variants have the potential to wipe out all the progress the US made if Americans get lax with safety measures,

In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday that Covid-19 hospitalizations have "jumped up" slightly

Those include the rolling back of restrictions, a prison outbreak, Covid-19 fatigue, a failure to wear masks, and the B.1.1.7 variant fueling the surge, Morse told CNN. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased restrictions earlier this month, upping capacity limits at restaurants as well as in retail stores, gyms and other facilities.

There's a long list of factors contributing to the spike in cases in Michigan,

Justice had eased restrictions earlier this month, increasing capacity at bars, restaurants and other businesses to 100% and upping the social-gathering limit.

During Wednesday's news briefing, he added that the state has had "seven outbreaks in our church community" across five counties.

what could play a key role in helping control the pandemic will be more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests, top health officials

"I do believe that once we have teachers vaccinated that we can use testing in the schools -- serial testing, cadence testing -- to identify potential infections, asymptomatic infections, shut down clusters and keep our schools open."

Her remarks came the same day the CDC released updated guidance about testing, saying more and better testing should help catch asymptomatic cases and control the spread.

More than 73.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. And more than 39.9 million people are fully vaccinated -- roughly 12% of the US population. But challenges -- including vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and inequities -- remain, and it's not entirely clear when the US will hit herd immunity -

On Wednesday, both Fauci and Walensky pushed back against questions about herd immunity, saying a lot depended on how quickly Americans take vaccines.

For now, the US still has a long way to go to overcome vaccine hesitancy,

Vaccination is the country's best hope to get beyond the pandemic, he said, "and yet there's all this overlay, and some of it is politics and some of it's social media conspiracy theories and some of it is just distrust of anything that the government had anything to do with."

Additionally, in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, counties considered to have high social vulnerability had lower vaccine coverage than counties considered to have low social vulnerability,

The agency's social vulnerability index identifies communities that may need additional support during emergencies based on more than a dozen indicators across four categories: socioeconomic status, household composition, racial/ethnic minority status and housing type.

By March 1, vaccination coverage was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with low social vulnerability than in counties with high social vulnerability -- and the differences were largely driven by socioeconomic disparities, particularly differences in the share of the population with a high school diploma and per capita income.

Only five states -- Arizona, Montana, Alaska, Minnesota and West Virginia -- had higher coverage in counties with high social vulnerability.

Achieving vaccine equity, the CDC said, is an important goal requiring "preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected"

Yet in many states, there are racial disparities in who has received the shot.

Boyd says there's evidence that Blacks will seek out vaccines when they have access to them.

Blacks are 26% of the population but they've made up only 16% of COVID-19 vaccinations so far

NPR identified disparities in the locations of vaccination sites in major cities across the South — with most sites placed in whiter neighborhoods. NPR found that the health care locations likely to be used to distribute a vaccine tend to be located in the more affluent and whiter parts of town where medical infrastructure already exists.

Boyd, who wrote about the lack of health care access for Blacks in a recent New York Times op-ed, urges expanding the network of health care services and placing primary care clinics "right in Black communities." She also calls for making "going to the doctor in the United States free.

1 out of 5 Black adults are unlikely to have a regular provider. They don't have somebody that they go to who they trust for their clinical care. We also know Black folks have some of the highest rates of uninsured and underinsurance,"

Back in the 1990s, our federal government said let's eliminate cost as a barrier to vaccination for children. And they created the Vaccines for Children program. ... By 2005, there were no gaps between Black children and other racial and ethnic groups for receipt of regularly recommended vaccines like MMR and polio.

Boyd and other Black health care workers and researchers created a campaign, called The Conversation: Between Us, About Us, to educate Blacks about COVID-19 vaccines.

"We knew that there were already baseline information gaps about how vaccines work and particular concerns that folks in the Black community had about this vaccine's development and their safety,"

"So we put together a campaign to actually tackle that misinformation so that when folks make the choice about vaccination, they can make an informed one."

She says the perception that Blacks are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine has its roots in racial inequity.

"We say the reason that you have higher rates of diabetes or higher rates of heart disease is your own individual choices. You know, your cultural choices to choose what to eat shapes your disparity rather than the structural environment around you that might place you in a food desert.

"I think in health care we have had an analysis of what drives racial health inequities that centers on individuals rather than on our systems. And that has led us not to really confront racism as a cause of racial health inequities, including right now during the vaccine distribution."

When the Covid-19 tsunami hit us one year ago, the tidal wave swept over our most vulnerable.

To top it off, economists now predict that women face a generational setback, obliterating decades of long-fought economic gains.

In December, women accounted for 100% of jobs lost in the US. This past January, women's labor force participation dropped to a 33-year low at 57%. That same month, women accounted for nearly 80% of all workers over the age of 20 who left the workforce.

Women of color continue to bear the highest burden. Their unemployment is higher. Many lost jobs in the hard-hit service and hospitality sectors.

The lack of quality, affordable childcare has long been a crisis, even pre-pandemic.No one could have foreseen that working moms would have to balance their work Zoom meetings with their children's Zoom classes.

It's encouraging to see the Biden administration bring this issue front and center, increasing childcare support for families and including more after-school, weekend and summer programs in the pandemic relief package that just passed.

I also believe there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, and New York State is exploring ways to eliminate childcare deserts and to incentivize employers to provide better options.

We must prioritize women's economic empowerment and job training opportunities that lead to sustainable financial independence -- now.

In New York State, we are bringing together the public and private sectors, including Fortune 500 companies, to commit to creating more inclusive workforces and job training programs.