On Thursday, the largest county in the United States said it is "strongly recommending" people wear face coverings in indoor public settings but stopped short of requiring them.
The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, said in an editorial that China must “unswervingly implement” the policy that requires mass obligatory testing and places millions under lockdown to try to eliminate the coronavirus from the nation of 1.4 billion people and the world’s second-largest economy.
The unrelenting campaign has kept infections and deaths low at great economic and social cost, as new fast-spreading variants make containing the virus near impossible....
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s executive arm sought on Wednesday to toughen up pollution restrictions to ensure that harmful pollutants are eliminated by 2050 to potentially save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
The European Commission’s proposals center on air, waste and water pollution, and need the backing of the EU parliament and member states before they can be made mandatory. That is likely to take many months.
Air pollution is the biggest threat to the bloc’s 450 million citizens. The proposals include the doubling of limits to permissible fine air particles by 2030. Such particles are make up a significant part of air pollution overall, which the EU says is killing nearly 300,000 people a year.
Death rates in the United States are higher in rural than urban areas, and the difference has grown over the last 2 decades (1). Death rates for all of the 10 leading causes of death in 2019 were higher in rural than urban areas (1). In 2020, deaths due to COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death in the United States (2). This report presents COVID-19 death rates for rural and urban areas in 2020 by sex and age group (under age 65 and 65 and over). Rates are presented for the six categories of urbanicity according to the decedent’s county of residence (3). Urban areas include large central metropolitan, large fringe metropolitan, medium metropolitan, and small metropolitan; rural areas include micropolitan and noncore (nonmetropolitan).
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