With COVID back on the rise, some cities, agencies mulling a return of health mandates San Jose reinstated indoor mask requirement for all its employees ‘out of an abundance of caution’ through at least May 20 Grace Hase The Mercury News

As the Bay Area braces for yet another COVID-19 surge, a few cities and agencies are reinstating indoor mask mandates as the region continues debating the worth of a patchwork of coronavirus-related health orders.

Rare cases of COVID returning pose questions for Pfizer pill A small number of COVID-19 patients are relapsing after taking Pfizer's antiviral pill, raising questions about the drug at the center of the U.S. response effort ABC News ABC News

WASHINGTON -- As more doctors prescribe Pfizer's powerful COVID-19 pill, new questions are emerging about its performance, including why a small number of patients appear to relapse after taking the drug.

WHO calls on Pfizer to make its COVID pill more available GENEVA (AP) — The head of the World Health Organization called on Pfizer to make its COVID-19 treatment more widely available in poorer countries, saying Tuesday that the pharmaceutical company's deal allowing generic producers to make the drug was insufficient. AP NEWS

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EU lifts mask requirement for air travel as pandemic ebbs BERLIN (AP) — The European Union will no longer require masks to be worn at airports and on planes starting next week amid the easing of coronavirus restrictions across the bloc, authorities said Wednesday. AP NEWS

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While the new recommendations take effect on May 16, rules for masks may still vary by airline beyond that date if they fly to or from destinations where the rules are different. ...

The 'five pandemics' driving 1 million U.S. Covid deaths STAT analyzes the data to show how five key factors worked to drive U.S. Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, yielding "five pandemics." J. Emory Parker STAT

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One way to start understanding how a country as advanced as the U.S. lost so many people is to look at the ocean of public health data that was gathered as 1 million individual tragedies rippled through civic life.

Do COVID Vaccines Stave Off New Medical Conditions? Large study finds breakthrough cases linked with lower risk of diabetes, hypertension diagnoses Molly Walker medpagetoday

Risks of long COVID symptoms and the incidence of new onset hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease were lower among vaccinated patients with breakthrough infection versus those with COVID who were unvaccinated, a large analysis of medical records in the U.S. suggested.

Why Covid-19 vaccine boosters may be more important than ever With waning immunity and a coronavirus that seems to become more infectious with each new variant, the Biden administration predicts that up to 100 million more people could get Covid-19 in the fall and winter. That estimate makes it crucial that as many people as possible get booster shots of Covid-19 vaccine, experts say. Jen Christensen, CNN CNN

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