Globally, Covid cases have fallen since a terrifying peak last month.
It is too soon to declare victory, but the current trend is encouraging trib.al/wJUg2W2
🇪🇺The European Union suffered a nasty new wave of cases in early spring.
The trend is now emphatically lower as its vaccine rollout gathers pace trib.al/wJUg2W2
🇮🇳It looks as though that outbreak in India has peaked, even if the number of people falling ill remains appallingly high trib.al/wJUg2W2
🇺🇸In the U.S., the trend in new infections remains clearly downward — infections haven't been this low in 11 months — even if the disease is still far from being eradicated trib.al/wJUg2W2
🇬🇧In Britain, hit by the first significant variant of Covid but then the first big country to roll out the vaccine into the population, the disease also appears to be under control trib.al/wJUg2W2
🇹🇼For one discordant note, Taiwan is in the grip of its first outbreak.
That said, note the scale on this chart; its worst day to date has seen 700 new cases, a tiny number compared to the pain endured in other countries trib.al/wJUg2W2
Warmer temperatures are heralding ice-free summers for the Arctic, opening up all sorts of economic opportunities:
🛢Potential oil and gas riches
🛳New shipping routes
💥Military might
Decades of harmonious exceptionalism may be coming to an end bloom.bg/3wvp3hU
It is still possible to shield the region from rising tensions elsewhere.
That will require rethinking the role of states without polar territory, China among them, and creating an informal venue for security discussions that includes sanctions-hit Russia bloom.bg/3wvp3hU
And the pandemic winner is … Florida and its governor, Ron DeSantis.
Can anyone doubt it? As America tries to recover from the pandemic, psychologically as well as economically, Florida is way ahead of just about every other state in the U.S. trib.al/AR1mgQR
As of March, its unemployment rate was 4.7%, compared with New York’s 8.5% and California’s 8.3%.
The Census Bureau reports that more than 250,000 people moved to Florida last year, second only to Texas trib.al/AR1mgQR
The reason, of course, is that in Florida, the pandemic is being treated as ancient history.
Are Covid-19 victims still dying in Florida? Yes. But the numbers are relatively low: 45 deaths on Wednesday, for instance trib.al/AR1mgQR
WeWork’s CEO, Sandeep Mathrani, declared last week:
The most engaged employees are those who put in face time at the office, while the least engaged are very comfortable working from home 🤨 trib.al/6T279v5
The fear some bosses also think this way is enough to feed workaholic habits — even if it’s not clear that any boss agrees.
This has likely pushed us to put in more hours while working remotely during the pandemic — an extra 2.5 hours a day in the U.S. twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
In the banking world, the degree to which workers will be at home vs. in office looks very different on each side of the Atlantic, writes @ElisaMartinuzzi.
➡️Europe is adopting flexible working styles
➡️The U.S. is itching to get back to the office bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Some women have experienced unusual changes in their menstrual cycles after taking the Covid-19 vaccine.
🩸Reports of early and unusually heavy periods or other irregularities were becoming so common that an anthropologist started collecting them trib.al/kWS0rju
After the Covid-19 vaccine, women:
💉Make up nearly all of the small number who had a severe allergic reaction
💉Are more likely to suffer severe rashes
22 of the 28 people who got blood clots possibly associated with the J&J vaccine were female trib.al/kWS0rju
More than a few dystopian fantasies depict a future in which humanity’s water supply derives from recycled human waste.
Today, elements of these visions are becoming a reality trib.al/R24jQCt
In 1965, Frank Herbert released his novel "Dune" — now a much-anticipated blockbuster — where humans inhabiting a rainless planet must wear “stillsuits”— a rubbery second skin that captures sweat, urine and feces and recycles them into drinking water trib.al/R24jQCt
While no climate models predict a future without rain on Earth, all show severe disturbances in hydrology:
☔️Increasingly excessive rain
🌊Flooding in some region
🌵Intensifying drought in others trib.al/R24jQCt