News Room

As colleges and universities reopened in the fall of 2020, many emerged as hot spots of Covid-19 transmission. The narrative that has emerged to explain this centers on irresponsible, party-going 20-somethings who refuse to listen to reason. Some schools have expelled students who held gatherings in their dorms. A few governors have called out these students as drivers of the epidemic. With no national Covid-19 control plan in sight, it may be politically expedient to blame youths for the nation’s woes.

Researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute’s COVID-19 Simulator website have designed a new tool that focuses on a particular potential superspreader event: football games. The new tool, called the COVID-19 Football Tracker, arose from a collaboration among Harvard Medical School, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Boston Medical Center. The feature is an extension of the Institute’s existing COVID-19 Outbreak Detection Tool, which visualizes the effects of different COVID-19 prevention measures.

Coronavirus cases are trending up in a number of states, forecasting a fall surge that could push hospitals to capacity and deplete already scarce supplies. Experts worry that hospital systems in hard-hit areas may not be ready.

This year has been a parade of unprecedented events, and the early voting in the general election is proving to be no exception. Through Thursday, more than 78 million Americans had voted. Of those early votes, more than 51 million — or approximately two-thirds — were mail ballots, according to the United States Elections Project at the University of Florida.

Researchers are nearing completion of a mathematical algorithm to help pinpoint the source of coronavirus infections within sewer systems. Reports arose earlier in the pandemic of universities and cities looking to sewage for traces of the virus, to more quickly identify and isolate virus cases; each flush from an infected person sends genetic remnants of the virus into sewage systems. A company called Biobot, for instance, has worked with about 400 facilities in 42 states to map virus concentrations in sewage over time, with current data representing over 10% of the U.S. population, a spokesperson told Fox News.