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Give Jeff Bezos this: When he builds a rocket, he rides the rocket, strapping his own mortal hide into a seat and test-flying what he’s developed before inviting paying passengers aboard to make the same journey. “If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for anyone,” Bezos said in a video segment released by Blue Origin, his private rocket company, before Tuesday morning’s first crewed launch of its New Shepard rocket on a suborbital lob shot that soared to an altitude of 106 km (66 mi.).
Today, the rocket—which had previously flown 15 uncrewed missions to suborbital space—indeed proved safe not just for Bezos, but for the three other passengers aboard with him: Wally Funk, 82, an aviator and flight instructor and now the oldest person to fly in space; Mark Bezos, marketing executive and volunteer firefighter and Jeff Bezos’s brother; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a paying passenger who became the youngest person to fly in space, after his father, the founder of the Dutch hedge fund Somerset Capital Partners, purchased him the seat for an undisclosed multimillion dollar price tag.
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The flight, which lifted off from the Texas desert shortly after 8:00 a.m. CT, was, by modern-day standards, a modest affair. It essentially replicated the suborbital flight of the first American in space, Alan Shepard (after whom the rocket is named), which took place just over 60 years ago. In fact, Shepard actually bested Bezos and his crew—at least in terms of altitude, flying to a loftier 187 km [116 miles], easily exceeding the 100 km (62 mi.) Von Karman line, which is the internationally recognized boundary of space. Bezos’ flight just barely cleared that bar.
Still, the machinery on display today was impressive and flew its flight profile faultlessly. The compact 18 m (60-ft.) tall rocket is powered by a single engine, fueled by clean-burning liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen—the same fuel NASA used for the second and third stages of its legendary Saturn V moon rocket. The engine burned for just over two minutes, accelerating the ship to a maximum speed of 3,540 k/h (2,200 mph), and an altitude of roughly 80 km (50 mi.). Twenty seconds later, the crew capsule—which can accommodate up to six people in a roomy 15 cubic m (530 cubic ft) interior—separated from the booster, and continued coasting upward, breaking the Von Karman barrier and affording the crew about four minutes of weightlessness and sightseeing.
The ride down was a free fall for the passengers—subjecting them to a maximum gravitational force of 5.5 g’s—before three small drogue parachutes opened, followed by three main parachutes, slowly lowering the capsule toward the dusty Texas scrubland. About 2 m (six ft.) above ground, a blast of air was released from the bottom of the capsule, providing a cushioning that set the passengers down at a speed of less than 3.2 k/h (2 mph). The rocket itself landed up right on a pad 3.2 km (2 mi.) north of the launch site.
“Best day ever,” Bezos said after the capsule touched down.
For Blue Origin it was indeed a good day—though how soon the company will begin flying commercial passengers able to pay in the low six figures for a 10-minute vacation is unclear. There are only two more crewed flights planned before the end of the year, both of which will be flown by wealthier customers who will compete in an auction for the right to ride—at prices that are expected to reach into the millions. Sir Richard Branson, who beat Bezos to space by nine days aboard his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity space plane, is similarly unclear on how soon his company will at last begin long-delayed commercial flights. Both men insist they are not in competition with each other—never mind the barbs that came out of Blue Origin after Branson’s flight, pointing out that he reached a maximum altitude of only 80 km (50 mi.), a boundary that the U.S. military recognizes as the edge of space, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.
“I know nobody will believe me, but honestly there isn’t [any competition with Bezos],” Branson told NBC’s Today on July 6.
Maybe, but that’s for later. For now, both billionaires have notched big wins—earning their astronaut wings for themselves, and in the process legitimizing their companies’ claims that they have the wherewithal to open a new market for space tourism. Whether enough customers will eventually come is unclear, but the hardware, at least, is ready to fly them.
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We’re less than a week out from the Tokyo Olympics—and it’s time to think about how the international competition in Japan will set into motion age-old rivalries between countries around the world, which will formally start as the Opening Ceremony kicks off on July 23.
The Summer Olympics this year will involve 339 events across 33 sports. The Summer Olympics are showcases for different countries than the Winter Olympics: without snow sports, places that don’t have access to cold climates have a better shot at featuring their homegrown talent. The Summer Olympics are where runners, swimmers and team sports players shine.
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For this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, the country to beat is indisputably the U.S., with a historic tally of 2,542 medals collected over 100-plus years of Summer Olympics dating back to 1896. (In second place is the Soviet Union, which picked up over 1,000 summer medals in its stint as a state from 1955 to 1985. Meanwhile the modern state of Russia, known as the Russian Federation, has over 400, collected on either end of the Soviet experience.)
Michael Phelps remains the world’s most decorated individual Olympian, with a decisive 28 medals all of his own, thanks to his dominance in swimming over the past decade-plus. (The runner-up in that ranking, the Soviet Union’s Larysa Latinina, only has 18.)
These are the 10 countries with the most Summer Olympics medals:
The American Medical Association Foundation announced on Tuesday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Public Health and Medicine will be the first institution to participate in its new National LGBTQ+ Fellowship Program, which aims to combat shortcomings in the medical care provided to LGBTQ people in the United States.
The fellowship, which launches with a $750,000 grant from the AMA Foundation—the association’s philanthropic arm—aims to provide training for early-career physicians on how to best meet the needs of LGBTQ patients and combat disparities in the health equity landscape. The UW-M’s School of Public Health and Medicine will launch its first fellow in July of 2022. (The AMA also announced plans to launch similar programs at other medical schools, with the goal of eventually training hundreds of fellows and developing new standards of care across medical disciplines.)
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The school’s selection came after a peer-reviewed application process, the AMA Foundation said in a press release, and was chosen because of the school’s established “extensive multidisciplinary network of institutional and community leaders with expertise in LGBTQ+ health.”
“A lot of our current health professionals weren’t really trained in this area,”Dr.Elizabeth Petty, the senior associate dean of academic affairs at the UW-M’s School of Medicine and Public Health, explains.“The landscape has been changing very rapidly as more and more individuals are really embracing their authentic gender identity. There’s some real mismatch there, and a lot of opportunity for [medical professionals] to learn and to grow.”
A 2017pollby NPR,the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that nearly one in five LGBTQ adults have avoided seeking care in the past out of fear of discrimination.And misinformation around gender-affirming care, particularly for trans youth, has been on the rise in 2021, as an unprecedented number of anti-trans bills have been introduced in state legislatures in the last 7 months. At least 250 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year alone,according to the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, and at least 35 have focused on banning transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming medical care. In the spring, Arkansas became the first state toactually outlawgender-affirming care for transgender youth.
LGBTQ health disparities can appear in several ways. Misconceptions and incorrect assumptions about people’s sexual activity or gender identity can lead providers to not provide the correct treatment, Dr. Petty explains, giving the example of a provider who might not think to offer a queer woman a pap smear because they might assume she’s never had sex with a man, or cannot contract the HPV virus from sex with a woman (which is untrue). Both misguided assumptions could lead to the patient receiving inadequate care. Dr. Petty also says doctors treating LGBTQ patients need to be more sensitive to the ways sociocultural issues can impact LGBTQ health, such as how a lack of support from one’s community, or even their own family, can lead to significant stress that increases the risk of depression, substance abuse and suicide.
“We want to really try to create an affirming environment that allows individuals to feel comfortable and confident in their health care providers, [and] that their health care providers will be able to understand and provide compassionate and affirming care across a diverse spectrum of identities,” Dr. Petty says.
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(MONTPELIER, Vt.) — Ben & Jerry’s said Monday it was going to stop selling its ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested east Jerusalem, saying the sales in the territories sought by the Palestinians are “inconsistent with our values.”
The announcement was one of the strongest and highest-profile rebukes by a well-known company of Israel’s policy of settling its citizens on war-won lands. The settlements are widely seen by the international community as illegal and obstacles to peace.
The company informed its longstanding licensee — responsible for manufacturing and distributing the ice cream in Israel — that it will not renew the license agreement when it expires at the end of next year, according to a statement posted on the Vermont-based company’s website.
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The Ben & Jerry’s statement cited “the concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners.”
The company did not explicitly identify those concerns, but last month, a group called Vermonters for Justice in Palestine called on Ben & Jerry’s to “end complicity in Israel’s occupation and abuses of Palestinian human rights.”
“How much longer will Ben & Jerry’s permit its Israeli-manufactured ice cream to be sold in Jewish-only settlements while Palestinian land is being confiscated, Palestinian homes are being destroyed, and Palestinian families in neighborhoods like Sheik Jarrah are facing eviction to make way for Jewish settlers?” the organization’s Ian Stokes said in a June 10 news release. The organization didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Founded in Vermont in 1978, but currently owned by consumer goods conglomerate Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s has not shied away from social causes. While many businesses tread lightly in politics for fear of alienating customers, the ice cream maker has taken the opposite approach, often espousing progressive causes.
Ben & Jerry’s took a stand against what it called the Trump administration’s regressive policies by rebranding one of its flavors Pecan Resist in 2018, ahead of midterm elections.
The company said Pecan Resist celebrated activists who were resisting oppression, harmful environmental practices and injustice. As part of the campaign, Ben & Jerry’s said it was giving $25,000 each to four activist entities.
Aida Touma-Sliman, an Israeli lawmaker with the Joint List of Arab parties, wrote on Twitter that Ben and Jerry’s decision Monday was “appropriate and moral.” She added that the “occupied territories are not part of Israel” and that the move is an important step to help pressure the Israeli government to end the occupation.
The West Bank and east Jerusalem were captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. Some 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the two territories — roughly 500,000 in the occupied West Bank and 200,000 in east Jerusalem.
Israel treats the two areas separately, considering east Jerusalem as part of its capital. Meanwhile, Israel considers the West Bank as disputed territory whose fate should be resolved in negotiations. However the international community considers both areas to be occupied territory. The Palestinians seek the West Bank as part of a future independent state, with east Jerusalem as their capital.
While Ben & Jerry’s products will not be sold in the settlements, the company will stay in Israel through a different arrangement.
The Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the roughly 500,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements, said “there’s no need to buy products from companies that boycott hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens because of the place they choose to live.” It said Ben & Jerry’s decision “brought a bad spirit to such a sweet industry” and called on Israelis to buy locally produced ice cream this summer.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called the decision “a shameful capitulation to antisemitism, BDS and everything bad in the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish discourse.” He said he is going to take the issue to the more than 30 states that have legislation against the anti-Israel boycott movement.
BDS is shorthand for a grassroots, Palestinian-led movement that advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli institutions and businesses. The BDS movement compares itself to the anti-apartheid movement targeting South Africa in the 20th century, and its nonviolent message has resonated with progressives around the world. But Israel says the movement masks a deeper aim of delegitimizing or even destroying the entire country.
For its part, the BDS movement applauded Ben & Jerry’s decision as “a decisive step towards ending the company’s complicity in Israel’s occupation and violations of Palestinian rights,” but called upon the company to do more.
“We hope that Ben & Jerry’s has understood that, in harmony with its social justice commitments, there can be no business as usual with apartheid Israel,” a statement read.
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Associated Press reporters Lisa Rathke in Marshfield, Vermont, and Ilan Ben Zion and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Six months ago, Svetlana Kim was so scared of guns, she couldn’t even look at an image of one without feeling anxious.
If she was home watching a movie that suddenly depicted gun violence, the 47-year-old accountant would scramble to hit the fast-forward button on the remote. If she couldn’t skip the scene, she would shut her eyes, and her husband would gently put his hand over hers until the scene was over. Kim knew it was just a movie, but in those moments, she couldn’t help but feel like she was in the victim’s shoes, staring the shooter in the eye.
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“My brain was always signaling danger. I just felt like, it’s here, it’s present,” says Kim, who blames empathy and imagination for her visceral reaction, since she has never personally experienced gun violence. “It was bad like that, and I couldn’t control it.”
That all changed when something scarier came along. Months into the pandemic, people who looked like Kim were being shoved and kicked to the ground, punched, stabbed and slashed, while doing everyday activities like walking around the neighborhood, shopping and riding buses and trains. One after another, unprovoked, racist attacks against Asian Americans being unfairly blamed for the COVID-19 virus started to increase in major U.S. cities. Kim wondered if she could be the next victim.
“It was a turning point when I saw that people just randomly got attacked based on their race,” says Kim, a Korean American, who lives in Downey, Calif.
On March 3, Kim went from being a “really anti-gun person” to the new owner of a Springfield 40 mm. handgun.
Isadora Kosofsky for TIMETom Nguyen and Robbie Tarnove of L.A. Progressive Shooters, a group that works to empower BIPOC gun owners, remove targets after a beginner’s class at Burro Canyon Shooting Park in Azusa, CA.
<strong>“It was a turning point when I saw that people just randomly got attacked based on their race.”</strong>After months of rising anti-Asian hatred, many others like Kim are having a change of heart about firearms. Tired of relying on bystanders for aid that sometimes never comes, more Asian Americans are bucking entrenched cultural perceptions of guns and overcoming language barriers to help fuel a spike in U.S. gun ownership. While there is no official data on firearm purchases by Asian Americans, a survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) indicated that Asian Americans bought 42% more firearms and ammunition in the first six months of 2020 than they did in the same timeframe the year before. At Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., where guns and pepper spray have been flying off the shelves since the pandemic, gun purchases by Asian buyers have surged 100% due to recent fears of attacks, according to Jimmy Gong and Jay Zeng, the shop’s Chinese-American owners.
“Everybody got paranoid,” says Gong, 47, adding that some might have good reason to feel that way. Several customers have walked into the business, saying they were targeted in robberies, home invasions and assaults. “Some guys come in with black eyes,” Gong says.
From March 2020 to March 2021, reported hate incidents against Asian Americans nationwide jumped 74% to more than 6,600, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic. Anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities increased 149% in 2020, according to an analysis of official preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The sustained violence has shaken Asian-American communities, particularly in New York and California, where the majority of the hate incidents have unfolded and where assaults on the elderly have sent shockwaves across the world. Terror grew on March 16 after a white gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, at Atlanta-area spas.
“I’ve never seen this level of fear,” says Chris Cheng, 41, a professional sport shooter in San Francisco, who has been fielding numerous questions from relatives, friends and strangers about buying guns.
An Rong Xu for TIMEJimmy Gong, co-owner of Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., shows a revolver to customers on July 10, 2021.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted after the Atlanta massacre found that one in five Asians blame former President Donald Trump for the uptick in violence against them. Ericson Reduta, a 49-year-old Californian who had been on the fence about buying a gun for years, armed himself for the first time in 2020, largely due to Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric. Before then, Reduta had done his homework on firearms but had not purchased one, mostly because he thought his Filipino-American family wouldn’t approve and that he wouldn’t feel comfortable in any gun membership groups. “Most gun owners you see on TV or on the internet are white, conservative, Republican, outspoken, former military or hunters in the Midwest,” says Reduta, a Democrat. “That’s just what I saw.”
But as Trump doubled down on his divisive nicknames for COVID-19, including “the China virus” and “Kung Flu,” Reduta gave in. He says growing up as a person of color in the U.S. gave him the foresight to know that bigotry already existed and would only get worse if a sitting president was singling out an entire race. “Unfortunately, we are the scapegoat,” he says.
In the spring of 2020, Reduta participated in a firearm safety class over Zoom, joined a national gun club for liberals, and then purchased three pistols and an AR-15 rifle.
Gun ownership is most common among white men, particularly those who live in rural areas and those who describe themselves as conservative, according to the Pew Research Center and other surveys. During the first six months of 2020, gun buyers were nearly 56% white males, the NSSF said, citing an industry survey of 104 retailers, which tracks with other national demographic surveys on gun ownership trends. Only about 3% of gun buyers were Asian males and less than 1% were Asian females, the survey found, so Reduta’s initial concerns about fitting in might have been warranted.
<strong>“If more guns made people safer, this would be the safest country on Earth.”</strong>Asians have been historically underrepresented among gun owners, so much so that major national demographic surveys conducted on gun ownership trends in the past have left out Asians as a category entirely. A 2013 NSSF report on diversity found some reasons why. About 35% said gun ownership negatively impacts their ethnic community, while 38% said owning a firearm is not desirable in their culture, according to the report, which was based on a national survey of 6,000 white, Black, Hispanic and Asian adults. That was true for Reduta, who waited a year to tell his family that he had bought a gun. Kim still has not shared the news with her two sisters.
“Asians never like guns,” says David Liu, another gun shop owner who has seen a spike in his Arcadia, Calif. business. “They only buy guns after they’ve become a victim.”
There’s a lot more to it, says Cheng, who testified before the Senate’s Judiciary Committee on March 23 about the “real and imminent threat” convincing Asian Americans that they need to arm themselves. Besides having to overcome negative cultural perceptions about firearms, language poses a challenge. The vast majority of gun shops and gun ranges in the U.S. have English signage and instruction, Cheng says, and a good understanding of the English language is necessary to fill out federal background check forms. “You have literal language barriers,” he says.
On a Monday afternoon in June, the handful of masked customers who trickled into Jimmy’s Sportshop, on a business strip in a suburb about a dozen miles outside of New York City, did not speak English. That’s common, says Gong, who often accompanies those customers to police precincts when their applications are wrongly denied and when they’re unable to fight their case on their own. “It would be a problem for them to buy from a non-bilingual speaking gun shop,” he says.
At least one gun group plans to tackle that issue. In the aftermath of the Atlanta shooting in March, Patrick Lopez, 46, created the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association (APAGOA), a California-based nonprofit educational resource group, which features on its website downloadable posters of basic gun-safety rules available in multiple languages. More than 500 people have subscribed in just four months—and Lopez says interest grows each week, largely by word-of-mouth.
An Rong Xu for TIMEJimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., promotes itself and caters to Chinese-speaking clients.
Racial tensions have beenspurring gun sales among people of color since 2020. Not everyone sees that as a good thing, including Alex De Ocampo, a Filipino-American who knows firsthand the trauma a firearm can bring. When he was 9, he says three teens burst through the door of his family’s one-bedroom apartment near Los Angeles and demanded money. One of them held a gun to his forehead, while his father, in the final stages of spinal cancer, cried and begged them to leave.
“I remember vividly thinking of my mom and my dad, when that gun was pointed at my head,” says De Ocampo, who was convinced he would die that day. After his older sister offered the intruders the $4 in her wallet, the robbers fled, leaving De Ocampo and his family unharmed. But the incident changed him.
Now a 41-year-old community activist, De Ocampo tells as many people as he can that more guns are not the answer. His warnings have fallen on deaf ears for at least one of his relatives, who bought a gun because of the increase in anti-Asian hate. The other day, his teenage nephew suggested that the family get his grandmother a gun, too. “That we have to resort to that is terrifying and it’s just sad,” he says. De Ocampo thinks about his father, who died in 1991 after immigrating to the U.S. for a better life, and how this is not the world his father wanted for his loved ones.
<strong>“Unfortunately, we’re the scapegoat.”</strong>“If more guns made people safer, this would be the safest country on Earth,” De Ocampo says. “But that’s not the reality.”
Gun-control advocates agree, saying firearms largely cause more harm than good, despite so many people purchasing them for self-protection. There were more than 43,500 gun deaths and 39,000 gun injuries in the U.S., last year, compared to about 39,500 deaths and roughly 30,000 injuries in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which uses police and news reports and varioius government sources to tally daily gun-violence incidents.
Svetlana Kim sees things differently. Since she became a gun owner, her confidence has skyrocketed, and she no longer feels she has to shrink away from confrontation. “It just opened for me a whole different world,” Kim says. She’s become a regular at the shooting range, where she boasts of hitting targets 75-yards away. Now, she and her husband are going back to finish old movies she fast-forwarded.
“The happiest person in the world is my husband,” she says. “We don’t have to skip anymore.”
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With every passing day, the United States appears more likely to be on the cusp of a dreaded fourth wave of COVID-19 infections, even as the percentage of fully vaccinated Americans inches toward 50%. In the past two weeks, the number of average new daily cases has more than doubled, from 13,200 on July 4 to more than 32,300 on July 18, a surge that harbors grim reminders of the fronts of the second and third waves in the summer and fall of 2020.
But on closer inspection, this surge looks significantly different than those we have seen in the past—and may very well be worse than it looks on the page.
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The coronavirus pandemic has never, even in its worst heights last winter, struck the U.S. uniformly. Instead, it has wandered from eruptions in specific urban areas to suburban and rural counties and then back again, like a persistent hurricane. Now, as the gap between states’ completed vaccination rates widens—Alabama has vaccinated just 33.7% of residents, compared to nearly 70% in Vermont—the per capita rate of new cases has clustered in a handful of regions where a majority of adults remain unvaccinated even as reopening continues apace.
Here’s a county-level map of the 14-day growth of cases per 100,000 residents by county:
To draw on my amateur oceanography, the current crest resembles less a wave than a rip tide, with surges of current inundating several hotspots while the remainder of the country remains blissfully unaware (or unwilling to admit) that the pandemic is not remotely over. The upshot is that local data, rather than state- or nationwide-level figures, now paint the most accurate picture of the current state of the outbreak.
“State-wide cases don’t tell the entire story. We need a finer-toothed comb,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, the lead epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins University Testing Insights Initiative.
As Nuzzo notes, the most recent documented outbreaks are more concentrated in rural areas than those of the worst spikes over the past 16 months (though the virus didn’t spare any corner of the country). What appears to be different now, even within more rural regions, is a blossoming of outbreaks that are at the moment highly clustered, particularly along the border between Arkansas and Missouri as well as northeast Florida and southeast Georgia.
But any such observation comes with the same caveat that we on the Numbers Beat have been striving to communicate since the beginning: The number of cases is contingent on the number of people being tested for the virus, a figure that can only underestimate the true picture, not exaggerate it.
Let’s recall: A year ago, COVID-19 skeptics, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, were attributing a spike in cases at the time to an increase in testing, a claim that was easily debunked. Now we face the opposite question: As the number of weekly tests has plummeted, taking a back seat to vaccination, and with the sense of urgency abating (for now), is the situation in fact worse than it appears?
“I don’t worry that we are missing the severe cases,” including when a patient is hospitalized, Nuzzo says. “It’s everybody else I worry about. We have turned our telescope to a different part of the sky.”
Murray Côté, an associate professor of health policy and management at Texas A&M University, agrees. “I still think we’re missing a chunk” of positive cases, he says. “It’s a confluence of things. We don’t have the testing facilities we used to have [earlier in the pandemic].” That chunk, both Côté and Nuzzo say, is likely made up of people who are experiencing mild or no symptoms, but can still be part of a transmission chain.
I last spoke with Côté in June 2020 when unwinding Pence’s claim that the summer surge was a product of more testing. Our conversation this time felt both reversed, as we were discussing a possible under-calculation of reality, as well as strangely familiar, because a year ago, we were seeing a new surge amid a widespread relaxation of safety measures—not unlike the freedom from safety measures like maskless dining we currently enjoy.
“We’re behaving exactly the same way as we did last year,” Côté says. To refresh your memory: Around this time in 2020, the U.S. had a brief moment where cases began to drop. Some Americans started to ease their social distancing and mask wearing, and it led to both a summer surge and, after another lull, the massive winter spike that turned out to be the worst stretch of the global outbreak to hit any country in the world. What’s different now is that this time we have highly effective vaccines—but, while inoculation can protect individuals, vaccination rates in many communities across the U.S. remain too low to prevent fresh outbreaks.
In the heady days of spring, 2021, many states began reducing the frequency of their reports on new cases to every few days or once a week. That was a foolish mistake when, even with a massive reduction in testing, the seven-day rolling average of new cases never dipped below 10,000 at the national level. Given that the best-case scenario—even before the emergence of the Delta variant—was a reduction of cases and deaths to endemic levels for years to come, states must pair their desperate attempts to vaccinate more individuals with a renewed focus on surveillance and contact tracing.
For now, the best way to prevent the current spikes from becoming a proper fourth wave is vaccination (which, even if cases continue to rise, can help prevent hospitalizations and deaths), increased surveillance, and a return to mitigation measures. Indeed, Los Angeles County on Sunday reinstituted mandatory mask-wearing in businesses and public areas, a major rollback after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on May 13 that fully vaccinated individuals could shed their masks in many scenarios. Unless states can rapidly revive widespread and easily available testing, L.A. will be far from the last county to ask residents to mask up once again.
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