https://www.fox13news.com/news/through-vaccination-or-infection-doctors-predict-florida-will-hit-herd-immunity-to-covid-19

TAMPA, Fla. - The coronavirus is sweeping through unvaccinated populations across the globe, and especially in Florida.

Bay Area experts believe this will be the final wave of the pandemic because, after this spike, we should hit herd immunity because the majority of people will have either been vaccinated – or infected.

Modeling done by University of South Florida researchers shows our region could be headed for a record-breaking spike in COVID-19 cases, with a peak likely in mid-September.

"The numbers that I'm seeing in terms of daily infection rates are doubling every seven days. And that's the fastest that I've seen since I started doing the calculations back in July of last year," explained Dr. Thomas Unnasch, USF College of Public Health Distinguished Professor.

It’s the same story at the state level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus cases topped 19,000 in early January.

"Florida today reported 13,000 cases a day. So we're getting pretty close to the peak that we saw back in January in terms of daily case numbers," said Unnasch.

That will likely continue to climb over the next four to six weeks, with unvaccinated people accounting for most of the infections.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/tech/whatsapp-india-intl-hnk/index.html

New Delhi (CNN Business)WhatsApp blocked 2 million accounts of Indian users in a month to prevent harmful behavior, the company said in its first ever compliance report published under the country's strict new information technology rules.

Under the new rules, which came into effect in May, social media companies have to publish a compliance report every month detailing how many complaints they received from Indian users and what action they took. International technology firms also have to hire executives locally, who can help regulate content and take swift action in response to legal complaints.

The Facebook (FB)-owned messaging app said that more than 95% of the 2 million accounts blocked between May 15 and June 15 were banned "due to the unauthorized use of automated or bulk messaging."

"These numbers have increased significantly since 2019 because our systems have increased in sophistication," the company said in a statement Thursday. "Keep in mind, we ban the vast majority of these accounts proactively, without relying on any user reports."

https://www.vox.com/2021/7/6/22554198/political-polarization-vaccine-covid-19-coronavirus

The US’s partisan divides have left much of the country vulnerable to Covid-19 — leading to unnecessary deaths.

The Covid-19 epidemic in the United States risks becoming a tale of “two Americas,” as Anthony Fauci warned in June: a nation where regions with higher vaccination rates are able to beat back the coronavirus, while those with lower vaccination rates continue to see cases and deaths.

At face value, it’s a division between those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated. But, increasingly, it’s also a division between Democrats and Republicans — as vaccination has ended up on one of the biggest dividing lines in the US, political polarization.

Polarization, of course, is not a new force in American life. Growing polarization doesn’t just mean a Congress more starkly dividing between left and right; it means people’s political views now closely hew with views on seemingly unrelated issues, like which movies should win Oscars. But throughout the pandemic, polarization has manifested as stark differences in how Democrats and Republicans each approach Covid-19, from hand-washing to social distancing to masking.

That polarization has now opened political rifts in vaccination rates, with people’s decision to get a shot or not today a better predictor of states’ electoral outcomes than their votes in prior elections. It’s led the US’s vaccination campaign to hit a wall, missing President Joe Biden’s July 4 goal. Meanwhile, the more infectious delta variant is spreading, raising the risk of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in unvaccinated — and often heavily Republican — areas.

To put it bluntly: Polarization is killing people.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/02/tech/robocall-prevention-stir-shaken/index.html

New York (CNN Business)The scourge of obnoxious robocalls has resumed after a brief dip during the early months of the pandemic. But a new prevention program developed by the Federal Communications Commission — which officially went into effect this week — could begin to offer some relief later this year.

The program, called "Stir/Shaken," is a set of technical standards that mobile carriers are required to adopt to help prevent call "spoofing," a tactic used by robocallers to make an incoming call look like it's from your area code so you're more likely to pick up. Robocalls from spoofed numbers aren't just an annoyance, they're dangerous — capable of scamming people out of money or sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers.

Under the Stir/Shaken protocol, carriers are required to certify, with varying confidence levels, that calls really are coming from the numbers displayed on caller ID. The deadline for most big carriers to implement the standards was Wednesday and the major carriers have all said they've signed on.

The idea is this: When your wireless carrier processes an inbound call that doesn't have a certification letting it know the number is legitimate, the carrier will be able to block it before your phone ever starts ringing.
"While there is no silver bullet in the endless fight against scammers, Stir/Shaken will turbo-charge many of the tools we use in our fight against robocalls," FCC acting chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement Wednesday.