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India has become the most recent country to be struck by a crushing surge of COVID-19 cases in recent weeks. Many of its hospitals are overcrowded and underfunded, and have been forced to turn patients away. The Biden administration has said it will share a portion of its AstraZeneca vaccine stockpile with India -- which is the world's largest vaccine manufacturer -- though those shots may take several months to actually get into the arms of its citizens.
COVID-19 infections in India increased sevenfold over the course of five weeks, and experts predict that the situation there will soon get "meaningfully worse" as those numbers continue to climb before they begin to taper off in mid-May. In order to get this crisis under control, the Indian government will need to significantly scale up its vaccination programs, ideally with much-needed support from the global community.
In the United States, Florida's COVID-19 vaccine rollout is leaving essential farmworkers behind. The state opened up access to the COVID-19 vaccine to all adult residents on April 5. But a stringent proof of residency requirement has created a significant obstacle for undocumented workers, many of whom hold seasonal agriculture or food industry jobs and have helped keep Florida's economy afloat during the past year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidance for fully vaccinated people this week. One major shift? Masks are no longer required when spending time outdoors for those who are at least two weeks out from their completed vaccination. But the agency emphasized that masks are still recommended indoors as well as in crowded outdoor areas, like sporting events or concerts.
Some health insurance companies are rolling back waivers for COVID treatment fees. Many insurers voluntarily waived costs associated with hospital stays, medical appointments and other COVID-related care early on in the pandemic, according to Kaiser Health News. But that means that these insurers can also decide when to start charging regularly again. COVID-19 vaccines and tests, however, should still remain cost-free, per a federal mandate.
This is what it looks like when a coral reef dies. A marine biologist wrote about the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean -- "one of the most remote, seemingly idyllic places on Earth" -- for The Conversation. Warming waters have threatened the archipelago's coral reefs, causing them to explode in color before bleaching to a haunting white as they begin to die. Although the Chagos reefs could still recover, the die-offs there serve as a "canary in the coal mine" for the kind of destruction that climate change threatens to impose on any ecosystem.
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins died Wednesday at age 90. In 1969, he stayed in lunar orbit alone for over 20 hours while fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first landing on the moon. Collins said he was focused on making sure his crewmates could return home. PBS NewsHour correspondent Miles O'Brien spoke with Collins in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the historic flight.
A massive underwater toxic waste site has long been suspected off the Southern California shore, since industrial companies used the ocean as a dumping ground until 1972. Now marine scientists have identified over 25,000 barrels they believe contain the toxic chemical DDT in the Pacific Ocean. Now, experts are pushing the federal government to get involved alongside the scientific community to "chart the path forward" when it comes to addressing this waste and its potential ecological impact.
Ask the science desk
This is one of the many questions we still have regarding "long COVID," a condition experienced by a portion of COVID-19 survivors that involves long-term debilitating symptoms like fatigue, headaches and muscle pain.
Breakthrough infections occur when fully vaccinated people contract COVID-19, a phenomenon that is rare but expected. Existing COVID-19 shots provide strong protection against severe disease and death, but it's not clear whether or not they decrease a person's risk of experiencing long COVID after infection.
In a Facebook live Q&A hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (you can find an excerpt from that conversation here), Vice Dean Dr. Josh Sharfstein offered the following insight:
"There are some studies being set up to assess this, but we don't know for sure. The safe bet would be that the chance of getting a long-haul infection is going to be much lower [for] someone who's vaccinated compared to someone who's not, just because that person is much less likely to get infected at all."
What we're reading, watching and listening to this week:
Homes in flood-prone areas should be getting cheaper. They're not. (Popular Science)
This climate solution actually adds millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (MIT Technology Review) Mantis shrimp start practicing their punches at just 9 days old. (Science News) Melting glaciers drove '21 percent of sea level rise' over the past two decades. (Carbon Brief) -
"The paper, published in Nature, is the first to analyze the rate of melting from almost every glacier on the planet – around 200,000 in total, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets – to show how they have lost mass and thickness between 2000 and 2019." How extreme temperature swings in deserts stir sand and dust. (Smithsonian Magazine) A backdoor lets the immune system monitor the brain. (Quanta Magazine) Until next time, Bella Isaacs-Thomas
Megan McGrew
News assistant on the PBS NewsHour's science desk | 
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