Dear Reader:

Worldometer (Aug 15): More than 21.5 million cases and more than 766 thousand deaths worldwide. More than 5.5 million cases,and more than 172 thousand deaths in the U.S. 60,600 new cases and 1,120 new deaths yesterday, Aug 14, in the U.S. More than 49 thousand new cases and 1,007 new deaths in Brazil, yesterday. More than 65 thousand new cases and 990 new deaths in India, yesterday.

Close to 3 thousand new cases in France, a third day of over 2 thousand new cases per day. 1,440 new cases in the UK, yesterday.

AP: Thousand of Britons return from France to avoid quarantine (Aug 15): “Thousands of British tourists beat a hasty retreat from France, packing out planes, trains and ferries to return to the U.K. by the early hours of Saturday morning to avoid a mandatory 14-day quarantine at home. .. The exodus was prompted late Thursday when the British government took France off a list of nations exempt from traveler quarantine requirements because of a sharp rise in new coronavirus infections there… Some air fares were selling for significantly inflated prices compared to normal rates. British Airways was selling tickets of a flight from Paris to London on Friday night costing 452 pounds ($590). The same journey on Saturday could be made for just 66 pounds. Ferry companies put on extra services but they sold out fast too.

“Peter Norris, who managed to get on one of the last flights Friday out on Nice, in the south of France, said it would have been ‘incredibly inconvenient’ for him to face another two-week period cooped up at home. ‘It’s not like during lockdown, where you can go for a run, got to the shops, come back’, he said. ‘None of that, we have to stay in for two weeks.’..As well as complicating the return home for the hundreds of thousands of British tourists in France, the U.K. move has the potential to upend the plans of those planning trips in the days ahead.”

Best Life: The CDC just made a major reveal with this new Covid Guidelines (Aug 15): “The updated guidance on quarantine protocols released at the beginning of August states: ‘People who have tested positive for Covid-19 do not need to quarantine or get tested again for up to three months as long as they do not develop symptoms again,’ implying some level of immunity during that period of time as a result of antibodies. And according to The New York Times, this is the first time the agency has officially acknowledged Covid-19 immunity could last for at least three months… A study published in Nature Medicine in June found that, in many people, antibodies from Covid-19 infection start to decline after two or three months, which supports the CDC’s most recent claim.”

anita