Asia

China drops COVID-19 group travel bans to 78 nations including U.S., Japan - UPI.com China announced Thursday it was removing its COVID-19-era restrictions on group travel to nearly 80 countries including the United States and Japan. UPI

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China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced group travel could continue to 78 nations including the two popular destinations as well as Australia, Britain, Germany, Qatar and South Korea.

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Study finds climate change fingerprints on July heat waves in Europe, China and America Climate change’s sweaty fingerprints are all over the July heat waves gripping much of the globe. A new study finds these intense and deadly hot spells in the American Southwest and Southern Europe could not have occurred without it. AP News

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Deadly flooding is hitting several countries at once. Scientists say this will only be more common Lethal flooding has simultaneously hit India, Japan, China, Turkey and the U.S. Northeast. Scientists have long warned that more extreme rainfall is expected in a warming world. AP News

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Study suggests vaccination plays role in making Omicron waves less severe CIDRAP

A new analysis suggests that the Omicron variant has comparable intrinsic severity to the ancestral (Wuhan) SARS-CoV-2 strain, but its effective severity is substantially lower because of vaccination.

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Case-patients with at least one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or CoronaVac vaccine had significantly lower odds of mortality than unvaccinated patients, the authors said, with the lowest odds observed in people who had received three Pfizer doses (odds ratio, 0.31; 95% CI, 0.18 to 0.49).

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