Health

Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images (NEW YORK) — President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that his administration will distribute 500 million free at-home rapid tests to Americans beginning in January to combat the surging omicron variant. Americans will be able to request the tests through a website that will launch next month and they will […]

Alex Wong/Getty Images (ATLANTA) — Life expectancy in the United States decreased by nearly two years in 2020, mainly because of the pandemic, a new federal report suggests. In 2019, Americans had a life expectancy — the average number of years a person is expected to live — of 78.8 years. But new data from […]

Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images (NEW YORK) — With millions of Americans set to travel and gather for Christmas and the New Year, families across the country are scrambling to try to ensure they are adequately protected against the coronavirus. Experts suggest a confluence of factors is likely driving the country’s case rate up amid the surge […]

Vertigo3d/Getty Images (NEW YORK) — As Americans brace for the possibility of another difficult winter ahead in the nation’s fight against coronavirus, there is a renewed sense of urgency to get as many people inoculated and boosted as quickly as possible, given the emergence of the highly contagious omicron variant — now dominant in the […]

Navinpeep/Getty Images (NEW YORK) — The recent rise in COVID-19 cases has come at an important time for millions of American families, particularly ones who avoided gatherings during last winter’s surge. However, doctors and medical experts said this year’s holiday celebrations don’t necessarily need to be outright canceled if eligible family members are vaccinated and […]

iStock/koto_feja (NEW YORK) — Just three weeks after it was first discovered in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimates that the highly transmissible omicron variant is the dominant variant in the United States, representing 73% of new coronavirus cases, as of Dec. 18. The variant has now been […]

David Malan/Getty Images (CHICAGO) — When Autumn Carver was in her darkest days fighting off complications from COVID-19, which she contracted while pregnant with her third child, she said she still had hope she would make it home to see her kids and husband. Now, the 35-year-old is savoring every moment of being home with […]

Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith (NEW YORK) — Dr. Deborah Levine has been a pediatric emergency medicine physician in the New York City area for over two decades. In recent years, she has observed an increase in the number of mental health emergencies in adolescents — which only got worse during the pandemic. […]

Joe Raedle/Getty Images (ATLANTA) — The CDC’s advisory committee recommended Thursday that people who have a choice should get an mRNA vaccine, either Pfizer or Moderna, over the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine after a review of new CDC data on rare blood clots linked to J&J. The rare blood clots are not a new […]

Kilito Chan/iStock (WASHINGTON) — Two senators are taking aim at the widespread issue of fake and ineffective masks flooding the U.S. market. A new bill announced Thursday and obtained exclusively by ABC News will grant more authority to the Food and Drug Administration to enforce and punish counterfeiters in the mask industry. It’s a bipartisan […]