The grass is apparently not greener in Florida.

Thousands of Floridian transplants who moved to the Sunshine State during the pandemic are packing up to move elsewhere, complaining of the relentless heat, damaging hurricanes and dangerous wildlife.

More than 700,000 people drawn by the promise of sunny weather, no income tax and lower costs moved to Florida in 2022 — including 90,000 from New York state, according to census data cited by NBC News.

Four years on from the first Covid lockdown, life feels to be largely back to normal, although legacies of the pandemic remain. Collective amnesia seems to have set in. Politicians seem eager to move forward and not relive the decisions, delays and deaths that characterised public policy and press briefings. Yet we can’t forget such a brutal event, when Covid is estimated to have killed nearly 16 million people worldwide in 2020 and 2021, and caused life expectancy to decline in 84% of countries, including Britain. Pandemics aren’t a one-off event.

As the US Open got underway this week, you may have noticed Novak Djokovic was missing from the field. The Serbian tennis player withdrew from the competition last week,citing the United States’ entry policy for foreign nationals as the reason. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, which in my humble opinion isn’t the worst place to be these days, you’ll know this is because of his reluctance to get vaccinated against Covid. Djokovic has been one of the firmest public figures in his stance on this issue. In some ways, his stance has eclipsed sports altogether.

Deaths linked to excessive drinking surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The study in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that the average annual number of deaths from “excessive alcohol use” rose by around 30 percent from 2016-2017 to 2020-2021. In the same period, the average annual number of deaths from “excessive alcohol use” rose by around 27 percent for men and 35 percent for women.

Outbreaks of measles virus in the UK and U.S. are not related to hypothetical “Disease X” - a placeholder term for an unknown future pandemic-causing pathogen - as suggested by misleading social media posts.

While measles is highly contagious among people who are not vaccinated - such as groups linked to recent outbreaks – it is also highly preventable with the existing vaccine and therefore has little pandemic potential, experts told Reuters.

The National Institutes of Health appears to be struggling to hide its dirty laundry on COVID-19 origins against a rash of leaks, congressional probes, and Freedom of Information Act requests, even when officials are determined to thwart sunlight.

The ongoing exposure of their communications and actions isn't the only thing likely worrying federal scientists. 

Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble.

The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

Five Republican senators are demanding that President Joe Biden implement a ban on travel from China in response to reports of a “mystery illness” infecting Chinese children.

In a move that marks a turning point in the COVID-19 public health crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Covid Data Tracker, a once-revered source of information regarding the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States, has made its penultimate update. The final one will occur on June 1, 2023, to reconcile historical data; after that, the CDC will no longer track such numbers, at least not comprehensively.