After months of counting calories and saying no to desserts, those on a diet will not want to hear this.

But improving eating habits will only keep weight off for less than a year and improvements in blood pressure will also disappear, according to a study.

Scientists looked at 14 popular food fads, including fashionable Atkins and Paleo diets, which were followed for an average of 26 weeks.

The Atkins diet encourages people to limit their carbohydrate intake while Paleo diets mean eating the foods ancient hunter-gatherers used to.

The United States now has the most cases of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, in the world, and the majority of the country is under strict stay-at-home orders to slow the rate of infection. As Americans approach one month since the start of intense social distancing measures, everyone is wondering the same thing: When will this end?

To get a better understanding of what people can expect from COVID-19, Dr. Robert Norton, a professor of public health at Auburn University and member of several coronavirus task forces, answers questions about the virus.

Will COVID-19 be gone by the summer?

“Realistically, I think it’s going to be going well into the summer in some areas,” Norton says.

An analysis based on mathematical statistics more precise than those previously carried out uncovered the reason why powdery mildew fungi on Åland are most abundant in roadsides and crossings. Identified as the specific cause was that traffic raises the spores found on roadsides efficiently into the air.

The researchers are interested in disease transmission, as it helps explain the occurrence and biology of diseases. There are plant diseases that spread along riversides, bird migration routes, ocean currents or, for example, air traffic networks, much like human diseases that spread through social networks.

The transmission process determines the abundance and location of occurrence, while the method of transmission determines how the diversity of the disease branches off temporally and spatially, and, in the end, how the disease evolves through natural selection.

Dear How to Do It,

I’m having a wonderful affair with a man. We’re both married, but we’re careful and responsible—it’s what we both need to survive in our marriages, and it’s what’s best for both of us. (Without saying too much, in our situation, divorce would destroy our big, happy, extended immigrant families. I’m not looking for judgment on that.)

The problem is social distancing because of the coronavirus. Our spouses and kids are now both home full time, and getting away to see each other has been impossible. I’m miserable without the sex and companionship, and so is the man I’m seeing. At one point, he suggested meeting in our cars by the grocery store. I obviously declined. Then today, he called me and said to go to my window and waved to me from his car (we live about two neighborhoods apart). I was moved by the gesture, but it worried me. I feel like I am on the verge of doing something risky, and all this time with my husband, who is a kind man, is making me want to lash out and tell him I don’t love him.

What can I do to keep my head on straight here? I would be cast out of my family if this came out, but this whole situation is making me feel out of control.

—Swelter in Place

The Trump administration’s goal of halting HIV transmission by 2030 is being swamped by the coronavirus crisis, with many sexual health clinics closing their doors and local health departments' infectious disease staff being redeployed to emergency response roles.

That's raising concern about the large population of people living with undiagnosed and untreated HIV, whose compromised immune systems could put them at higher risk of succumbing to coronavirus.

“Those individuals are going to be susceptible to opportunistic infections and would be at considerable risk if they are exposed to Covid-19,” said Christopher Hall, an infectious disease physician in San Francisco and the chairman of the clinical advisory council for the National Coalition of STD Directors.

It's an especially vulnerable population, Hall said. Nearly half of people living with HIV in the U.S. are over 50 years old. Up to half smoke cigarettes, potentially worsening their outcomes from respiratory infections like the coronavirus. And many have preexisting health conditions like diabetes and hypertension that dramatically increase the odds of mortality.

Should we all be wearing masks? That simple question is under review by officials in the U.S. government and has sparked a grass-roots pro-mask movement. But there’s still no consensus on whether widespread use of facial coverings would make a significant difference, and some infectious disease experts worry that masks could lull people into a false sense of security and make them less disciplined about social distancing.

In recent days, more people have taken to covering their faces, although it remains a scattershot strategy driven by personal choice. The government does not recommend it.

That may change. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering altering the official guidance to encourage people to take measures to cover their faces amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing matter of internal discussion and nothing has been finalized.

There’s a lot of anxiety about grocery shopping these days, and one very visible manifestation of it is the number of people in the aisles wearing gloves. Rubber gloves, dishwashing gloves, regular winter gloves—“I actually witnessed people earlier this week wearing plastic bags on their hands,” says microbiologist Kelly Reynolds, Ph.D., director of the environment, exposure science and risk assessment center at the University of Arizona.

Does wearing gloves make grocery shopping safer? First of all, grocery shopping, if you observe the current novel coronavirus safety recommendations, isn’t ask risky as some parts of the internet have made it out to be (get point-by-point clarity on that here).

Second, and more importantly, “it could be causing a lot more harm than good,” explains Reynolds. There are a number of issues:

Gloves are like hands when it comes to spreading viruses; maybe even worse.

It’s hard to sit in a room alone and not really know which way you’re going to go.

And you don’t have any of your social support. My family actually quarantined upstate, because they live there mostly full-time this year. I was able to FaceTime, which is something probably a lot of elderly people can’t do. My kids, who are 2 and 4, don’t know. They think I was at work. I wore a mask, so they couldn’t really see the whole high-flow setup.

For my wife, her mother died of lung cancer when she was 13, so, this was acutely traumatic for her. She’s isolating upstate and she’s taking care of two kids while she’s really pregnant. I still don’t know how she’s dealing with it. Probably not well.

I managed my own high flow. After six days in the hospital, I was able to get down off the high flow for a long time. The hospital was full, and I was like — you know, I’m just feeling OK enough to manage at home. The hospital is such a sick, ill environment right now, I didn’t want to spend any more time there than I absolutely needed to. I definitely think I have a long way to recover, and certainly my lungs have taken a bit of a hit. It’s going to be a bit of time before I feel like I’m not at risk for regular infections, like pneumonia.

The virus is impacting a subset of people who are infected, but the aftershocks of this are going to be felt in a lot of different areas. The sort of emotional, psychological toll on health care workers will probably lead to people leaving medicine. This idea that — I can’t really adequately say it — that people are dispensable. The government thinks that we can go to work without proper PPE and put our lives at risk. That’s something you can’t really get over — this kind of callousness for human life. I think they should have been trying harder months ago. And there are going to be people who miss their mammograms and get breast cancer. Or they have chest pain and they don’t want to go to the hospital, because they don’t want to get COVID.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to impact communities around the world, experts are advising people on the best ways to go about their personal routines, including staying safe while grocery shopping, cleaning produce from the supermarket, and skin-care best practices for social distancing at home.

One of the most recent suggestions that has gained traction online comes from a Facebook post reportedly relaying advice from an Australian nurse for people to keep their fingernails short to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

A spate of mysterious second-time infections is calling into question the accuracy of COVID-19 diagnostic tools even as China prepares to lift quarantine measures to allow residents to leave the epicenter of its outbreak next month. It's also raising concerns of a possible second wave of cases.

From March 18-22, the Chinese city of Wuhan reported no new cases of the virus through domestic transmission — that is, infection passed on from one person to another. The achievement was seen as a turning point in efforts to contain the virus, which has infected more than 80,000 people in China. Wuhan was particularly hard-hit, with more than half of all confirmed cases in the country.

But some Wuhan residents who had tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing positive for the virus a second time. Based on data from several quarantine facilities in the city, which house patients for further observation after their discharge from hospitals, about 5%-10% of patients pronounced "recovered" have tested positive again.

Some of those who retested positive appear to be asymptomatic carriers — those who carry the virus and are possibly infectious but do not exhibit any of the illness's associated symptoms — suggesting that the outbreak in Wuhan is not close to being over.

The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland has announced that it is “not of the view” that services need to stop to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

This statement was issued two days ago, in the wake of UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s March 16 briefing that said everyone must avoid both “mass gatherings” and “pubs, clubs, theatres and other such social venues”.

The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland said: “Although many have interpreted UK government advice and remarks [about coronavirus] as meaning that all services in church buildings should cease, and have stopped meeting, the Church Interests Committee is not of that view.”

Yes, really.

“There was a meme going around which really kind of put me in my place which was like ‘Your grandparents went to war, and you’re being asked to sit on a couch.’ Like, get the fuck with it,” Stan said. “I talked to a couple friends who are in the workforce like cops out there sleeping in their garages, working 20 hours a day; nurses coming home and not being able to hold their children because they’re afraid they’re going to contaminate their families, then going back to work. You hear that stuff and it blows my mind because it makes me feel like I have such privilege to be able to sit around here while these people are beating themselves.”

“But what makes me insane is seeing that the beaches in fucking Miami are still flooded with these fucking idiots...

Several states are reporting a spike in coronavirus cases, raising fears more hotspots will emerge in the US after New York as soon as next week.

The US surpassed Italy and China this week to become the country with the most coronavirus cases in the world --- with more than 101,240 known cases, according to CNN's tally. At least 1,588 Americans have died. At least 402 of those deaths were reported on Friday alone.

More than a third of the country's cases are in New York -- which has been in a partial lockdown for a week as officials try to slow the spread of the virus and hospitals scramble to keep up with the patients streaming in.

Tracking coronavirus cases in the US

The state's healthcare system is already overwhelmed. One hospital was forced to create a makeshift morgue and another reported 13 patient deaths in 24 hours. New York and its National Guard are now assembling four 1,000-bed temporary, overflow hospitals in existing buildings.

The rate of new cases may be slowing in New York, but the governor says it may take 21 days for the state to hit its peak -- the highest point of reported cases before that number begins going down.

Gavin Newsom takes new tone with Trump as he steers California during coronavirus crisis

Meanwhile, officials in other states are warning they could be next. In Los Angeles County, cases more than tripled in six days and one official says numbers will keep going up. Health Director Barbara Ferrer says she expects to see case counts in Los Angeles double every four days for the next two to three weeks.

Focus on this, contact lens wearers of the world: To reduce the spread of the pandemic virus that causes Covid-19, experts suggest it's time to put your contact lenses on the shelf and dazzle the world with your frames.

That's because wearing glasses can help you stop touching your face, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, a key way any virus is spread, including the novel coronavirus currently spreading across the world.

Why contact lens?

Contact lens users not only touch their eyes to put in and remove their lens twice or more a day, they also touch their eyes and face much more than people who don't wear contacts, said Dr. Thomas Steinemann, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

"You touch your eye and then you touch another part of your body," said Steinemann, an ophthalmologist at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Well-intentioned crafters have been flocking to JoAnn Fabrics this week for free, do-it-yourself mask and gown kits so they can make crucial medical gear that’s currently in short supply at hospitals treating coronavirus patients around the country.

But several employees who spoke to VICE News felt the company hadn’t considered their health and safety — or their customers’ — before making the decision to declare stores “essential,” remain open during states’ lockdowns, and launch an effort to draw even more shoppers.

At one store location in Colorado Springs, employees even picketed outside their store Wednesday. They stood a safe distance apart while holding signs that read “our health over their profit” and “fair wages for retail workers.”