Minks infected with a mutated strain of COVID-19 in Denmark appear to be rising from the dead, igniting a national frenzy and calls from local officials to cremate mink carcasses.

While the sight itself is certainly terrifying for the residents of West Jutland, a region of the country grappling with confirmed COVID-19 cases connected to mink, there is likely a scientific explanation for the zombie-like reemergence from their graves.

A Danish police spokesman, Thomas Kristensen, told a state broadcaster that gases form while the body decays underground, according to the Guardian.

“In this way, in the worst cases, the mink get pushed out of the ground,” Kristensen said of the nightmarish sight.

There are many 'zombie' animals. Here's which ones you should actually worry about.

Public health experts are sounding the alarm about the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States as the coronavirus spreads through the country largely unabated and officials muse aloud about the possibility of fresh lockdowns.

“Our hospitals are full,” Megan Ranney, an emergency medicine professor at Brown University, said in an interview. “Our workers are getting sick. And it is simply overwhelming the system.”

The rapid rise in hospitalizations could foreshadow a long period of rising deaths, said Scott Gottlieb, former director of the Food and Drug Administration. Although improvements in care have pushed the mortality rate below 1 percent in the United States, 1,549 people died of the virus Wednesday, the highest toll since April.

Frieden tweeted that the United States has entered “the exponential phase” of virus spread and that the situation will worsen significantly before it improves. But he emphasized that policy decisions have an impact, and throwing in the towel is the wrong solution.

“If people on the whole just go to the store one less time a week, you could substantially reduce spread,” Gottlieb said on “Squawk Box.”

The holiday season, meanwhile, is a looming danger that Ranney expects will lead to a “deadly” spike in infections. The virus’s prevalence across the country means that this is the worst time for people to increase their risk of transmission by attending family-centric celebrations, she said.

Over the last week, Washington broke two records for highest daily case count since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to Department of Health data.

Health officials in Washington state are warning of an increase in COVID-19 transmission in the coming months.

Dr. Kathy Lofy, the state health officer, advises people to stop socializing so we can flatten the curve and prevent another economic shutdown.

“Accelerated growth in (COVID-19) cases in past two weeks… at this point in time, it's the highest number of cases we’ve ever had, and our case count is accelerating," Lofy said.

More than a dozen states have seen record-high Covid-19 infections in the past five days, as the country experiences case counts never seen before anywhere in the world and, once again, surging hospitalizations and deaths.

But public health experts around the country told STAT they were deeply worried that there has not been a correspondingly urgent response from federal, state, and local leaders. As a result, they warned, the country is set on an even more dire course as it moves deeper into the fall and holiday season.

Some governors and other elected officials say the public is tired of burdensome interventions. Leaders also feel burned by the backlash to more intensive measures or believe the virus will spread no matter what, so restrictions that harm the economy and society aren’t worth the costs. The result, experts say, is a dangerous combination of fatigue, fatalism, and forfeiture that will only result in more illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths. On Election Day, the country once again crossed 1,000 daily Covid-19 deaths, and it has stayed above that mark most days since, according to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker.

Hey, so, remember in 2018 and then again in 2019 when the FDA and CDC issued widespread warnings about the potential for lettuce to make you sick? It was linked to E. coli contamination and although the incidents were separate, it took months for things to calm down in both cases. Well, it’s 2020, so you had to know that we were going to see it again and, yep, here it is.

According to an FDA recall bulletin, a produce distributor named Tanimura & Antle Inc. is voluntarily recalling multiple lots of its single head packaged romaine lettuce because of the possibility that it is contaminated with E. Coli. The recall states that the lettuce was potentially distributed to 20 different US states.

Soaring case counts around the country are impacting children at "unprecedented levels," according to new numbers released Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association, which are tracking data reported by state health departments.

There were 61,000 new cases in children during the last week of October, "which is larger than any previous week in the pandemic," the AAP said in a statement. From the onset of the pandemic through October 29, more than 853,000 children have tested positive for Covid-19, the AAP said, including nearly 200,000 new cases during the month of October.

Attention Virginia residents! Beware the fluffy and hairy-looking caterpillar that has been crawling around the eastern part of the state.

The puss caterpillar, which transforms into the southern flannel moth when it becomes an adult, may resemble a tiny toupee, but it’s actually one of the most venomous caterpillars in the United States according to a profile by Donald W. Hall, professor emeritus of University of Florida's Entomology and Nematology Department.

The Virginia Department of Forestry has been receiving reports of recent sightings and issued a warning on Tuesday with a photo of one of the caterpillars. The department told Virginians in a Facebook post to “#SocialDistance away from this caterpillar!

For Mirabai Nicholson-McKellar, Covid-19 brought an onslaught of symptoms from chest pains to an 11-day migraine, three positive test results, and a period in hospital.

Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.

“Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,” says Nicholson-McKellar, adding that the experience would be better described as cognitive impairment.

The consequences, she says, have been enormous.

“I can’t work more than one to two hours a day and even just leaving the house to get some shopping can be a challenge,” she says. “When I get tired it becomes much worse and sometimes all I can do is lay in bed and watch TV.” Brain fog has made her forgetful to the point that she says she burns pots while cooking.

“It often prevents me from being able to have a coherent conversation or write a text message or email,” she adds. “I feel like a shadow of my former self. I am not living right now, I am simply existing.”

Xanax will soon come with a new warning label, the New York Times reports. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced it will now require benzodiazepines, a class of common psychiatric drugs, to feature labeling that reflects the drugs’ high risk for abuse and addiction.

A pack of masked “bandits” is marauding in a San Francisco park.

The group of 14 raccoons emerged from the bushes at Golden Gate Park on Thursday, startling a father and son who snapped a picture of the bizarre scene, SFGate reports.

“It was so surreal…a posse of bandits…like out of a movie,” the dad, Marc Estoque told the outlet. “And then two minutes later there was a coyote. I was waiting for the unicorn to pop out.”

A mother's depression and anxiety from conception through the first year of the baby's life is associated with negative developmental outcomes through adolescence, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

That could affect a lot of women: About 15% to 23% of women worldwide experience anxiety during pregnancy, while 15% deal with anxiety after childbirth. Depression through pregnancy is estimated to affect 10% of women, and 15% face postpartum depression. The burden is greater for women who are experiencing poverty or are teen parents, according to Postpartum Support International.

For the baby, the perinatal stage — which is defined as the time from conception through pregnancy (antenatal), birth and the first year of the baby's life (postnatal) — is "a time of unprecedented growth and sensitivity," the study said. That's when exposures and early life experiences may modify development starting from when he or she is in the womb to that critical first year as a growing child and onward.

A mother experiencing depression and anxiety before and after birth was moderately linked with her child's deficits in language and cognitive and motor development in infancy.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

The rate of suicide among those aged 10 to 24 increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018, according to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise occurred in most states, with 42 experiencing significant increases.

"It's a real trend that has been demanding, for a while, a serious public health and research effort to understand what is happening and why," said Anna Mueller, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies suicides in adolescents. "I don't buy that it's just social media, which is one of the explanations that I most consistently see."

"We absolutely need to be really careful to not think about suicide as just a white kid problem," Mueller said. "It's absolutely not. Kids across racial and ethnic groups and sexual orientations experience suicidal thoughts, and even attempt at significant rates."

But Mueller cautioned not to lose sight of the fact that suicidal thoughts are not uncommon, especially among young people.

Much of Orange County is transporting homeless people into Santa Ana, placing an unfair burden on that city to address the county’s homelessness crisis, city officials allege in court documents filed Monday.

The filing marks the city’s latest effort seeking legal relief over this issue. And this time, officials have some numbers and additional data that they hope will prove their point that many other cities in the county are “dumping” their homeless in Santa Ana.

“We now have better evidence that the county did not stop this practice. It’s just being done in other ways,” Santa Ana City Manager Kristine Ridge said.

Santa Ana officials and residents have long complained that they’ve become a dumping ground for the homeless.

Santa Ana officials said transfers from other communities have led to to a disproportionate number of homeless people in their city. From 2017 to 2019, homelessness in Orange County increased by 43 %; but in Santa Ana, homelessness increased by 77 %, according to the lawsuit. As of April 2019, more than 25 % of the county’s homeless lived in Santa Ana.

A new report from researchers at MIT and University of Oxford shows current social distancing guidelines may no longer be effective. Researchers are warning that in some cases, the 6-foot rule is not great enough.