Early on in the pandemic, parents joked about encasing their kids in bubble wrap, but seven months in, that seemingly over-the-top idea is now looking pretty practical. In fact, Under the Weather — a brand best known for the pop-up "WeatherPods" that can be seen on the sidelines of kids' outdoor soccer and baseball games during rainy days — is now introducing a child-size "ShieldPod" after it successfully launched a line of Safety Pods designed to help protect healthcare workers on the front lines from possible COVID-19 exposure earlier this summer.

The original ShieldPod generated so many requests from families that Under the Weather modified the design to accommodate anyone looking for, according to the site, "extra protection, added peace of mind, or social distancing solutions."

We knew the long quarantine was making us all crabby, but this is extreme: People now feel fully betrayed by the long history of crabification (technically, “carcinization”) of different species over time. That means groups of crustaceans have evolved into crabs in five completely different contexts, giving rise to a meme that the long arc of history truly bends toward the crab.

So how does carcinization happen? Well, that part is pretty simple. Animals that live in similar habitats face obstacles that can shuttle them all toward the same evolutionary advantages. Britannica cites the marsupials as a key example, where despite having one critical difference from their “placental” counterparts in other parts of the world, the marsupials often correspond very closely to these other animals.

Animals can evolve separately but end up evolving toward other species, too, or even spontaneously evolve the same characteristics in totally separate groups. Birds and bats can both fly using mechanical wings. Birds and mammals are both warmblooded, but both evolved from groups that were not.

The United States is in the midst of a crushing economic recession, COVID-19 infection rates are spiking, and thousands of schools and childcare facilities have yet to reopen in-person classrooms. The group bearing the brunt of this torrent of bad news? Women.

Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the labor force, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics September jobs report. In the same time period, just 216,000 men exited the workforce. Meanwhile, one in four women are considering reducing work hours, moving to part-time roles, switching to less demanding jobs, taking leaves of absence from work, or stepping away from the workforce altogether, according to an annual Women in the Workplace study published in September by McKinsey & Co. and Lean In.

“If we had a panic button, we’d be hitting it,” says Rachel Thomas, the CEO of Lean In, a gender equity advocacy group co-founded by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. “We have never seen numbers like these.”

Women’s decisions to exit the labor force this year will likely impact their own professional and financial goals for the rest of their lives. It’s an imprecise comparison, but studies done on students who graduate into a recessions and are then either unemployed or forced to take jobs below their qualification levels lose out on earnings compared to students who finished college amid rosier economic circumstances. The losses amount to about 9% initially, and tend not to fully dissipate until about a decade after graduation day.

During this pandemic, people in the United States are dying at rates unparalleled elsewhere in the world.

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that in the past five months, per capita deaths in the U.S., both from COVID-19 and other causes, have been far greater than in 18 other high-income countries.

"It's shocking. It's horrible," says Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of health policy and medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study.

"The United States really has done remarkably badly compared to other countries," he says. "I mean, remarkably badly."

A new report estimates that 29 million women and girls are victims of modern slavery, exploited by practices including forced labour, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude.

Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Walk Free anti-slavery organisation, said Friday that means one in every 130 women and girls is living in modern slavery today, more than the population of Australia.

"The reality is that there are more people living in slavery today than any other time in human history," she told a U.N. news conference.

Walk Free defines modern slavery "as the systematic removal of a person’s freedom, where one person is exploited by another for personal or financial gain," she said.

According to the report, titled "Stacked Odds," women account for 99% of all victims of forced sexual exploitation, 84% of all victims of forced marriage, and 58% of all victims of forced labour.

More than 6 in 10 Americans questioned say they are more favorable toward people wearing a mask, and there have been steady increases in mask usage among people of all ages, demographic groups, and political leanings since a similar poll in July.

Despite noisy no-mask protests, 92 percent of 2,200 Americans polled say they wear a face mask when leaving their home, with 74 percent saying they “always” do. That “always” percentage is up nearly a quarter since July, according to the poll, which has a 2 percent margin of error.

Public health officials call a mask an effective way to curtail airborne transmission of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans since February and sickened more than 7.4 million. Forty-four states require mask usage in certain situations.

Here's a stunning stat: Women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men.

The burden of parenting and running a household while also working a job during the pandemic has created a pressure cooker environment in many households, and women are bearing the brunt of it.

It has come to a head as a new school year starts with many children staying home instead of returning to their classrooms in person because of the pandemic. And its forcing many women to make a difficult choice and drop out of the workforce altogether.

Just in September, 865,000 women over 20 dropped out of the American workforce compared with 216,000 men in the same age group, the Labor Department reported Friday.

"It was a really startling difference," said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. "The child care crisis is wreaking havoc on women's employment."

Tao is looking on the bright side thanks to his sunny pal.

According to Daily Mail, the 11-year-old golden retriever lost his eyesight last year to glaucoma, and eventually had both of his eyes removed because of the condition. Tao impressed everyone by quickly adjusting to life as a blind dog, learning his way around the house in just a few days, but his owner found that Tao was missing some of the playful energy he had prior to losing his eyesight.

In an effort to give Tao the best quality of life, the dog's owner, Melanie Jackson of Somerset, England, got Tao a puppy friend in hopes the little dog would help her senior pooch feel better and have more fun.

The obstacles and hardships facing working mothers are not new, but the pandemic has given them more visibility, says Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the book Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.

"Low-income families, single parents, they see how little support they have constantly because they're in a never-ending battle to figure out how to put food on the table, to keep a roof over their heads, [to find] someone to watch their kids so they aren't alone at home while they go to work," Collins says. "It's advantaged people who have long not seen these difficulties."

Now, the global pandemic and its horrifying trajectory in the U.S. have given Americans a chance to reflect on what could be different.

Humans, like nature itself, abhor a vacuum—and there’s been no vacuum lately quite like the tedious months of COVID-19 quarantine. In nature, air rushes in to fill the empty space. In the time of pandemic, it’s been alcohol. That, at least, is the finding of a new survey of American adults conducted by the RAND Corporation and published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open. But the study bears close reading.

From the very start of the pandemic, it was clear that alcohol was going to be the medication of choice for a lot of Americans, especially during the early days when panicky shoppers were hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, bottled water, and groceries. During the week ending March 21, national alcohol sales increased 54% from the same week a year before and online sales leapt a staggering 262%.

The question was, with more alcohol on hand—and plenty more available as soon as stores began to reopen but stay-at-home guidelines remained in place—would people actually consume more? The answer, according to the RAND researchers, who surveyed a sample group of 1,540 adults, was: And how.

Historic wildfires which ravaged California throughout August and September may cause 3,000 early deaths, according to research from academics at Stanford University.

This year there have been over 8,100 wildfires that have burned well over 3.7 million acres in California. Since August 15, when California's fire activity elevated, there have been 26 fatalities and over 7,000 structures destroyed.

On Sunday, 17,000 firefighters were still at work, battling 25 wildfires in the state.

Now academics have concluded that the wildfires, from August 1 to September 10, were responsible already for at least 1,200 deaths in California - and may, over the next month, cause a total of 3,000 deaths.

One in three parents doesn't intend to have their child vaccinated for the flu this season, according to a new poll, despite the potential threat of a second wave of COVID-19 cases.

Health officials have increasingly emphasized the importance of vaccinations this year, in part to limit stress on the health care system during the coronavirus pandemic. If the flu is not controlled, officials say hospitals may become overwhelmed by dealing with both.

Despite this, 32% of parents say their child is "unlikely" to get a flu vaccine, according to the recent National Poll on Children's Health.

Hip hip hooray!

People with chunky thighs or large hips are less likely to die early compared to those with bigger bellies, a new study suggests.

The study, published this week in the medical journal BMJ, says that central fatness or fat stored around the abdomen is associated with a higher risk of early death from any cause — regardless of overall body fat – while larger hips and thighs are associated with a lower risk.

As authorities in suburban Milwaukee gamed out the complex preparations to allow children back into classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic, they didn't plan for one scenario: parents deliberately sending infected kids to school.

Yet that's exactly what's happened multiple times in Washington and Ozaukee counties, health officials said this week.

"Something that happened and continued to happen … which I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would happen, is people sent their known positive kids to school," Washington Ozaukee Public Health Department officer Kirsten Johnson told WISN.

As health officials investigate cases in more than two dozens schools in the counties, some are demanding harsh repercussions for any parent caught sending a child to class after they test positive.

Do not waste your time and emotional energy planning around an imminent game-changing injection or pill in the coming months. A pandemic is not a problem that will be fixed in one move, by any single medication or a sudden vaccine. Instead, the way forward involves small, imperfect preventive measures that can accumulate into very effective interventions. Groups of practices that minimize the spread of disease are sometimes known as prevention bundles. Our COVID-19 bundle includes important drugs, such as dexamethasone and remdesivir, which seem to help certain patients in specific situations. It also involves behaviors, too, such as distancing and masking. “Any action you take has the potential for numerous secondary and tangential benefits,” Thomas said.

On april 13, Robert Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared on the Today show and assured viewers that the worst was nearly behind us.

By July, the number of daily cases had doubled. The death total had shot past 100,000. As Redfield looked ahead, his tone became more ominous. The fall and the winter, he said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, “are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health.”

A vaccine will be part of our bundles, hopefully before too long. But it will not instantly eliminate the need for everything else. If we can accept that masks will be a part of our lives indefinitely, we can focus on improving their effectiveness and making them less annoying to wear, Yale’s Ko said. “And it’s not just the design of masks themselves; we can come up with more innovative ways to promote face-mask use.” For one thing, they could be made more ubiquitous by employers and state agencies. Governments could even, as Luxembourg’s did, send masks to everyone by mail.