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A divided U.S. appeals court on Tuesday said federal workers are generally not entitled to extra pay for being exposed to COVID-19 through their jobs .In a 10-2 decision with potentially "far-reaching" ramifications, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against 188 current and former correctional employees at a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. (Stempel, 2/14)

The World Health Organization has quietly shelved the second phase of its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic due to a lack of cooperation from the Chinese government. “Their hands are really tied,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, told the scientific journal Nature. Without access to China, researchers said it may be impossible to understand how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people. (Vaziri, 2/14)

Rates of COVID-19 rebound were similar among hospitalized patients infected with the Omicron BA.2.2 variant who did and didn't receive oral antiviral drugs, and relapse wasn't tied to worse clinical outcomes, suggests a study published yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Rebound is a re-emergence of symptoms and an uptick in viral load after a period of recovery. The antiviral drug nirmatrelvir-ritonavir (Paxlovid) was associated with COVID-19 rebound in some previous research, while some newer research has concluded that it is not unique to Paxlovid. (Van Beusekom, 2/14)

On May 11, the central pillar of the country’s pandemic response — the declaration of a national emergency that began March 1, 2020 — will come down. But Americans will continue to have access to the vaccines, drugs and medical devices that were authorized for emergency use against COVID-19, so long as they remain sufficiently safe and effective in the view of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (Healy, 2/14)

Public health experts warned from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that the disease was “not like the flu,” resulting in far more deaths and hospitalizations each year. Unless most people get annual booster shots, that grim tide is not going to let up anytime soon, a new Pennsylvania State University study finds. (Avril, 2/14)

The illness struck the little baby suddenly. It was a hot, sticky day late in the summer of 2017. Only 5 months old at the time, her little boy was a peaceful infant, his mother recalls. "He didn't make much of a fuss." The family lives in a small fishing town near the South China Sea in Sarawak, Malaysia, at the mouth of the Rajang River. Their tidy home sits atop stilts, above a maze of canals and families' rowboats tied to piers. (Doucleff, 2/15)

“Covid left its scars, like the spike in violent crime in 2020 — the first year of the pandemic.”— President Biden, remarks in the State of the Union address, Feb. 7. We quickly fact-checked various claims in the president’s address to Congress last week, but there’s usually something that requires a bit more digging. That’s the case with this line, which appeared to make a direct connection between an increase in violent crime and the coronavirus pandemic. (Kessler, 2/15)