Depending on your point of view, I'm either the best or the worst kind of karaoke participant: the guy who's extremely into it—especially after a drink or two—but is utterly and completely tone deaf. I have committed uncountable crimes against music in various karaoke bars, and I apologize for none of it.
The thing is, even if you're a terrible singer, karaoke is downright fun. And as writer Aimee Phan argues in a new essay for TIME, getting together with some friends for a night of passing the mic around might be just the thing you need to put your pandemic blues behind you.
"Before the pandemic, karaoke served as a fun, goofy outlet for pent-up frustration and worries over work and family life," she writes of her first night back at karaoke with friends since the pandemic began. "Now it felt more urgent and cathartic. It was yet another pleasure we’d taken for granted. That evening, we gave ourselves permission to experience that bliss and freedom again, to be transported by a sentimental melody, with newfound gratitude and relief. To appreciate our love of silly songs, no matter how off-key we are."
Even if karaoke isn't your thing, her point applies to almost anything else that was off-limits during the height of the pandemic. I haven't gone back to a karaoke bar just yet, but I did recently get together with some longtime friends to hit some balls at the driving range—an activity I'm only slightly better at than singing, but one that's still lots of fun in the right company. Spending time with those friends in the flesh is always rejuvenating, but never quite like it was after a year of our friendships mostly reduced to text messages and FaceTime calls.
If you haven't gotten together with your friends for something fun yet, I highly recommend it—as long as you're comfortable doing so. If it helps, feel free to ask people if they're vaccinated before getting together. There's nothing wrong with a little extra confidence that what you're doing is safe, especially as the Delta variant spreads around the country.
About 387 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of this morning, of which nearly 334 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 48% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
More than 186.7 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 4 million people have died. On July 11, there were 339,608 new cases and 6,644 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 3 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 33.8 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 607,100 people have died. On July 11, there were 6,164 new cases and 24 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of July 12, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
Cases are rising in a number of U.S. states, mostly in the south and southeast, including Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and others. The states with the most alarming spikes also tend to have relatively low vaccination rates (less than 35% of Arkansans are fully vaccinated, compared to nearly 50% nationwide) and the loosest restrictions (Florida governor Ron DeSantis has filed successful lawsuits that led to the striking down of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's cruise line restrictions). "We are seeing more people 30 years and older getting sicker and requiring hospitalization," a doctor at a Springfield, Missouri hospital recently told CNN of the latest spike. "Also, we have seen that in this wave, each person is getting sicker faster."
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is set to publish a new warning linking the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine to a small number of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, the Washington Post reports. Only about 100 cases of the condition—which leads a person's immune system to attack their own nerves—have been reported among the nearly 13 million people who have received the J&J vaccine in the U.S. Those reports are most common among men over the age of 50, and most people diagnosed with Guillain-Barré fully recover.
While experts in the U.S. and elsewhere debate the merits of a booster shot, health officials in Israel are going ahead with offering a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to severely immunocompromised adults, the Washington Post reports. The goal is to better protect those most at risk from the virus, especially as the Delta variant, which is both more transmissible and causes more severe disease, spreads around the world. It's worth keeping an eye on the results of this natural experiment—Israel has long had one of the world's top vaccination rates, making it an ideal real-world vaccination laboratory.
The Caribbean island nation of Cuba was rocked yesterday by what appeared to be the biggest street protests since the revolution that put the late Fidel Castro in power more than 60 years ago, the Associated Press reports. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest the government's coronavirus response, high prices, long lines for basic goods and general economic malaise driven both by sanctions imposed by the U.S. Trump Administration and a drop-off in tourism amid the pandemic. "We are fed up with the queues, the shortages," one protestor told the AP. "That’s why I’m here."
The Biden Administration is sending hundreds of thousands of Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses to Moldova, the Associated Press reports. A relatively poor Eastern European country—it has Europe's second-lowest GDP per capita, ahead only of Kosovo—Moldova has so far fully vaccinated less than 12% of its approximately 2.7 million residents. The donation comes just ahead of parliamentary elections pitting pro-Western candidates against those closer to Russia, making it the latest example of a vaccine exporter using its excess supply as a form of geopolitical soft power.
As of this Wednesday, Malta, a Mediterranean archipelago south of Sicily, will become the first European country to ban all unvaccinated visitors, Reuters reports. "We will be the first E.U. country to do so, but we need to protect our society," the country's health minister said during a Friday press conference. Unvaccinated visitors were previously allowed to enter Malta with a negative test; the rule change comes after a cluster of cases amid visitors who were unvaccinated but tested negative before entering the country.
Early in the U.S. outbreak, experts worried that a shortage of ventilators would leave hospitals without what was seen as a critical tool for saving critically ill coronavirus patients. That crisis was mostly averted, in part because ventilators were moved around the country as outbreaks ebbed in one place and arose in another. But as the New York Times reports, shortages of another last-ditch lifesaving tool—ECMO, short for "extracorporeal membrane oxygenation," have left doctors around the country struggling to decide which patients have enough of a chance to survive to get the treatment, which functions as a mechanical substitute for a patient's lungs. "Patients died because they could not get ECMO,” Dr. Lena M. Napolitano, co-director of the Surgical Critical Care Unit at the University of Michigan, told the Times. “We could not accommodate all of them."
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Alex Fitzpatrick and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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