Is it safe to stay in hotels during the pandemic?
In a recent travel update, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes it clear: Staying home is the best way to protect yourself against the coronavirus.
If you do travel, the CDC says, sharing a rental home with people from your own household is safer than staying with friends or family who aren't from your household or staying at a hotel where you would encounter more people. The riskiest option, it says, is a hostel or other dorm-like lodging with shared sleeping areas. Read more here:
In other developments:
- AstraZeneca hopes to show its COVID-19 vaccine is effective by the end of this year and is ramping up manufacturing so it can supply hundreds of millions of doses starting in January.
- The Federal Reserve kept its benchmark interest rate at a record low near zero Thursday and signaled its readiness to do more if needed to support an economy under threat from a worsening coronavirus pandemic.
- The United Nations has voted to hold a summit on the COVID-19 pandemic on Dec. 3-4 to respond to the spread of the coronavirus around the globe and its “unprecedented” effects on societies, economies and global trade.
- A suburban St. Louis election official who worked at a polling place on Election Day despite a positive test for the coronavirus has now died, raising concerns for the nearly 2,000 people who voted there.
- Independent music clubs all over the nation — pop culture icons like the Troubadour in West Hollywood; the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, Tennessee; The Bitter End in New York's Greenwich Village — are shuttered. And owners fear for the future of their businesses and of a musical way of life.
- The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell slightly last week to 751,000, a still-historically high level that shows that many employers keep cutting jobs in the face of the accelerating pandemic.
