--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, July 16th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You've probably come across the term breakthrough infections, cases where people who are fully vaccinated still got the coronavirus. Last night, a baseball game was postponed after several vaccinated players on the Yankees tested positive.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The team's general manager, Brian Cashman, had an update. Thankfully, I can report that those players are doing well thus far and doing what they need to be doing in quarantine, regardless of being diagnosed post-vaccination.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's typical of a breakthrough infection, a positive test, but not severe COVID symptoms that send people to the hospital. While new variants of the virus are increasing public health risks, Catherine Wu over at The Atlantic says the language we use to describe some of these new infections is problematic.
--:-- Catherine Wu: She and I spoke about a story she wrote on that term, breakthrough. These vaccines were originally developed, as most vaccines are, to keep individual people from getting sick, even if they encounter a virus like the coronavirus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When we heard all those amazing efficacy numbers from the clinical trials, from Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J, they were reporting efficacy at preventing symptomatic disease, so actual cases of COVID-19.
--:-- Catherine Wu: But when we use just this general term breakthroughs, that captures pretty much everything from the asymptomatic to hospitalization and death. That's a huge spectrum, and not all of it is necessarily what we originally imagined the vaccines to be.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So is the fact that breakthrough infections even exist being used to cast doubt on vaccines? Unfortunately, in some cases, yes.
--:-- Catherine Wu: But, I don't want to cast that as necessarily malicious. I think there are some people out there who see pretty much any breakthrough, regardless of severity, as evidence that, these vaccines are not doing their job. These vaccines are failure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But I think that's an oversimplification. If we really look at what breakthroughs are telling us, they tell us such different things depending on what going on.
--:-- Catherine Wu: We know that you know even if somebody takes an incredibly good vaccine but they walk into a high area where there a ton of virus around that can really make things complicated and raise the risk further.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We know that variants are giving vaccines a little bit of trouble, though it does not seem to be a disastrous situation yet. There are just so many variables to consider.
--:-- Catherine Wu: And so in many other cases where we're talking about breakthroughs, it's so easy to latch onto that one word and consider it this catch-all term. I don't blame people for being confused.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't blame different outlets or researchers for talking about this in a broad way. It's the easiest thing to do in a lot of cases, but I just hope that there can be a little bit more granularity going forward so that we can actually accurately represent what vaccines are accomplishing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: How do variants of COVID-19 fit into the conversation about breakthrough disease? The answer right now is we don't know 100%, but this is something that people are keeping an eye on.
--:-- Catherine Wu: So as I mentioned before, there are many, many reasons that a breakthrough can occur. So as the virus is changing, even if the vaccine is excellent, nothing about the vaccine has changed, the virus might be getting a little wilier and slipping past some defenses.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it's very possible that we may see more breakthroughs occurring, that certain breakthroughs are more responsible. Delta could be responsible for this, but it's a good time to remember that vaccines are sort of more like a dimmer than a light switch.
--:-- Catherine Wu: They're reducing your risk piece by piece. The easiest hurdle to clear is preventing death, then hospitalization, then symptoms, then infection. They're still doing an incredible job at stopping Delta from putting people in the hospital and killing them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In this article, you're right, tracking milder breakthroughs is important. How are scientists and public health officials going to use that data in particular?
--:-- Catherine Wu: Having data on the full range of breakthroughs is really useful in a lot of ways. It just gives us a sense of where the virus is and what variants are more or less likely to cause symptomatic disease in people who are both vaccinated and unvaccinated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also, sequencing the viral genomes that come out of those breakthroughs across the entire spectrum of severity just helps us keep tabs on how the virus is changing, what new variants might be on the horizon to trouble us next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Catherine Wu is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She covers science. Catherine, thank you so much for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Catherine Wu: Thank you for having me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you have a kid, you may have seen the new child tax credit show up in your bank account this week. This benefit is part of the coronavirus stimulus package, which Democrats passed in March.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Vice President Harris says this extra money could do a lot for families. The payments may be monthly, but the impact of this child tax credit will undoubtedly be generational.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post spoke with a welfare policy historian who called this program the biggest anti-poverty effort since the 1960s.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Treasury Department says it's now sent payments to households representing roughly 60 million children. The benefit gives qualifying families up to $300 per child every month.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It phases out for the wealthiest families, and unlike past programs, Americans with no income at all are eligible for the full payment amount. But still, some people are skeptical about how this tax credit will actually reach everyone in need.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For low-income families who've never filed taxes, it's challenging for the IRS to identify them and get them this credit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The White House set up an online portal to help families who are outside the tax system, but critics say the website is hard to use.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They also argue the White House is overstating how much this plan is going to impact child poverty.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Changes made to the tax credit, they're going to expire at the end of the year if Congress doesn't act.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Deadly flash floods are devastating parts of Western Europe. Germany has been hit the hardest.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to CNN, local officials are reporting dozens of deaths, with more than a thousand people missing as of this morning.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These floods are also affecting Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Record-breaking rainfall is to blame here.
--:-- Shamita Basu: CNN describes fast-moving water engulfing towns, causing buildings to collapse and leaving people stranded.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll have updates throughout the day on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When it comes to space exploration, Mars tends to draw a lot of attention. But there's a group of scientists who've always had eyes for Venus.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For years they've been pushing for more research to be done on this super hot neighbor planet of ours. They say understanding Venus better could help us answer questions about life on Earth and maybe about whether life could exist elsewhere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Popular Science explains Venus is relatively close to Earth and similar in many ways.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The best topographic radar maps we have of Venus were made in the 1990s. From these maps, we know that Venus has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But there are many important things that we just don't know, including what's in the rocks on that planet?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Over the last few decades, dozens of Venus proposals have been rejected by NASA.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At one point, a scientist who had his project turned down by NASA said that he and his colleagues felt like Cubs fans waiting for decades to win a World Series.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But now, Popular Science reports. These scientists are catching a break. NASA recently approved not just one, but two Venus expeditions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They launch later this decade. One is going to send a satellite to map Venus at a higher resolution than ever before.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The other will send a probe to Venus to collect data about its atmosphere.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are 14 people on the planet right now who are descendants of Leonardo da Vinci. We know this because of a new study that reconstructed his family tree across 21 generations.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Gizmodo writes about this new research. The project began in the 1970s, and it was kind of tricky because the Renaissance master never had children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The living relatives range in age from 1 to 85, and some of them still have da Vinci's last name.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Researchers are hoping this information might be used to reconstruct da Vinci's genome. That could tell us more about his genetic health or whether he had synesthesia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's where you might smell colors or taste sounds. Having genetic data could also help determine if remains in France are actually those of Leonardo da Vinci.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Plus, don't forget to check out our weekend interview show, In Conversation. This week, I sit down with Louise Rodonofsky from The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She recently profiled Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles. And you really get a sense of her strength on and off the mat.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll be back with the news on Monday.
