CHECKUP FINDS BIDEN “VIGOROUS”

BETHESDA, MD.» President Joe Biden remains “healthy” and “vigorous” and fit for duty but he is showing some signs of aging, his doctor said Friday after the oldest president in American history underwent his first routine physical in office and — in a history-making moment — briefly transferred power to Vice President Kamala Harris while he underwent a colonoscopy.

Harris, the first woman, first Black person and first person of South Asian descent to be vice president, was — for one hour and 25 minutes — acting president while Biden was under anesthesia.

Research links COVID-19 in pregnancy with stillbirths.

Pregnant women with COVID-19 face increased chances for stillbirths compared with uninfected women, and that risk spiked to four times higher after the delta variant emerged, new government data shows.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Friday that examined 1.2 million deliveries in 736 hospitals nationwide from March 2020 through September 2021.

Stillbirths were rare overall, totaling 8,154 among all deliveries.

However, the researchers found that for women with COVID-19, about one in 80 deliveries resulted in stillbirth. Among the uninfected, it was one in 155.

“All of Germany is one big outbreak.”

BERLIN» Germany has entered a “nationwide state of emergency” because of surging coronavirus infections, the head of the country’s disease control agency said Friday.

Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, said regular medical care cannot be guaranteed anymore in some parts of the country because hospitals and intensive care wards are overstretched.

“All of Germany is one big outbreak,” Wieler said. “This is a nationwide state of emergency. We need to pull the emergency brake.”