The last year has brought an unusual pattern in COVID surges. 

Typically, the virus is worst during the winter with an additional summer surge beginning around June. Last winter, there were fewer infections, hospitalizations and deaths, and while this year’s summer surge has been delayed, it’s now being felt across the region.

To the Editor:

Western Carolina University is only one of many public institutions being infected with the disease of Trumpism. Single-handedly Trump has mandated that diversity can no longer be promoted in hiring, curriculum, and even in student populations.

(Editor’s Note: Amid the chaos of the recent floods from Hurricane Helene, this column wasn’t able to run in the Oct. 2 issue of The Smoky Mountain News due to space issues in the midst of crisis.)

Hello from Room 13 at the Seabirds Motel in Kure Beach, North Carolina. Saturday morning.

If there’s one word to describe singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, it would be persistent.

From humble and hardscrabble beginnings as a performer in dive bars and back rooms throughout the Midwest in the late 1970s and early 1980s to international acclaim just a decade later, Etheridge has remained a beacon of creativity and purpose throughout the decades — where now words like “legend” and “icon” tend to precede her name in the bright lights of show business. 

Question: Does Milk Cause Mucus When You Have a Cold? 

Haywood County hadn’t logged a coronavirus-related death in the better part of a year. But since Dec. 19, 2023, it has seen five.  

Most people don’t contribute to the world over a lifetime what Charlotte Joy Norris did in just two short years.   

I’ve never doubted I’m an old soul, so maybe my attachment to herbal remedies and plant-based eating is connected to another lifetime when nature and humans functioned more synergistically.

Recent cases of malaria in Texas and Florida have caused alarm about the potential for the disease to spread in warmer regions of the United States, but according to mosquito researcher Brian Byrd, a different type of mosquito-borne illness is of greater concern in Western North Carolina.

The number of positive COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are once again on the rise due to the delta variant, which is more contagious than the original virus. Despite mask recommendations from the CDC and state health officials, several school systems have decided to make masks optional when students return to class.