Over the past two years, the United States has seen more than 63 million Covid-19 cases, with some people infected more than once. More than 240 million people in the US have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. More than 60 million have received three. While Covid-19 infections are never a good…
Read More “This is what long-term immunity to Covid-19 might look like” »
The fierce backlash to the CDC’s recent decision to shorten the recommended isolation period for people who test positive for Covid-19 was the latest in a series of communications blunders so severe that they have now become a meme. Communication is an essential part of any public health response. But US health agencies have struggled…
Read More “The most consistently botched part of the US pandemic response” »
Like many states across the country grappling with the onset of the omicron variant, Texas’s fight against Covid-19 took a turn for the worse in December. And due to the state’s relatively low vaccination rates, and a Republican state government that has fought public health officials’ recommendations on masking, vaccine mandates, and business restrictions, matters…
Read More “Texas shows the dangers of indifference to omicron” »
Last September, the World Health Organization and the United Nations laid out a roadmap to end the pandemic. The key goal: having every country in the world achieve at least 40 percent vaccination coverage against Covid-19 by the end of 2021, and 70 percent by mid-2022. One major player in that effort has been Covax….
Read More “Is Covax finally going to vaccinate the world?” »
The omicron variant doesn’t spell complete disaster for the economy, but it’s not great, either. It reinforces what’s been true throughout the pandemic: What happens to the economy is contingent on what happens with the virus, and as long as the virus isn’t under control, neither is the country’s economic destiny, or the world’s. The…
Read More “The lesson America refuses to learn about Covid-19 and the economy” »
Should we be swabbing our noses or our throats for at-home tests? Do rapid tests even detect omicron at all? Are PCR tests the only results we can trust right now? Guidance about how to approach testing in the omicron era seems to be evolving by the day. A recent real-world study that followed 30…
At the stroke of midnight on January 1, New York City welcomed its first new inhabitant of 2022: Leyla Gessel Tzunun Garcia, born as the new year began at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn. Given changing trends around population and fertility, though, there’s less competition to become the first baby of the new year than…
Governments make choices that shape millions of lives. Workers and businesses are taxed to provide health care to the elderly and to the least fortunate. Men and women are incarcerated or even killed for crimes defined by the state. Wars are fought. Refugees are given a place of safety or turned away at the border….
Read More “The stakes in the Supreme Court’s vaccine cases are even bigger than they seem” »
The omicron variant has helped drive the United States into uncharted territory for the pandemic. The country was reporting an average of more than 400,000 new Covid-19 cases every day as of January 3, easily eclipsing last winter’s record of 250,000. And infections are still spiking, with the number of newly reported cases quadrupling since…
Read More “The shape of the omicron wave is becoming clearer” »
