A new viral outbreak is testing whether the world has learned anything from COVID. By Ed Yong Yesterday afternoon, I called the UCLA epidemiologist Anne Rimoin to ask about the European outbreak of monkeypox—a rare but potentially severe viral illness with dozens of...
Early anecdotes about Paxlovid’s effects on long COVID are intriguing, but no one’s testing them in clinical trials yet. By Katherine J. Wu In the two years since she caught the coronavirus, 38-year-old Jessica McGovern has cycled through “well over 100 drugs,...
With time and effort, we can build enough protection to blunt surges—but herd immunity remains out of reach. By Katherine J. Wu The Atlantic I, as far as I can tell, have not yet been infected by the virus that causes COVID-19. Which, by official counts, makes me an...
Understanding when to abandon beliefs and when to recommit to them can help us ride out this pandemic and prepare for the next one. By Olga Khazan In the spring of 2020, as Americans continued to proclaim their excitement for basketball games and parades, an ER doctor...
Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic. By Ed Yong ucy esparza-casarez thinks she caught the coronavirus while working the polls during California’s 2020...
All epidemics trigger the same Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect. Even so, that cycle isn’t meant to spin this quickly. By Ed Yong All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and...
Here are four shapes that the next variant might take—which will also dictate the shape of our response. By Katherine J. Wu If the coronavirus has one singular goal—repeatedly infecting us—it’s only gotten better at realizing it, from Alpha to Delta to Omicron. And it...
The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why? By Ed Yong he united states reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays...
South Korea has repeatedly suppressed the spread of the virus and kept deaths to relatively low levels. By Uri Friedman About the author: Uri Friedman is the managing editor at the Atlantic Council and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He was...
Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use?By Tom Bartlett Originally published in The Atlantic ~ August 12, 2021 Robert Malone—a medical doctor and an infectious-disease researcher—recently suggested that the...
Omicron is inundating a health-care system that was already buckling under the cumulative toll of every previous surge. By Ed Yong hen a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of...
Here’s everything we do. By Katherine J. Wu As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health...
Medical professionals are used to being believed, but as patients, they found that their expertise didn’t matter. By Ed Yong Before she caught COVID-19 at a wedding in March 2020, the physician associate spent her days diagnosing and treating people; after she was...
This one is far from over, but the window to prepare for future threats is closing fast. By Ed Yong A year after the United States bombed its pandemic performance in front of the world, the Delta variant opened the stage for a face-saving encore. If the U.S. had...
This has become a common refrain among the cautious—and it’s wrong. By Craig Spencer About the author: Craig Spencer is an emergency-medicine physician and director of global health in emergency medicine at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. For...