Move over, case rates and hospitalizations. The next generation of COVID tracking is here. By Betsy Ladyzhets It is a truth universally acknowledged among health experts that official COVID-19 data are a mess right now. Since the Omicron surge last winter, case counts...
All of this will happen again. By Ed Yong Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of...
A lifelong promoter of vaccines suspects he might be the rare, unfortunate exception. By Roxanne Khamsi On september 22 of last year, Michel Goldman, a Belgian immunologist and one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research, walked into a clinic near his...
Is this what normal now looks like? By Jacob Stern This is where we are. Steady state unless a more dangerous variant appears. On a plateau.Almost 3000 deaths a month. That's the bad news and the good news. Good because deaths are way down.And we've become...
Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard. By Ed Yong On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their...
A string of negatives can still presage a clear-as-day positive. By Katherine J. Wu In early May, 27-year-old Hayley Furmaniuk felt tired and a bit congested, but after rapid-testing negative for the coronavirus two days in a row, she dined indoors with friends. The...
Will the danger mount each time, or will it fade away? By Katherine J. Wu Two and a half years and billions of estimated infections into this pandemic, SARS-CoV-2’s visit has clearly turned into a permanent stay. Experts knew from early on that, for almost...
There’s plenty more to learn about the lifesaving antiviral COVID treatment. By Rachel Gutman The first data on Paxlovid, out last November, hinted that the COVID antiviral would cut the risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent. Pundits called the drug...
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...