News Roundup

A New York Times report on a possible new COVID variant spreading in New York City is making waves, but scientists and City Hall were quick to criticize what they said was the potentially premature release of unfinished research.

Highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are now available, but their mere existence is not enough to end a pandemic that has infected more than 110 million people globally and killed about 2.5 million. People will continue to get sick if vaccine rollout is slow, the novel coronavirus is spreading rapidly or people do not trust the vaccines and decline to get a shot.

Throughout the pandemic, there has been perhaps nowhere more dangerous than a nursing home. The coronavirus has raced through some 31,000 long-term care facilities in the United States, killing more than 163,000 residents and employees and accounting for more than a third of all virus deaths since the late spring.

The past 11 months have been a crash course in a million concepts that you probably wish you knew a whole lot less about. Particle filtration. Ventilation. Epidemiological variables. And, perhaps above all else, interdependence. In forming quarantine bubbles, in donning protective gear just to buy groceries, in boiling our days down to only our most essential interactions, people around the world have been shown exactly how linked their lives and health are. Now, as COVID-19 vaccines rewrite the rules of pandemic life once more, we are due for a new lesson in how each person’s well-being is inextricably tangled with others’.

The coronavirus pandemic has crippled economies, shut down travel and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, transforming the world in ways that would have been unthinkable a year ago. The Biden administration’s first days were inevitably dominated by discussion of how his team would tackle the crisis, as the U.S. death toll continued its inexorable climb to a staggering milestone: 500,000 deaths.