Tag: coronavirus treatment and testing
Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Ever End?
Twenty-seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, our defenses against the coronavirus seem at once stronger and more penetrable than ever. A growing majority of the U.S. population now has some immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, whether from vaccination, past infection, or both. However, staggeringly infectious members of the Omicron family have demonstrated an ability to evade some of those protections. Since April, they have led to a quadrupling of daily coronavirus cases; the U.S.
How COVID Exploded in Hong Kong
At the beginning of 2022, Hong Kong stood out as a pandemic success story—proof that the so-called Zero COVID approach, whatever its costs, could squash the virus’s medical toll. Less than one per cent of the population had been infected, and the city had recorded around two hundred COVID deaths across a population of nearly seven and a half million people. Then Omicron and its more contagious cousin, B.A.2, arrived. Since then, more than three million people are thought to
What Happened to Joe Biden’s “Summer of Freedom” from the Pandemic?
Even in the compressed historical arc of the pandemic, July 1st wasn’t so long ago. The mood that morning, when President Biden’s COVID-response coördinator, Jeff Zients, opened the White House’s weekly pandemic briefing, was unusually optimistic. “Going into the Fourth of July holiday weekend,” he said, “Americans have good reason to celebrate.” Zients, a wealthy businessman in his mid-fifties, had built a reputation within the Democratic Party for fixing impossible operational problems. At the dais in the White House