Tag: Pandemic
The Unemployed Epidemiologist Who Predicted the Pandemic
Illustration by Ryan Inzana.
In early March 2020, Rob Wallace, an evolutionary biologist who had been adrift after an unceremonious exit from the University of Minnesota, flew to New Orleans and then got on a bus to Jackson, Miss., where he was scheduled to speak at an event on health and racial injustice. Wallace, who turned 50 this summer, has been studying and writing about infectious diseases and their origins for half his life. For almost as long, he’s been
Movie Studios’ Risky Pandemic Demands Are Bad Business
The world experienced a reckoning of sorts over the past 18 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and if there’s a silver lining to be found in this tragedy, it’s the spotlight the virus has shone on systems that can be — and should already have been — changed for the better.
For movie fans and film journalists, one of those changes took the form of increased streaming availability of films, which offered general audiences an alternative to crowded theaters
Why Is the Pandemic So Bad in Florida?
The numbers are remarkable. More than 100 million people in the United States have likely been infected by SARS-CoV-2 and 167 million people are fully vaccinated. Yet despite this huge population of people with at least some level of immunity, the Delta variant has sent case and hospitalization numbers soaring. Florida is on its way to having twice as many people hospitalized now than during any previous wave, when essentially no one was vaccinated.
One way to think about it,
Delta Has Changed the Pandemic Endgame
In September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. And though
Penn State’s Pandemic Denialism – The Atlantic
As the fall 2021 semester approaches, nearly 700 college campuses across the United States are requiring proof of vaccination for students or employees. If you plot these colleges on a map, the image bears a striking resemblance to one depicting the results of the 2020 presidential election. And that image resembles a map of current COVID-19 hot spots, which mirrors a map of vaccination rates. In other words, vaccination rates lag behind in the areas where vaccinations are needed
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
The Pandemic Exodus: Kindergarten Enrollment Drops
As the pandemic took hold, more than 1 million children did not enroll in local schools. Many of them were the most vulnerable: 5-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods
PHILADELPHIA — On a sweltering July afternoon, Solomon Carson, 6, jumped off the stoop of his family’s tidy rowhouse in West Philadelphia, full of what his father, David, called “unspent energy.”
When a stranger asked his name, he answered brightly, but added that he couldn’t spell it. “I can help
Pandemic Shoppers Are a Nightmare to Service Workers
In May, I stood in the rear galley of an airplane and watched as a line formed to berate the flight attendant next to me. We were at a gate at LaGuardia, our flight half an hour delayed, and the air inside the cabin was acrid with the aromas of anxiety sweat and bags of fast food procured at the gate. Impatient passengers squeezed past others hoisting carry-ons into overhead bins to jockey for position in the complaining queue,
Biden, Republikaner und das Pandemic Blame Game
Präsident Biden befindet sich in einer schwierigen Lage: Er setzte sich für die Ideen ein, dass er das Team hatte, um eine Pandemie zu bewältigen, und dass seine fünf Jahrzehnte lange Karriere als Deal Maker in Washington genau das Richtige war, um die politische Polarisierung des Landes zu überwinden.
Das passiert nicht, nicht einmal ein bisschen.
Die Republikaner widersetzen sich nicht nur dem Vorstoß von Herrn Biden, die Pandemie zu beenden, einige von ihnen behindern sie auch aktiv. Die republikanischen
The Pandemic Birthed a New Generation of Finance Bros
On a Wednesday in June, deep in a corner of the Reddit message board r/WallstreetBets, a user going by Your_Boy_Roy_ published a lengthy post. The subreddit, which now has almost 11 million members (or “Degenerates,” as the page officially lists them), has become an epicenter for crowdsourced, short-term, high-risk stock speculation and analysis. Roy had been a member of the group since “its prime,” and had to get something off his chest.
“You are all being ridiculous with these endless