Tag: sick leave
Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest Country
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One morning a couple of years ago, during the awkward hour between my eldest daughter’s school drop-off and her sister’s swim lesson, I stopped at a coffee shop. There, I ran into the father of a boy in my daughter’s class. He was also schlepping a younger child around, and as we got to talking, I learned that we had a lot
America Was in an Early-Death Crisis Long Before COVID
Jacob Bor has been thinking about a parallel universe. He envisions a world in which America has health on par with that of other wealthy nations, and is not an embarrassing outlier that, despite spending more on health care than any other country, has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality, and fewer doctors per capita than its peers. Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, imagines the people who are still alive
Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?
Well, here we go again. Once more, the ever-changing coronavirus behind COVID-19 is assaulting the United States in a new guise—BA.5, an offshoot of the Omicron variant that devastated the most recent winter. The new variant is spreading quickly, likely because it snakes past some of the immune defenses acquired by vaccinated people, or those infected by earlier variants. Those who have managed to avoid the virus for close to three years will find it a little harder to continue
This Fall Will Be a Vaccination Reboot
In one sense, this is how it was always supposed to go: When viruses evolve, vaccines should follow, and sometimes try to leap ahead. The COVID-19 shots that the U.S. has used to inoculate hundreds of millions of people are simply so new that they’ve never had to undergo a metamorphosis; up until now, their original-recipe ingredients have stood up to SARS-CoV-2 well enough. But the virus they fight has changed quite radically, and this fall, the vaccines will finally,
Five COVID Numbers That No Longer Make Any Sense
The past two and a half years have been a global crash course in infection prevention. They’ve also been a crash course in basic math: Since the arrival of this coronavirus, people have been asked to count the meters and feet that separate one nose from the next; they’ve tabulated the days that distance them from their most recent vaccine dose, calculated the minutes they can spend unmasked, and added up the hours that have passed since their last negative
You Are Going to Get COVID Again … And Again … And Again
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 everyone, infection with this coronavirus would be inevitable. As James Hamblin memorably put it back in February 2020, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus.” By this point, in fact, most Americans have. But now, as wave after wave continues to pummel the globe, a grimmer reality is playing out. You’re
How Public Health Failed America
Even though Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, backed off his statement that the United States is “out of the pandemic phase,” elected officials and much of the public seem to think that he had it right the first time. But if the end of the COVID-19 emergency is at hand, the United States is reaching it with lower vaccination and higher per-capita death rates than other wealthy nations. The conventional wisdom is that the American political
America Created Its Own Booster Problems
By this point in the pandemic, the benefits of boosters seem pretty darn clear. Boosters continue the immune system’s education on the coronavirus, upping the quantity of defensive fighters available, while expanding the breadth of variants that vaccinated bodies can snipe at. During Omicron’s winter wave, people who received a booster were less likely to be infected, hospitalized, or killed by the virus than those without a boost; older people and other high-risk populations especially benefited from dosing up again.
America’s Flu-Shot Problem Is Also Its Next COVID Problem
About 18 years ago, while delivering a talk at a CDC conference, Gregory Poland punked 2,000 of his fellow scientists. Ten minutes into his lecture, a member of the audience, under Poland’s instruction, raced up to the podium with a slip of paper. Poland skimmed the note and looked up, stony-faced. “Colleagues, I am unsure of what to say,” he said. “We have just been notified of a virus that’s been detected in the U.S. that will take somewhere between
What Controlling COVID Actually Means
And just like that, the national attitude on COVID is flipping like a light switch. As the United States descends the bumpy back end of the Omicron wave, governors and mayors up and down the coasts are extinguishing indoor mask mandates and pulling back proof-of-vaccination protocols. In many parts of the country, restaurants, bars, gyms, and movie theaters are operating at pre-pandemic capacity, not a face covering to be seen; even grade schools and universities have started to relax testing