Coronavirus

On September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up with a cold. Her parents gave her some extra-strength Tylenol and, within a few hours, she had died. That same day, in a [...]

Last March, during the first wave of the pandemic, Adriana Heguy set out to sequence coronavirus genomes. At the time, New York City’s hospitals were filling up, and American testing capacity was [...]

Tiffany Chance has worked as a certified nursing assistant since 2005. As an African-American woman in her mid-thirties, Chance typifies the demographics of her profession: most C.N.A.s are [...]

It is hard to overstate the scale of the pandemic in America. On many days, a quarter of a million Americans become newly infected with the coronavirus, and four thousand die—numbers that dwarf [...]

Kirtiraj Rana grew up in Rajamunda, a village of fewer than a thousand people in the northeastern Indian state of Odisha, which faces the Bay of Bengal. A migrant worker, he dropped out of school [...]

Beyond the dread that I feel for my patients, my work as a physician on the coronavirus wards has instilled in me two related fears. The first fear, which surges each time I learn about another [...]

Just how big is the coronavirus’s winter wave? It can be hard to get your mind around it. One way to try is to note that, right now, more than a hundred thousand Americans are in the hospital [...]

On March 15, 1902, Henning Jacobson, a pastor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, refused the smallpox vaccine. At the time, Massachusetts was one of eleven states that allowed officials to enforce [...]

Europe’s second wave built slowly, starting in midsummer. At that time, charts comparing coronavirus cases in America and Europe highlighted the inadequacy of the U.S. response; there were days [...]

Nine months into the pandemic, it’s a truism to say that America’s response has been politicized. Even so, with an election looming, the virus surging, and President Trump and others in [...]