Coronavirus: Essential Reads

Scientists say a moonshot effort is needed to end social distancing and this pandemic. Will leaders listen?

The coronavirus outbreak may last for a year or two, but some elements of pre-pandemic life will likely be won back in the meantime.

We’ve counted the viral spread across peoples; now we need to count it within people.

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

Many Americans are still on the job, tending to basic needs and risking their health as cities close down around them.

John M. Barry, who knows the deadliest pandemic in history better than anyone, speculates on what the new coronavirus means for our lives in the future.

While test shortages are making headlines, there’s a lot about the technology behind these tests that isn’t as clear to the public.

Scientists who have fought pandemics describe difficult measures needed to defend the United States against a fast-moving pathogen.

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.

We’ve known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it’s behaving in such an extreme way.

Our world became one of isolation, round-the-clock care, panic and uncertainty — even as society carried on around us with all too few changes.

How it works, why we need it, and why it’s taking so long for the U.S. to get people diagnosed.

The countries affected, the number of deaths, and the economic impact.

Experts weigh in on whether you should cancel your dates, dinner parties, and gym sessions.

The WHO has declared the Covid-19 outbreak to be a pandemic. But what does that mean?

Everything that was once simple feels difficult, and everything that was already difficult feels impossible.

Without any measures to slow it down, Covid-19 will continue to spread exponentially for months. To understand why, it is instructive to simulate the spread of a fake disease through a population.

Preventing the spread of an outbreak requires a massive global effort, but here are steps everyone can take.

“It’s our everyday way of going about business on the planet that seems to be driving this.”

As the coronavirus has spread from China to other countries, anti-Asian discrimination has followed closely behind.

We would do well to educate ourselves about the history of pandemics and disease. University of Virginia historian and associate dean Christian W. McMillen, author of Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction, recommends the best introductions to the subject.

The new coronavirus is not an equal-opportunity killer: Being elderly and having other illnesses, for instance, greatly increases the risk of dying from the disease the virus causes, Covid-19.

How one young doctor at a Seattle lab tried to get out in front of the coronavirus crisis by inventing his own test.

The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States.

A COVID-19 vaccine developed, licensed, and manufactured at a global scale in twelve months would be an unprecedented, remarkable, even revolutionary achievement.