In the News

SARS-CoV-2 remains a long way from being ordinary. It has not yet found seasonal cadence — take the recent surge in Europe and the U.K., which comes just weeks after the initial Omicron wave subsided — and it’s still capable of inflicting mass death and disability (see Hong Kong’s lethal last few months).
 

Two new Omicron variants sweeping South Africa—likely able to evade vaccines and natural immunity from previous infections—have been identified in the U.S., multiple COVID-19 researchers told Fortune.
 

Gigi Gronvall discusses how far we’ve come in securing pathogenic specimens and the role of misinformation in promoting fears around the development of bioweapons.

Although mandates and recommendations for wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have changed over the past several months, it is still considered safe to go maskless at crowded outdoor events.
 

An invisible wave is possible because cases capture only the number of people who test positive for the virus, which is different from what epidemiologists really want to know: how many people are infected in the general population.
 

Americans are hearing mixed messages on the pandemic as the country moves into a new phase of a more than two-year battle against the coronavirus.

Daniel Webster from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions talked about his research and approaches to reducing gun violence.
 

On April 11, Shanghai sectors were categorized into three types of zones — lockdown zones, controlled zones and precautionary zones — based on their total positive cases, according to the state-controlled China Daily.
 

Sixty percent of Americans, including 75 percent of children, had been infected with the coronavirus by February, federal health officials reported on Tuesday — another remarkable milestone in a pandemic that continues to confound expectations.

The bloodshed over Easter weekend was emblematic of the alarming and unabated surge in gun violence in the United States.
 

In a groundbreaking study, Dr. Lisa Cooper, a leading researcher on racial health disparities at Johns Hopkins University, found that nearly all 40 participating Baltimore-area primary care doctors said they regarded their White and their Black patients the same.
 

While plenty of people celebrated the end of the mask mandate, others have concerns about how it will affect their safety — and the health of their families. Many are parents of children who are still too young to be eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.