A Failure of Empathy Led to 200,000 Deaths. It Has Deep Roots.
The Atlantic · 7 minOne giant psychology experiment explains why many people seem like they don’t care about the deaths of the elderly.
Stay informed with this curated guide to the global outbreak. For official U.S. guidelines and health updates, visit cdc.gov.
One giant psychology experiment explains why many people seem like they don’t care about the deaths of the elderly.
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 surpassed 200,000 on Tuesday — reaching what was once the upper limit of some estimates for the pandemic's impact on Americans. Some experts now warn that the toll could nearly double again by the end of 2020.
Nurses and doctors depend on respirator masks to protect them from covid-19. So why are we still running low on an item that once cost around $1?
No sensible person can dispute that Covid-19 is a great tragedy for humanity — a tragedy even in the ancient Greek sense, as defined by Aristotle, with the disastrous ending contingent on some prideful flaw in the protagonist. This time it’s not Oedipus or Agamemnon.
How were hundreds of infected Ruby Princess passengers allowed to disembark in Sydney and return to homes from Tasmania to Florida? Unloading a cruise ship is a complex process, and delays aren’t unusual. But the Wrights waited only a short while before being told they could go.
"We're only a few weeks in. We can't keep doing this."
Millions of coronavirus tests may be happening without their results being made public.
Covid-19 "long haulers" feel they aren't yet getting recognition for an illness that has disabled them for months, with no end in sight.
A Harvard epidemiologist offers a framework for making key life decisions while also managing pandemic risk.
The pandemic has shown how a lack of solid statistics can be dangerous. But even with the firmest of evidence, we often end up ignoring the facts we don’t like.
Vaccines are making progress, but they may not defeat the virus completely. Luckily, other therapies are on the way, too.
Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it.
As the U.S. heads toward the winter, the country is going round in circles, making the same conceptual errors that have plagued it since spring.
The intelligence wars over vaccine research have intensified as China and Russia expand their efforts to steal American work at both research institutes and companies.
Trump should keep that in mind as he pushes for a coronavirus shot.
The White House’s new science adviser says: nothing. The science disagrees. Updated at 11:03 a.m. ET on September 8, 2020.
What the term actually means, and what it doesn’t.
Our brains weren't wired to deal with the "psychological pandemic" of not knowing what the future holds. Here's how to cope with living in limbo.
How did the deadliest pandemic ever recorded come to an end?
The coronavirus is spiking around campuses from Texas to Iowa to North Carolina as students return.
The key to taming the pandemic will be both a new commitment to “assurance testing” and a new vision of what public health really means.
In New Orleans, hospitals sent patients infected with the coronavirus into hospice facilities or back to their families to die at home, in some cases discontinuing treatment even as relatives begged them to keep trying.
There are worrying signs or at least rational reasons to predict the negative consequences of prolonged remote work.
Beyond its scientific backing, the notion that a COVID-19 patient might wind up with long-term lung scarring or breathing issues has the ring of truth.
Fifty years ago, few scientists believed a drug could fight viruses with low side effects. Then Gertrude Elion showed the doubters "what I could do on my own."
Visionary responses to catastrophes have changed city life for the better.
Contact tracing works almost everywhere else. Why not here? With her thin eyebrows arched high on her forehead, Robyn Openshaw urged her 212,000 fans to stand up to a new menace: contact tracing.
U.S. prestige could falter, the administration could take deadly risks, the world will have to rethink its alliances — and those are just a few of the possibilities.
An area that had been almost entirely unaffected by the global pandemic was suddenly a hot spot, the largest outbreak in Maine to date.
A closer look at the Bradykinin hypothesis.