Soon after the White House announced a sweeping new array of Covid-19 policies last week, vaccine mandates chief among them, some states began speaking out in opposition to the national directives.

Biden announces additional mandates, researchers probe new shots and treatments, and global vaccine distribution falters.During the pandemic, the pressure of caring for people sick with Covid has undermined years of progress in preventing these kinds of infections.

More institutions and companies are now mandating vaccinations , particularly since the FDA granted Pfizer and BioNTech’s shot full approval.Pfizer and BioNTech have struck a new deal with Eurofarma, a Brazilian pharmaceutical company, to make doses of their Covid-19 vaccine in and for Latin America.

Researchers trace new variants in Africa, cases surge in India, and US vaccine rollout progresses even with snags.Scientists in Africa race to find new variants in areas where testing lags.

President Biden sets a new vaccination goal, Europe curbs its vaccine exports, and experts caution against a hasty return to “normal.” Here’s what you should know: Want to receive this weekly roundup and other coronavirus news?

But within a few months, as the coronavirus spread rapidly through the world’s human population, it leapt from people back into an animal species: minks, being raised in confinement on fur farms.

The pandemic has raged for a year, vaccine trials contend with approved shots, and Biden signs a $1.9 trillion relief bill.As the vaccine rollout accelerates, drugmakers are facing a new dilemma : getting people to sign up for trials for new shots, where they might get a placebo instead of the real thing.

The first Johnson & Johnson shots are administered, some states begin opening prematurely, and new variants demand vigilance.

This week, harsh winter weather swept the country and caused a huge number of problems, including delaying the shipments of hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses across the country.

Oxford releases new data on vaccine efficacy against UK strain, Johnson & Johnson seeks FDA approval, and the US Senate passes a key resolution for coronavirus aid.The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine protects against the UK variant, while the FDA drafts new plans for dealing with mutations.

For months, these researchers had been periodically doing similar genomic surveillance work to keep tabs on the dozens of strains of SARS-CoV-2 that were circulating around the country, looking for any problematic mutations in the virus’s spike protein.

Biden gets to work on the pandemic, the CDC adjusts vaccine guidelines, and death tolls rise worldwide.CDC data suggests the country has already reached a pace of approximately one million vaccines administered per day several times in the last few weeks, but it also indicates that states and cities are administering fewer than half of the doses that they’ve received.

Publicly, at least, no one was yet using the “p word.” Although scientists were aware that pandemics were a possibility, like the 2009 H1N1 swine flu, it had been more than a century since the emergence of a virus capable of infecting a third of the world's population and killing millions of people.

However, unlike pharmacies, fire/EMS are already coordinated with one another and already have lines of communication with public health authorities, and could be stood up more swiftly.Education of the public about the process and their interaction with it should be managed collaboratively by federal, state, and local authorities.

“They get all the same illnesses as adults, just at a lower rate,” says Lindsay Thompson, a pediatrician and the vice chair for health outcomes and translational research at the University of Florida, who last month wrote a perspective in JAMA Pediatrics summarizing the lessons of the last year.

Then came 2020.Under pressure from politicians, activists, and media, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all made policy changes and enforcement decisions this year that they had long resisted—from labeling false information from prominent accounts to attempting to thwart viral spread to taking down posts by the president of the United States.

An FDA advisory panel authorizes the first vaccine, the US hits grim milestones, and cases rise worldwide.On Thursday, as cases and hospitalization rates rose further, the country hit a grim milestone: The total number of Americans who have died from Covid-19 surpassed the number of US service people who died in combat during World War II.

Trust in vaccines grows slightly, distribution faces challenges, and legislators plan for the next stage.

On Wednesday, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals published what many took to be a disheartening result: According to some headlines, a 6,000-person randomized controlled trial in Denmark had found that wearing a mask does not offer any clear protection from being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Pfizer seeks FDA approval for its vaccine, the CDC urges Americans to avoid Thanksgiving travel, and the federal pandemic response draws renewed concern.The news comes just days after the companies announced they had the data needed to seek emergency use and found the vaccine to be 95 percent effective and safe.

The vaccine process nears a new phase, Biden plans his pandemic response, and the winter surge arrives.The 13-member team of doctors and health experts will help the president-elect develop a plan for tackling the pandemic and work with governors to develop consistent messaging at the state and federal levels.

Best news since January 10,” tweeted Florian Krammer, a virologist and vaccinologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (who also happens to be a participant in the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine trial).

Cases rise as election results come in, vaccines and treatments advance, and the reach of screening and tracing technology grows.

Americans prepare for another surge in cases, vaccine and treatment approval moves forward, and new partnerships curb coronavirus misinformation.This news comes approximately a week after a massive international trial found that remdesivir does not prevent deaths among patients with severe cases with Covid-19.

Treatment and vaccine trials are halted, the US forges ahead with its decentralized response, and new revelations about American society and institutions underscore the deadly toll of the virus.

Covid continues its spread through the White House, researchers look at new treatments and symptoms, and the scientific community takes on politics.

The weird thing was that people were showing up in Covid-19 wards, after having tested positive for the virus, with lots of sugar in their blood.Rubin and his colleagues were seeing blended features of both types showing up spontaneously in people who’d recently been diagnosed with Covid-19.

President Trump tests positive, lawmakers consider new approaches to contact tracing and testing, and America’s largest school districts navigate reopening.Thus far, contact-tracing apps haven’t done much to stop the spread of Covid-19 in the US, as different states coordinate patchwork responses and the federal government doesn’t weigh in.

It helped that back in December, while the coronavirus was just starting to spread inside the Chinese city of Wuhan and the World Health Organization was still months away from declaring a global pandemic, the Taiwanese government deployed its equivalent of the US Defense Production Act to produce masks for its citizens.

More vaccines enter Phase III trials, researchers continue to learn about the long-term impacts of Covid-19, and risk calculation becomes increasingly difficult as the country reopens.New tools aim to help you calculate risk as cases rise and the country reopens.