“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.

Last winter, Brian Hie, a computational biologist at MIT and a fan of the lyric poetry of John Donne, was thinking about this problem when he alighted upon an analogy: What if we thought of viral sequences the way we think of written language?

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, illustrators have been working hard to create images that help teach scientists and lay people about how the virus works and how to take precautions to avoid it.

It was a singular medical triumph, from the first known case of a novel, fatal infectious disease to vaccines against it in just about a year.It’s a classic challenge—a fight between the public health of a society and the medical choices of, well, you.

But while thousands of life scientists pivoted to trying to understand how the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc on the human body, and others transformed their labs into pop-up testing facilities, the field of Crispr gene editing nevertheless persisted.

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.

I took a second test three days after the first, and the results came back overnight: negative.There is no single, standard way to detect the virus; different labs set their own thresholds for signaling a positive result.

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

Researchers at Oxford also told reporters Monday that testing showed the vaccinated group in the UK had fewer asymptomatic infections, which means they'd be less likely to unwittingly spread the disease themselves.

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.

Long before any results came in, the protocol for this trial calculated what sort of data—including how many people ended up getting sick—would need to be tallied in order to know that the vaccine had cleared the minimum requirement of 50-percent effectiveness set by the Food and Drug Administration.

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.

When I asked a well-placed and concerned Republican strategist why the Trump administration had not used the DPA more aggressively in the spring, this person told me that doing so would have been seen as a big government solution, which runs against long-established principles of the American conservative movement.

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.

In September, Apple announced that its Watch Series 6 would also have the ability to monitor blood oxygen levels right from your wrist.Why do I need to monitor my blood oxygen level.

Berman was aware of the practical issues raised by putting books in purgatory for so long, but she had a broader concern: that all this research was encouraging an undue fixation, or even a fear, of the objects librarians are meant to joyfully share with the public.

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.

President Trump is isolating himself in the White House, having tested positive for the coronavirus last night.Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, says the first step is to work out when Trump likely became infectious.

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.

Now a group of HIV researchers, impatient with the delay, has proposed taking one of those plans, the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, as the basis of a comprehensive Covid-19 response, one that would define what it means to beat back this disease, and set out the steps to get there.

If our Covid tests were only cheap enough to make, and prompt enough in delivering results, according to Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, then we could “quickly contain and end this terrible plague.” Let’s call it the Theory of the Magic Testing Cure: Give the masses inexpensive, instant, at-home diagnostics, and everyone who is infectious will know to put themselves in quarantine.

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.

However, according to John Naslund, who studies digital mental health at Harvard Medical School, the Covid-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented surge in online activity.It’s interesting that they’re not considered essential.” In his research into online groups dedicated to mental health issues, he’s found such communities to be incredibly helpful for some people’s wellbeing.