coronavirus

It's still a mystery. How did the pandemic begin?

There is the leading hypothesis among scientists: The virus hopped from an animal — possibly a bat — to a human, or to some other animal, which later spread the disease to humans.

And then there is the lab leak hypothesis: The virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Dr. Leora Horwitz treats fewer and fewer COVID-19 patients at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. Still, she thinks there are too many.

And, notably, the COVID-19 patients almost all have something in common.

"I've only had one patient who was vaccinated, and he was being treated for cancer with chemotherapy," she says, alluding to recent research on the vaccines' limited effectiveness for cancer patients.

More than 15 months since the first confirmed death due to COVID-19 in the U.S., the coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 600,000 lives across the country.

But that trend has slowed from thousands to hundreds per day in recent weeks, thanks largely to the ready availability of vaccines.

The first results from a large efficacy study of a new kind of COVID-19 vaccine are now out, and they are good. Very good.

According to Novavax, the vaccine's manufacturer, it had a 100% efficacy against the original strain of the coronavirus and 93% efficacy against more worrisome variants that have subsequently appeared.

Fifteen months into the pandemic, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has issued a mandatory workplace safety rule aimed at protecting workers from COVID-19. But it only applies to health care settings, a setback for unions and worker safety advocates who had called for much broader requirements.

It looks like New York state is not ready to change its guidance on masking yet for grades K-12.

On Friday, NYS Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker released a letter he sent to the CDC, saying that the state would try and align its school and summer camp mask guidance, and that would mean that both indoors and outdoors, students, campers and staff who are fully vaccinated do not need to wear masks.

MUMBAI — Three years ago, when Shiv Joshi was studying to become a doctor at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in central India, he had to choose a specialty. He'd been reading about the Black Death and the Spanish flu, and he wanted to learn how to track infectious diseases through triage, testing and contact tracing. So he decided to specialize in community medicine.

This was in 2018 — a century after the 1918 flu pandemic he was reading about, and two years before the coronavirus would become a full-blown pandemic in India.

The U.S. COVID-19 vaccination program has gone from zero to 50% in less than six months.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Biden administration said, half of the country's adults are now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

"This is a major milestone in our country's vaccination efforts," Andy Slavitt, a White House senior adviser on the COVID-19 response, said during a midday briefing. "The number was 1% when we entered office Jan. 20."

When cases of COVID-19 began rising in Boston last spring, Pooja Chandrashekar, then a first year student at Harvard Medical School, worried that easy-to-understand information about the pandemic might not be available in the many languages spoken by clients of the Family Van, the health services and health literacy program where she was working at the time.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced a change in the duration for those Excelsior COVID-19 vaccination passes that many people who have received the vaccine have downloaded onto their smartphones.

Cuomo said on Saturday that, “All Excelsior COVID-19 Vaccination Passes retrieved beginning today will be valid for 365 days, up from 180 days. Those who already have a Vaccination Pass may retrieve a new Pass whenever they choose to in order to take advantage of this extension.”

Each week, we answer frequently asked questions about life during the coronavirus crisis. If you have a question you'd like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the subject line: "Weekly Coronavirus Questions." See an archive of our FAQs here.

Updated Monday, May 24, 2021

Anyone who has watched soap operas in the last 50 years knows Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center as General Hospital. For decades, its original building graced the soap opera's opening credits.

Inside, though, there's no love story between Luke and Laura.

LAC + USC is what's known as a safety-net hospital — one of the largest in the United States. And that makes the reality inside a daily financial struggle to care for every patient who walks through its doors, patients other hospitals often try to avoid.