Even if researchers’ quest for the coronavirus vaccine concludes quickly — and that’s a big if — the solution would still need to me manufactured, packaged, paid for and distributed.
Tag: pandemic
Real estate markets are starting to stir from their Covid-induced slumber. After months of plummeting listings and frozen transactions, new deals are finally being made and prices have begun to recover. But the extent to which real estate will share the longer-term pain of a global economic downturn is still unclear, with some predicting that […]
How is the pandemic panning out in the world’s second most populous country? Science editor for The Wire, Vasudevan Mukunth, offers some statistical insight.
In the movie version, the contagion would lead to lawlessness and chaos. But in reality, institutions are encouragingly resilient.
PARIS — It was only back in May that experts palmed off the 12-month goal post for a COVID-19 vaccine as wishful thinking. Now, with more than 140 candidate vaccines being developed, including three already in the final phase-3 trial, it seems we may be sprinting towards a new speed record in medical development. “The […]
Throwback ideas and the next big thing are working for some, even as many other parts of the economy slide into recession.
COVID-19 makes us think about things we should’ve been thinking about anyway. And since the beginning of the outbreak, we’ve all been keeping a closer eye than usual on the hard truths of statistics: From daily global emissions (down by 17%) to the number of precarious workers in the world (1.6 billion), as well as […]
Face mask policy has been a moving target since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With some countries and localities facing shortages, and the World Health Organization itself initially suggesting that masks were not effective in containing the spread of the virus, governments were reluctant to implement rules to force people to wear face coverings. But since, […]
The South American nation has the second highest number of coronavirus fatalities in the world (after the United States), and with ICU beds in short supply, the death toll will continue to rise.
The long lockdown period has only added to the frustrations people feel about their country’s unresolved class disparities, crass politics and history of violence.
As coronavirus shut down businesses around the world, red-light districts from Amsterdam to Bangkok to Frankfurt turned off their lights. But many continued to work illegally, risking infection and potential legal consequences in order to support themselves. As one Dutch sex worker told Die Welt, “The confinement does not mean that people stopped wanting sex.” […]
In normal times, we might be writing this month about the annual momentum gathering for the Plastic Free July challenge. Launched in 2011 by the Australia-based Plastic Free Foundation, the idea is simple: refusing single-use plastics, from bags to packaging, for 31 days. But in 2020, that simple desire to go fully plastic-free for at […]
“The worst is yet to come…” So warned World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his assessment earlier this week of the status of the COVID-19 pandemic. The grim picture globally comes as many countries appear to be succeeding in greatly reducing the number of new cases, and quarantine and social distancing restrictions […]
The protests, pandemic and poor U.S. jobs numbers all seem to spell trouble for President Donald Trump. But his challenger has a few disadvantages of his own.
PRAGUE — As I walked down Avenue René Coty on a sunny day in late May, everything was like a Paris postcard — except that my glasses were fogging up over my facemask. But I knew the scenery by heart by then, as I had never left a one-kilometer radius around my student residence during […]
Unlike the SARS and H1N1/09 outbreaks, which caused friction between the two countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has, if anything, improved Chinese-Mexican relations.
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The Vaccine Sprint Accelerates
The global death toll in the COVID-19 pandemic has passed 475,000, and the confirmed cases are now more than nine million worldwide. But there’s another number that looms: fear of the pandemic’s second wave striking countries in the coming weeks and months. Already, clusters of new outbreaks of cases have appeared in countries such as […]
There has been plenty of debate and questions surrounding the use of masks since the coronavirus pandemic started. Should we wear them or not? What type of mask works the best? Should countries make them compulsory? But even as a general scientific consensus has emerged that masks are one of the most effective tools at […]
The most common symptoms are fever, a dry cough and loss of taste and smell. The majority of deaths are due to respiratory failure. But more studies about COVID-19 are now focusing on neurological factors in what is still a largely mysterious pandemic. In the last few weeks, findings from around the world give support […]
Building scientific beliefs is a long and arduous path that originates from a contradictory process. But facing a pandemic, it’s the best we’ve got.
From schedule changes and face shields to full operational shutdowns, the pandemic has directly impacted the country’s industrial sector.
Forced to stay home from one day to the next, millions of quarantined people were suddenly faced with a rare luxury in our fast-paced world: time. That, of course, came with a question: What to do with it? Where others may have chosen to Netflix, garden, read, meditate or complete a 51,300 pieces-jigsaw puzzle, the […]
If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that no one is safe until everyone is safe.
-Essay- Among the many things that COVID-19 taught us, one is to not measure the world by latitude. Take the case of Milan, a shining example, we’re told, of northern Italian industriousness and efficiency that’s supposedly absent in the south. And yet this capital of the Lombardy region saw one of the world’s worst COVID-19 […]
By now, our regular readers know that Worldcrunch works hard at being of and for and about no one particular place or people or subject matter. Our beat and our audience are written in our name, and we work with journalists and newspapers everywhere to tell the stories (no matter how big or small) that […]
Life was difficult enough for refugees even before the coronavirus outbreak. But with the lockdown depriving them of even meager earnings, the situation has beyond dire.
Skeptical. Overwhelmed. Disappointed. Exhausted. Helpless. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, healthcare workers have felt it all. But in recent weeks, doctors and nurses around the world have added one adjective to their list of feelings: angry. In Europe, the mood has indeed shifted from the images of people applauding their medical heroes every night, from […]
Today, the European Commission will unveil plans for an unprecedented EU economy recovery package in the face of the coronavirus crisis. The proposed EU rescue fund comes on the heels of last week’s surprise announcement that French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had agreed to a 500-billion-euro recovery package set out to […]
As countries around the world scramble to conduct sufficient COVID-19 testing, there is now an urgent need for the design of rapid diagnostics of early symptoms to identify potential carriers to test, and eventually, isolate them. Researchers and the so-called “health tech” and “wearables’ sector are racing to release new devices, and adapt existing ones, […]
The pandemic, and especially the fears whipped up by states and the media, may be pushing society toward greater submission to the world’s powers.
Across the globe, the coronavirus crisis has forced people to change not only the ways they work and interact with each other, but also how they travel. And in several countries, one of the unexpected consequences of all this has been a renewed interest in transportation of the pedal-powered, two-wheeled variety. In some places — […]
When we think of modern urban planning, it tends to be focused on improving efficiency in where we live and work, and how we move from place to place. But it should also be about keeping us healthy. The concept is neither a knee-jerk reaction to COVID-19 nor some nod to corporate social responsibility and […]
Taiwan’s success in containing the coronavirus is certainly cause for celebration, and to really emphasize the point, farmers in one agricultural region decided this week that it’s high time to break out the… watermelons? After a string of six straight days with no new confirmed coronavirus cases, a group of farmers in Changhua, in central […]
It is, of course, inevitable that governments’ stay-at-home orders and other emergency measures to contain the novel coronavirus would generate differences of opinion. And yet, even a few weeks ago, it was hard to imagine that it would take as ugly a turn as what’s happening right now in the U.S. state of Michigan, where […]
The coronavirus pandemic has been both a boost and a challenge for delivery services like Chowbus, which specialize in Chinese fare.
Humans have been greeting each others with handshakes for thousands of years. Are we witnessing the end to pressing the flesh, and giving some skin? “I don’t think we should shake hands ever again,” declared Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the key members of the US coronavirus task force, in a Wall Street Journal podcast. […]
Whether or not they were looking for it, the COVID-19 crisis has given epidemiologists bonafide public power. “At this point, if Drosten says it is too early, that carries as much weight as Merkel saying it,” quipped German economist Marcel Fratzscher about his country’s top epidemiologist Christian Drosten and top politician Angela Merkel. There is […]
Latin American countries are, for the most part, appreciative of Beijing’s donations of much needed medical supplies. But the goodwill isn’t guaranteed to last forever.
Every fictional plague has an origin story, and an ending — happy or otherwise. We hereby issue a pandemic spoiler alert!
As the new pandemic reality requires radical rethinking about how we live our lives, one hint of where we may be going could appear this summer in a neighborhood near you. The re-opening of bars and restaurants coinciding with warm weather is pushing city officials to reallocate the space that diners and motorists can occupy. […]