Contributed

The world has been living through the COVID-19 pandemic for nearly eight months. Much is still unknown about the illness that has stricken 14.8 million people and killed more than 610,000 worldwide, but every day brings new insights and developments. Columbia experts have been at the forefront of the international response to this crisis. We asked them to review what we’ve learned, so far, and to discuss the most significant challenges ahead.

The upcoming school year will be like nothing teachers, students, and families have ever experienced, as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic steers school systems to embrace online learning and incorporate it in new ways.

At a press conference before a speech to the Medical Committee for Human Rights in 1966, two years before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhumane because it often results in physical death.”

When I heard the doorbell ring that Saturday afternoon, I did something I had never done before. I bought something from a door-to-door salesperson. It was a pest control representative who was canvassing the neighborhood for new business. The logo on his bright green golf shirt matched his truck in the driveway. He introduced himself and said, “I see you have a vole problem. Have you tried anything?”

Mysterious, unsolicited packets of seeds possibly from China are arriving in some Southern California mailboxes, prompting state officials to urge recipients to refrain from planting them. The California Department of Agriculture is aware of the packets and has been in contact with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine what action, if any, is necessary for shipments arriving in California, spokesman Steve Lyle said Monday.