This month marks the two-year anniversary of the pandemic. Many Americans started to grasp that something serious was happening as U.S. states began to lock down on March 15, 2020. California issued its shelter-in-place order on March 19.
Giving birth in America has been getting harder for years, but the pandemic has likely sped up the shuttering of maternity wards, writes Dylan Scott at Vox.
Eight-year-old Brooklynn Chiles fidgets on the hospital bed as she waits for the nurse at Children’s National Hospital. The white paper beneath her crinkles as she shifts to look at the medical objects in the room. She’s had the coronavirus three times, and no one can figure out why.
There’s nothing like war to hasten the spread of a plague. It’s impossible to maintain handwashing, social distancing and masking in the middle of a siege. The war in the Ukraine makes COVID-19 spikes in the region “inevitable,” writes Alice Park at Time; those surges in turn could provide fertile ground for new variants to emerge.
The official global death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 6 million on Monday — underscoring that the pandemic, now entering its third year, is far from over.