| What You Need to Know About the Coronavirus - The Atlantic Posted: 24 Mar 2020 04:28 PM PDT  Editor's Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Updated at 9:57 a.m. ET on April 8, 2020. By all estimates, the novel coronavirus is quickly becoming the most disruptive pandemic in more than a century. New developments and warnings are being issued every day. The uncertainty of this moment has also led to abundant misinformation, some coming from the president himself. As you sort through the onslaught, here are some stories to help you make sense of life during a pandemic. The Atlantic is choosing to make these freely available to all readers, even those who don't subscribe. This list will be updated with our continuing coverage. -
Novel "test and trace" systems are emerging in countries such as China and South Korea, where social-distancing measures ,are beginning to ease up. Using information from sources as varied as cellphone GPS and credit-card purchases, these systems can track citizens' movements and interactions, identifying and alerting those who have recently come into contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. Such systems—some of which even publicly broadcast the information of infected individuals—run headfirst into issues of privacy, government surveillance, and complicated stigmas surrounding health. But they could be the best way to preserve other democratic values in the face of widespread illness. The pandemic has already required Americans to embrace extreme behavior in the name of saving lives. Tens of millions of Americans are living under house arrest. Many chief executives and entrepreneurs have said they agree with a government mandate to shut down their businesses. In these strange times, common rights that once seemed nonnegotiable have been suddenly renegotiated. Compared with our life just six weeks ago, smartphone tracing might seem like a violation of our dignity and privacy—and compared with our life six years from now, I hope it will be. But compared with our present nightmare, strategically sacrificing our privacy might be the best way to protect other freedoms. -
In mid-March, a controversial French doctor's claim that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19 made its way to Donald Trump via the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. Since then, the president has spoken of the drug as a miracle cure, even going so far as to issue an emergency authorization of its use to treat COVID-19 in American hospitals. James Hamblin, an Atlantic staff writer and a medical doctor, reviewed everything we know about hydroxychloroquine—which inhibits the immune system—and found that the evidence in its favor is sparse. Some COVID-19 patients could even get sicker if they were to take it. But Trump is pushing the drug anyway, arguing that even if it doesn't work, it's worth a shot. What do you have to lose? is a dark sentiment from a president managing a crisis that his administration failed to prepare for: It failed to develop testing, failed to communicate, and failed to have enough face masks for doctors. There is, in fact, much to lose. Americans also need hydroxychloroquine to treat serious immune conditions and parasitic diseases. Since Trump began promoting the drug, people have been hoarding it, and it has been added to the growing list of drug shortages. Two weeks ago, in an attempt to procure some, an Arizona couple ingested chloroquine, which is meant to be used in fish tanks. The man died. -
The White House, the CDC, the WHO, and world governments have been flashing infection charts for weeks. But these models aren't meant to be crystal balls: They represent possibilities, rather than predictions. When you see any projected death toll, pay careful attention to the parameters that come along with it. Is that number indicative of a worst-case scenario—if, say, American hospitals were to all close tomorrow? Or is it a goal we are to work toward, requiring careful action to be taken by all in order to make it a reality? At the beginning of a pandemic, we have the disadvantage of higher uncertainty, but the advantage of being early: The costs of our actions are lower because the disease is less widespread. As we prune the tree of the terrible, unthinkable branches, we are not just choosing a path; we are shaping the underlying parameters themselves, because the parameters themselves are not fixed. If our hospitals are not overrun, we will have fewer deaths and thus a lower fatality rate. That's why we shouldn't get bogged down in litigating a model's numbers. Instead we should focus on the parameters we can change, and change them. -
Politicians including the president continue to tout what our staff writer Derek Thompson calls the "gospel of growth": "The notion that Americans cannot afford to save tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of lives, if it means sacrificing a quarter or two of gross domestic product." Economists, however, are quick to point out that unchecked viral spread would create an economic catastrophe unto itself. The ideal solution would be a system that effectively freezes the economy in place until the pandemic is over, with objectives that include paying people to stop working, ensuring protections for companies, and focusing on the business of science—namely, testing. "In a normal recession, you want to boost demand," said the Northwestern economist Martin Eichenbaum. "But we don't really want to boost demand in the very short run at all, right now. We don't want United to be flying full planes. We don't want restaurants serving food to dine-in customers. We want everybody to stay in and hold on." It follows that we should—as incomprehensible as this may sound—hope for a deep, short recession, caused by a cliff dive in many forms of economic activity. That would be a clear signal that people have gone home and that the face-to-face economy has been shut down to limit the spread of disease. "The question I would ask of our leaders is: What will you regret?" Eichenbaum said ... "It's pretty obvious what the worst-case scenario is. You want to err on the side of saving lives." -
Nearly 10 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States have occurred in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—and many victims are young. Disparities in health-care access and policies, as well as high poverty levels, mean that 40-to-60-year-old Southerners are more likely than other similarly aged Americans to suffer from chronic conditions that make the coronavirus more dangerous. And those aren't the only risk factors threatening younger populations in the South: Advocates have drawn attention to the extreme vulnerability of people in prison to the coronavirus—and the South incarcerates a larger proportion of its population than anywhere else in the United States. A federal prison in Louisiana has already seen a spike in COVID-19 cases this week. Also, a global fear in this pandemic is that it will sicken health professionals and doctors, and leave them unable to contend with waves of hospitalizations. Southern states have some of the lowest ratios of active physicians to patients in the country. -
Even after the pandemic ends, measuring the total loss of life caused by the coronavirus will be a herculean task.The virus is likely to kill many people who will never be tested for COVID-19. For victims with comorbidities such as heart and respiratory conditions, determining one specific cause of death can be virtually impossible. In an interview with The Atlantic, the environmental scientist John Mutter, who studies how natural disasters impact human well-being, explains the difficult calculus of tallying deaths from a crisis that stretches into every part of society: "After Katrina, there was a lot of infant mortality. Poor women in Mississippi—who probably didn't get very good health care anyway—when they were pregnant [during and after the storm] got no health care. So infant mortality rose for a while, and the reason was not [physically related to the hurricane itself]. It's because people can't get access to health care. It just goes on and on. "Here in New York, after Hurricane Sandy, one of the veterans' hospitals had to close. People have done studies on the excess mortality associated with closing one hospital. It's a cumulative thing. It wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Sandy. That's the way to think about it." -
Staying at home is the number-one recommendation to minimize the spread of COVID-19. If you must leave your home, health organizations such as the CDC recommend keeping at least a six-foot distance from other people. But some experts have suggested that coronavirus particles can travel farther than six feet and linger in the air for longer than previously thought. How the virus behaves in air is still a mystery—as is whether masks can protect people. You could tie yourself in knots gaming out the various scenarios that might pose a risk outdoors, but the environmental engineer Linsey Marr recommends a simple technique. "When I go out now, I imagine that everyone is smoking, and I pick my path to get the least exposure to that smoke," she told me. If that's the case, I asked her, is it irrational to hold your breath when another person walks past you and you don't have enough space to move away? "It's not irrational; I do that myself," she said. "I don't know if it makes a difference, but in theory it could. It's like when you walk through a cigarette plume." -
Private companies such as Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp are now leading the country in COVID-19 testing. Tests might be more widely available now, but that hasn't been matched by increased processing speed. In California alone, more than 57,400 people are currently awaiting the release of their test results, primarily from Quest—and state testing numbers don't reflect them. Through BioReference and other commercial companies, as well as its own laboratories, New York now has almost 20 percent of all the completed tests in the United States. As a consequence, the number of confirmed cases has skyrocketed, but at least New York knows the severity of its outbreak. If New York is on one end of the spectrum, California is on the other. What's unclear is how common California's and Quest's situations are. No other state reports that it has such a huge backlog of tests stuck in private laboratories, but California's reporting idiosyncrasy likely reflects reality better than other states' reporting. For example, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker tweeted yesterday that private-lab results in his state are taking "4-7 days and sometimes even up to 10 days." -
Jared Kushner's "shadow task force" on the coronavirus has spent most of its time attempting to ramp up drive-through testing locations, but The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer revealed that a Kushner-associated project may have involved a major breach of ethics. Oscar Health, an insurance firm co-founded and funded by Kushner's brother Joshua, posted source code on Github that indicates the company built a website to allow users to search for information about symptoms and nearby test sites. The site is suspiciously similar to one Trump claimed Google was building earlier in March; Oscar Health is not Google, but Google's parent company is a major investor in Oscar. Even though the website was constructed for free and never went live, experts believe that Kushner's use of Oscar as a government contractor could be in strict violation of federal regulations. "It's not typical. It's usually not allowed," Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law, told me. Oscar's relationship with the Trump administration could breach federal law in two ways, Tillipman and other experts told me. First, companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. "The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company," Tillipman said. More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the "impartiality rule," which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake. -
Many American hospitals still lack the ventilators, protective equipment, and personnel to provide adequate care to the number of sick patients they're expecting in the coming days and weeks. In New York, the health-care workforce is so thin that medical students are graduating early and retirees are returning to emergency rooms. Meanwhile, hospitals are scrambling to institute guidelines on how to ration resources when there's not enough of them to go around. In an attempt to lift some of the burden from individual providers, hospitals around the country are convening emergency meetings to develop guidelines for rationing, according to who is least likely to benefit from treatment. The goal is to make the guidelines objective, accurate, and easy to use, as well as to minimize the waste of resources. The instructions could be as strict as age limits for intensive care, or withholding care from people who have the lowest chance of survival, such as those suffering from heart failure or emphysema. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Northwestern University's medical center, in Chicago, was considering putting every patient with COVID-19 on "do not resuscitate" (DNR) status. This would mean that if their heart stops, no "code blue" would be called; instead, a time of death would be noted. -
In late March, doctors began to treat COVID-19 patients with infusions of blood plasma from survivors of the disease. The technique, known as convalescent-plasma therapy, has varying success—and requires a constant stream of willing, healthy donors. If the treatment proves to be effective, it could become an important weapon against the coronavirus as more and more people recover from weeks spent sick. But that would require quite a bit of scaling up. Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, likened this phase to the "craft brewing" of convalescent-plasma therapy. It's available at only a few academic centers, and doctors are reliant on personal connections to recruit donors. Getting to the "national-brewery model," he says, requires involving bigger players. The FDA could help identify donors, and a network of national blood banks could send COVID-19 plasma to hospitals in small cities and towns. Eventually, pharmaceutical companies might be interested in pooling and purifying plasma down to a concentrated dose of antibodies—at which point convalescent plasma truly would be a standardized product you pull off the shelf. All of this, of course, is contingent on plasma actually working against COVID-19. -
Our contributing writer Deborah Copaken has a presumptive case of COVID-19. She sleeps in her own bedroom, isolated from the rest of her family—as do her three children and partner, all of whom are either sick or in quarantine because of travel abroad. "Part of me wants, as soon as we're better, to grab my three kids and my partner and escape someplace remote," she writes. "But where? COVID-19 is everywhere." I spoke with my daughter yesterday morning from her Airbnb in D.C. She's not sure where to go after her 14 days of quarantine are over. She'd planned on staying in her post in Cameroon for two years but was able to complete only six months before the emergency evacuation, and she's not allowed to return. As a Peace Corps volunteer, she's not eligible for unemployment. She is, at 23, broke, heartbroken, and homeless, which is another reason I'd better not die right now. My son is going stir-crazy all alone in his Airbnb. I haven't been able to hug him since he got back from Greece. Should he come home on March 31 or pay for another week of the Airbnb, given our illnesses? How long will we remain sick? The World Health Organization says two weeks for a mild case, and three to six weeks for a more serious bout. But that's just the accepted dogma right now. Tomorrow, those numbers could change. -
American life will start to feel familiar again when we reach the point of "population-level immunity": when some significant proportion of people, perhaps 70 percent, have resistance to the virus, gained via vaccination or recovery. Once we pass this threshold, restaurants will likely reopen before concert venues, and schools before sports stadiums. But it's hard to guess how long all that will take. Broadly, there are four possible timelines, ranging from two months (unlikely) to 18 months (most likely). Amid everything I've described so far—the crowd-free baseball games, the bars and restaurants with spaced-out seating, and so on—researchers around the world will have been scrambling to develop a vaccine. Spring 2021 is about the earliest anyone expects one to be available … Vaccines take so long to make because they are difficult to perfect. There are a series of methodical trials done to make sure they don't harm healthy people, to make sure they generate the desired antibodies, and to make sure those antibodies actually defend against the disease. These aren't overcautious bureaucratic safeguards; if researchers are making something that's going to be pumped into the arms of hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people, they want to make sure it's just right. -
Early reports that COVID-19 caused only mild symptoms in healthy young people left many Millenials and members of Gen Z worried less about their own health than about the risk the coronavirus posed to their grandparents. Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a young internal-medicine resident in New York City, insists that those in their 20s and 30s are wrong to feel such a strong sense of personal safety. On one recent overnight shift, Meltzer writes, five out of six patients she saw with COVID-19 symptoms were close to her age or younger—and their cases weren't all mild. Late in the night, another young patient came in with a high fever and no underlying health conditions. They'd had a dry cough for the past four days. They'd come to the hospital after finding they were unable to walk a few feet without getting severely short of breath. On their chest X-ray, I saw lungs that were almost completely whited out, indicating a significant amount of inflammation. It was clear how uncomfortable they were, and how desperately they were trying to catch their breath. They were in a different category from the previous patients I'd seen that night. They needed to be admitted. They needed testing. They needed close monitoring. -
Mere months ago, the United States ranked higher than every other industrialized nation in pandemic preparedness. Today, it's on track to lose 2.2 million lives to COVID-19 by the fall, in part due to a White House that, our science reporter Ed Yong writes, is "a ghost town of scientific expertise." Depending on how the next few months play out, America faces multiple possible futures—each bringing integral changes to public life and politics that will last far longer than the pandemic itself. After the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 might be shunned and stigmatized, as were survivors of Ebola, SARS, and HIV. Health-care workers will take time to heal: One to two years after SARS hit Toronto, people who dealt with the outbreak were still less productive and more likely to be experiencing burnout and post-traumatic stress. People who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. "My colleagues in Wuhan note that some people there now refuse to leave their homes and have developed agoraphobia," says Steven Taylor of the University of British Columbia, who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics. -
As more and more people have fallen ill in the United States, experts' fears that the coronavirus's reach was enabled by asymptomatic carriers have been confirmed. "Every six days that the country did not test, every six days that it did not act, the number of infected Americans doubled," our reporters write. Many of the COVID-19 cases appearing and worsening now are in people who moved around freely in February and early March, when the CDC's reported numbers of confirmed cases were low and lagging. Now the country is stuck trying to stop a machine already in motion. American cities, blinded by the lack of testing data, did little as crucial days went by. On March 7, as the severity of the local outbreak was becoming known, huge events were allowed to go on. More than 30,000 people attended a Seattle Sounders game that night. No one wanted to say what has now become clear: February was our chance to get this right. We lost that entire month. And we now live in a new era of work stoppages, overwhelmed hospitals, dead elders, and a wrecked economy. You can find your state's count of coronavirus tests, cases, and deaths—along with The Atlantic's assessment of how reliable those data are—in our interactive COVID-19 Tracking Project. -
Recommendations for extreme social distancing have intensified, but many Americans still struggle or outright refuse to abide by the new rules of everyday life. Trying to persuade someone to stay away from public life can be frustrating, scary, and tense—but according to family psychologists and public-health experts, it's best done with kindness and understanding. Reminding people of the bigger picture, sharing stories of individual lives already affected by the coronavirus, and suggesting alternative activities are all useful tactics for conveying the urgency of social distancing. The coronavirus outbreak is a story often told numerically: confirmed cases, fatality rates, hospital-bed capacities, and so on. But most of the time, you'll probably have better luck persuading someone if you leave out the statistics. "Trying to identify a human face of people who have experienced coronavirus" probably has a better chance of swaying a listener who hasn't yet seen the catastrophic effects of the virus firsthand, said Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. If you still need help persuading a loved one to stay in place, one of our editors, Saahil Desai, wrote about his own decision, after the pandemic hit the East Coast, to travel to his family's home in Ohio. Even though he wasn't defying any quarantine or shelter-in-place orders at the time, he quickly realized that his trip could have dangerous repercussions. "A lockdown can feel eerily draconian or downright authoritarian, and implementing a countrywide shelter-in-place mandate in the United States would be a legal quagmire. So rather than waiting to see if the federal, state, and local governments demand it, Americans should take on the onus of holing themselves up at home. -
Understanding what all coronaviruses have in common is much easier than answering the question of what makes this one different. One way the virus that causes COVID-19 seems to be special is that the spikes unique to its surface can be easily split by an enzyme that's found nearly everywhere in the human body, which gives the virus a fuller run of the respiratory system. And while other coronaviruses infect either the upper or lower airway, this one infects both. The structure of the virus provides some clues about its success. In shape, it's essentially a spiky ball. Those spikes recognize and stick to a protein called ACE2, which is found on the surface of our cells: This is the first step to an infection. The exact contours of SARS-CoV-2's spikes allow it to stick far more strongly to ACE2 than SARS-classic did, and "it's likely that this is really crucial for person-to-person transmission," says Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University. In general terms, the tighter the bond, the less virus required to start an infection. -
A March 16 report from Imperial College London projected that 2.2 million Americans could die of COVID-19 before the pandemic's end if extreme measures aren't enacted. Aaron E. Carroll, a pediatric specialist, and Ashish Jha, a global-health scholar, argue that extreme social-distancing measures can flatten the curve of infections, a goal that will above all else buy us time. With that time, standardized testing protocols can be developed, businesses can resume operations, and more complicated (but less extreme) measures—such as reopening community spaces with monitored entry—can be put in place. Some Americans are in denial, and others are feeling despair. Both sentiments are understandable. We all have a choice to make. We can look at the coming fire and let it burn. We can hunker down and hope to wait it out—or we can work together to get through it with as little damage as possible. This country has faced massive threats before and risen to the challenge; we can do it again. We just need to decide to make it happen. -
A fever is part of the body's retaliation against infection. So while some doctors recommend making yourself comfortable by taking Ibuprofen if you do have a fever, there's also evidence that reducing fevers with medication can prolong some illnesses. Doctors still don't know enough about COVID-19 to say definitively whether this is the case. While authorities including the French health minister have urged the public to avoid pain medications including ibuprofen if they suspect they have the coronavirus, others are torn on whether the potential risk is worse than suffering through a fever sans relief. Multiple studies involving lizards, mice, or dogs, for instance, have found that infected animals that were prevented from having a fever were more likely to die. In one study of critically ill patients, those whose fevers above 101.3 degrees were treated with acetaminophen suffered more infections than those whose fevers went untreated. The study was stopped because seven patients in the treated-fever group had died, compared with just one in the untreated-fever group. But when this question was asked of a different doctor, Richard Klasco, in a Q&A in The New York Times in 2018, he came to a different conclusion: Treating a fever with painkillers had no effect at all. "Since rigorous clinical trials have shown that these drugs do not worsen outcomes," Klasco told the Times, "why not make yourself comfortable?" Klasco told Khazan in an interview that he still stands by this advice. -
A series of interviews with Daniel Horn, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, provides a unique window into the fear and determination in America's hospitals right now. One of Horn's major concerns is protecting health-care workers so they can continue to treat others, even as protective supplies are running low. "It would be great to see our collective society, our large corporations, consulting firms, logistics experts like Amazon, be thinking aggressively about how to rapidly either procure or manufacture personal protective equipment for health-care workers. Yes, we moved to social distancing. That is tremendous. The next thing that needs to be solved: We need personal protective equipment for our health-care workers, and then ventilators. Or, thinking aloud here: Corporations and global communities really ought to stand together to collect all the hoarded personal protective equipment, masks, Purell, surgical masks. In particular, no one in a house needs an N95 mask. They are in short supply. We should find a way to get them back out of houses, and into the hands of health-care workers. I don't have a plan, and it would need to be a very thoughtful approach. What if a community put all their hoarded supplies on their front porches at the same time, one day during the week? Amazon could set up an operation to gather it. If we designed it right, we could make it safe and get those supplies back into hospitals." -
In a mid-March interview with The Atlantic, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, shared his growing fears about the United States' coronavirus prognosis. "If you wait until you've seen lots of affected cases, you know you've waited too late," he warned. Here's what Collins said when asked what surprised him most about the coronavirus: "The degree to which this is so rapidly transmissible. More so than SARS was. SARS was a terribly scary situation for the world 18 years ago, but it never reached the level of infections or deaths that we have for this coronavirus, because it wasn't as transmissible. SARS was transmissible but only from people who were really very sick. This one seems to be transmissible from people who have minor illness or maybe no illness at all—which is why it has been so difficult to get control or to know when you should be imposing these stringent measures we've been talking about." -
Even as normal life grinds to a halt in the U.S., Americans still need to consider their most quotidian needs, eating among them. There's no perfect way to get food without some human contact. If braving the crowded supermarket feels overwhelming, delivery can be a good option, but only if you put careful precautions in place (such as leaving money outside your door) and make ethical choices about when and how you order. The places people order from make a difference too. A local restaurant is a better choice than a start-up that sends gig workers with no health-care benefits into crowded big-box grocery stores to fight over dried beans on your behalf. The restaurant delivery person interacts with fewer people, lessening his or her individual risk, and the money you pay for the food goes toward keeping a restaurant's staff employed through a crisis. In Wuhan, local delivery drivers were the city's lifeline during a lockdown that made venturing out for fresh food difficult. -
Social distancing is one of the most important community-wide precautions that healthy people can take to slow or stop the spread of infectious disease, but what exactly that entails can be hard to pin down. Our writer Kaitlyn Tiffany asked three experts about subways and gyms (avoid unless absolutely necessary), meeting up with friends (try a walk in the park, six feet apart), work (do it from home if you can!), and more. With few exceptions, now is the time to cancel get-togethers. Dating, family visits, house parties, should all be postponed or held virtually if possible. There are personal situations where you must go out for work, for supplies, or to help someone else in need. In those cases, take precautions to keep your distance from others, and wash your hands frequently. If you develop a fever or cough, don't go out unless it is absolutely necessary or to seek medical care. -
Preparation and protection is important, but it's also crucial to know what steps you can take if you start to feel ill. In an ideal outbreak scenario, reliable testing would be available to all, but America's already-strained public-health system has left many with less serious symptoms waiting for a test for days on end. For now, the most common recommendation is temporary self-isolation—a choice that's going to be difficult for workers and caretakers to make without community or government assistance. One idea supported by some economists is that "everyone receive cash, immediately." People need to feel able to skip work and still make rent and feed their family. They need cash without strings attached, and they need it now, not via a complex omnibus economic stimulus package next month … A pandemic is like a slow-motion hurricane that will hit the entire world. If the same amount of rain and wind is to hit us in any scenario, better to have it come over the course of a day than an hour. People will suffer either way, but spreading the damage out will allow as many people as possible to care for one another. -
COVID-19 is unlikely to kill most people who aren't in high-risk groups (including the elderly and the immunocompromised). Still, you're not likely to evade it. The new coronavirus drew early comparisons to 2003's deadly SARS outbreak, but critical differences soon emerged. COVID-19's relatively low death rate (which hovers somewhere between 2 and 3.4 percent) means that healthy-seeming people can act as unknowing carriers of the disease, allowing it to spread quickly. And it's already too late for a vaccine to turn the tide, according to Richard Hatchett, the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness. "The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth 'endemic' coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, 'cold and flu season' could become 'cold and flu and COVID-19 season.'" We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. Haley Weiss is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.  |
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