Everyday tiredness is nothing like the depleting symptom that people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience.

A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.

Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard.

What does society owe immunocompromised people?

More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can’t go on like this.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and why I did it.

The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?

Cases of COVID-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day—but the way there is different now.

Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic.

Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus.

The latest surge is a test of our pandemic priorities.

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

What appears to be a life-affirming triumph is really a cautionary tale about drones and wildlife.

We’ve known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it’s behaving in such an extreme way.

What was once outright denial has morphed into a subtler dismissal.

All of this will happen again.

Even before the pandemic began, more people here were dying at younger ages than in comparably wealthy nations.

In a new study, researchers uncovered female programmers who made important but unrecognized contributions to genetics.

A new statistic shows that health-care workers are running out of space to treat COVID-19 patients.

The new variant poses a far graver threat at the collective level than the individual one—the kind of test that the U.S. has repeatedly failed.

As the U.S. heads toward the winter, the country is going round in circles, making the same conceptual errors that have plagued it since spring.

Omicron is inundating a health-care system that was already buckling under the cumulative toll of every previous surge.

Vaccines are still beating the variants, but the unvaccinated world is being pummeled.

And what it lost in the process

Omicron is pushing hospitals to their limit, but the medical system still has an ethical responsibility to all patients—no matter the choices they make.

Here’s how I thought through the decision.

All epidemics trigger the same Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect. Even so, that cycle isn’t meant to spin this quickly.

The metaphors that Trump and others use when talking about COVID-19 are making the pandemic worse.

In a groundbreaking move, the beautiful but uncomfortable documentary forces viewers to acknowledge their own complicity in the decline of nature.

Everyday tiredness is nothing like the depleting symptom that people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience.

The disease’s “long-haulers” have endured relentless waves of debilitating symptoms—and disbelief from doctors and friends.

In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.

Only a couple dozen doctors specialize in chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Now their knowledge could be crucial to treating millions more patients.

Many people with long COVID feel that science is failing them. Neglecting them could make the pandemic even worse.  

Many American public-health specialists are at risk of burning out as the coronavirus surges back.

Trump claims his illness has led him to a coronavirus “cure.” Antibody therapy is still far from that.

Their dung consumes the oxygen around it, creating lethal pulses of suffocating water.

Join Laura and Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong as they talk about bearing witness to complex societal issues and what he does to keep going.

A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend

A new viral outbreak is testing whether the world has learned anything from COVID.

The president’s behavior threatens the very employees charged with taking care of him.

It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second, it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O, and it fends off sharks and Priuses alike.

Without understanding the lingering illness that some patients experience, we can’t understand the pandemic.

The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves.

Trump could have infected him. We won’t know with certainty for another week.

As vaccines roll out, the U.S. will face a choice about what to learn and what to forget.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds announced a new partial mask requirement Monday evening and put some restrictions on gatherings and businesses to slow the spread of coronavirus in the state. But there are...

Without understanding the lingering illness that some patients experience, we can’t understand the pandemic.

I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.

What does society owe immunocompromised people?

A doomsday fungus known as Bd has condemned more species to extinction than any other pathogen.

The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?

Trump could have infected him. We won’t know with certainty for another week.