The Coronavirus Outbreak

The risk of infection increased by up to 30 percent or so among people with observances in the first 10 months of 2020

Genomic sequencing efforts are limited in developing countries, but scientists are mobilizing to help

Pandemic highlights for the past two weeks

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series: COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between.

You can listen to all past episodes here.

The pandemic is teaching us key lessons about how people respond to crisis and misinformation, and it is spurring changes in the way scientists study public health questions

Doling out cash rewards and lifting mask mandates could increase vaccine uptake, some research suggests

The new rules would require employers to notify workers of possible exposure to the disease and to report deaths or hospitalizations to the government

The international collaboration does not have enough COVID vaccine doses to meet its goals, so wealthy countries must step up to fill the gap

An examination of the arguments that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in China and the science behind them

Viruses that “spill over” to people do not stick around in animals, so finding true sources takes years of careful work, an expert says

A pan-coronavirus vaccine could be “one vaccine to rule them all,” and so far it has shown strong results in mice, hamsters, monkeys, horses and even sharks.

Large gatherings and much more lenient restrictions have allowed the virus to spread at devastating levels