Outdated textbooks, not enough teachers, no ventilation — for millions of kids like Harvey Ellington, the public-education system has failed them their whole lives.

On this ward at Morton Plant Hospital, nurses are overwhelmed by the number of new, desperate cases.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of workers churn through a vast mechanism that hires and monitors, disciplines and fires. Amid the pandemic, the already strained system lurched.

Covid allowed Raquel Esquivel and 4,500 others to be released from overcrowded federal prisons. So why is she back behind bars?

On losing your Beloved in 2020.

Why now is the time to rethink COVID safety protocols for children—and everyone else.

The rush to find a conspiracy around the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins is driven by narrative, not evidence.

From medical health privacy laws to a maze of siloed information systems, the true impact of COVID-19 on American Indian and Alaska Natives is impossible to calculate.

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

Droplets v. aerosols.

A group of high school students try desperately to make it through an isolated and dire year.

A century of research has demonstrated how poverty and discrimination drive disease. Can COVID push science to finally address the issue?

A cohort of journalists is drowning in burnout, trauma, and moral injury.

Sewage epidemiology has been embraced in other countries for decades, but not in America. Will Covid change that?

What will it take to get the world’s choral musicians back together again?

As one blockmate after another fell ill, we tried to stay safe and care for one another. It wasn’t always enough.

More than a year into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, some scientists say the possibility of a lab leak never got a fair look.

A dispatch from the pandemic under Governor Kristi Noem.

How did so many rich countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right?

In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.

Baby Olivia weighed 1 pound, 10 ounces. Her doctors faced a stressful paradox: giving her the healing power of a parent’s touch, while keeping the virus out.

How will we remember Covid-19?

Some teachers and students got sick. Principals had to improvise constantly. But it worked—mostly.

Could the pandemic teach us why our sense of smell matters?

Thousands of patients report lingering symptoms. Can research into another mysterious syndrome help?