Since early last year, more than six million Americans aged 18 or younger have tested positive for Covid-19. Of those, less than two percent (around 120,000) have required hospitalization; a rate five times lower than adults. Yet the Delta variant saw positive cases amongst the young surge this summer, ensuring a major stress test of the American pediatric ICU system.
Like it did in the late 1990s, the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is likely to have disastrous consequences for the nation’s health care and medical education networks. For the Afghani medical community—both those who stay and leave—the path forward is uncertain.
After a single positive case of Covid-19 two weeks ago, New Zealand headed into a strict nationwide lockdown. For a world jaded by a global pandemic that has claimed more than 4.5 million lives, the news felt almost bemusing; an odd throwback to March 2020.
Though New Zealand’s Covid-19 approach has been among the world’s most successful, the rush to lockdown revealed huge flaws in the South Pacific nation’s pandemic strategy.
Amongst the enduring images taken during the Covid-19 global pandemic, few may ultimately match the simple, heartbreaking power of those shared from India over recent weeks. Car parks and small patches of urban land covered in funeral pyres, often fueled by wood cut down from nearby city parks. Raw and uncomplicated, they feel like moments from a pandemic long-past; scenes of an old world finding itself again, in the new.
