Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

The Wall Street Journal: Smart Face Masks? Fever-Sensing Doorbells? CES 2021 Tech Promises Covid Protection. 
Good news, everyone, I’m still breathing. At least, that’s what my smart mask says.In fact, it tells everyone around me, via a small color-customizable LED light. (I chose purple.) It illuminates when it’s recording my respiratory cycle. Look, do I have the coolest mask at the supermarket? 100%. Do I need it? 100% not. The connected $150 AirPop Active+ mask, which I’ve been testing for the past few days, was officially announced this week at what can now only be called CPS—the Covid Protection Show. Bye-bye, CES! (Stern, 1/13)

The Washington Post: This Photographer Shows Us How The Long-Term Effects Of Covid-19 Are Being Studied At A Hospital In Rome
It’s now 2021, and globally, we are still dealing with the novel coronavirus and its fallout. Though vaccines have been approved, their rollout is taking time, so we are urged to continue practicing the precautions we followed throughout most of 2020. One of the unfortunate aspects of the virus and covid-19, the disease it causes, is the lingering health problems that some experience. In Italy, photographer Marco Carmignan spent some time at the Day Hospital Post-Covid-19 of the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, which opened in April last year to treat covid-19 patients recovering from the virus and dealing with its long-term effects. (Dickerman and Carmignan, 1/8)

The New York Times: An Appreciation For Vaccines, And How Far They Have Come 
This time of year, my thoughts turn to the DTP vaccine. Last year I wrote about the apocryphal “Christmas miracle” of 1891, in which the newly discovered diphtheria antitoxin may (or more likely, may not) have been used before it had been approved to save a child’s life. Still, the moral was that bacteriology, that new 19th-century science, had figured out how one of the deadly microscopic bacteria did its damage, with a poison that could choke off children’s airways, and had invented an antidote, and that was miracle enough. (Klass, 1/11)

Bloomberg: Covid Vaccines: National Regulators Cut The Red Tape At Their Own Pace
If one country approves a coronavirus vaccine, should another just trust it and follow suit? Covid-19’s rapid global spread pushed labs and manufacturers to develop vaccines quickly. Several are now in use and more are in various stages of development. Early predictions that a vaccine would take 12 to 18 months to arrive seemed optimistic. Hand it to the  pharmaceutical companies; they stepped up and delivered. Now, the greater burden is on regulators to deploy vaccines in their countries. Drug approval processes vary by nation and there isn’t a universal one-stop procedure, though various bodies tend to communicate. This means timelines of deployment vary from place to place, often delaying shots going into arms. (Trivedi, 1/11)

Philadelphia Inquirer: Are We At The Beginning Of The End Of COVID-19? The Tricky Road To Herd Immunity, Explained
One year into a changed world, the numbers defy comprehension. More than 21 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States — a rate approaching one in 15 people — plus untold millions who had mild or no symptoms and were never identified. Add the millions who have now received their first doses of vaccine, and it is fair to wonder: Can we start to look forward to when life returns to normal? The answer hinges on that often-misunderstood concept of herd immunity, made all the more complicated by the emergence of two variants of the coronavirus that seem to spread more rapidly, one of which is already in the U.S. Evidence so far suggests that the new mutations will have little, if any, impact on how well the vaccines work, and they do not seem to result in more severe illness. (Avril, 1/8)

The New York Times: A Year After Wuhan, China Tells A Tale Of Triumph (And No Mistakes)
At a museum in Wuhan, China, a sprawling exhibition paints a stirring tale of how the city’s sacrifices in a brutal 76-day lockdown led to triumph over the coronavirus and, ultimately, rebirth. No costs appear to have been spared for the show, which features a hologram of medical staff members moving around a hospital room, heart-rending letters from frontline health workers and a replica of a mass quarantine site, complete with beds, miniature Chinese flags and toothbrush cups. (Qin and Hernandez, 1/10)

Modern Healthcare: How The Biden Administration, Congress Can Heal Healthcare
Amid the worst health crisis of our lifetimes, American voters ranked the economy and healthcare as top issues in a pre-election Gallup poll, perhaps not a surprise given that an estimated 14.6 million individuals lost employer-sponsored health insurance due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The incoming Biden administration and the 117th Congress can begin to improve the health of our citizens and the American economy with policies that support a sustainable, value-based healthcare system. (Connolly, 1/13)

And more good reads —

The New York Times: Tommy Lasorda’s Death Starts A Conversation About His Son 
When Penelope Spheeris heard that Tommy Lasorda died on Thursday at 93, she knew many people would be touched by the sad news, particularly in Los Angeles. The city has long been her home, and it is also where Lasorda became a baseball icon, leading the Dodgers to two World Series titles during his Hall of Fame career. But Spheeris’s mind quickly turned to someone else in the Lasorda family that she had known and missed: his son, Tommy Jr., known as Spunky, who was gay and died in 1991 at 33 from complications from AIDS. She cried. (Wagner, 1/11)

ProPublica: The Nursing Home Didn’t Send Her To The Hospital, And She Died 
In early April, before COVID-19 hit her state hard, Palestine Howze was in a Durham, North Carolina, nursing home, living in pain. She had lost her legs to diabetes, and for months she had been suffering through a bedsore. In her medical records, staff noted that Howze, 71, would moan through the night. Her daughters had been told about the bedsore back in August 2019, and it was a small spot, no bigger than a quarter when Howze’s daughter Lisa saw it. But as it persisted, they wondered why it wasn’t going away. They say the facility reassured them that the wound was under control. Then on April 2, 2020, Lisa Howze received a call from the nursing home. The sore had become infected. (Campbell, 1/8)

The New York Times: The Sperm Kings Have A Problem: Too Much Demand 
The sperm kings of America are exhausted. These men are flying all over the place. They are shipping their sperm with new vial systems and taking the latest DNA tests because that is what women want now. Sure, they can talk on the phone, but they say it has to be quick because they are driving to Dallas or Kansas City or Portland, Maine, in time for an ovulation window. They would like to remind me they have day jobs. “People are fed up with sperm banks,” said Kyle Gordy, 29, who lives in Malibu, Calif. He invests in real estate but spends most of his time donating his sperm, free (except for the cost of travel), to women. He also runs a nearly 11,000-member private Facebook group, Sperm Donation USA, which helps women connect with a roster of hundreds of approved donors. His donor sperm has sired 35 children, with five more on the way, he said. (Bowles, 1/8)

The New York Times: When Getting High Is A Hobby, Not A Habit 
It doesn’t take long to get to what is perhaps the boldest and most controversial statement in Carl Hart’s new book, “Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.” In the prologue, he writes, “I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user.” In all honesty, I don’t know how to feel about this admission. It’s not easy to square all that I’ve learned about this drug with the image I also hold of Hart: a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia University, an experienced neuroscientist, a father. Hart knows this. He knows about the discomfort his readers might feel when they encounter his full-throated endorsement of opiates for recreational use. He offers the information in a spirit of radical transparency because he believes that if “grown-ups” like him would talk freely about the role of drugs in their lives, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in, a mess brought about by our ruinous drug policies, which have had such profound — and profoundly unequal — consequences for those who fall afoul of them. (Schwartz, 1/12)