Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

The Washington Post: Unpaid Caregivers: How America Treats Women Caring For Paralyzed Partners
The pandemic year has exposed the cost of caregiving on a previously overlooked workforce, almost entirely made up of women, who work for little pay — or in some cases no pay. Who gets paid to be a caregiver is complicated. Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance companies have different rules and requirements for paying family members, as do individual states — and in most states, married caregivers are not counted as workers. Only eight state Medicaid programs allow married people to be paid caregivers to their partners. Eight additional states have private programs that allow spouses to be paid as caregivers. (Ferguson, 8/6)

CBS News: Volunteers Bring "Tears Of Joy" To Paralyzed Resident By Making Miami Beach Accessible To All 
For Sergio Echeverria, it wasn't just a day at the beach. Nicknamed Aquaman, Echeverria has always considered the ocean to be his second home — but a tractor accident this winter left him paralyzed from the waist down, jeopardizing his ability to do what he loved. "I had my doubts," he said of his ability to get in the water again. But he was proven wrong. Making his dream come true was a small army of volunteers who, once a month, place plastic mats on a stretch of Miami Beach to make it more accessible to wheelchairs or other mobility devices. There are also special floating chairs that transport people with disabilities in the water. (Bojorquez, 8/9)

The New York Times: With More Freedom, Young Women In Albania Shun Tradition Of ‘Sworn Virgins’
A centuries-old tradition in which women declared themselves men so they could enjoy male privilege is dying out as young women have more options available to them to live their own lives. (Higgins, 8/9)

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Reuters: How The COVID-19 Pandemic Laid Bare America’s Diabetes Crisis
It took the deadly disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose a deeper, more intractable U.S. public-health crisis: For more than a decade, the world’s richest nation has been losing the battle against diabetes. Long before the pandemic, Kate Herrin was among the millions of Americans struggling to control their diabetes. Her problems often stemmed from her government-subsidized medical insurance. Doctors routinely rejected her Medicaid plan, and she repeatedly ran out of the test strips she needed to manage her daily insulin injections. She cycled in and out of emergency rooms with dangerously high blood-sugar levels, or hyperglycemia. Then COVID-19 hit. (Terhune, Respaut and Nelson, 8/12)

Politico: Covid Brought Despair To This Neighborhood. So Why Won’t Its Residents Vaccinate? 
Diamond Wright says she won’t get the Covid-19 vaccine. The 33-year-old housing worker lost her grandfather to the virus last year. Her neighbors in New York’s Far Rockaway died at a rate nearly 50 percent higher than the rest of the city during the height of the pandemic. And the Delta variant is raising anew the specters of spring 2020. But none of that has changed her mind. “Me, personally, I’m not gonna get it,” she said of the vaccine last week. “It’s something new. They came up with it kinda fast.” She’s not alone. (Kvetenadze, 8/12)

AP: Overwhelmed By COVID-19: A Day Inside A Louisiana Hospital
Before the latest surge of the coronavirus, Louisiana neurologist Robin Davis focused on her specialty: treating patients with epilepsy. These days, as virus patients flood her hospital in record numbers, she has taken on the additional duties of nurse, janitor and orderly. “I was giving bed baths on Sunday, emptying trash cans, changing sheets, rolling patients to MRI,” said Davis, who has been coming in on her days off to provide some relief to overworked nurses at Ochsner Medical Center in the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson. (Plaisance, 8/11)

The Washington Post: A Scientist Who Came Out Of Retirement To Help Fight Covid Loses His Own Battle
Thomas Hodge III logged on from his hospital bed for what would be his last weekly Zoom meeting with some 200 scientific collaborators. Gaunt and unshaven, he conferred with the group on how to defeat this country’s latest surge of covid-19 — the virus Hodge’s body was battling a second time. The prominent immunologist died two days later of complications from the disease. One state away, mere hours later, a beloved granddaughter succumbed to kidney cancer. He was 69. She was 6. (Kalter, 8/11)

The Atlantic: When Will Masking End?
Last week, the CDC played what probably seemed like one of the most obvious cards left in its hand: asking fully vaccinated people to once again mask in public indoor spaces, in places where the virus is surging. This recommendation echoed one the agency had controversially dispensed with in May—and has clearly saddled immunized Americans with a serious case of masking déjà vu. “It’s been an abrupt 180,” Helen Chu, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me, and for many people, “that’s made it difficult.” (Wu, 8/6)

The Atlantic: Delta Has Changed The Pandemic Endgame
But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.” In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus had a basic reproduction number, or R0, of 2 to 3, meaning that each infected person spreads it to two or three people. Those are average figures: In practice, the virus spread in uneven bursts, with relatively few people infecting large clusters in super-spreading events. But the CDC estimates that Delta’s R0 lies between 5 and 9, which “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. At that level, “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said. (Yong, 8/12)

The New York Times: Locked Down And Fed Up, Australians Find Their Own Ways To Speed Vaccinations 
After an order of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine from the government never materialized, Quinn On realized on Monday that a busy pharmacy he manages in Western Sydney would soon run out of doses. He raced to pick up shots from one of his other stores, while his wife pleaded with local officials for extra supplies. Their mom-and-pop business has become a vaccination hub where it matters most — in the part of the city where Covid-19 case numbers refuse to decline despite a seven-week lockdown. They had already hired extra pharmacists. They set up a tent on the sidewalk to safely register arrivals. And on Monday, with all their scrambling, they secured a few hundred shots to inoculate a long line of people by day’s end. “It’s costing us money to do this, but I’m doing this for the community,” said Mr. On, 51, who came to Australia from Vietnam as a refugee when he was 8. “I’m just hoping it will work.” (Cave, 8/12)