Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: The Taliban And The Coronavirus; Medical Possibilities Of An Underwater Forest; The Perfect High
Undark: With Taliban Cooperation, Afghanistan Girds For A Virus
On March13, 50-year-old Sayeed Karim attended Friday prayers at his mosque in Mangalha, a remote village in Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan. While there, he and his neighbors were presented with a unique public information session issued by local Taliban groups. “They talked about the coronavirus,” said Karim in a phone interview with Undark.According to Karim, who is a village elder, the Taliban rebels informed worshipers that the thousands of Afghan refugees recently returned from Iran must remain in their homes until they can be tested for SARS-CoV-2. Since the 1980s, an estimated 2 million undocumented Afghan refugees have sought asylum in Iran, in an effort to escape violence and economic insecurity in their own country. And for years, Iran has been sending these migrants back to Afghanistan at a rate of roughly a thousand people per day. But as Covid-19 cases have surged in Iran, the number of returnees spiked dramatically. Iran continues its deportations, while many Afghans are now returning to their homeland voluntarily. Afghanistan’s earliest confirmed Covid-19 cases predominantly occurred among returnees, raising fears that the virus will now spread throughout Afghanistan, a country with more than 35 million people. (Kumar, 4/2)
The New York Times: Creatures In This Underwater Forest Could Save Your Life One Day
It was 6 a.m. at the dock on a Tuesday in December, and the weather did not look promising. Fog hovered over the water, and the engine of the Research Vessel E.O. Wilson rumbled. Our ship disappeared into the mist, and by 7:30 the crew, a team of biologists, chemists and microbiologists, reached its destination. The sun lounged on obsidian water, masking a secret world where land and sea swap places, and past, present and future collide. (Klein, 3/31)
The Wall Street Journal: Dr. Fauci Was A Basketball Captain. Now He’s America’s Point Guard.
The basketball team at Regis High School had a 1-16 record as the players entered a rival’s gym in the winter of 1958 fully expecting to leave with yet another loss. The other team’s star was a future NBA coach who would one day run the New York Knicks. Regis was led by a diminutive future doctor who would one day run the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Nobody gave us a chance,” said John Zeman, a Regis alumnus. “Everyone figured it was going to be a blowout.” But there was one teenager who looked at this demoralizing collection of data and came to a wildly optimistic conclusion. (Cohen, 3/29)
The New York Times: Cannabis Scientists Are Chasing The Perfect High
The retail showroom of INSA, a farm-to-bong cannabis company in western Massachusetts, is a clean industrial space on the first floor of a four-story brick building in the old mill town Easthampton. When I visited recently, before the coronavirus shut down recreational sales and forbade crowds, the crew of eight behind the glass display cases looked a lot like the staff you’d see dispensing lattes at Starbucks or troubleshooting iPads at the Genius Bar: young, racially diverse, smiling. They were all wearing black T-shirts with the INSA motto, “Uncommon Cannabis.” (Greenberg, 4/1)
The Atlantic: Coronavirus: It's Okay To Be Nostalgic For Normalcy
Since the start of social-distancing measures in New York City, I’ve made a habit of scrolling through my Instagram profile every night, thinking about how bizarre it is that I was standing near my friends whenever I wanted to only a month ago. It already feels impossible that I used to enter bar bathrooms with abandon, look in the mirror, wipe errant makeup out of the corners of my eyes, and touch my mouth to get the wine stains off. Last week, I spent two full minutes stroking a free postcard from the pizza place I went to on Valentine’s Day. The sight of a crumpled movie-theater receipt in the bottom of my purse made me grab my knees. I’m nostalgic for February, which feels ridiculous. (Tiffany, 4/1)
FiveThirtyEight: Best-Case And Worst-Case Coronavirus Forecasts Are Very Far Apart
Building a model to forecast the COVID-19 outbreak is really freaking hard. That’s one reason we’ve been following a weekly survey of infectious disease researchers from institutions around the United States. This week’s survey, taken on March 30 and 31, shows that experts expect an average of 263,000 COVID-19-related deaths in 2020, but anywhere between 71,000 and 1.7 million deaths is a reasonable estimate. (Boice, 4/2)
