The world may have undercounted Covid-19 deaths by a staggering margin, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The actual count may actually be 6.9 million deaths, more than double official tolls. The United States alone is estimated to have had 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, vastly more than the 579,000 deaths officially reported, and more than any other country. The calculation is based on modeling of excess mortality that has occurred during the pandemic. The drastic difference highlights how difficult it is to keep track of even basic metrics like deaths when a deadly disease…

There’s a scene in The West Wing’s second season in which one of the protagonists is told a Chinese satellite is falling to Earth, but no one knew exactly when or where. “A satellite is crashing to Earth, and NASA sent us a fax?” Donna Moss says, clearly concerned. But few in the show shared her fear, because debris in space often falls out of orbit and is either burned up upon reentry or lands harmlessly somewhere on the planet. The US government estimates around 200 to 400 tracked objects enter Earth’s atmosphere every year — roughly one a day — out of the 170 million pieces of space debris…

While here in the US some are tentatively removing their masks and resuming small outdoor gatherings, others around the world are searching for air. In India, people need oxygen, and they need it now. Last week, Covid-19 became India’s No. 1 killer. One million people in a country with a population of 1.3 billion are predicted to die of Covid-19 by August. As of May 7, 150 people were reportedly dying every hour, and while 29 million have been fully vaccinated there, vaccines are not what is most urgently needed right now. When people are sick with Covid-19, many have trouble breathing, and the most important treatment is oxygen. But…

If a waiter at a restaurant brought you a murky, stinky glass of water, that would be unacceptable. But yet, many waiters — at least before the Covid-19 pandemic hit — were forced to breathe poorly ventilated air in restaurants and other indoor spaces where people packed together. Click Here: And still today, “if anybody asks a restaurant owner, ‘what’s the ventilation here?’ they will probably look strangely at them,” says Lidia Morawska, a physicist and an aerosol expert at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia who has advised the World Health Organization on the spread of airborne pathogens. In the post-pandemic world, Morawska wants all of us to…

Now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 can shed their masks, there are obvious questions: How do you verify that people are vaccinated? Especially in situations in which some people can’t get vaccinated, including young children, or may remain vulnerable after, like some immunocompromised people, how can we guarantee they’re safe from the unmasked as mandates disappear? Unlike many of the challenges we’ve faced with Covid-19 in the past year, there’s a clear answer: vaccine passports. Under this system, vaccinated people could provide proof of inoculation to unlock privileges they didn’t have before, like going into a…

Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say that researchers understood the wires, but not the light switch. Then came Ardem Patapoutian. In 2010, Patapoutian and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute discovered the proteins that serve as two kinds of switches…

Every year, malaria kills more than 400,000 people, most of them children. There has been significant progress against the disease in the past few decades — death rates have fallen nearly in half since 2000 — but there’s still a long way to go. For decades, researchers have been working on developing a vaccine. It hasn’t been easy. Malaria, a parasite infection, is hard to vaccinate against, and many attempted vaccines haven’t produced durable immunity. But progress is happening. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it has given its stamp of approval to a vaccine against malaria for children for the first time, after encouraging results from a…

After months of discussion and debate, Democrats are at an impasse on a raft of infrastructure legislation that could make or break President Joe Biden’s effort to fight climate change. The rift, as it’s framed in countless news stories, is between progressives who want an ambitious social and climate spending bill and moderates who have protested the price tag. But there’s a problem with portraying these disagreements as a conflict between moderates and progressives. This picture leaves out the unarguable scientific reality that pollution is warming the planet at an unsustainable and dangerous rate. There is nothing moderate or debatable about the catastrophic changes that global emissions are wreaking on…

You’ve probably heard it by now: Covid-19 is not going away. The broad consensus among experts is that it’s not realistic to think we’re going to totally eradicate this virus. We will, however, see it move out of the pandemic phase and into the endemic phase. That means the virus will keep circulating in parts of the global population for years, but its prevalence and impact will come down to relatively manageable levels, so it becomes more like the flu than a world-stopping disease. For now, “we have to remember that we are still in a pandemic with this virus,” said Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy…

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a natural jump from animal to human. And while the US intelligence community’s current best guess is that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” the theory has been the subject of much debate and has not been definitively ruled out. The many unknowns we confront underscore the need for a much bigger toolkit to deal…