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A virus is “simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein,” the biologists Jean and Peter Medawar wrote in 1977.In January, scientists deciphered a piece of very bad news: the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The sample came from a 41-year-old man who worked at the seafood market in Wuhan where the first cluster of cases appeared. Researchers are now racing to make sense of this viral recipe, which could inspire drugs, vaccines and other tools to fight the ongoing pandemic. (Corum and Zimmer, 4/3)

Making sense of the coronavirus pandemic requires getting up to speed on semantics as much as epidemiology. Government officials and health-care professionals toss off mentions of mortality rates, flattening the curve and lockdowns, assuming that we know what they mean. But the terms mean different things from country to country, state to state, even city to city and person to person. Officials use the same phrases about mass testing, caseloads and deaths to describe very different situations. (Perez-Pena, 4/3)

Fighting a pandemic like Covid-19 requires experts in many fields: epidemiologists who study the spread of disease, doctors who treat the sick, scientists who work on finding a vaccine. There is math involved in all of these specialties, but math can also help us to make sense of the barrage of information that we’re receiving daily. The starting point is the math of exponential growth. The word “exponential” is sometimes used informally to mean “really fast,” but mathematically it means something very specific: that a quantity is repeatedly multiplied by the same number. (Cheng, 4/2)

If you've been thinking about quitting smoking, there's no time like the present pandemic. With the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe, the science on quitting smoking offers welcome news for smokers who want to build up their defenses in case they contract Covid-19. Though it may still take many months for a smoker's lungs to heal from damage caused by long-term smoking, your health can noticeably improve in the days and weeks after quitting in ways that could make a difference against the virus. (Prior, 4/3)

Pregnant women are often particularly susceptible to respiratory infections and, once infected, can become seriously ill, with long-lasting consequences for both mother and baby. Is that true for the new coronavirus? The information available so far is thin, but it appears that pregnant women are no more likely than anyone else to have severe symptoms from the coronavirus. In an analysis of 147 women, only 8 percent had severe disease and 1 percent were in critical condition, according to a report published on Feb. 28 by the World Health Organization. (Mandavilli, 4/2)

New Orleans suffers a COVID-19 per-capita death rate seven times higher than New York and 10 times that of hard-hit Seattle, according to a report by Reuters.Researchers struggle where to place blame: the crowds of Mardi Gras? churches? Nursing homes? Emerging data trends show that 97% of those who were killed by the coronavirus in Louisiana suffered from a pre-existing health condition, most prominently, obesity.  (Elder, 4/2)