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At the start of the pandemic, in late March 2020, President Trump held a White House briefing at which his top advisors presented their official COVID-19 death projections. In somber tones, they forecasted that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die from the disease if we followed reasonable social-distancing and other mitigation guidelines. Two hundred and forty thousand! That was an inconceivable amount of death. Four times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. Eighty times the number who died in the 9/11 attacks. (Nicholas Goldberg, 4/18)

Judging by the numbers, China appears to be experiencing a far different pandemic than the rest of the world. In the latest surge in Shanghai, its largest city with a population of 25 million, China has reported more than 300,000 cases since early March and no deaths. By contrast, the world as a whole has experienced about 195 deaths for every 100,000 population as of last November. Can China’s statistics be believed? (4/16)

W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel “The Painted Veil” features a harrowing description of a cholera outbreak in a provincial Chinese city. “The great city lay in terror; and death, sudden and ruthless, hurried through its tortuous streets … The people were dying at the rate of a hundred a day, and hardly any of those who were attacked by the disease recovered from it; the gods had been brought out from the abandoned temples and placed in the streets; offerings were laid before them and sacrifices made, but they did not stay the plague.” (Niall Ferguson, 4/17)

Two days after getting my second dose of the Moderna mRNA vaccine as part of a clinical trial, my body was still mounting a robust immune response when, from the floor of my son’s bathroom, I frantically telephoned the clinical research site at the University of Illinois. The region of my brain that controls thermoregulation, the hypothalamus, likely detected the flood of vaccine-induced copies of viral proteins in my bloodstream and cranked up my internal thermostat to 104.7 degrees F, a fever high enough to make me feel delirious. The trial’s principal investigator called in a prescription for an anti-nausea medication and two bags of IV fluid, which a mobile service gave me at home to stabilize me. (Dawn Sinclair Shapiro, 4/18)

As many people have largely moved on, a new concern has moved in. After a significant drop in COVID cases, BA.2, a subvariant of Omicron that is said to be even more highly transmissible than its predecessor, is causing an increase in new infections. In Boston, the proportion of COVID tests coming back positive surpassed 6 percent last week, beyond what Boston Public Health Commission officials deemed the “threshold of concern,” 5 percent. In early March, the city’s rate was 2.2 percent. (Renee Graham, 4/17)

The little girl felt poorly, but both she and her mom thought they knew the reason. Aliyah Davis, just nine years old, was battling COVID. Fatigued, repeatedly sick to her stomach, with no sense of smell or taste and some shortness of breath, she seemed to have a near-textbook case of the virus. Aliyah had a history of asthma, so her mother, Christina Ortiz, took her to the emergency department, where she was told the symptoms were likely COVID-related. But two and a half weeks later, Aliyah became sick again during the middle of the night, and Christina noted that her daughter had been experiencing insatiable thirst and frequent urination ever since that first ED visit. This time, a urine dip tested positive for ketones. Further workup revealed the issue: Aliyah had new-onset diabetes. (Carolyn Barber, 4/15)

In 1918, as the world collapsed under the weight of a different pandemic, a simultaneous mental health toll rose from underneath. While the influenza pandemic of that era infected 500 million people — taking  the lives of 50 million globally and 675,000 in the United States – many survivors suffered a “post-influenzal depression.” Historians noted how their lives became “unbearable, even after the infection had passed.” Today, we are seeing similar trends among COVID survivors. When pandemic flu took hold, a novel clinical entity called “encephalitis lethargica” also surged. Despite unclear evidence, doctors connected it to influenza. The syndrome’s constellation of vague neuropsychiatric symptoms sounds eerily similar to long COVID. (Sandhira Wijayaratne, 4/18)