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Medical researchers are raising significant doubts about whether an agent of the human immune system causes some coronavirus patients to end up in the hospital with injured lungs and other organs, struggling to breathe. What remains is a continuing mystery about what causes certain people to die from Covid-19, and how best to prevent that. A hypothesis that emerged early in the pandemic involves cytokine storms, an immune system response that is often invoked to explain severe viral infections, and to many doctors it seemed to make perfect sense: Patients who died from Covid were found to sometimes have little or no virus in their bodies. Their immune systems got rid of it. But in doing so, the hypothesis went, their body’s defenses went rogue, spewing out powerful compounds — cytokines and other drivers of inflammation — that fatally damaged tissues and organs in a storm. (Kolata, 11/8)

Adar Poonawalla is an Indian billionaire whose family-owned firm makes more vaccines a year than any other company on Earth. Ask him about the race for a coronavirus vaccine and he will offer some unvarnished opinions. One prominent vaccine candidate requiring ultra-cold storage is “a joke” that will not work for the developing world. Anyone who declares how long a vaccine will confer immunity is talking “nonsense.” The world’s entire population will not be immunized until 2024, he says, contrary to rosier predictions. Poonawalla is equally frank about the gamble his company, Serum Institute of India, is making in the pandemic. He is putting $250 million of his family’s fortune into a bid to ramp up manufacturing capacity to 1 billion doses through 2021. (Slater, 11/11)

For those who must travel, or those who are itching to do so, airlines and airports are increasingly offering ways to get tested for the coronavirus ahead of a trip. Taking a test can assure you and others that you aren’t spreading the virus from one place to another. In recent weeks, some destinations, like Hawaii, New York, Washington, D.C., and some Caribbean countries began allowing people who have tested negative for the virus and can show test results to skip mandatory 14-day quarantines, a process that some view as risky because it is possible that people can take a test, receive a negative result and then contract the virus later. (Mzezewa, 11/10)

Kyra Wade’s favorite color is pink. The 11-year-old likes road trips and the movie “Monsters, Inc.” She loves to watch people laugh. Her culinary preferences run to noodles and rice. Beyond that, her parents don’t know much about her needs and wants. Kyra is autistic and profoundly deaf. She was born premature at about 27 weeks, just a little over 2 pounds, which has impacted pretty much everything: eyesight, hearing, digestion, sleep patterns. A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language. Her parents think she recognizes a couple dozen signs. (Silverman and Devoid, 11/5)

Eleven years ago, when she was 24, Katherine Standefer was working as a ski instructor and a climbing teacher in Jackson, Wyo., when she suddenly passed out in a parking lot. She later learned that she has long QT syndrome, a genetic heart condition in which the heart can suddenly quiver instead of rhythmically pumping blood."[The syndrome] can lead to there not being enough blood in vital organs, which causes someone to pass out," Standefer says. "If they're lucky, they might wake back up. If they're not lucky, they could die of sudden cardiac death." Standefer was lucky to survive the parking lot incident, but she had a problem: She didn't have health insurance. (Davies, 11/10)

There’s a special kind of exhaustion that the world’s best endurance athletes embrace. Some call it masochistic, others may call it brave. When fatigue sends legs and lungs to their limits, they are able to push through to a gear beyond their pain threshold. These athletes approach fatigue not with fear but as a challenge, an opportunity. It’s a quality that allows an ultramarathoner to endure what could be an unexpected rough segment of an 100-mile race, or a sailor to push ahead when she’s in the middle of the ocean, racing through hurricane winds alone. (Minsberg, 11/7)

The ambulance was rushing to a psychiatric hospital, with Y. strapped to a gurney, asking the medics: Why? Why were they taking her there? Just that morning, she’d noticed her speech quickening—a symptom of her bipolar disorder—and made an appointment with her doctor for the next day to adjust her medication. She knew she was “wavering,” but was being proactive so it didn’t disrupt her life. (She asked to go by her middle initial only, concerned that speaking openly about her mental illness could affect her current job search.) (Thompson, 11/8)

Since March, The Marshall Project has been tracking how many people are being sickened and killed by COVID-19 in prisons and how widely it has spread across the country and within each state. Here, we will regularly update these figures counting the number of people infected and killed nationwide and in each prison system until the crisis abates. (11/6)