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The intruder stalks its prey with stealth and precision, preparing to puncture its quarry’s armor. Once inside, the aggressor forces its host to produce more intruders, and then causes it to explode, spewing out a multitude of invaders who can continue their rampage on a wider scale. The drama, depicted in a microscopic video of SARS-CoV-2 infecting bat brain cells, provides a window into how the pathogen turns cells into virus-making factories before causing the host cell to die. (Jacobs, 8/22)

Like many toddlers, 1-year-old Asher Subramanyam is capable of bending the household to his routines and rituals. The Connecticut tot demands that all visitors wash their hands before leaning down for a hug. There are no exceptions, as his grandparents found out on a recent visit. “He would motion for them to wash their hands or he would come over and pretend to give them hand sanitizer,” says Asher’s father, Dr. Venkat Subramanyam. Covid-19 has created a sub-generation of children hard-wired for hygiene. Little ones have picked up all the pandemic-related behaviors grown-ups have adopted for the last 18 months—or for as long as many tykes have been around. (Hur, 8/25)

For years, the Veterans Affairs has spent upwards of $1 billion a year funding state-run nursing homes for veterans, while requiring only a single annual safety inspection, performed by an outside contractor. Watchdogs both in and out of the VA have questioned the adequacy of the inspections for decades. Just months before the pandemic bore down, the GAO in 2019 warned that the VA inspections lack teeth, merely making recommendations about some deficiencies instead of meticulously documenting them and requiring that they be addressed. (Kenen, Vestal and Tahir, 8/24)

Amanda Garrett recalls her first thought upon learning her father-in-law was violently attacked: “That doesn’t make any sense at all.” Garland Garrett Jr., 80, a former North Carolina state transportation secretary and onetime political figure in Wilmington, was an ailing man with dementia, known as “The Mayor” among staff in the secure memory unit of a local assisted-living facility. Garrett died on Sept. 12, 2020, from what the county medical examiner ruled to be blunt force trauma, including two fractures to his neck. Another resident with dementia and a history of violent outbursts aimed at staff and other residents assaulted Garrett early in the morning six days earlier, while Garrett lay in his bed, according to court records. A joint inspection by state and county licensing authorities cited the assisted-living facility, Spring Arbor of Wilmington, with the state’s highest level violation for failing to properly supervise care. (Rowland, 8/20)

Cyndy O’Brien, an emergency room nurse at Ocean Springs Hospital on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, could not believe her eyes as she arrived for work. There were people sprawled out in their cars gasping for air as three ambulances with gravely ill patients idled in the parking lot. Just inside the front doors, a crush of anxious people jostled to get the attention of an overwhelmed triage nurse. “It’s like a war zone,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is the patient care coordinator at Singing River, a small health system near the Alabama border that includes Ocean Springs. “We are just barraged with patients and have nowhere to put them.” (Jacobs, 8/21)

It’s hard to comprehend how nurses, who see firsthand evidence of how Covid can kill people, could oppose getting a vaccine that’s been shown in numerous studies to provide extraordinary protection against severe illness and death. But it’s a problem hospital administrators all over the country find themselves facing. In the most recent survey by the American Nurses Association (ANA), fielded as part of a broader coalition of nursing groups intended to combat vaccine hesitancy in its ranks, almost 1 in 8 hadn’t gotten the vaccine or didn’t plan to, despite having had access to the shots for almost nine months. (Koons and Court, 8/26)

When Gavin Newsom outsourced key components of California’s vaccine rollout to the private sector during the pandemic’s darkest days last winter, the Democratic governor promised the changes would benefit the most vulnerable. His “number one” reason for handing the reins to Blue Shield of California, an Oakland-based health insurance company, was “equity” — delivering vaccine doses to those at greatest risk, many in communities of color, he said in February. But the $15 million contract with Blue Shield, plus another $13 million for McKinsey, did not deliver on that promise, according to state and county officials, as well as public health experts. (Stanley-Becker, 8/22)

China imposed its first pandemic restrictions on Jan. 23, 2020. Over the next 18 days, travel plummeted 58 percent. From factories to public transit, industries ground to a halt. New research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances indicates these changes contributed to an earlier, brighter and greener spring in the country. “The vegetation basically responded immediately to the change in conditions,” said John P. Wilson, a professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California and an author of the study. The findings, Wilson and his co-authors wrote, show that “short-term changes in human activity can have a relatively rapid ecological impact.” (Root, 8/25)