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When everyone was scrambling for a Covid-19 vaccines last year, public health officials liked to say that the best kind of shot was the one you could get. Today, doctors are scrounging for a limited supply of Covid-19 treatments, and unfortunately, that same maxim doesn’t apply. Not all treatments are effective in treating omicron patients, and the ones that do work are in very short supply. (Lisa Jarvis, 1/25)

Americans don't trust their public health experts, a serious problem in the best of times but downright dangerous amid a pandemic. Just 44% of Americans trust in the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, while only 40% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci (the nation's point man on all things COVID) according to an NBC News survey conducted this month. Trust in politicians is even lower. It's perfectly understandable why Americans feel this way. At all levels, our public health agencies have been using contradicting claims and supposition masquerading as fact. And it's not hard to diagnose the root of the problem. To quote the Captain's speech in "Cool Hand Luke," "what we've got here is failure to communicate."  (James Davis, 1/26)

As physician-parents of elementary and middle school students, we know that in-person school has undisputed benefits. Last year, our children struggled when schools were shuttered. We, too, were challenged in juggling patient care and work demands with our kids at home and appreciate that virtual education or hybrid teaching does not work well for many families and teachers. As physicians, however, we are deeply concerned that the hard-line stance of opening in-person schooling “on-time” at any cost despite a coronavirus surge is shortsighted and dangerous, risking long-lasting harm to our most vulnerable students, teachers and their families. (Ashwin Dharmadhikari, Nirali Shah and Prabha Viswanathan, 1/25)

As some 3,000 athletes, their retinues and the media converge on Beijing, the Chinese government has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent the 24th version of the Winter Olympics, which open Feb. 4, from becoming a Covid superspreading event. Though athletes and coaches will be required to be vaccinated, they will face severe restrictions. Those who receive a medical exemption from vaccination are being required to quarantine for 21 days after entering the country. Even the vaccinated will have to present two negative tests. Participants must submit to daily Covid tests and will be confined to an Olympic bubble to prevent spread to the local population. (Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Michael T. Osterholm, 1/25)

Predicting how Covid-19 will behave next remains notoriously hard. Predicting how humans will react is much easier, since history can be a guide. One of the most prescient articles written about the pandemic’s future was Gina Kolata’s May 2020 New York Times article “How Pandemics End,” with historians of medicine describing society’s reactions to Ebola, bubonic plague and the 1918 flu pandemic. There’s a biological end to a pandemic, when cases and death rates fall, and a social end, when people get tired of being afraid, accept a certain amount of risk, and resume social and commercial life. The social end sometimes comes first. (Faye Flam, 1/25)