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Britain faces a second wave of COVID-19 this winter twice as widespread as the initial outbreak if it reopens schools without a more effective test-and-trace system in place, according to a study published on Tuesday. Researchers from University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine modelled the impact of reopening schools either on a full- or part-time basis, thus allowing parents to return to work, on the potential spread of the virus. (8/4)

In Russia's Dagestan region, the official coronavirus figures started to seem suspicious to residents back in April. The mountainous republic in the North Caucasus region along the Caspian Sea was reporting just two to three fatalities per day from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at the time. That didn’t add up when a single village might hold five funerals in one afternoon. Dagestan’s officials eventually acknowledged that the real number of coronavirus cases and deaths was probably much higher. And, in the process, Dagestan became a point of reference for questions on the overall tallies in Russia, which reports the world’s fourth-largest number of confirmed cases but a mortality rate that is about a fifth that of U.S. per capita figures, according to Johns Hopkins University data. (Khurshudyan, 8/3)

Antibody testing in Italy indicates that nearly 1.5 million people, or about 2.5% of the population, have had the coronavirus. But officials said Monday that huge geographic variations in the results confirmed a nationwide lockdown was “absolutely crucial” to preventing the country’s south from getting slammed as badly as its north. The Health Ministry and the national statistics agency based their assessment on tests performed May 25-July 15 on a sample of nearly 65,000 Italians selected for their location, age and type of work. The government carried out the testing to understand how widely the virus circulated in the first country in the West to be overwhelmed by COVID-19, given that the bulk of confirmed cases and deaths occurred in northern Italy. (Winfield, 8/3)

Like most Spaniards, Emma Gaya thought the worst of the pandemic was behind her. Spain’s government had ended a three-month lockdown after an COVID-19 onslaught that claimed at least 28,400 lives in the European Union nation. To kickstart its stalled economy, Spaniards were encouraged to cautiously resume their lives under a “new normality” based on wearing face masks, washing hands and social distancing. The respite didn’t last long. (Brito and Wilson, 8/3)

Stylist Julia Wanja picks her way delicately through piles of food waste, discarded masks, rubber gloves and other rubbish at Nairobi’s Dandora dumpsite, looking for used hair extensions she can clean and resell to customers. The pandemic means fewer clients with less money and she is cutting down on costs by cleaning and reselling hair from the dumpsite. (Mukoya, 8/4)

When the mayor of Modica, a Sicilian town known for its chocolates and churches, learned that a sex worker in the area had tested positive for the coronavirus, he immediately started to worry about an outbreak. He made a frantic public appeal for clients to get tested, assuring them that their wives wouldn’t find out. But contact tracing proved difficult as the mayor, Ignazio Abbate, began receiving anonymous phone calls from men “asking for a friend” what the sex worker looked like. The secrecy and stigma around unregulated sex work put “everyone in danger,” Mr. Abbate said. (Bubola, 8/3)