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On the doorstep of a terraced house in northern England, virus hunter Colin Hutchinson came face-to-face with the new wave of COVID-19, and the obstacles to slowing its spread. A retired surgeon, Hutchinson is part of a local team of “contact tracers” in Halifax, Yorkshire, that aims to reach infected people before they infect others. His experience that day in mid-October, he said, summed up why Britain’s “tracking of the virus is very, very poor. ”He wanted to speak urgently to a 54-year-old woman who’d tested positive for COVID-19, to identify her contacts. The area’s two hospitals were filling up – 40 COVID-19 patients were already being treated – and deaths from the virus had tripled in the district in the previous two weeks. (MacAskill, Grey, McNeill, Stecklow, Wilkes and Marshall, 11/24)

Last spring was the busiest season Michael K. Donohue can remember for his family’s six funeral homes in the Philadelphia suburbs. COVID-19 was the primary reason, of course, with 160 funerals in April alone — double the usual number. But this fall, even as the daily totals of new infections have surged past where they were in the spring, business at Donohue Funeral Homes remains fairly normal — so far. Donohue, the president of the 122-year-old business based in Upper Darby, sees the trend as well as any epidemiologist. (Avril and Dutchneskie, 11/22)

On Saturday morning, Megan Ranney was about to put on her scrubs when she heard that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. That day, she treated people with COVID-19 while street parties erupted around the country. She was still in the ER in the late evening when Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris made their victory speeches. These days, her shifts at Rhode Island Hospital are long, and they “are not going to change in the next 73 days,” before Biden becomes president, she told me on Monday. Every time Ranney returns to the hospital, there are more COVID-19 patients. (Yong, 11/13)

The coronavirus is resurging across the U.S. But it’s hitting hardest in rural places, where people have been sheltering less than anywhere else in the country. As new virus cases broke records all over, Americans in rural counties were leaving home about as much as they did before the pandemic struck, a Wall Street Journal analysis of coronavirus case data from Johns Hopkins University and cellphone mobility metrics from data firm SafeGraph found. In cities, people have remained more hunkered down. (Fuller and Hobbs, 11/24)

Weeks passed as cases of a lethal new illness spread farther and farther west. For residents of Los Angeles, fear grew as the second wave of the flu pandemic washed across the country in fall of 1918, just as a surge of coronavirus cases would do a century later. Los Angeles leaders didn’t wait for the contagion to arrive. With reports of infections overwhelming Eastern cities, officials outlawed public gatherings. Their goal was to minimize the spread of disease, while also avoiding panic. Now, Los Angeles is among the cities battling a record number of new coronavirus cases as the worst pandemic since 1918 ravages the United States. (Waters, 11/21)

Before 2020, the remote islands of the South Pacific were more accessible to leisure travelers than ever before. Thanks to affordable global air travel, little-known places such as Tonga, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands welcomed thousands of visitors annually from all over the world — up until the coronavirus pandemic hit. Now those islands are some of the only remaining corners of the globe where the coronavirus doesn’t exist, thanks to their total suspension of inbound tourism and other nonessential travel. (McMahon, 11/24)

Imagine standing between active volcanoes, looking upward in awe as a perfect circle of black hangs in the sky. It’s surrounded by wispy tendrils of light fanning outward like luminous hair, pinprick stars freckling the azure sky. A 360-degree band of amber surrounds you on the horizon, while occasional green meteors streak through the twilight. The breeze flatlines as crickets chirp in the sudden nightfall. If it sounds like an otherworldly experience, that’s because it’s sure to be. It’s one that thousands have eagerly been preparing for leading up to a Dec. 14 total solar eclipse that will track across Chile and Argentina. But almost none will be able to go, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Both countries have sealed their borders to international tourism and show no signs of reversing that decision before the once-in-a-lifetime celestial spectacle. (Cappucci, 11/22)

Every few weeks or so, Grete Fält-Hansen gets a call from a stranger asking a question for the first time: What is it like to raise a child with Down syndrome? Sometimes the caller is a pregnant woman, deciding whether to have an abortion. Sometimes a husband and wife are on the line, the two of them in agonizing disagreement. Once, Fält-Hansen remembers, it was a couple who had waited for their prenatal screening to come back normal before announcing the pregnancy to friends and family. “We wanted to wait,” they’d told their loved ones, “because if it had Down syndrome, we would have had an abortion.” They called Fält-Hansen after their daughter was born—with slanted eyes, a flattened nose, and, most unmistakable, the extra copy of chromosome 21 that defines Down syndrome. They were afraid their friends and family would now think they didn’t love their daughter—so heavy are the moral judgments that accompany wanting or not wanting to bring a child with a disability into the world. (Zhang, 12/1)

Shorter than a Barbie doll and lighter than a football, Kambry Ewoldt entered the world fighting to survive. Kambry and her identical twin sister, Keeley, were born Nov. 24, 2018, around the 22-week mark of the pregnancy of their mother, Jade Ewoldt. They weighed 15.8 ounces and 1 pound 1.3 ounces, respectively, and spent the first four months of their lives in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital before they could go home. (Kay LeBlanc, 11/23)

Extensive research in lab animals has linked different flame retardants to various health problems. Brominated flame retardants, which have received the most scrutiny, can build up in tissue, cause cancer, disrupt hormones, harm the reproductive system and cause neurodevelopmental problems, at least in animals and perhaps humans too. (Gross, 11/23)

If you’ve lost your job during the pandemic, and with it your health insurance, you may think that Obamacare plans are too expensive and therefore not worth seeking. Or maybe you’re worried about whether the coverage will withstand legal challenges. Think again, health care analysts say. (Carrns, 11/13)