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Gonzales is a small city in central California populated mostly by Latino immigrant families and farmworkers. Like other places, it has felt the weight of the coronavirus pandemic. (Margarita Alegria, 2/9)

On Twitter recently, writer Ann Bauer recounted a meeting she attended with a Minnesota lawmaker about school closures in her area. Parents testified that they’re worried about suicides; a 15-year-old growing up in the wealthy suburb sobbed about how she has gone to a place “so dark, she didn’t know if she’d get out.” Continued lockdowns are killing our kids — literally. A Las Vegas school district saw such a spike in suicide numbers, it rushed forward its reopening plan. The superintendent explained to The New York Times, “When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the COVID numbers we need to look at anymore. We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.” (Bethany Mandel, 2/8)

When President Biden met on Friday morning in the Oval Office with House Democratic leaders and committee chairs working on his covid-19 rescue plan, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), who leads the Appropriations Committee, noticed that he and Vice President Harris were seated under a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She reminded the president that FDR’s most ambitious domestic initiative, the creation of the Social Security system, assured that 90 percent of senior citizens would not have to end their lives in poverty. DeLauro told Biden that he has the opportunity to do almost as much for the nation’s children by lifting nearly half of the those who currently live in poverty with “the stroke of a pen.” (Karen Tumulty, 2/8)

It’s been a tough 11 months for mothers. For about a millisecond after the onset of the pandemic, I hoped that remote work would cause fathers to finally see all of the myriad household tasks mothers do every day and begin doing their fair share. It didn’t happen. Instead of curing the fairness gap, we got the Great COVID Cop-out. Nearly 80% of mothers have been primarily responsible for doing the housework since March, while 66% are chiefly responsible for the child care among partnered parents. When you look at home schooling, parents’ contributions are even more skewed. (Joan C. Williams, 2/7)

The Biden administration’s recent investment of $230 million to expedite rapid production of the Ellume home Covid-19 test represents an audacious step forward in mitigating the pandemic. Some experts have criticized it as a “waste of money” because this kit costs more than other alternatives and because of the timing of the investment. I believe the test is worth the extra cost, due to its connectivity and the types of research it enables, though all of these tests need to be evaluated against the other options. (Eric D. Perakslis, 2/8)

The U.S. Supreme Court erred late Friday when it ordered California to reverse its ban on indoor faith services for counties in the state’s purple tier, which have extremely high rates of COVID-19 infection. The conservative majority concluded — wrongly, we believe — that the state has been unfairly harsh on houses of worship and thus violated the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion. That’s hogwash, and the tortured justification laid out in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s opinion in a lawsuit brought by South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista makes it clear that either the majority justices don’t understand how congregational activities pose a unique threat of contagion or just don’t care.

Among the Trump administration’s last and best decisions was to allow almost all physicians to prescribe buprenorphine, one of the most effective treatments for opioid addiction. Previously, only doctors who had completed an eight-hour training course and obtained a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration could do so. Only 7% of physicians are certified to prescribe the drug, and more than half of rural counties lacked a single prescriber as of 2018. (Brian Barnett and Jeremy Weleff, 2/8)

If you want to succeed in just about anything, you need a plan. The same goes for pregnancy. Cindy Lamb’s job is to help as many pregnant people as possible create their ideal birth plan. Cindy is a doula. In Greek, doula means servant to the woman, and Cindy also uses “labor support professional.” “Doctors and nurses punch the clock — doulas don’t,” Lamb says. In fact, doula care is among the most promising approaches to combating disparities in maternal health. Unfortunately, it’s a kind of care that is largely inaccessible to Kentuckians who need it most. Let me be clear: Kentucky is in a maternal mortality crisis. Statistics show that becoming pregnant here is too often a death sentence. And we are moving in the wrong direction: A woman is more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes now than in 1987.