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If no one in your circle of family and friends is mentally ill, count yourself lucky — or maybe you’re just deluding yourself. In my intimate social network, I can think of at least six cases. (Niall Ferguson, 2/26)

An especially virulent strain of bird flu has killed off more than 58 million birds in the US since January 2022. That’s not the toll from disease. It’s mostly the result of whole flocks of poultry slaughtered by American farmers to prevent the virus from spreading after even one infected bird is found. But those drastic measures have failed to stop the devastation. (Adam Minter, 2/26)

More than half of U.S. hospitals are nonprofit, meaning they receive generous tax exemptions in exchange for benefiting their communities. Many aren’t fulfilling that mission. (Sanjay Kishore and Suhas Gondi, 2/27)

The 27.5 million Americans lacking health insurance must not be left behind as the nation moves off war footing against COVID-19 and back toward normality as the pandemic's third year ends. (2/26)

Three years into the COVID pandemic, more than 1.1 million people are dead, and millions more are living with long COVID. How did the nation judged most prepared for an epidemic or pandemic in 2019 suffer a death rate so much worse than peers such as Canada, Germany or Japan? (2/24)

Americans should be worried — and hopeful — that the Biden administration has announced it will end the Covid-19 public health emergency in May. (Beth Cameron, Gary Edson and J. Stephen Morrison, 2/27)

“We want to know what led to this, so we can hopefully try and prevent something similar from happening in the future.” Those words, from Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University, reflected the national conversation around the origins of Covid-19 in 2021. Did it come from a lab? Was it a zoonotic transfer? Something else? Surely, with time, an answer would become clear. (Paul LeBlanc, 2/27)

What is it about conservative COVID deniers and masks? For some reason, mask mandates have been the target of more overheated carping by right-wingers about anti-COVID measures than almost anything else, vaccines aside. (Michael Hiltzik, 2/24)