A medical moonshot would help fix inequality in American health care

  COVID-19 has put the American health care system’s deeply entrenched inequities into high relief. The social, economic, and political structures that predated the pandemic’s public health crisis and resulting recession have meant that Black and Latino people are more likely than white people to be exposed to, hospitalized for, and die from COVID-19. But Black and Latino people also died at higher rates than whites from non-COVID-19 causes in 2020, underscoring the harm of delays in medical care generally.

  Simply put, inequity kills.

What are viruses anyway, and why do they make us so sick? 5 questions answered

  Editor’s Note: You may sometimes have felt like you “have come down with a virus,” meaning that you became sick from being exposed to something that could have been a virus. In fact, you have a virus – actually, many – all the time. Some viruses cause the common cold, and some are crucial to human survival. New viruses can also emerge, and they typically create illness in humans when they have very recently jumped from another species to humans. As world health leaders try to determine how to respond to the new coronavirus, virus expert Marilyn J. Roossinck answers a few questions.