COVID-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in India, 4 April 2021. On 3 April 2021, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare confirmed 93,249 new cases, the highest single-day tally since mid-September 2020. The country’s daily case counts have been rising exponentially since early March 2021. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

India sees “alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” – 47,913 new cases reported in a single day in Maharashtra, “which is more than double its earlier peak”

By Morgan Winsor 5 April 2021 LONDON (ABC News) – India has seen “an alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” in recent weeks, the prime minister’s office said Sunday. More than 12.3 million people in India have been diagnosed with COVID-19 so far and at least 165,101 of them have died, making India one […]

Top 10 accounts by tweets, likes, and retweets in tweets mentioning “vaccines” or “vaccinations” between 9 November 2020 and 9 February 2021. The fact that the Russian Embassy in Mexico received the fifth most likes and retweets is remarkable given that the embassy only posted 46 tweets mentioning vaccines during the studied period. On a per-tweet basis, the embassy’s vaccine-related tweets received the most engagement of any monitored account—roughly 795 likes and 374 retweets per post—far more than state media accounts with 100 times more followers. Likely buoyed by its vaccine messaging, the @embrusiamexico account saw the third largest percent gain in followers (70 percent) among monitored Russian accounts during the studied period. Data: Hamilton 2.0. Graphic: ASD

How Russia, China, and Iran shaped and manipulated coronavirus vaccine narratives

By Bret Schafer, Amber Frankland, Nathan Kohlenberg, and Etienne Soula 6 March 2021 (ASD) – When Vladimir Putin announced last August that Russia had granted regulatory approval for Sputnik V, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it signaled—albeit perhaps prematurely—not only a potential turning point in the fight to end the coronavirus pandemic but also a new phase in […]

Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak, and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals – “We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude”

By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado 27 March 2021 PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (The New York Times) – The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives. But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s […]

Global map showing large-scale protests against COVID-19 control measures, defined as those that lead to arrests, in January 2021. Nations in green imposed large-scale lockdowns in 2021. Graphic: Al Jazeera / World Happiness Report

World Happiness Report 2021: Reasons for Asia-Pacific success in suppressing COVID-19 – Death rate in Asia-Pacific nations 42 times lower than North Atlantic nations

By Jeffrey D. Sachs 20 March 2021 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network) – […] Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) in the Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the […]

Screenshot of the EPA Climate Change website, which was relaunched on 17 March 2021 after President Biden reversed the antiscience policies of the Trump administration. Graphic: EPA

EPA brings climate science back to website after Trump purge – “Climate facts are back”

By Richard Luscombe 20 March 2021 (The Guardian) – Canceled four years ago by a president who considered global warming a hoax, climate crisis information has returned to the website of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of Joe Biden’s promise to “bring science back”. The revival of a page dedicated to the […]

Aerial view of a power outage in Austin, Texas, on 25 February 2021, after the power grid failed during Winter Storm Uri. Austin residents with medical conditions struggled to survive amid widespread power outages and no water. Photo: Brontë Wittpenn and Ana Ramirez / Austin American-Statesman

Living in Texas feels like an exercise in survival – “The message is clear: You’re on your own”

By Karen Attiah 5 March 2021 DALLAS, Texas (The Washington Post) – As spring makes inroads down here in North Texas, the impending reopening of the state feels ominously like a death trap. At a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock this week, Gov. Greg Abbott (R)proclaimed that he would issue an executive order to open Texas up “100 […]

A child tosses a surgical mask into a fire during a mask-burning event at the Idaho Capitol building in Boise, Idaho on 6 March 2021. One protest sign reads, “I will not self-suffocate”. Photo: Nathan Howard / Getty Images

“Destroy them!” Anti-maskers encourage kids to burn their face coverings on the Capitol steps in Idaho

By Kim Bellware 7 March 2021 (The Washington Post) – Cheering parents watched as children tossed surgical masks into a fire outside the Idaho Capitol in Boise on Saturday as more than 100 people gathered to protest mask mandates as an affront to their civil liberties. The rally was one of several held statewide in […]

Workers in decontamination suits spray down the deck around the “Christ the Redeemer” statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Dado Galdieri / The New York Times

Brazil’s Covid crisis is a warning to the whole world, scientists say – “The acceleration of the epidemic is leading to the collapse of public and private hospital systems”

By Manuela Andreoni, Ernesto Londoño, and Letícia Casado 3 March 2021 RIO DE JANEIRO (The New York Times) – Covid-19 has already left a trail of death and despair in Brazil, one of the worst in the world. Now, a year into the pandemic, the country is setting another wrenching record. No other nation that […]

Trump refers to a map, modified using a Sharpie, while talking to reporters following a briefing from officials about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office at the White House on 4 September 2019. Trump has dismissed scientific evidence and fact numerous times, including 2019 when he displayed a map inaccurately modified to show Hurricane Dorian’s likely path. Photo: Erin Schaff / The New York Times

How Trump tried, but largely failed, to derail America’s top climate report – “Thank God they didn’t know how to run a government”

By Christopher Flavelle 1 January 2021 (The New York Times) – The National Climate Assessment, America’s premier contribution to climate knowledge, stands out for many reasons: Hundreds of scientists across the federal government and academia join forces to compile the best insights available on climate change. The results, released just twice a decade or so, […]

Protesters shout outside the Ohio Statehouse Atrium where reporters listen during state officials’ coronavirus update Monday, 13 April 2020. About 100 demonstrators assembled outside the building, upset that the state remains under a stay-at-home order and that non-essential businesses remain closed. Photo: Joshua A. Bickel / Dispatch

Doomiest images of 2020

31 December 2020 (Desdemona Despair) – In 2020, the long campaign by conservatives to squelch scientific decision-making in government reached its goal: the complete sidelining of evidence-based expertise in favor of arbitrary political whim. Last year’s Doomiest Graph presaged this development, but even Desdemona couldn’t have imagined the mass death that would result as government […]

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