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Five pressing questions about COVID-19
To mark six months since the world first learnt about COVID-19, Nature runs through some of the key questions that researchers still don’t have answers to. The pandemic has catalysed a research revolution, as scientists, doctors and other scholars have worked at breakneck speed to understand the disease and the virus that causes it: SARS-CoV-2. But for every insight into COVID-19, more questions emerge and others linger.
Lessons from ‘war-game’ simulations
Biosecurity experts use military-style exercises to plan for biological threats. In this week’s COVID-19 podcast, the Nature news team discusses how these simulations work, what recommendations have come out of them and whether any of these warnings have been heeded.
Nature Coronapod | 33 min listen
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Features & opinion
Nerve agents: from discovery to deterrence
Even with an international convention banning them, the threat of chemical weapons being used outside conventional warfare is ever-present. A history of nerve agents by defence and security expert Dan Kaszeta is weak on some of the complexities of recent politics, writes reviewer Leiv Sydnes, who chaired the international task group that assessed the impact of scientific advances on the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2007 and 2012. But it makes clear a sobering point: it is all too easy for those who seek to do harm to make nerve agents in small quantities.
COVID-19’s unequal toll in the United States
Data made available after The New York Times sued the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Black and Latino people have been three times as likely to become infected as have white people. Information from 640,000 cases reveal how factors other than underlying health problems — such as access to health care, job security and the ability to work remotely — affect who gets COVID-19. “Some people have kind of waved away the disparities by saying, ‘Oh, that’s just underlying health conditions,’” says epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo. “That’s much harder to do with the case data.”
The New York Times | 13 min read
Australia’s mysterious flesh-eating disease
On the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne, “everyone, regardless of their social standing, seemed to know someone” who had had a brush with the mysterious disease Buruli. The flesh-eating bacterium that causes it seems to have no single mode of transmission. Microbiologists’ halting efforts to track down what is spreading the disease reveal the ways in which politics and inequality hinder public-health science.