Phonte caught Covid
No article, but on the Taboo episode of ?uestlove's podcast Phonte , wh0 famously sheltered during COVID, caught COVID after doing a small tour on San Diego and Orange County.

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A hidden pandemic: the orphans Covid has left behind
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/26/us/covid-orphans-pandemic/index.html

Swipe: Joshua, his younger brother, Zachary, 14, and sister, Maddie, 10, are among the estimated 238,500 Covid orphans in the United States whose lives have been upended in the past three years by the loss of a parent or primary caregiver, according to the Imperial College London COVID-19 Orphanhood Calculator. Globally, there have been more than eight million Covid orphans since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020.


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It's getting hard to find data on COVID infections since most trackers have shot down and most countries are reporting less frequently.

I heard that last week the entire continent of Africa reported only 6 deaths in total. The US reported 1700 deaths last week.


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https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-19-death-rates-varied-dramatically-us-major/story?id=98055024

Swipe:
"Nearly every state, from the 26 worst performing states in the pandemic, fall into one of the three... disproportionately high population of people identifying as Hispanic...higher than the national average identifying as black...or high levels of support for the 2020 republican presidential candidate," said lead author Tom Bollyky, a senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of law at Georgetown University, in a video commentary.

The authors further discussed parts of the study highlighting racial, economic and social inequities in the U.S. that led to differences in rates of infection and death rates between states.

States with higher poverty rates of poverty had higher death rates. For every 2.6% increase in poverty rates above the national average within a state, there was a 23.3% increase in the cumulative death rate, reflecting a significant economic healthcare disparity.

"The COVID-19 pandemic clearly exacerbated fundamental social and economic inequities, but science-based interventions and policy changes provided clear impact on mortality rates at the state level," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor.

Policies adopted by states during the pandemic, including mask mandates, social distancing and vaccine mandates, were associated with lower COVID-19 infection rates and higher vaccination rates were associated with lower death rates.