Do not waste your time and emotional energy planning around an imminent game-changing injection or pill in the coming months. A pandemic is not a problem that will be fixed in one move, by any single medication or a sudden vaccine. Instead, the way forward involves small, imperfect preventive measures that can accumulate into very effective interventions. Groups of practices that minimize the spread of disease are sometimes known as prevention bundles. Our COVID-19 bundle includes important drugs, such as dexamethasone and remdesivir, which seem to help certain patients in specific situations. It also involves behaviors, too, such as distancing and masking. “Any action you take has the potential for numerous secondary and tangential benefits,” Thomas said.

On april 13, Robert Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared on the Today show and assured viewers that the worst was nearly behind us.

By July, the number of daily cases had doubled. The death total had shot past 100,000. As Redfield looked ahead, his tone became more ominous. The fall and the winter, he said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, “are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health.”

A vaccine will be part of our bundles, hopefully before too long. But it will not instantly eliminate the need for everything else. If we can accept that masks will be a part of our lives indefinitely, we can focus on improving their effectiveness and making them less annoying to wear, Yale’s Ko said. “And it’s not just the design of masks themselves; we can come up with more innovative ways to promote face-mask use.” For one thing, they could be made more ubiquitous by employers and state agencies. Governments could even, as Luxembourg’s did, send masks to everyone by mail.

Japan has the oldest population in the world, and that's causing an acute labor shortage. With almost a third of the population aged 65 and above, finding workers can be a challenge.

Increasingly, companies are turning to technology as a solution — including two of the biggest convenience store franchises in Japan, FamilyMart and Lawson.
This week, Lawson deployed its first robot in a convenience store, in Tokyo. FamilyMart trialled the same robots last month, and says it plans to have them working in 20 of its stores by 2022.

Engineering firm Furrion has built a massive, four-legged mech suit called Prosthesis, a 9,000 pound monstrosity straight out of “Pacific Rim” — and it wants you to pilot it.

The company recently put out a call on Kickstarter, asking enthusiasts if they’d like to help them build a “global racing league that would pit multiple world-class athletes in head-to-head competitions, through complex technical obstacle courses, wearing giant powered mech suits.”

Depending on the level of commitment, fans are able to receive “one-on-one mech pilot training,” or watch the action unfold in person at live events.

An Army engineer working on soft robotics says that his work is directly inspired by the T-1000, the shape-shifting (and fictional) robot villain from the 1991 James Cameron blockbuster “Terminator 2.”

Frank Gardea, an aerospace engineer at the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s (CCDC) Army Research Laboratory, is leading a project to develop robotics out of flexible, self-repairing and self-reconfiguring materials, according to Military.com.

Gardea envisions self-repairing drones and other uncrewed aircraft, but the ultimate goal is machines with the “reconfiguration characteristics of the T-1000 character in the Hollywood film, ‘Terminator 2,'” he said in a release.

Suddenly I’m thinking of moving to Spain.

A bill introduced recently in the nation’s parliament would require that Spanish children do housework and homework. They would also be required to “participate in family life” and “respect their parents and siblings.”

Wow. Good luck with that.

Back here in the United States, I can barely get my 16-year-old to take out the trash. Sometimes, it feels like Middle East peace talks must be easier.

Meanwhile, other parents don’t even ask their kids to pitch in—either because they’ve completely surrendered, have concluded that it’s easier to do the job themselves, or have decided that after-school activities and playtime are more valuable. Children have gone “from being our employees to our bosses,” Jennifer Senior notes in her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 1.5 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tonnes of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make. Such claims have been questioned. After all, does a parent really bear the burden of their child’s emissions? Won’t our individual emissions fall as technologies and lifestyles change? Isn’t measuring our individual carbon footprint – a concept popularised by oil and gas multinational BP – giving a free pass to the handful of corporate powers responsible for almost all carbon emissions? The only thing that isn’t up for debate is that we all know that we are living in ways that can’t continue.

Coronavirus isn’t likely to give us coronababies – but a pandemic isn’t the reason that having children has shifted from an inevitability to a choice, and now, a moral question. A long time ago, “Do we have children?” became “Should we?”

Years ago, the thought of using software to fight a deadly pathogen might have seemed far-fetched. Today, it’s a reality. The Coronavirus pandemic has caused monumental shifts in the use and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) around the world.

Of those now using AI to fight Coronavirus, none are more prominent than China. From software that diagnoses the symptoms of Coronavirus to algorithms that identify and compile data on individuals with high temperatures vis-à-vis infrared cameras, China is showcasing the potential applications of AI. But Beijing is also demonstrating its willingness to leverage the technology to solve many of its problems.

To understand the potential benefits and perils, we need to delve a bit deeper into the subject of AI itself. Artificial intelligence essentially falls into two categories: narrow and general. Narrow AI is a type of machine learning that is limited to specifically defined tasks, while general AI refers to totally autonomous intelligence akin to human cognition. General AI remains a distant dream for many, but the real-world implications of narrow AI exist in the present—and China is working diligently to become a world leader in it.

For the generation of Americans not yet old enough to drive, the demographic future has arrived.

For the first time, nonwhites and Hispanics were a majority of people under age 16 in 2019, an expected demographic shift that will grow over the coming decades, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.

“We are browning from bottom up in our age structure,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. “This is going to be a diversified century for the United States, and it’s beginning with this youngest generation.”

Grocery stores have shut down self-serve salad bars during the pandemic. They’ve taken away displays of fresh olives and dips. And they’ve replaced giant kettles of ready-to-ladle hot soup with sealed to-go containers.

The deli and prepared food areas that used to draw traffic to stores and differentiate grocers have fallen from favor as customers worry about the spread of the coronavirus, cook more from scratch and try to limit their time in stores.

Grocers are trying to revive those parts of the store with new approaches. At Publix, salad bars and hot bars have reopened, but employees dish out each item. Wegmans moved hummus, olives and more behind a counter where cheese shop employees fill orders. And at Texas-based H-E-B, some coolers carry prepared meals from local restaurants and a former food bar became an ice chest of beers.

Thanks to COVID-19, and—more specifically—a delayed mitigation push here in the U.S., the live concert element of the music industry has remained on an effective pause. While many artists and managers were previously holding out hope that postponed dates could be pushed into late 2020, an increasing number of tours originally slated for this year are being canceled outright or being retooled with 2021 in mind.

The multidisciplinary design team at Production.Club out of Los Angeles, meanwhile, has taken up the task of imagining what a protective concert suit might look like.

A Manhattan woman who flew on an American Airlines flight from Miami to LaGuardia says she was shocked that the flight was packed full — and about half the passengers did not wear masks despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, more than a month later, as Italy begins to consider what the brave new world coexisting with coronavirus looks like, the protective bubble of the lockdown feels like a pretty safe place.

The lockdown was never intended to give people immunity from COVID-19. The purpose is to stop the disease from being transmitted person-to-person. But the coronavirus is not like an Angel of Death that passes by and never returns. As long as it is still out there, it could be passed around again when people begin mingling, making everyone just as vulnerable as they were when this whole ordeal began.

Over the past few weeks, uneasy routines have now become comfortable habits. Going out for essential supplies is no longer an enticing excuse to leave the safety of my apartment. The ordeal to glove up, mask up and then wipe everything down quickly takes the fun out of getting out of the house. And as the days get warmer, there is a genuine fear of taking off a layer and exposing any skin at all.

While President Donald Trump hopes to see live sporting events in the near future, 72 percent of Americans polled said they would not attend games without a COVID-19 vaccine, while 83 percent said they would watch games played in empty arenas with as much or more interest.

The poll was conducted by Seton Hall University's Stillman School of Business and included input from 762 respondents.

One major problem is that a COVID-19 vaccine may not be available until 2021, which is when Johnson & Johnson is hoping to have its version approved and ready for consumers.

One of the consequences of people being told to stay home to slow the spread of coronavirus is loneliness. And a collection of 13 robotics experts from around the world have a suggestion for how to solve that: a robot pal.

The innovation is just one of many mentioned in an open letter by the global contingent of robotics experts who suggest that the coronavirus pandemic should serve as a catalyst for the increased use and development of robots.

“Now the impact of COVID-19 may drive further research in robotics to address risks of infectious diseases,” says the statement, published March 25 in Science Robotics magazine.

The statement aims to inspire more funding to develop these varieties of robots, many of which it became clear were needed during the 2015 Ebola crisis.

The sister of actor Matthew Broderick said she received preferential treatment at a California hospital while battling the coronavirus.

Janet Broderick, a pastor at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, was hospitalized last month after falling ill upon returning from a conference in Kentucky. She has since recovered and is back home.

Broderick told New York Magazine that her general practitioner didn't know about her famous familial connection and "didn't care very much." But that changed when the pastor went to an emergency room at a Beverly Hills hospital.

"As soon as I got ahold of the guy at the hospital who knew who Matthew was, I was given the name of the head of the emergency room," she said. "Well, trust me, the folks I've spent my lifetime working with in Jersey City would never have been given the name of the head of the emergency room. If they were, it would have been disregarded."

"I think I'm absolute living proof that this system is completely corrupt," she told the outlet.