August 18, 2020

Less than half of Americans say they will get a coronavirus vaccine, according to an NBC News poll, with a stark partisan split: a majority of Democrats but only 36 percent of Republicans say they would take a government-approved shot. The finding lands the same day Fauci warns that even healthy people can have symptoms for months and Birx insists masks save lives, a tag-team messaging effort that polls suggest is reaching an increasingly skeptical public.

Wuhan, the city where the pandemic was first detected and which endured the world’s strictest lockdown, hosts a huge pool party with hundreds of maskless revelers, a scene CNN calls pandemic ground zero letting loose. The visual contrast with the continued restrictions across much of the rest of the world goes largely unremarked in the coverage that treats it as a curiosity rather than an implicit question about the duration of the measures elsewhere. A Reuters inquiry finds for-profit nursing homes in Connecticut were hit harder by COVID-19 than nonprofit or government-run facilities, adding another thread to the pattern of the pandemic exploiting gaps in the for-profit care system. Depression rates double in Britain, with one in five adults reporting depressive symptoms, the BBC reports, as the economic and social toll of the lockdowns extends well beyond the virus itself.