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Welcome to the newsletter highlighting The
Economist’s best writing on the pandemic.
Our cover
this week is about an energy shock that is speeding up the shift to a
new world order. As covid-19 struck the global economy earlier this
year, demand for oil dropped by more than a fifth and prices
collapsed. Meanwhile, the clean-energy industry is gaining real
momentum. What does that mean for 21st-century geopolitics?
In our writing on covid-19 we focused on the effects of the pandemic
rather than the disease itself, starting with a review of what, in
April, we called “the 90%” economy—in which activity would remain
deeply depressed. Did it turn out as badly as we feared?
A correspondent in China reports from Wuhan, where it all
started. We look at Britain’s problems with testing, and
how the virus has affected controls on abortion and added to inequality in rural America.
And Adrian Wooldridge, a columnist for our sister magazine, 1843,
compares the social mores of 2020 to the plague-ridden Middle Ages.
Our mortality tracker uses the gap
between the total number of people who have died from any cause and
the historical average for the time of year to estimate how many
deaths from the virus the official statistics are failing to pick up.
We have also been covering the pandemic in Economist Radio and
Economist Films. This week Babbage, our podcast on science and
technology, explores the
achievements of Rosalind Franklin, who was born 100 years
ago and whose work helped define the molecular structure of DNA—and
viruses like SARS-CoV-2.
As the recorded death toll approaches 1m, the implications of
the pandemic continue to deepen. I hope you find that our coverage
helps you explore them.
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