A reminder about Roundups! This is a feature I introduced as a paying-subscriber benefit last September. The goal is to step back and bring together a set of writing and thinking on a particular topic, with commentary. You can see earlier editions on pregnancy, statistics, and child sleep. Today: COVID. 

Over the past two years, I’ve written a lot about COVID (understatement). Unlike with pregnancy or parenting, much of this writing is relevant in the moment. COVID data moves fast, and updates on vaccination from January or August of 2021 are much less useful now. Rounding up all the COVID posts from this newsletter might be an interesting reflective journey, but most would not be action items.

However: some of them remain quite relevant, especially with a bit of updating. So below is a collection of writing on several hot-button topics — vaccines, risks for kids, masks — including what I’ve covered before and a few updates. I’ll also talk through a couple of the more general decision-making posts that I believe are still relevant as we move through this pandemic phase.

A few recommendations, first, for where to look outside this newsletter (or at least where I go) for COVID content:

• Case/death/hospitalization rates: New York Times 

• Excellent science-based explainers on current COVID news (especially but not exclusively about kids): Your Local Epidemiologist 

• Daily news roundup of what is going on with COVID and schools: COVID-19 Policy Update

• Data reporting from the U.K., which both seems to get COVID waves before we do and has much, much better reporting: John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times and Alasdair Munro 

I trust those can sustain you for the times when I’m looking at topics other than COVID. For now, let’s turn to vaccines.