By Katherine J. Wu

In November, as fall was fading, Matt Binnicker began to hunker down for a hard winter. The coronavirus had already infected an estimated 13 million people nationwide, and his team at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was now peering over the precipice of flu season, when every coughing, feverish patient would need not one diagnostic test, but two.

Determined to stay one step ahead, Binnicker’s lab had worked furiously to develop its own influenza test in order to amp up capacity. …

There are many points at which one’s understanding of reality could conceivably start to slip while watching a stranger on the internet construct a pie out of Spaghetti-Os. It could be when the cook, a young woman named Janelle Elise Flom, holds up her container of garlic powder to the camera in the exact same way that YouTube makeup artists introduce a lip gloss. It could be when she adds a splash of milk, to make things “juicy.” …

By Katherine J. Wu

At about 2 a.m. on Thursday morning, I woke to find my husband shivering beside me. For hours, he had been tossing in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, nursing chills, a fever, and an agonizingly sore left arm. His teeth chattered. His forehead was freckled with sweat. And as I lay next to him, cinching blanket after blanket around his arms, I felt an immense sense of relief. …

By Nicky Woolf

“He’s gone,” the doctors told us, gently.

Geoff Woolf — my dad — had been taken by ambulance to Whittington Hospital in north London with COVID-19 in March, at the beginning of the very first wave of the disease in the United Kingdom. He was placed on a ventilator a couple of days later. By the time the neurologists called us in to “discuss next steps” — their euphemism for switching off life support — Dad’s oxygen levels had finally stabilized after 67 brutal days of mechanical ventilation.

But two weeks after sedation was lifted, he had not returned to consciousness from the coma they had induced so that he wouldn’t reject the ventilation tube shoved down his windpipe. …

By Gregg Gonsalves

In mid-January, I got an email telling me that I should schedule a visit to get my COVID-19 vaccination. I was a little surprised, as I am only 57 years old and didn’t think I qualified for the shot. I am also HIV-positive, but that shouldn’t move me ahead in line; my virus is well controlled on antiretroviral therapy, and my life expectancy is near normal. I am a professor at a public-health school, but that does not make me an essential worker. Meanwhile, my 86-year-old mother, who lives in New York, just one state over from where I live in Connecticut, is dutifully waiting for a call from her doctor’s medical network to tell her to come in for her first vaccine dose. …

By Emma Marris

It feels as if the world is on fire — and it is. In the last days of the Trump administration, U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms.

I am an environmental writer, and in the environmental world, the past year in particular has felt like an endless series of reactions to immediate crises: constant rollbacks of environmental protections, the pandemic complicating environmental work, colossal wildfires that torched the West. (The offices of the local climate-justice organization I volunteer for literally burned to the ground, for example.) We were so busy coping with immediate catastrophes, we had little time to make things better. …

By Sarah Shroud | Photographs by Arlene Mejorado and Carlos Chavarrí

When Antonietta Zuñiga woke up to smoke pouring through her bedroom window, everything she had learned about how to care for her grandson completely left her mind. It was November 2019, in the Los Angeles County city of Pico Rivera. Antonietta’s grandson, Carlos Zuñiga Jr., is schizophrenic; she had the number for ACCESS, L.A. County’s mental-health hotline, taped to her fridge for moments precisely like these. But she knew they were vastly underfunded, and it might take days for them to respond.

Frightened and half-asleep, Antonietta picked up her cell phone and dialed 911. About 10 police cars showed up, she says. When they arrived, she recalls, she told the police that Carlos had been off his medication for weeks and refusing to come inside. He’d been collecting trash in the backyard and had set some on fire to warm himself. “He doesn’t do anything because he wants to do it,” she remembers telling them. “He’s doing that because he’s sick.” …

By Marina Koren

Troy Hudson didn’t want to think about Mars. It was Christmas, he had taken some time off, and this planet had enough going on at the end of 2020. But Mars was difficult to escape, he told me. It twirled in a mobile of the solar system in his home. It sat right there on his skin, tattooed on his arm, below the elbow. Hudson had spent more than a decade working on a robot that was currently parked on the surface of Mars, and NASA was about to decide whether to give up on it.

Hudson is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works on the InSight mission, which delivered a lander to Mars in late 2018. One of the spacecraft’s instruments, a spike-shaped probe called the “mole,” had struggled for nearly two years to hammer into the soil. At several moments during the desperate efforts to rescue the probe, team members believed they could succeed. Of course they thought that — this is NASA, and NASA is known for doing some improbable things, especially with robots. Plus, NASA is good at Mars. For decades, it has sent machines to orbit, drive, and drill around the planet. …