The Economist this week | | Our coverage of the new coronavirus |  | | |
| Welcome to the newsletter highlighting The Economist’s best writing on the pandemic. Our cover this week is about the profound shift taking place in economics as a result of covid-19. It will be characterised by government borrowing, money-printing and intervention in capital markets—all underpinned by low inflation. Each era of economics confronts a new challenge. After the 1930s the task was to prevent depressions. In the 1970s and early 1980s the holy grail was to end stagflation. Today policymakers must learn how to manage the business cycle and fight financial crises without a politicised takeover of the economy.
In our coverage of the pandemic we report on new speculation that the virus may have started spreading many years ago across the border from China, in Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar. In the rich world nearly half of all deaths from the coronavirus have taken place in care and nursing homes, even though they contain less than 1% of the population. We draw some lessons for the elderly. Elsewhere, we dig into the causes of America’s runaway caseload of covid-19—and how it depends on geometric growth. Our correspondents in Israel and Central Asia write about how, in their own way, both places are struggling with the disease. We catch up with recent progress in vaccines and treatments. And our data journalists take the chance offered by crowd-free football games to answer an age-old question: what explains home advantage?
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. And we have plotted the march of covid-19 across America and Europe , exploring which places are successfully battling the disease.
We have also been focusing on the pandemic in Economist Radio and Economist Films. This week we have a film on its impact on American stockmarkets, and why they have enjoyed a record-breaking streak even though the country faces the deepest recession in living memory.
Almost seven months into the pandemic there is still so much to learn about the virus and its impact. | | |
 | Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-In-Chief | | | |
Editor’s picks Must-reads from our recent coverage | | |
