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 looks at universities in the age of covid-19. For students, the pandemic is an inconvenience; for universities, it is a catastrophe. Faced with the loss of a huge chunk of revenue from foreign students, they need to embrace long-overdue change.
In our writing on the pandemic we pick our way through the hard choices confronting governments over how much to spend on vaccines and how best to distribute them. We report on the disease in Africa, which is nearing 1m recorded cases. Our data journalists have scraped the web to see which lockdown fads have faded, and which have stuck. We ask why covid-19 has boosted the independence movement in Scotland, which has not done a lot better than England; and observe that business in Sweden, which did not go into lockdown, has outstripped business in Germany, which did. And we look at the prospects for baseball which, like America as a whole, is struggling to cope.
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 focusing on the pandemic in Economist Radio and Economist Films. Babbage, our podcast on science and technology, asks whether “pool sampling” could be the solution to the global shortage of covid-19 testing capacity.
We have entered the dog days of August. But the virus has not slackened its pace. With over 1.8m new recorded cases a week, and around 40,000 deaths, it is spreading faster than ever. In these difficult times, I hope you find our coverage useful. | | |
 | Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-In-Chief | | | |
Editor’s picks Must-reads from our recent coverage | | |
