| Welcome to the newsletter highlighting The Economist’s best writing on the pandemic.
This issue’s cover focuses on Vladimir Putin. In Belarus, among scenes that recall the revolts of 1989, people are turning out in their hundreds of thousands after a blatantly rigged election. In the Russian city of Khabarovsk tens of thousands march week after week to protest against the arrest of the local governor and the imposition of Moscow’s rules. Mr Putin is rattled. Why else is Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption crusader and his greatest popular rival for the Russian presidency, lying poisoned in a Berlin hospital bed?
In our writing on the pandemic we consider the lingering psychological effects of covid-19 on communities and how they will last long after the pandemic has abated. Our data team looks at doubts about vaccination around the world—and notes that anti-vaxxers are more common in rich countries. We have two reports on children, one on their susceptibility to the virus and the other on America’s schools. We ask whether politics is interfering in the approval of anti-covid-19 medicines. And Chaguan, our columnist in Beijing, wonders whether the pandemic will raise Chinese doctors’ surprisingly lowly status. 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. This week we have a film asking whether America’s stimulus package is working. The government has spent trillions of dollars to prop up its economy. But what will be the long-term effects?
As September approaches, the rate at which new cases are being recorded around the world has reached a plateau at about 1.8m a week. Alas, with the total nearing 25m and 850,000 deaths, the pandemic is far from over. | 
