Welcome to the newsletter highlighting The Economist’s best writing on the pandemic and its effects. Our cover this week looks at how to safeguard the rules of public speech in an age of social media. As online outrage mounts, pressure is growing on big technology companies to restrict ever more material. The tech firms’ shifting attempts to clean up their platforms mean that a handful of unelected executives are determining the boundaries of free speech. Is that good for society?

In our writing on covid-19, we adjudicate between the scientists backing the Great Barrington Declaration and their critics behind the John Snow Memorandum—which, in essence, is an argument over whether to permit a controlled burn of the disease or to attempt to suppress it. We report on the wave of infections breaking over Europe and virus-related price gouging in New York. We take the temperature of China’s red-hot post-covid economic recovery and North Korea’s icy policy of national withdrawal. And in 1843 , our sister publication, Ann Wroe describes how covid-19 has swept aside the calendar—the only thing she can plan for is Christmas.

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 been covering the pandemic in Economist Radio and Economist Films, too. This week The Economist Asks spoke to Brené Brown, an American research professor, about the effects of pandemic restrictions on mental health.

Cases are mounting in Europe and the United States. I hope you find that our coverage helps shed light on the increasingly bitter debate about what is going wrong.