How Britain lives with covid-19 today | Abortion bans in America are corroding some doctors’ souls | When the Smoke Clears in Gaza

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How Britain lives with covid-19 today - The Economist

Covid-19 is still making headlines. On October 3rd Britain’s official covid inquiry began a fresh set of public hearings, looking at the government’s decision-making around interventions such as lockdowns. Entries released from the diary of Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, criticised the “flip-flopping”, “bipolar decision-making” and “chaos” of Boris Johnson’s government. What, though, of the disease itself?

As Britain heads towards the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of covid-19, it is easy to forget what life was like at the height of the pandemic. At the peak of the crisis, when hospitals were running out of body bags, more than 1,000 people in England were dying with the virus a day (see chart). In the week ending September 22nd, around 35 a day did. Cases are rising again, and many people remain affected by long covid. But the decreasing virulence of variants and the delivery of 150m covid vaccines have reduced the number of people the virus can kill or hospitalise. Now when covid hits it does so in small waves, not tsunamis.

As the threat from covid-19 has changed, so too has the strategy to combat it. During the third lockdown, in January 2021, Britons viewed the government’s online covid dashboard 76.5m times in 24 hours. In September the government replaced it with a version that also tracks flu and other respiratory diseases. In the National Health Service (NHS), executives now use the jargon of covid “recovery” rather than “response”. Operational guidance for the NHS puts “workforce” above covid in its list of priorities for 2022-23.

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Abortion bans in America are corroding some doctors’ souls - The Economist

The patient was about 16 weeks pregnant. As Donna stood by her bed, steeling herself to deliver the bad news, she tried to stifle the now-familiar feeling of helplessness. It was November 2022 and they were in the triage area of the hospital in Texas where Donna (a pseudonym) worked as an ob-gyn (obstetrician-gynaecologist). The pregnant woman’s waters had broken. At this stage in the pregnancy, the fetus’s lungs are months away from fully forming and stop developing as the amniotic fluid drains away. Doctors therefore usually recommend aborting the fetus or waiting to miscarry. The latter course can take days or weeks, during which time the mother is at high risk of infection – and must endure the trauma of carrying a non-viable fetus.

But in Texas, termination was no longer an option. A year and a half earlier, its Republican-dominated legislature had passed Senate Bill 8 (SB8), which outlaws abortion from the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected (around the sixth week of pregnancy). In June 2022 America’s Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade, a nearly half-century-old ruling that said there was a constitutional right to abortion. States were suddenly free to ban the procedure. Texas did so immediately, with exceptions only if the mother is at risk of death or a “substantial impairment of a major bodily function”. Doctors who refuse to comply are classed as criminals.

Having told the patient that her baby was going to die, Donna then had to deliver more distressing news. “Normally we would offer you an induction but right now because of the law – because your baby still has a heartbeat – we have to send you home.” She had seen many women in this position since SB8 had come into effect, and knew to speak slowly and calmly, choosing her words carefully. Though the curtain around her patient’s bed gave the appearance of privacy, the other patients on the ward could hear almost everything. “If you develop an infection or start bleeding heavily, come back to the hospital, and then we can give you medicine to deliver the baby or do a procedure.”

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When the Smoke Clears in Gaza - The New Yorker

Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, the all-too-familiar scenes of violence in the Gaza Strip—the sight, on Sunday, of children’s bodies being pulled from a flattened house; the rocket launches—will temporarily stop. As after every round that preceded this, a ceasefire will eventually be reached. The question is what we will have learned.

Since the bombing began, both sides have asked how this ends. If the answer is something other than with a repetition in a few more years—a perpetual state of war—Israelis must wrestle with the question of their own identity. No, that question is not the clichéd one: Does Israel have a right to exist? Rather, the more imperative question is: Is the way in which Israel exists—as an occupier, a colonizer, and ultimately, as an apartheid state—right? Is there another solution, involving a single, democratic state?

For decades, the ideas put forward by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” have shaped the way that many Israelis have approached their relationship with the Palestinians. Jabotinsky, the ideological forefather of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing Likud party, believed that it was naïve to think that the native Arabs would ever accept what he identified as “Zionist colonization.” Thus, he concluded, the only way that the Zionist project could succeed was through the use of force—“an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.”

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Help Your Overwhelmed, Stressed-Out Team - Harvard Business Review

Is your team stressed out? These days, everyone seems overwhelmed and way too busy. But even when your team members have a lot on their plates, they don’t have to sacrifice their health or happiness. What can you do to reduce your team’s stress? How can you help them focus on what really needs to get done?

Focus your team on the things that matterThe first step, says Davey, is to identify the unique contribution your team makes to the organization. Begin by asking, “What does the company expect from my team that no other group can accomplish?” Don’t answer this alone in your office. Involve your team. Once you all agree on your team’s purpose, it becomes the guiding principle for how everyone should spend their time and the litmus test for what work team members should take on and what they should let go.

Edit their workloadEvaluate each project based on whether or not it’s in what Davey calls “the sweet spot” — what you’ve previously identified as your group’s unique purpose, what they’re good at, and what’s important to the larger goals of the organization. “It’s the manager’s responsibility to develop an action plan that allows everyone to be more productive and to insulate their teams from low-priority work that may trickle down from senior management,” she says. When a new assignment comes your way, don’t automatically say yes. “Remember to consider each project with an eye to whether or not it takes advantage of what your team, and only your team, has to offer,” Morgenstern says.

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