COVID-19 and Coronaviruses

Meghan O'Rourke says long COVID and other chronic illnesses put an unwieldy burden on patients, who have to testify to the reality of their own illness. Her new book, The Invisible Kingdom, chronicles her personal struggle to find diagnoses for her own nerve pain, brain fog, extreme fatigue and other symptoms."When you're at the edge of medical knowledge, the lack of evidence is treated as evidence that the problem is you and your mind," O'Rourke says. "I felt, in a sense, kind of locked away in a room like a 19th-century hysteric."

Though he fully expected to be infected with COVID, Dr. Thomas Fisher says he was committed to providing medical care to the Black community on Chicago's South Side. His new book is The Emergency.

When the COVID crisis hit in 2020, the federal government needed far more N95 masks and other protective equipment than it had — so it began awarding contracts to companies promising to provide them, often at a steep mark-up. J. David McSwane, a ProPublica reporter and author of the new book Pandemic, Inc: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick, says a shocking number of those companies had no experience in providing medical equipment.

Dr. Farzon Nahvi spent the first few months of the pandemic as an emergency room physician in Manhattan. He talks about trying to improvise treatments during that time. His new book is Code Gray.