Justin Fox

How many people in the US have contracted the coronavirus that causes Covid-19? According to the semi-official confirmed-case numbers gathered from state governments by the Covid Tracking Project, it’s a bit over 13 million. Everybody knows that number is an undercount. Early in the pandemic,…

There’s a very good chance that, by the time President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20, the Covid-19 pandemic will be on the retreat. In the meantime, it can still wreak an awful lot of havoc. The vaccine that Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE announced some very positive news about is not…

When White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx went to Bismarck, North Dakota, late last month, she wasn’t thrilled with what she saw. “Over the last 24 hours, as we were here and we were in your grocery stores and in your restaurants and frankly even in your hotels, this is the least…

When it came time in 1787 to set the rules for choosing a president of the US, three of the principal authors of the Constitution — James Madison, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson — argued that the best approach, the one most likely to inspire public confidence and national feeling, would be a…

The third-quarter gross domestic product number is coming out Thursday morning, and it’s going to be huge. The median of the economic forecasts collected by Bloomberg calls for a 29.9% annualized real GDP gain. This would be the biggest quarterly GDP gain on record, with the previous high of 16…

In May, Census Bureau survey-takers started asking Americans if they were working at home because of the coronavirus, and 35.4% of employed persons said yes. That percentage dropped in subsequent months, but as data released as part of Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics…

I’m writing these words at my desk in a large open-plan office in midtown Manhattan. Bold, no? OK, not that bold. The office is mostly empty, and I can get here easily by bike. Plus, hardly anybody in New York City has Covid-19 right now. That may be changing, but for the moment the risks of…

Covid-19 is especially hard on the old and frail, with 79% of the deaths attributed to the disease in the US among those 65 and older and 94% among people with at least one “comorbidity” such as diabetes, dementia, obesity or hypertension. This has led some people to argue that most of the…

Covid-19 the disease has mostly spared children’s lives, but it is widely expected that the measures taken to slow its spread and the economic dislocation that has followed in its wake will have all sorts of negative consequences for them. A team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…

Like a lot of countries in East and Southeast Asia, Thailand has done a pretty spectacular job of controlling the coronavirus pandemic. There have been just 3,446 confirmed cases of the disease, and 58 deaths, in a country of nearly 70 million inhabitants. Its per-capita Covid-19 death toll is less…