Journalism is the first rough draft of history, they say, and there couldn’t be a better exhibit than this one here. It is truly astonishing how Ed Yong — who already wrote some of the most comprehensive articles on the pandemic — has managed to pull everything together into a, for now, definitive piece on the pandemic. It focuses on the USA and its failures, but most of what we writes is universal. So if you’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on what happened in the first half of 2020, this is your piece. One of the key takeaways for me: «The countries that fared better against Covid‑19 didn’t follow a universal playbook. Each nation succeeded because it did enough things right.» Read it now (available as audio, too).