So, in adapting on the fly through March and April, the Spinach Bus partners took an ancient flower - evidence of cultivation goes back more than 1,000 years, and seed banks in the Netherlands, the heart of the global industry, have specimens grown continuously since the late 1500s - and ignored much of what had been done before in selling it.

— Mother’s Day Bouquets: How Five Friends Saved a Tulip Farm From Covid-19, Kirk Johnson in The New York Times

But like my friends and I, not everyone browsing Chatroulette is doing so alone-we flipped by the occasional scantily clad couple, the young person ignoring an offscreen parent’s command, or the roommates crowding around a screen, eager for a break from movie marathons and videogames. ‘We have nothing to do, we’re just here like, stuck in here,’ said Hugo, isolating with his roommates Joel and Ignacio in North Carolina. ‘It’s fun conversations. There’s some shit out there, but the people we’ve met… they’re pretty cool.’

— How to Talk to Strangers During Quarantine - VICE

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

— The real Lord of the Flies, Rutner Bregman in The Guardian

On the pathology:

What it does when it gets down to the lungs is similar in some respects to what respiratory viruses do, although much remains unknown. Like SARS-CoV and influenza, it infects and destroys the alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs that shuttle oxygen into the bloodstream. As the cellular barrier dividing these sacs from blood vessels break down, liquid from the vessels leaks in, blocking oxygen from getting to the blood. Other cells, including white blood cells, plug up the airway further. A robust immune response will clear all this out in some patients, but overreaction of the immune system can make the tissue damage worse. If the inflammation and tissue damage are too severe, the lungs never recover and the person dies or is left with scarred lungs, says Xiao. “From a pathological point of view, we don’t see a lot of uniqueness here.”

On the epidemiology:

“By far the most likely scenario is that the virus will continue to spread and infect most of the world population in a relatively short period of time,” says Stöhr, meaning one to two years. “Afterwards, the virus will continue to spread in the human population, likely forever.” Like the four generally mild human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 would then circulate constantly and cause mainly mild upper respiratory tract infections, says Stöhr. For that reason, he adds, vaccines won’t be necessary.

— Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic, David Cyranoski in Nature

My therapist used to tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. Our bodies and brains are consistently attuned to war, so we look paranoid or hypervigilant in peacetime. But in times of crisis, PTSD is an incredible survival mechanism that our genius bodies created to help us adapt.

— My PTSD can be a weight. But in this pandemic, it feels like a superpower., Stephanie Foo in Vox

The message is clear: The storage of empty vehicles is more important than the neighborhood’s fundamental mode of transport. Which is why some of the tensions that have flared during the coronavirus crisis-over runners using the sidewalk, or pedestrians using the bike lane-are particularly tragic. These confrontations are often ascribed to some personality flaw of the runner or pedestrian herself-she’s rude or entitled-rather than seen as an indictment of the misguided system that pits two people on a narrow sidewalk against each other in the first place. No one yells at a parked car, and the driver who scuttles by in the road gets a free pass, even as his driving imposes noise, pollution, and elevated climate risk upon those around him.

— The Pandemic Shows What Cities Have Surrendered to Cars, Tom Vanderbilt in The Atlantic