Skype has had some privacy concerns in the past, most recently when it came to light that Microsoft, which owns Skype, was allowing its contract workers in China to listen in to Skype calls with no security measures in place. It has since changed this practice, but it is a good reminder that even companies with decent security practices in place can handle your private data and conversations sloppily.

it will involve many heart-wrenching decisions along the way.

when ventilators are withdrawn from patients dependent on them, they will “die within minutes”.

staff, supplies and equipment—are directed to the patients who have the greatest chances of successful treatment, and who have the greatest life expectancy.

In Italy there are reports of doctors weeping in hospital hallways because of the choices they have to make.

If a young patient arrives needing a ventilator, and none are available, there is a chance that one will be removed from someone else who is identified as being less likely to survive.

a simple technique. “When I go out now, I imagine that everyone is smoking, and I pick my path to get the least exposure to that smoke,” she told me. If that’s the case, I asked her, is it irrational to hold your breath when another person walks past you and you don’t have enough space to move away? “It’s not irrational; I do that myself,” she said. “I don’t know if it makes a difference, but in theory it could. It’s like when you walk through a cigarette plume.”

sampled the air in various public areas, and showed that the virus was either undetectable or found in extremely low concentrations. The only exceptions were two crowded sites, one in front of a department store and another next to a hospital. Even then, each cubic meter of air contained fewer than a dozen virus particles. (No one knows the infectious dose of SARS-CoV-2—that is, the number of particles needed to start an infection—but for the original SARS virus of 2003, one study estimated somewhere between 43 and 280.)

Finding viral RNA is like finding a fingerprint at a crime scene—the culprit was once there, but might be long gone.

The RNA was on obvious places such as bed rails and toilets, but also on harder-to-reach spots such as ventilation grates, window ledges, and the floors beneath the beds. The RNA even lingered in the air; using air-samplers, the team detected viral RNA floating more than six feet away from the patients, and even in the hallways just outside the patients’ rooms.

the virus is “definitely borne by air.” The better questions are: How far does the virus move? And is it stable and concentrated enough at the end of its journey to harm someone’s health?

exhalations, sneezes, and coughs unleash swirling, fast-moving clouds of both droplets and aerosols, which travel many meters farther than older studies predicted. Both kinds of glob also matter over shorter distances: Someone standing next to a person with COVID-19 is more likely to be splashed by droplets and to inhale aerosols.