There is a widespread belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased global income inequality, reducing per capita incomes by more in poor countries than in rich. This supposition is reasonable but false. Rich countries have experienced more deaths per head than have poor countries; their better health systems, higher incomes, more capable governmentsand better preparednessnotwithstanding. The US did worse than some rich countries, but better than severalothers.Countries with more deaths saw larger declines in income. There wasthus not only no trade-off between lives and income; fewerdeaths meant more income. As a result, per capita incomes fell by more in higher-income countries. Country by country, international income inequality decreased.When countries are weightedby population, international income inequality increased, not because the poorest countries diverged from the richest countries, but because China—no longer a poor country—had few deaths and positive economic growth, pullingit away frompoorcountries. That these findingsare aresult of the pandemic is supportedby comparing global inequality using IMF forecastsin October 2019 and October 2020.

COVID-19 and global income inequality

Schools operating in person have seen scant transmission of the coronavirus, particularly when masks and distancing are employed, but some indoor athletics have led to infections and should be curtailed if schools want to operate safely, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in papers published Tuesday.

CDC finds scant spread of coronavirus in schools with precautions in place

Data from across the UK government and devolved administrations highlight the effects of the pandemic on society and the economy.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) in charts: What we learned over the past month

10.31234/osf.io/srv6t

Despite the availability of multiple safe vaccines, vaccine hesitancy may present a challenge to successful control of the COVID-19 pandemic. As with many human behaviors, people's vaccine acceptance may be affected by their beliefs about whether others will accept a vaccine (i.e., descriptive norms). However, information about these descriptive norms may have different effects depending on people's baseline beliefs and the relative importance of conformity, social learning, and free-riding. Here, using a large, pre-registered, randomized experiment (N=305,694) embedded in an international survey, we show that accurate information about descriptive norms can substantially increase intentions to accept a vaccine for COVID-19. These positive effects (e.g., reducing by 5% the fraction of people who are "unsure" or more negative about accepting a vaccine) are largely consistent across the 23 included countries, but are concentrated among people who were otherwise uncertain about accepting a vaccine. Providing this normative information in vaccine communications partially corrects individuals' apparent underestimation of how many other people will accept a vaccine. These results suggest that public health communications should present information about the widespread and growing intentions to accept COVID-19 vaccines.

Surfacing norms to increase vaccine acceptance

10.1136/bmj.n327

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 will only slow if people who test positive for the virus self-isolate. But expecting them to do so is a bigger ask than governments seem to realise. Chris Stokel-Walker reports

Covid-19: Why test and trace will fail without support for self-isolation

As the pace of the race to the vaccine becomes less salient, equal access to vaccines will become a more prominent issue

Israel’s vaccination rollout: short term success, but questions for the long run