1 . My son, Toby, 17 months old, has just tested positive for COVID-19. He is the first in our household to test positive, and all the information provided for people in this situation is designed for adults who are(or should be) concerned about protecting their families. Toby, obviously, cannot comprehend such advice. He cannot keep a distance from everybody else, or eat and wash in a separate room. We called 911, and the medic we spoke to agreed that the official guidance didn’t really apply to our situation.

Indeed. Not much we can do. So, here we are, trapped within our four walls with a little baby infected with COVID-19, who continues to climb on us, spit in our faces, love us and hug us. It seems inevitable that we, and our elder son, are going to get COVID now. Not much we can do.

My first reaction, after absorbing his diagnosis, was to cook sausages. I didn’t even know that was my comfort food of choice. Perhaps an afternoon crisis would have caused a different cooking desire? Anyway, a full stomach helped me take stock. Yes, it may now be inevitable that we’re going to contract the very virus we’ve spent a year avoiding, but as long as we don’t contract it at the same time, then, hopefully, one other of us will be available to look after our kids (thus answering my five-year-old’s most pressing concern: “…but who will make the pudding?”).

So, to minimise transmission, we’ve opened all the windows. And we’ve decided to wear face coverings whenever we are with Toby. This decision has been insignificant to him—I imagine he literally cannot remember life before masks—but for me, it’s distressing. I’ve become accustomed to wearing masks in supermarkets and coffee shops, of course, but to actually walk around with half my face covered in my own house is quite another matter—it is telling me that my home has been infected, That it’s no longer a safe space.

And so it was, when I sat down to write this column, that I ended up writing about COVID, which is probably the last thing you wanted to read. Sorry about that. COVID has coloured my thoughts today, even though I know that my wife and children will be fine, and that really we should just be grateful we haven’t passed it on to my grandmother.

I predict there will be more sausages in the morning.

3 . In the early days of covid-19, the tech industry was consumed by a sense of excitement. With billions of people locked down at home, work and play were shifting online. Many hoped that the new normal would spark a huge productivity boom as firms digitized and workers spent less time commuting. The excitement was most evident in stock-markets, where any firm related to this trend saw its share price surge. The tech-heavy NASDAQ rose by 88%.

The crazy has ended. Today the lockdown lunacy index(疯狂指数) — which includes Netflix, a streaming service; Peloton, a maker of fancy exercise bikes; Robin-hood, a stock-trading app; Shopify, and e-commerce platform; and Zoom, a videoconferencing firm - has fallen by more than 80% from its peak.

How worrying is this return to Earth? To be sure, some of it reflects gloomier prospects for the global economy. And it is disappointing that two years of digitization and remote work have not provided clear evidence of a productivity boom. Yet there are reasons still to be techno-optimistic. Much of the early enthusiasm may simply have been focused on the wrong types of firm. Though the pandemic darlings have fizzled, the shift towards ever greater digitization continues. The true winners are not the flashy consumer-tech firms, but the companies that provide the infrastructure to enable this shift.

Look beyond the boom and bust of consumer tech, and you see the real successes. The market for the infrastructure technology that underpins people’s daily lives, such as cloud computing, cyber-security and digital payments, is booming. The cloud-computing industry is expected to grow to almost $500bn this year, up from $243bn in 2019. Amazon’s cloud offering, the largest in the world, is still growing at 33% each year. It accounted for three-quarters of the firm’s operating income over the past 12 months, and is propping up the tech giant’s ailing e-commerce business. Its closest rivals are the cloud services of Microsoft and Google. Their annual sales are growing by 40% and 36%, respectively.

Cloudification has created new demands for cybersecurity, another tech winner. The combined revenue at the three largest listed cybersecurity firms has almost doubled since the start of the pandemic. Their market capitalisation has tripled, and has come down only a fraction since the start of the year. Digital payments are another bright spot, thanks to lockdowns and social distancing. Three-quarters of iPhone owners use Apply Pay, up from half in 2019, and nine out of ten American retailers now accept it as a payment method. Almost 200m people in India and China have used some form of digital payment for the first time since the onset of covid.

The bubble may have burst on the pandemic’s darlings, but the drumbeat of digitization continues. The less obvious technologies that provide the underlying infrastructure for the shift are the true beneficiaries of covid. Whether these will fuel a productivity boost one day remains to be seen. But there was more going on during the pandemic than lockdown crazy.

Will the coronavirus bike boom lead to greener cities?

The coronavirus pandemic (新冠疫情) has led to an explosion of interest in bikes and biking. With the pandemic     1     (continue) to spread, people began looking for ways of getting around that didn’t involve crowded forms of public transportation. Because biking happens in the open air, and the chance of catching the coronavirus while riding     2     (be) very low, biking is seen as a safe way to travel.

In many places, governments are encouraging bike use. In Italy, for example, the government itself is offering up to $575 for people to buy new bikes, while France will chip in $55 to help riders with their bike repair costs.

Families appreciate biking, too. With schools     3     (close), and kids unable to hang out with their friends, biking is a welcome activity. For many people,     4     encourages them to ride bikes is that biking is fun.

But bikes are also practical. Experts say that for people in some cities, roughly 60% of their trips can be made by bike. Many cities are seeing this as an opportunity     5     (make) their streets safer and greener. Cities around the world are adding miles and miles of bike lanes     6     their streets to encourage biking.

New York says it will close off up to 100 miles of roads so they     7     be used by bikers and walkers. Oakland, California plans to close 74 miles to traffic,     8     accounts for almost 10% of the streets in the city. Paris has set up over 400 miles of new bike lanes. Cars and trucks     9     (ban) from 75 miles of streets in Bogota, Colombia.

    10     many of these bikes lanes are only being added for the time being, if changes in biking habits become permanent, they could seriously cut down car traffic and help make cities a lot greener.

Welcome to the YOLO Economy

Something strange is happening to the exhausted, type-A millennial workers of America. After a year spent hunched (弯腰驼背) over their MacBooks,     1     back-to-back Zooms, they are deciding to risk it all. Some are     2     stable jobs to start a new business, and others are stepping off the career treadmill altogether.

If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s “YOLO”—“you only live once,” an acronym (首字母缩略词)     3     by the rapper Drake a decade ago and used by cheerful risk-takers ever since. It has come to characterize the attitude that has     4     a certain type of bored office worker in recent months.

To be clear: The pandemic is not over, and millions of Americans are still experiencing     5     for the loss of jobs and loved ones. Not everyone can afford to throw     6     to the wind. But for a growing number of people with financial cushions and in-demand skills, the dread and anxiety of the past year are giving way to a new kind of professional fearlessness.

“It feels like we’ve been so     7     into careers for the past decade, and this is our opportunity to switch it up.” said Nate Moseley, 29, a buyer at a major clothing retailer. “The idea of going right back to the pre-Covid setup sounds so unappealing after this past year,” he said. “If not now, when will I ever do this?” If “languishing (受煎熬)” is 2021’s     8     emotion, YOLOing may be the year’s defining work force trend. A recent Microsoft survey found that more than 40 percent of workers globally were considering leaving their jobs this year.

    9     of employees’ quitting jobs, bosses are trying to boost morale (士气) and prevent burnout. LinkedIn recently gave the majority of its employees a paid week off.

Raises and time off may persuade some employees to stay put. But for others, stasis (停滞) is the problem, and the only solution is     10     change.

8 . As the coronavirus pandemic shuts down public life on the streets, a new kind of life is opening up online. Many people who are_______ enough to still have their jobs are working from home, often experimenting with video chats and virtual offices for the first time. The outbreak could change the internet as _______ as it is changing our handwashing habits.

Our range of _______ apps has already started to shift. Almost overnight, the video conferencing app Zoom has gone from insignificance to necessity. People are using it to hold meetings with colleagues, teach university classes and have quarantine (隔离) —compliant cocktail hours with friends. For those who don’t want to be “Zoom-bombed”, where a(n) _______ person joins the video call by exploiting bugs in the app, there are video features you can use in Skype, Google Hangouts and Discord.

Popular streaming service Twitch, typically used to watch gaming live, has also had a _______ in fortunes. It has suddenly become a(n)_______ performance space, with musicians, writers and comedians all using it to broadcast live shows that they have had to cancel—and _______ Twitch’s tipping and subscription functions, they can get paid for it, too.

To _______ the experience of inviting people over for a movie night, there are countless apps for watching media online with friends. Though it isn’t as good as a(n)_______visit, these gatherings have eased my loneliness and made the days more bearable. Though we have had online video chat for years, it has always been a sideshow of most social media platforms. Now it is moving to the __________ of our internet experience because it is connecting us with people we would ordinarily see in our day-to-day lives. We want to feel like we are in the room with people we love and depend on, and seeing their faces makes the ________ feel more official and real.

Until recently, the internet was mostly a place of leisure. We went there for entertainment, news and catching up with friends, both distant and imaginary. Yes, it has always been a ________ for some of us, but now millions more people are using apps like Slack and Asana to talk to colleagues all day and organize projects. When the time comes that the majority of us rely on the internet for work, it is________that we will have to take it more seriously.

Of course, the internet could also become an even more powerful means of________ for the millions of people who have lost work in an economic apocalypse (灾难) that is almost as terrifying as covid-19 itself. With nothing to lose, shut in our homes, we may be subjected to extremist manipulation.

After the pandemic is over, the internet won’t feel as much like a(n)________ field any more. It will be as real as a pay cheque—and that might actually make us demand more accountability from our favourite social apps.

In a study comparing 46 severe COVID-19 patients with 460 matched controls, researchers found the mental impacts of severe COVID-19 six months later can be the     1     to aging 20 years—going from 50 to 70 years old—or losing 10 IQ points.

“Cognitive impairment is common to a wide range of neurological disorders, including dementia (痴呆), and even routine aging, but the patterns we saw—the cognitive ‘fingerprint’ of COVID-19—was     2     from all of these, ” says neuroscientist David Menon from the University of Cambridge in the UK, who was senior author of the study.

The experiment involved 46 people who’d gone to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge as a result of COVID-19 between March and July 2020. An average of six months after their infection, researchers     3     them using a testing tool called Cognitron to see how they were doing in areas such as memory, attention, reasoning, as well as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The researchers compared their results against a matched control group of 460 people. These results were then     4     to see how far they deviated from expected scores for their age and demographic (群体), based on 66, 008 members of the general public.

The results showed that those who’d survived severe COVID were less accurate and had slower response times than the general public.

The magnitude of cognitive loss was similar to the effects of aging between 50 and 70 years of age-or losing 10 IQ points.

The somewhat good news is that, upon follow up, there were some     5     of recovery—but it was gradual at best. “We followed some patients up as late as ten months after their acute infection, so were able to see a very slow improvement, ” says Menon.

“While this was not statistically     6    , it is at least heading in the right direction, but it is very possible that some of these individuals will never fully recover.”

This study only looked at the more extreme end of     7     patients, but there are plenty of other studies showing that even ‘mild’ cases can cause similar cognitive impacts. What’s still not fully understood is why and how the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes this cognitive     8    .

Previous research has shown that during severe COVID, the brain decreases glucose (葡萄糖) consumption in the frontoparietal network (额顶网络), which is     9     in attention, problem solving, and working memory. It’s also known that the virus can directly affect the brain.

But the researchers suggest the likely culprit isn’t direct infection, but a combination of factors: including reduced oxygen or blood supply to the brain; clotting of vessels; and microscopic bleeds. There’s also     10     evidence that the body’s own immune and inflammatory response may be having a significant impact on the brain.

The research has been published in eClinical Medicine.

Global health authorities are investigating unexplained severe hepatitis (肝炎) cases in children that have been recorded in more than a dozen countries worldwide.

    1     British health officials first sounded the alarm about the mysterious illness, which has largely affected children aged under 10 years old, in early April, about 190 cases of severe liver inflammation of unknown origin have been identified around the world.

Andrea Ammon, ECDC director, said investigations about what     2     (lie) behind the outbreak were “ongoing” but “the exact cause of this hepatitis still remains unknown”.

She said early findings “point towards a link to adenovirus (腺病毒) infection”. Adenovirus — a group of viruses typically     3     (associate) with symptoms, such as a persistent cough, conjunctivitis or diarrhoea — rarely leads to hepatitis in healthy children.

One possible factor, said Ammon, was that children having “little exposure” to adenovirus as a result of decreased social mixing     4     Covid-19 restrictions was contributing to more severe outcomes. However, she cautioned that in terms of explaining     5     the cases were emerging now: “it’s all speculation”.

Three-quarters of the British children     6     were tested for adenovirus after falling ill with the unexplained hepatitis returned positive results, according to data from the UK Health Security Agency published on Monday. The UK     7     (record) 111 cases of the illness by April 21. The US, Israel and 10 other European nations have also recorded cases.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, told a news conference that 17 children had required liver transplants and one child died after contracting the illness.

He said symptoms included abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, jaundice, severe acute hepatitis, and increased levels of liver enzymes. However, the viruses that commonly caused acute viral hepatitis had not been detected in     8     of the cases.

Adenovirus had been detected in at least 74 cases and this, and other hypotheses, were being explored, Tedros said.

Scientists are also investigating whether adenovirus combined with previous coronavirus infection or simultaneous Covid-19 infection     9     be behind the increase in severe hepatitis.

But health officials have ruled out the possibility that traditional types of hepatitis viruses — A to E — are the cause of the outbreak, or that Covid-19 vaccination is the thing     10     (blame).