When I got my first dose of the Moderna shot back in the spring, I didn’t question the look and feel of the largish, black-and-white paper vaccine card that came along with the injection. I was so excited to get the vaccine that, frankly, the official U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine record I was handed could have been printed on a papyrus scroll for all I cared. But as the months have passed, and a flash of a vaccine record has more and more become a part of life, it’s become increasingly apparent that the current CDC design is—to put it bluntly—terrible.
When you use something daily, a phone or a credit card for instance, small inadequacies tend to add up. If something in such an object is a little wrong, a bit poorly thought out, you might not notice the first time you use it, but you’ll be all too aware of the flaw by the 10th or 20th time you take it out. That’s why professional designers put hundreds of hours into perfecting layouts of everything from headphones to staplers, obsessing over the smallest details.
Now that you’re often required to flash a vaccine card in all sorts of aspects of daily life, the glaring flaws of the current CDC design are becoming impossible to ignore. It’s too large to fit in most wallets, and the cardstock it’s printed on makes it easy prey for counterfeiters. If you’re caught in the rain, the handwritten medical information can smudge and become illegible, not to mention that it might be better to have that sensitive data encrypted behind a barcode or QR code anyway.
Over the past week or so, my colleagues Jeffrey Kluger and Jennifer Prandato set out to see what better alternatives might be possible. “It seems counterintuitive that we got everything right when it came to developing the vaccines in record time and with record effectiveness, and then dropped the ball when it came to the simplest step,” Jeffrey says. “We developed something nonportable, highly destructible, and highly forgeable. It just felt like we ran out of creative energy after developing the vaccines.”
Jeffrey and Jennifer engaged a series of professional designers, asking them to try and come up with better alternatives for what might be the most crucial new item in daily life. The results were striking not only for their creativity, but also in how they laid bare the inadequacy of the current vaccine card system. One designer opted for a plastic credit card-style layout, with QR codes that would allow it to be quickly scanned. Another laid out a folding card system with vaccine and booster information kept safe from the elements on the interior faces and raised braille lettering for the visually impaired throughout.
“You need people dedicated to design to do this kind of thing, as opposed to the CDC,” says Jeffrey. “It does the scientific work really well, but it doesn’t do the marketing work as well as it could or should.”
About 434.6 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of this morning, of which nearly 365.7 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 52% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
More than 214.6 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 8 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 4.4 million people have died. On August 26, there were 711,549 new cases and 10,762 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 4 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 38.3 million coronavirus cases as of 8 a.m. E.T. today. More than 633,500 people have died. On August 25, there were 161,331 new cases and 1,292 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Aug. 27, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against President Joe Biden’s eviction moratorium yesterday in a decision that split the court along ideological lines (the three liberal justices dissented). The majority wrote that the CDC had overstepped its limits in issuing the moratorium, and that it should be up to Congress to impose such a rule.
Long-term COVID symptoms could be more pervasive than we thought, according to the biggest-yet long-term study of people formerly hospitalized with COVID-19. Almost half of those surveyed were still experiencing at least one lingering COVID-19 symptom a full year after being struck by the illness, my colleague Alice Park reports. The study, released last night, also showed worrying evidence of lingering mental health effects from the virus, with nearly a third of former patients reporting anxiety or depression a year after their illness.
Earlier today, a Florida judge ruled against Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban on the state’s schools issuing their own mask mandates. “Parents' rights are important,” said Judge John Cooper in issuing the ruling, “but not without limitation on safety, reasonableness, and compelling state interest.” Anti-mandate lawyers are likely to appeal the decision.
A previous COVID-19 infection gives better immune protection against the Delta variant than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a new Israeli study, published as a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper on medRxiv this past Wednesday. Scientists stress that people absolutely should not attempt to infect themselves with the virus, reported Science. Vaccines are highly protective against hospitalization and death—infection by SARS-Cov-2 can cause both.
America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD), one of the major proponents of ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug being promoted as an unapproved and unproven COVID-19 treatment, has been accused of taking in hundreds of fees from users without delivering drug prescriptions it promised, according to an investigation by my colleague Vera Bergengruen. In many cases, those who used the service wrote in message boards about how their own or family members’ illnesses grew more dire as they waited in vain for drugs they believed would help.
Nearly 94% of Texas’s ICU beds are occupied as the state’s health care network strains to treat a tidal wave of COVID-19 patients, many of them unvaccinated, according to ABC News. “These patients are very unpredictable,” one doctor told ABC. “At one moment they look great and the next moment, they're dying.”
COVID-19 is hitting Native Hawaiians especially hard according to the Associated Press, with civil society leaders on the islands launching a PSA campaign urging the archipelago’s native population to get the jab. Hawaii’s overall vaccination rate is about 62%, but only about 40% of native Hawaiians are fully vaccinated.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Alejandro de la Garza and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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