Douglas Hartley was dismayed when the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK and he was forced to stop providing cochlear implant surgery – a procedure performed on deaf children to allow them to hear. While Hartley knew the risks he and his colleagues faced in performing this aerosol-generating operation during the outbreak of a deadly airborne virus, he also knew that if he didn’t provide implants at a specific time in a child’s development, they may lose the opportunity to hear and develop language skills entirely.

So he and his colleagues decided to find a way to protect themselves from harm and get back into the operating theatre. In a longread for The Conversation, Hartley explains how his team went from being banned from performing surgery at all to creating a brand new form of PPE using safety goggles, a respirator and a surgical tent, resuming vital procedures within a matter of weeks.

How worried should we be about recent reports of people getting coronavirus twice? Sheena Cruikshank breaks down how reinfection can happen, and why it might sometimes be worse the second time around.

And while many of us are still working from home and taking meetings via Zoom, new research has shown women still faced sexist demands at work related to their appearance during lockdown. Oddly enough, author David Foster Wallace saw our disenchantment with video meetings coming in his totemic novel, Infinite Jest.

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