When COVID-19 hit Yemen’s Aden, it hit hard. Soon after the southern city’s first official cases were announced in late April, some estimated that one in four had already been infected. Dr Ammar Derwish, a young physician, witnessed this first hand as his friends, neighbours, and family members began to fall ill “one by one, like dominoes”. He did what he could to help, buying his own supplies, making house calls, and fielding desperate calls and texts at all hours of the night. And he wrote it all down, even as he got sick, tracking the spread of the pandemic in meticulous detail. Readers around the world related to his honest depiction of community, confusion, anxiety, grief, religion, and love. The diary, carefully illustrated by Adly Mirza, was the winner of the One World Media Coronavirus Reporting Award. If you’ve got some extra time over the holidays it is well worth your while, for a very personal, at times emotional look at how life continues during a pandemic.