Posts tagged “pandemic”
If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, right?
Your Local Epidemiologist critiques a graph of daily covid case projections: I do disagree with this graph hitting 1 million cases. We don’t have the testing capacity to record this many cases. We will run out of tests, reagents, and plastic. Lab capacity is finite. We would hit a plateau in case reporting, while the […]
We don’t just need better ventilation because of covid
Because while we are investing heavily in vaccination, the sense that the pandemic is going to “end” at some point in the not-to-distant future is leading to an underinvestment in other structural solutions we are going to need – a revolution in filtration and ventilation so that buildings do not readily spread disease and free, […]
Asymptomatic covid is widespread and dangerous
When people get covid but don’t have symptoms, they spread the virus, don’t develop much immunity to future infection, and can get long covid. Most countries have done very limited asymptomatic testing and most research is obviously on symptomatic people, so it’s hard to know how many people this group includes. This meta-analysis summarizes what […]
We could make better choices
Vaccines are thought to be the best available solution for controlling the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, the emergence of vaccine-resistant strains may come too rapidly for current vaccine developments to alleviate the health, economic and social consequences of the pandemic. To quantify and characterize the risk of such a scenario, we created a SIR-derived model […]
Good news / bad news
Good news: Covid may help us understand how Alzheimer’s works! Bad news: Covid is making us stupid Scientists have long known that areas of the brain involved with smell and taste also are involved in memory, thinking, planning, and mood, and public health officials are increasingly concerned about the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on brain […]
All Plagues Are Political | The Tyee
Alex de Waal’s myth-shattering new book deconstructs COVID-19 and two centuries of epidemics. Five deadly misconceptions. — Read on thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/07/09/All-Plagues-Are-Political/ Great to see these incredibly important ideas filtering out of academia.
A pandemic diary
Pandemic excerpts from from my 2020 journal February 5, 2020 They’re doing lots of quarantines for coronavirus. I wish we took the flu so seriously. March 15, 2020 Coronavirus – covid-19 – has spread basically everywhere now. It’s definitely a disease of the old and infirm, though young people aren’t invulnerable. I’ve been self-isolating for […]