It is far easier to view the past, with 20-20 hindsight, than to be able to predict the future. That's especially true for COVID-19, as it continues to challenge the human race.
Disease
In addition to AstraZeneca’s self-inflicted injuries in misreporting its vaccine efficacy and conducting the initial Phase III trials, it’s now contending with off-again, on-again concerns about clotting. Can we talk?
Mainstream news outlets have gone after COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with a passion. But when it comes to equally important science topics, they have no problem ignoring evidence and promoting conspiratorial nonsense. This blatant hypocrisy causes confusion and fuels the public's skepticism of science more broadly.
Whether you call it pandemic waves or surges, there’s little doubt that we’re in the midst of one. It’s not necessarily as virulent as the initial wave, but it's problematic nonetheless. Are we opening up too soon, over-relaxing our vigilance? A new study suggests the surges are linked to behavior – not ours, but the virus’.
It’s been a year since we've focused on the greying of hair. The pandemic may have caused you to lose more of it than normal, either by pulling it out in frustration or because of stress. Yes, stress can cause hair loss (at least in mice).
For many of us, over the past year we’ve read like never before. In addition to many more articles, we read from many more sources. Here is a bit of information from a new research letter in the JAMA Network.
COVID-19 continues to dominate the nightly news and play upon the global stage. While the probability of personal infection remains low at about 10%, the consequences are dire and there is a need to place these continually recurring statistics into context.
It remains a mystery to me why workers in “the business” of healthcare would be hesitant to be vaccinated. After all, they have high-risk exposure daily.
AstraZeneca just cannot get out of its own way. The latest confusion over the company's data is the second unintentional, self-inflicted misstep, and all told it continues to generate concern.
The more protective our immunity is after being infected by COVID-19, the less likely we will be reinfected. A recent study from Denmark shows that our immune system does a pretty good job, but the vaccination might be a wee-bit better.
You would think that healthcare workers, those in “the business,” would be jumping at getting a COVID-19 vaccine – you would be wrong. Here are a few of the facts.
Most of the COVID-19 analyses and media report “milestones,” or instead use averaging to “smooth out” daily random variation. Data on single days lack a temporal context. But here we consider two topics of particular interest: systematic variations such as weekend effects; and COVID-19 infections that might have resulted from family gatherings on national holidays.