Disease

Here is a general rule of thumb: every day of bed rest is worth three or more days of recovery. And you can modify those days if the patient is elderly, and more so when he/she is frail.

Viruses are simple organisms; the medical school metaphor is that of a syringe, a capsule with a spike that injects its genetic material into a cell, taking over that cell's machinery to reproduce.

Face masks are an important way to limit new COVID-19 infections, but since mask wearing has become politicized and the subject of derision in some areas, we questioned whether additional personal characteristics might be important.

First, let me get this off my chest. What is the value of these articles, especially those purporting to show no more significant deaths in 2020 than 2019? Will that mean that COVID-19 is a hoax, perpetrated for some ulterior motive?

In that top row, we can see some stratification by risk; the more likely a group perceives their risk, the more likely to get vaccinated. With one very concerning exception, Black Americans.

One of the risks of being alive is getting infected with a nasty microorganism. The coronavirus pandemic has proven that, despite the triumph of biomedical science over many common ailments, some diseases are nearly impossible to stop.

Let's say that there was an upper respiratory bug going around. If you caught it life wouldn't exactly be nirvana, but after a few days in bed with a low-grade fever, stuffy nose, and cough you'd be back to work.

Vaccines must be rigorously tested before they are deployed en masse. The reason is that vaccines can have unpredictable, unintended effects.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked a news coverage of COVID-19 over the past year using textural analysis - where they looked at the tone, tenor, and words of negativity.

How many particles of COVID-19 you are infected with, the viral load, and for how long they may appear in our breath or fluids, viral shedding, are reasonable measures of how able a person is to transmit the virus to another.