The numbers associated with COVID-19, its infectivity, hospital admissions, deaths, are all being studied like tea leaves for any pattern or trend. And the numbers vary quite a bit. Those variations are often ascribed to the veracity of the source or some underlying agenda of hope or fearmongering, and occasionally to a mathematical error.

For those wanting to see the relative contribution of traffic and power generation to air pollution, consider this picture of Los Angeles. LA sits in a basin surrounded by mountains, I grew up there and can remember days when you can actually see the mountains.

Different countries may appear to have different death rates, but only because they have applied different sampling and reporting policies to their accounting efforts. It's not necessarily because they are managing the virus any better, or that the virus has infected fewer, or more, people.

The biology of the virus will help us learn how to fight it.

How well we do in assessing the economic outcomes of the COVID-19 lockdown will determine how well we do in the next match. And there will be a next match.

Q: Where do you go to find overpaid, under-sane professors, talking about chemistry when they know nothing about it?
A: MIT, the home of Dr. Stephanie Seneff, who has spent a career making up nonsense about glyphosate. And she's outdone herself this time: Glyphosate causes COVID. Nope, not kidding.

Without a doubt, our world is now quieter since sheltering began, and we can imagine that the air smells sweeter. These are good things but purchased at the terrible costs of COVID-19 suffering and death and devastation of the global economy. The environmental scientist in me thought about lessons to be learned from our present situation.

Fred Singer was an impressive scientist with a great list of achievements. He will be missed.

A new review article published in The Lancet concludes that school closures are ineffective at controlling coronavirus epidemics. What else could be wrong with the conventional wisdom about COVID-19?

In the frantic fight to get an effective antiviral into the hands of a terrified world, there's a new kid on the block. This one is called N-hydroxycytidine and it's rather interesting. NHC is a potent inhibitor of coronavirus replication in cells, it's really easy to synthesize and it'll protect you from the virus. (That is, if you're a lab rodent.)