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?
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.)
Stories of "Chicken Little" and how we "model" our world. Should we always be the center of those models? In our moment of existential dread, new data seems to suggest we got the dinosaur extinction wrong. Finally, in six months, we will have our first national election in the time of COVID-19; how should we prepare?
Among the many lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is how cumbersome one‐size‐fits‐all regulations, administered by an impersonal bureaucracy, hamper a rapid and flexible response to an evolving public health emergency. The U.S. Navy Medical Corps provides us with a recent example.
Twitter captures geolocation data in about 3% of tweets. Two researchers from Johns Hopkins released a report on the changes in our social mobility. How much we are traveling, based on that dataset?
For a simple drug, there sure is a lot of controversy surrounding hydroxychloroquine -- a malaria drug that's one of a handful of repurposed drugs being evaluated as potential anti-coronavirus treatments. However, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) doesn't look especially promising. Dr. Katherine Seley-Radtke, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, explains.
Vaccines, antivirals, and antibodies are all possible strategies to treat the novel coronavirus. When will these potential COVID-19 therapies be available? And will they work?
We will soon be approaching the moment when, despite all of our best efforts, we'll be one ventilator shy of what's needed. It's now time to share what critical-care physicians and nurses have known for some time, and what they're planning to do when that moment arrives.
In war, the first casualty is truth. Apparently, the same is true of pandemics. Some people are now pretending that they saw the novel coronavirus coming long before anybody else, including scientists and public health officials. In their revisionist history, they were beacons of clarity while others were "COVID deniers."
Those are the words of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, describing the "twist of fate" that finds us awaiting personal protective equipment, ventilators and pharmaceuticals manufactured -- yes -- in China.
It has been another tough week. And the constant drumbeat of media, print, televised, or heard is both drawing me in and pushing me away. So, this week, one article to draw us toward COVID-19, and the rest to provide a little respite. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Children's Health Defense says governments and corporations are using the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) to advance a "global immunization agenda." The anti-vaccine group claims that our leaders just needed the right pandemic as a pretext to goad us into getting vaccines. This is a clever story. It's also false.