The New York Times, June 10, 2021 (with Jonathan Corum and Sui-Wee Lee)
Each month brings another grim harvest. When I last sent out a newsletter on May 1, the United States had suffered 64,203 deaths from Covid-19. Today the total has reached 108,708. As researchers probe the overall death rate, the full toll of the pandemic continues to come into sharper focus.
Countries and states that went into lockdown over the past couple months are now starting to loosen their controls. It seems as if a lot of people think this means that the pandemic is over. But there are still plenty of new covid-19 cases every day, and these folks could potentially infect a lot of other people if they board a bus, teach a yoga class, join a choir practice, or do any number of other things that have been shown to let the virus spread quickly from person to person. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 5, 2020”
The New York Times, June 3, 2020
Why do some people infected with the coronavirus suffer only mild symptoms, while others become deathly ill?
Geneticists have been scouring our DNA for clues. Now, a study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
Variations at two spots in the human genome are associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid-19, the researchers found. One of these spots includes the gene that determines blood types.
Continue reading “Genes May Leave Some People More Vulnerable to Severe Covid-19”
The New York Times, June 1, 2020
A lot of people are reading scientific papers for the first time these days, hoping to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re one of them, be advised the scientific paper is a peculiar literary genre that can take some getting used to. And also bear in mind that these are not typical times for scientific publishing.
It is hard to think of another moment in history when so many scientists turned their attention to one subject with such speed. In mid-January, scientific papers began trickling out with the first details about the new coronavirus. By the end of the month, the journal Nature marveled that over 50 papers had been published.
Continue reading “How You Should Read Coronavirus Studies, or Any Science Paper”
The New York Times, May 27, 2020
The first confirmed coronavirus infections in Europe and the United States, discovered in January, did not ignite the epidemics that followed, according to a close analysis of hundreds of viral genomes.
Instead, the outbreaks plaguing much of the West began weeks later, the study concluded. The revised timeline may clarify nagging ambiguities about the arrival of the pandemic.
For example, while President Trump has frequently claimed that a ban on travelers from China prevented the epidemic from becoming much worse, the new data suggest that the virus that started Washington State’s epidemic arrived roughly two weeks after the ban was imposed on Feb. 2.
Continue reading “Coronavirus Epidemics Began Later Than Believed, Study Concludes”