© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Covid-19: bring on effective treatments

AS far as the Covid pandemic is concerned, what I’m wishing for most of all is a major breakthrough in treatment. Something that will nullify the virus and prevent whatever over-reactive immune responses cause the worst effects in those susceptible. Ideally, like the treatment being explored by the Doherty Institute in Australia, it will be adaptable to deal with variants and with similar viruses that might erupt in future. I particularly want this to happen because: A) it will save lives and let society get back to ‘normal’, and B) it will mean (I hope) that…

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Back to flattening the curve

This round of Covid-19 has got me thinking about how things were when it began. When we speculated - wrongly - that the virus was easily transmissible from surfaces, that the early strain was extremely contagious and that it might take years to find a vaccine. Back then all the talk was of "flattening the curve", which meant we assumed most of us were going to be exposed to the virus but we hoped that by being careful we could keep the numbers of infected people from skyrocketing all at once. Our goal was to stop…

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Read more about the article We are all epidemiologists
Graphic from Rasmussen University

We are all epidemiologists

These days, it seems, everybody is an epidemiologist. If only. If only we could all adopt the habit of thinking in terms of population health - which is what epidemiologists do - then life would definitely be a lot better for a great many of us. But population health can be a little tricky to fully grasp, I find, and even trickier to use as the basis for personal decision-making. The tricky side of population health has been brought to the top of my mind recently by a lot of articles about the efficacy of vaccines,…

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