On COVID-19 origins and conspiracies
At NRO Jim Geraghty has a piece, The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream, where he links to the piece in New York Magazine, The Lab-Leak Hypothesis: For decades, scientists have […]
Coronavirus and the experts
Trust the experts. Believe in science. These are literal mantras that are in the air today. But I have to be frank and admit that I do not trust the […]
COVID-19 at the beginning of the 2020 “Holiday Season”
Like most people I initially underestimated coronavirus. Unlike most people I have a blog where I can see what I actually thought. My first mention of coronavirus is on January […]
COVID-19 at the beginning of the 2020 “Holiday Season”
Like most people I initially underestimated coronavirus. Unlike most people I have a blog where I can see what I actually thought. My first mention of coronavirus is on January […]
Selection in E Asians due to coronavirus epidemics
The above map shows cumulative coronavirus cases. One of the things that I’m still confused by are some geographic patterns. For example, Thailand with 70 million people has had fewer […]
Alina Chan is credible
A question from long-time reader Riordan: Razib, I’ve been seeing this Twitter thread being passed around my Facebook circles yesterday: It relates to the curiosity of all of these #pangolinpapers […]
Has China won by beating coronavirus?
About three weeks ago the Chinese reported a few instances of community spread in Qingdao. Five days ago a story broke that there were now 13 individuals. The government said […]
Razib Khan corona-casting in the time of coronavirus
I recently talked about coronavirus with our old friend Kushal Mehra. I decided this is probably a time where I can post all the different coronavirus related podcasts I’ve done. I started on February 17th, on my podcast with Spencer Wells. You can see all the podcasts in rough order of date recorded… It’s …
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The role of obesity in the COVID-19 crisis
There has been a fair amount of anecdotal and a bit of statistical evidence that obesity is somehow associated with individuals who have worse progression of COVID-19. The data out of China I saw wasn’t significant statistically speaking. The problem? There didn’t seem to be enough obese people in their samples. Then anecdotes and some […]
COVID-19, the springtime of 2020
A lot of my Covid-19 commentary is on Twitter, but since I delete my tweets every 2 weeks it’s ephemeral. So I’ll post about once a week about a “status update” of sorts of my perceptions, predictions, and general sense. First, I’m more optimistic than I was a few weeks ago. The main reason is […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 3, Episode 13: Pandemic!
The Insight Show Notes — Season 3, Episode 13: Pandemic!This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib and Spencer talk about the coronavirus pandemic, a status update on their discussion from February.Estimates…
COVID-19 and its environmental conditions
A friend of mine recently quipped that everyone seems to act like probability can be assigned two values 0 or 1. The same sort of logic seems to apply when it comes to talking about the environmental parameters which might affect the progress of COVID-19, such as temperature, humidity, and density. Many people seem to […]
Coronavirus: the revenge of the old gods!
I’ve been waiting for the pandemic to reach India. And not just me. Every day for the last week I see headlines which shout: “India the next hotspot!” In fact, Bloomberg put up a video interview, Is India the Next Coronavirus Hotspot?, predicting 300 to 500 million infections, just before I wrote this post. But, […]
The Weather, South Asia, and coronavirus
I have a post where I analyze the idea that weather has an effect on the spread of coronavirus. One thing to note is that the best models focus on absolute humidity. This means that coastal Karachi is much better placed than inland Lahore, because Lahore often has low humidity. Mumbai shouldn’t be well suited …
Nature will not help us against COVID-19 in the American Spring
It’s the beginning of the official spring of 2020, and the United States of America is now in the midst of a massive upsurge in positive test results for COVID-19, the illness caused by SARS-Cov-2. Right now, New York City is the major focus. Seattle, which was an early outbreak hotzone has taken a backseat. […]
COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, how bad will it get?
This weblog started in the spring of 2002, in the wake of 9/11. Like much of the early blogosphere it was inspired and precipitated by armchair punditry that bubbled up out of the interwebs in the wake of that exogenous shock. Similarly, a whole set of financial blogs (e.g., Calculated Risk) popped up in the […]
Blood group A at greater risk from COVID-19 (maybe)
To a great extent much of the population genetics of humans in the 20th-century that doesn’t involve external traits is the population genetics of blood groups. A, B, and O, along with Rhesus factor. Read L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and William Bodmer’s The Genetics of Human Populations, the first edition of which was written in the […]
Three coronavirus podcasts
– An Italian in the time of coronavirus. From 5 days ago in Verona in Veneto. – British scientist in Shanghai talks coronavirus. A British geneticist I know who works and lives in Shanghai. Two days ago. – Jeremy Carl advises worry but calm on coronavirus. Yesterday. Jeremy Carl is a fellow at the Claremont …
COVID-19 and its weather dependency
We’ve been talking about Coronavirus in our house pretty constantly since early February. I’ve come out into the open and admitted my family is doing self-quarantine to reduce spread (we don’t think we’re sick, but we don’t want to spread it by getting sick). I haven’t been very hopeful in a month due to what […]
Living in a time of COVID-19
We’ve come really far over the past month or so in relation to coronavirus. There are lots of resources online and people should be making recourse to them. medRxiv and bioRxiv are great. If I were you, I would at least read the Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, […]