Should we Invest in Curing Rare Diseases or Making Them Rarer?
An guest-post from Noor Siddiqui and Nikki Teran of Orchid Rare diseases cost Americans around 8 trillion dollars a year. About half of that is direct medical costs. If families are […]
The Data Platform for the Genomic Revolution
Introducing GenRAIT to the post-genomic eraThe human genetic map became reality in the first two decades of the 21st century. This was the dream of a century of genetics, laboriously tracing pedigrees across families decade after decade. But the combin…
Fewer than 500 American children have died of COVID-19
Find more statistics at Statista There are 258 confirmed deaths of COVID-19 for children. This is probably an underestimate, but I doubt it’s a two-fold underestimate. There are 74 million […]
Totally Under Control—A Review
Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control revisits a time, the legacy of which still haunts us. Spanning the period between January of 2020 and late spring of 2020, his new documentary traces the rise of the pandemic which has become a defining feature of our time. A New York Times headline on January 21st read “China Confirms New Coronavirus Spreads From Humans to Humans.” The full horror of mass deaths and economic lockdown hadn’t dawned on the world yet. Even in Wuhan there wasn’t full comprehension of what was to come. Nevertheless, the next day President Donald Trump was asked if he was worried about the pandemic and responded that “We have it totally under control.” Obviously, Trump was wrong. Totally Under Control is squarely focused on the bungling, mismanagement, and incoherence of the Trump administration. Gibney’s documentary is fundamentally a chronicle of the lopsided match between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration. As a point of contrast, Gibney focuses on the coherent and concerted efforts of America’s Pacific Rim ally, South Korea. The comparison …
Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control revisits a time, the legacy of which still haunts us. Spanning the period between January of 2020 and late spring of 2020, his new documentary traces the rise of the pandemic which has become a defining feature of our time. A Media and public attention to coronavirus
I haven’t been talking about coronavirus much. What’s there to talk about? In April I tried to be optimistic, and well that didn’t work out. We’re not at worst-case disaster scenarios, but likey “excess deaths” of 200,000 don’t look good. The idea expressed by some (and which I really hoped for) that weather or decreased […]
A possible reason for inter-regional differences in COVID-19 prevalence?
There have been striking differences in COVID-19 severity/penetration by region. There are all sorts of reasons posited. This post from Derek Lowe at In The Pipeline, New Data on T Cells and the Coronavirus, suggests a possibility: And turning to patients who have never been exposed to either SARS or the latest SARS CoV-2, this […]
Late spring in the age of coronavirus
I haven’t posted on COVID-19 in a while. What’s there to say? The last month or so has been a great muddle. We soldier on, without purpose or direction. At least here in the United States of America. In regards to the pandemic, we’re in, all I can say is that I feel a sense […]
Not too many young are dying from COVID-19
When does COVID-19 get more dangerous than the flu? The CDC has some deaths listed for COVID-19. It also has deaths recorded for influenza. These are not perfect records, but, they give us a general comparative sense. The total count in their data for the column I’ve plotting is about half of or so of […]
COVID-19 in India, one week before the easing…
Huge regional differences. The two southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have more people who have recovered than are active. This is a good sign.
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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COVID-19 status update, mid-April
Spencer and I recorded another coronavirus episode of The Insight. It should be live in a day or so. Therefore, I thought it was good to take stock and make some comments (my Twitter autodeletes). – A few weeks ago I had been optimistic and suggested that the USA would have 40,000 deaths. That seems […]
India’s COVID-19 heterogeneity
Find more statistics at Statista
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, another panic?
Michael Fumento became prominent with his provocative book, The myth of heterosexual AIDS. On the whole I think Fumento’s point, that HIV-AIDS was not a major issue outside of “at-risk” groups in the United States, was the correct one. I grew up as part of a generation that was taught about HIV-AIDS in a very […]
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 […]
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 […]
Browncast episode 88: Phillipe Lemoine, covid-19 “optimism”
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above! You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the …
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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, […]