COVID-19

Recently added:

• Variants dashboard

Dashboards

• Covid Vaccinations
• Covid Act Now — Dashboard of how well each state has the epidemic under control.
• NY Times dashboard another nice visualization
• CDC dashboard of variants. As I write this, delta makes up 80% of the cases, but there will likely be other variants of concern in the future.

Helpful information

• CDC guidelines on safe activities and Zeynep Tufecki’s criticism of it, which is less visual but more informative
• Unofficial Michigan vaccination sites and information
• The Risks — Know Them — Avoid Them — Immunologist Erin Bromage’s roundup of the science around avoiding catching COVID-19 as things reopen.
• Tips for what to do for people who catch COVID-19
  • So many resources are about avoiding the disease that I haven’t seen much about what to do if you get it

Backlinks

• 2021-08-30
  • This is fascinating: Cue Health offers an in-home COVID-19 test, which sends results to your smartphone in 20 minutes. It doesn’t seem widely available yet and is not cheap ($249 for the reader unit, plus $75 for a test), but seems like a very attractive approach.
• 2021-08-30
  • Lyman Stone is excited about COVID-19 research that picked random villages in Bangladesh to promote masking and then found that fewer old (55+) people got symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections in the villages where masking was promoted, particularly with surgical masks. Even better: Jason Abaluck was on the research team and wrote a thread about the research.
• 2021-08-30
  • In COVID-19 research, A new CDC study shows that unvaccinated are 5x more likely to be infected and 29x more likely to be hospitalized than those that are vaccinated.
• 2021-08-16
  • Vox has an article breaking down new data released by the CDC that shows the vaccines are still highly effective at preventing hospitalization from COVID-19.
• 2021-08-16
  • Recently, it was reported that there were more vaccinated people in the hospital in Israel than unvaccinated people. Does that mean the COVID-19 vaccines don’t work? No, and this article explains the math behind this.
• 2021-08-16
  • Andy Slavitt breaks down the issues of a third COVID-19 shot.
• 2021-08-09
  • Andy Slavitt provided guidance based on his discussions with experts on likely futures for COVID-19.
• 2021-08-02
  • James Surowiecki wrote about coverage of CDC’s new mask guidance and the underlying COVID-19 data and how the press did not do a good job of showing just how well the vaccines continue to work.
• 2021-07-26
  • This is part of perspective on a COVID-19 outbreak in Massachusetts. Alex Morse points out that the vaccines are working and a Reddit thread includes a lot more context about the story. Matt Gertz talked about the problem with these headlines. Here is the paper the CDC published
• 2021-07-26
  • There are some relatively rare side effects found in some of the COVID-19 vaccines. We all heard about the rare blood clots from the AZ and J&J vaccines. Did you know that the disease itself can cause blood clots?
• 2021-07-19
  • An article in Slate about COVID-19 digs into the risk to vaccinated people, highlighting the difference between “mild” case as defined by doctors and by laypeople. Essentially, a mild case according to doctors is one that doesn’t require a trip to the hospital or low blood oxygen levels, but it can still feel really terrible for a few days.
• 2021-07-19
  • Eric Feigl-Ding tweeted a bunch of articles with increased outdoor and fleeting contact spread of COVID-19. It’s scary how much more transmissible delta is, but the vaccines are still holding up.
• 2021-07-19
  • ABC News has a round up of stats showing just how dangerous it is to not get the COVID-19 vaccine.
• 2021-07-19
  • Virginia Department of Health has a page detailing the vaccination status of their COVID-19 cases. Over the past month, 97.7% of their cases have been among the unvaccinated, 93.22% of the hospitalizations, and 83.33% of the deaths. Part of the reason the deaths percentage is so low is that there have only been 6 in total during that time frame.
• 2021-07-12
  • Monica Gandhi notes on Twitter that Pfizer and AZ vaccines provide good efficacy against COVID-19 disease in England, Scotland, and Singapore with more data than the Israeli data that came up previously.
• 2021-07-12
  • Katherine J. Wu writes in the Atlantic about how the term breakthrough infection is leading to a bit of confusion around how well the COVID-19 vaccines work. She suggestions that specifying “symptomatic” and “asymptomatic” is helpful in clarifying that many vaccinated people may become infected with SARS-CoV-2 but never contract the symptomatic illness.
• 2021-07-12
  • COVID-19 is not gone and the delta variant is striking people who are vaccinated, albeit with little in the way of hospitalization or death. Trisha Greenhalgh has written a massive Twitter thread about the problems with finding evidence for mask efficacy and how to wear masks to protect yourself. Double masking (cloth mask over surgical mask) and knotting the ear loops of a surgical mask help.
• 2021-07-05
  • Monica Gandhi (infectious disease doctor at UCSF) explains why the COVID-19 vaccines are very protective against severe disease, even from variants.
• 2021-07-05
  • COVID-19 symptoms have changed with vaccination status and variants. The top 5 symptoms among the fully vaccinated:
• 2021-06-28
  • With the Delta COVID-19 variant gaining steam and having significantly different properties from the other variants, it’s useful to see that the CDC has a variant tracker. Delta is B.1.617.2 and Alpha is B.1.1.7.
• 2021-06-15
  • UCSF Dept. of Medicine Chair Bob Wachter has a thread about the Delta variant of COVID-19 and how it seems to have as much an increase in infectiousness over Alpha as Alpha did over the original. He stresses the importance of getting vaxxed now.
• 2021-06-13
  • Granted, this article about how nearly all hospitalized COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated contains no stats, the anecdotes they give are from hospital administrators who saw what things looked like at the worst and are now seeing the improvement.
• 2021-05-18
  • Dylan Morris has an essay in Zeynep Tufecki’s Insight newsletter about COVID-19 and how Novelty Means Severity is the key to the pandemic, because SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus (one our immune systems haven’t seen before):
• 2021-05-14
  • Zeynep Tufecki wrote just the other day about how the CDC was being timid with their approach to COVID-19. Now, with the CDC announcing that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks or social distance anywhere, Tufecki is arguing for masks a bit longer, and I think she’s right. She points to the sociological aspects of it, and she is a sociologist.
• 2021-05-13
  • Also, top scientists question the need for COVID-19 booster shots:
• 2021-05-13
  • The CDC has updated its guidance around COVID-19, saying that fully vaccinated people can essentially return to normal life, with the exception of very specific settings (health care offices, etc.) and subject to laws and rules set by businesses.
• 2021-05-11
  • This BBC article from April about catching COVID-19 while outside is really a great rundown of the risk factors.
• 2021-05-11
  • Vincent Rajkumar spoke with 2 large hospitals in India where most healthcare workers were fully vaccinated and found no serious cases of COVID-19 among the vaccinated workers. More good news that the vaccines are working.
• 2021-05-11
  • The CDC reports that less than 10% of COVID-19 cases are from outdoor transmission. David Leonhardt reports that this is misleading.
• 2021-05-10
  • Jose-Luis Jimenez is one of the authors of The Lancet article about COVID-19 transmission via aerosols. He wrote up an excellent Twitter thread summary of the article. I saw this in his new thread about the history of aerosols vs. droplets. Zeynep Tufecki has a huge article in the NY Times about the history of this particular medical blind spot. It’s an OpEd, but it’s been deeply fact checked.
• 2021-05-01
  • Apparently, some folks are claiming (falsely, as we’ll see) that the COVID-19 fatality rate among vaccinated people is higher among the vaccinated. This isn’t true for multiple reasons: we don’t have a good count of breakthrough cases because they’re more often asymptomatic, and a higher proportion of those who are vaccinated are elderly, which also means they’re at greater risk of serious illness from the disease in general.
• 2021-04-29
  • Kieran Healy has some excellent visualizations of excess deaths in 2020, which gives a stark picture of COVID-19 deaths, independent of reporting.
• 2021-04-28
  • The CDC yesterday released new guidelines for activities that are safe for the vaccinated and unvaccinated to avoid COVID-19 spread. Zeynep Tufecki argues that the way these guidelines have been communicated is too complicated and too timid.
• 2021-04-21
  • From Yes, vaccines block most transmission of COVID-19:
• 2021-04-19
  • Eric Feigl-Ding reports that people are selling real vaccination cards, enabling people to pretend to have received the COVID-19 vaccine. The ethics of that all around are terrible.
• 2021-04-19
  • Zeynep Tufecki wrote about a paper she co-authored in The Lancet, which makes the case that the evidence has consistently supported that COVID-19 transmits not via large droplets but via smal aerosol particles.
• 2021-04-19
  • COVID-19 science does not tell us that we need to wear masks outside all the time.
• 2021-04-19
  • Another COVID-19 tale for the day: Irrational COVID fears, about how we need to get back to reality after vaccination.
• 2021-04-15
  • For a debunking of common COVID-19 conspiracy theories or just plain bad info, there’s Derek Thompson’s The Panedemic’s Wrongest Man
• 2021-03-16
  • The Ann Arbor News has 9 things to know about Michigan’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Come April 5th, I’m definitely going to be trying to get an appointment, and this article includes places that will be handling appointments.
• 2021-02-08
  • Hygiene theater is still a huge waste of time writes Derek Thompson. In other words, the evidence continues to support that COVID-19 does not regularly move from person to person via surfaces.
• 2021-01-12
  • Jeremy Howard and others have published a peer-reviewed COVID-19 article about face mask use (tl;dr: wear one!). Twitter summary and the original paper at PNAS
• 2020-12-07
  • Someone (who I don’t know) on Twitter asked the question: What do you do if you get COVID-19? Like, how do you take care at home. covidhomecare.ca has answers. There was also a tip in the thread about using a fan to create negative pressure to avoid the virus flowing throughout a space.
• 2020-11-02
  • Good research news related to COVID-19: Non-medical masks do not reduce oxygen saturation levels in older people
• 2020-09-30
  • Zeynep Tufecki’s article in The Atlantic makes the case that we’re not paying enough attention to how COVID-19 spreads.
• 2020-09-09
  • In early February, Trump knew the dangers of COVID-19 and in March, he said he always wanted to downplay them. As much as his press secretary wants to call this false, there are tapes because Trump voluntarily sat for 18 interviews with Bob Woodward. Just Security has a [timeline of the botched response](https://www.justsecurity.org/69650/timeline-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-u-s-response/.
• 2020-08-01
  • An article in The Atlantic complains about hygiene theater and the fact that it pulls attention and effort away from the meaningful actions against COVID-19. Something important in the article, though, is a note on research showing how rare fomite (surface) transmission of the virus is.
• 2020-07-25
  • CNN reports that 2 students tested positive for COVID-19 a day after taking the ACT. The ACT and SAT have been on my mind because I have a child at the right age for those tests (who was, in fact, scheduled to take the test in April). I don’t see how we can safely have kids in a room together for 3-4 hours straight, and I’m guessing that many, if not all, of those kids in that Oklahoma classroom were not wearing masks. If they can’t safely administer a test like this, how can they safely have kids in classrooms this fall?
• 2020-07-03
  • The Washington Post spoke to Fauci and others about how they’re staying safe from COVID-19. There’s a lot of similarity in their approaches and little differences around the edges that are interesting.
• 2020-07-03
  • Dr. Van Dyken (a surgeon, not a researcher) posted a video on YouTube about Mask wearing and Hypercapnia. In other words: Does wearing a mask increase your personal CO2 levels dangerously? Short answer: No, because CO2 is tiny compared to COVID-19. Jeremy Howard does a demonstration of this as well.
• 2020-06-26
  • One of my coworkers linked to schools.forhealth.org which offers a report called “Risk Reduction Strategies for Schools”. This report provides some very clear and concise writing about COVID-19 and the challenges and risks of reopening facilities like schools.
• 2020-06-23
  • Jeremy Howard has been beating the mask drum for a while. He has posted a new thread about the latest on non-medical masks and their effectiveness in stopping COVID-19 spread.
• 2020-06-17
  • Covid Act Now is a COVID-19 tracking site that I hadn’t seen before. It provides a good visualization of how each state is doing at controlling the outbreak. It’s good to see Michigan in the green, and I hope it stays that way. Michigan was apparently the only state with a 50% drop in new cases last week.
• 2020-06-14
  • UCSF medicine chair Bob Wachter posted a twitter thread about assessing risk in adopting activities while COVID-19 is continuing to spread.
• 2020-06-14
  • Bonus: an interview with epidemiologist Michael Osterholm from the University of Minnesota with his take on COVID-19 and the future.
• 2020-06-12
  • New PNAS paper suggests that airborne transmission is key to COVID-19 and reinforces the importance of mask wearing. There’s a summary thread from Eric Feigl-Ding
• 2020-06-11
  • Meanwhile, VP Pence (theoretical head of the COVID-19 task force) apparently didn’t get the memo on masks because he posted a picture of their campaign staff crammed into an office and maskless. Wonder why he deleted that tweet?
• 2020-06-11
  • Though it’s not directly mentioned in the article, it appears that these two hairstylists were wearing masks when they saw 140 customers while showing symptoms of COVID-19. There were records of everyone they had seen, and no one developed the illness! This seems like a big win for masks.
• 2020-06-08
  • Michigan’s COVID-19 numbers have come way down. We do need to worry about demonstrations causing a new wave.
• 2020-06-08
  • Andy Slavitt wrote a Twitter thread about asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, in response to a WHO announcement that asymptomatic people “rarely spread it”. Slavitt says, “I believe this was an irresponsible statement even though it was based on legitimate observations,” and brings the evidence to back up the statement. Update on Tuesday: WHO says 40% of transmissions may be through asymptomatic people.
• 2020-06-06
  • Masks reduce airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 reinforces that mask wearing reduces the transmission of COVID-19. The WHO has also revised its guidance regarding mask wearing. Larry Brilliant says “If 80% of the people wore a mask 80% of the time, COVID would go away”.
• 2020-06-02
  • Two epidemiologists have written a NY Times op-ed about COVID-19: Just Stop the Superspreading. “In our study, 20 percent of Covid-19 cases accounted for 80 percent of transmissions.” 70% didn’t spread to anyone. Another similar article in Science.
• 2020-05-31
  • Interesting CNN article about the COVID-19 response from Vietnam, which kept confirmed cases at 328 with no deaths. The did it by acting early and swiftly with extensive contact tracing, isolation, and a modest amount of testing (lots of temperature checking, though). Oh yeah, and a catchy handwashing song.
• 2020-05-28
  • The first interesting COVID-19 claim is that 40-60% of uninfected people could have partial immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to previous infections with other “common cold” coronaviruses.
• 2020-05-28
  • Alistair Haimes’s Twitter thread caught my attention and led me to read the We’re all in the big numbers now. This article is arguing, reasonably so, that COVID-19 lockdown has been very damaging. Given that there are countries and territories that controlled the outbreak without such damaging measures, I think it is likely that we could have responded differently had we been better prepared, and this article concluded with some decent suggestions along those lines.
• 2020-05-28
  • I am more interested in what comes next for COVID-19. I responded with a question: “Are we actually at the tail-end of the epidemic” as Alistair claims? This seems like an important question to ask, because it determines how we respond (as a society and individually) this summer and onward. There were several interesting responses with links to other data.
• 2020-05-28
  • One thing that disappointed me with much of the data is that it’s focused on infection fatality rate (IFR). Fatalities are only part of the story with COVID-19. This disease results in more hospitalizations, according to current CDC data, “Hospitalization rates for COVID-19 in adults (18-64 years) are higher than hospitalization rates for influenza at comparable time points* during the past 5 influenza seasons.” Comparisons with influenza fall down somewhat when considered against the fact that COVID-19 is more likely more deadly but also likely to be more serious in general. However, it sounds like there’s a paper coming out supporting the idea that masks will lead to less severe cases and less deaths. If we’re reducing deaths _and_ severity, that sounds like a huge step.
• 2020-05-28
  • I listened to an episode of the What Next podcast for the first time, and they featured Emily Oster who runs a site called COVID-Explained, which has a few clear articles that attempt to boil down the latest data about COVID-19.
• 2020-05-28
  • Reason reports that nursing homes account for 42% of fatalities from COVID-19. There has been earlier reporting about high numbers of cases in prisons and meat packing plants. This backs up earlier research that showed sharing indoor space is a major infection risk. Conversely, there appears to be far less risk outdoors. And the jury is still out on a second wave.
• 2020-05-25
  • From Camping to Dining Out NPR has had some experts rate the risk of getting COVID-19 from some common activities.
• 2020-05-19
  • New COVID-19 research out of South Korea has found that people who tested positive after recovering from the coronavirus did not go on to infect others.
• 2020-05-11
  • As places start reopening after COVID-19’s (first) shutdowns, Erin Bromage’s The Risks — Know Them — Avoid Them is a detailed look at how the virus spreads and where most of the risk comes from, so that we can avoid behavior that is risky.
• 2020-05-02
  • Working with epidemiologist Marcel Salathé, Nicky Case made this fabulous visualization of COVID-19 interventions.
• 2020-04-30
  • COVID-19 deaths are actual counts. Jeremy Samuel Faust, an ER doctor and instructor at Harvard, asked other doctors if they could remember anyone dying from influenza. Most couldn’t, some remembered a few, which goes to show just how different COVID-19 is from flu, despite the fact that CDC estimated a bad flu year at 69,000 deaths. Actual counted flu deaths are 3,400 to 15,700 over the past few years.
• 2020-04-24
  • Vi Hart and others have put together a Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience (see also Vi Hart’s How We Reopen video). This plan outlines how we can safely reopen in light of COVID-19. It’s not easy, but it’s important that we do it right, and not in the slapdash manner that some states are pursuing.
• 2020-04-10
  • There are definitely a lot of privacy concerns around contact tracing, and I know a lot of people are concerned that once you let government people start having access to this information, they will never let it go. I understand that concern, but COVID-19 is a huge issue, and I do believe that Apple genuinely cares about privacy. Here is Apple’s documentation about the privacy-preserving contact tracing.
• 2020-04-08
  • Jeremy Howard has been pushing masks via Masks 4 All and The Guardian has an article with two more no sew-mask designs to prevent the spread of COVID-19
• 2020-04-03
  • Because one can never have too many face mask designs in this day and COVID-19 age, here is another one. Does require elastic.
• 2020-04-02
  • I don’t think the CDC and WHO guidance around masks for COVID-19 has changed yet, but increasingly individuals are taking steps. Ragmask is another simple, do-it-yourself mask design.
• 2020-03-31
  • Just a handkerchief and hair tie for COVID-19 protection.
• 2020-03-26
  • Slack’s growth during COVID-19
• 2020-03-26
  • Safe grocery practices during COVID-19
• 2020-03-23
  • With Folding@Home, you can donate your spare CPU and GPU cycles their way to help cure COVID-19, cancer, and more. Works when you’re not using your computer.