Author: Shannon Becker
What Covid taught scientists and the public about the flu
(NBC News) For nearly three years, the medical and scientific world scrutinized Covid. That research helped experts gain a new understanding of a much older virus: the flu. On March 3, 2020, the head of the World Health Organization began a daily press briefing exhorting countries around the world to do more to stop the spread […]
Nov 22, 2022
COVID-19 Is Linked to Detectable Brain Changes, Study Shows
(Time) While the world is learning to live with COVID-19, scientists still have many unanswered questions about how the infection affects the body and brain—not just when people are sick, but over the long term as well. In a study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, researchers report on changes to […]
Nov 22, 2022
Uganda Ebola Virus Disease Situation Report No 56
(Relief Web) Today marks 65 days of response to the EVD outbreak, first case was confirmed on 19-Sep-2022. (Download full report here)
Nov 22, 2022
Coronavirus variants are dodging antibody treatments. New lab-made options may help.
(Washington Post) In the evolutionary chess match between the coronavirus and humans, scientists’ next move can’t come soon enough for the millions of Americans relying on treatments known as monoclonal antibodies. These lab-made therapies are rapidly losing their healing power, forcing researchers around the world to devise new antibodies that are both more potent and […]
Nov 22, 2022
An elegant way to stop deadly Hendra virus spillovers from bats to horses … to us
(NPR) Not quite 20 years ago, Raina Plowright stood in a forest in Australia’s Northern Territory at dusk. She watched as hundreds of thousands of bats called little red flying foxes launched themselves into the air. “The sky was [dark] with these huge bats taking off in this stream of animals across the landscape looking for nectar,” […]
Nov 22, 2022
Analysis of two choir outbreaks acting in concert to characterize long- range transmission risks through SARS-CoV-2, Berlin, Germany, 2020
(PLoS) Superspreading events are important drivers of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and long-range (LR) transmission is believed to play a major role. We investigated two choir outbreaks with different attack rates (AR) to analyze the contribution of LR transmission and highlight important measures for prevention.
Nov 22, 2022
Gauging Our Return to Office and the Subways, One Tip at a Time
(NYT) It has been over a year since buskers, and their music, returned underground, and their slightly fuller tip jars and instrument cases suggest things may be looking up. Subway ridership hit a pandemic-era record on Oct. 27, with close to 3.9 million people — the most on a single day since the pandemic struck, but still […]
Nov 22, 2022
What Does It Mean to Care About COVID Anymore?
(The Atlantic) After nearly three years of constantly thinking about COVID, it’s alarming how easily I can stop. The truth is, as a healthy, vaxxed-to-the-brim young person who has already had COVID, the pandemic now often feels more like an abstraction than a crisis. My perception of personal risk has dropped in recent months, as has […]
Nov 22, 2022
Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter
(Science) Researchers say there is a growing body of evidence these viruses interfere with each other’s spread. Triple threat. Tripledemic. A viral perfect storm. These frightening phrases have dominated recent headlines as some health officials, clinicians, and scientists forecast that SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) could surge at the same time in Northern […]
Nov 22, 2022
How infectious disease experts are responding to Covid nearly three years in
(Stat) The world is fast approaching the third anniversary of those days when we got our first inkling that a new disease was spreading in China. In the months that followed, normal life was suspended, then upended. At this point, everyone is well and truly sick of Covid-19 and the accommodations we have had to make to […]
Nov 22, 2022