The Second Phase of the Pandemic: The Race to herd Immunity
Pandemics are multi-year events that often go in phases. The 1918 flu pandemic had 3 distinct phases of which the second was the deadliest. I have some serious concern that April 2021 through March 2022 will follow that pattern...
Read MoreWhy You Don’t Want to Be Like Brazil
It’s been about a year for us in the USA since things started to go sideways. Where are we? At the beginning of the year I developed a simple empirical model to project a worst-case scenario in terms of cumulative deaths from...
Read More
The SARS-Cov2 Outbreak in Manaus, Brazil: Bad Science, Bad Behavior, or Just Bad News?
As the pandemic spreads and many more individuals are infected with SARS-Cov2 we can expect many more “very rare” events to be come more commonplace due to sheer numbers.
Read More
Understanding Infections Rates in Terms of R0 and Re
One of my readers thinks the public needs an education on the nature of exponential growth (and...
Read More
We Should Be Very Concerned About the New SARS-Cov2 B.1.1.7 Strain
Most of you have heard by now of two new SARS-Cov2 strains that have come into play: The B.1.1.7...
Read MoreSARS-Cov2 Superspreaders: The Key to Controlling the Pandemic
Most people of heard of Typhoid Mary, an unfortunate healthy carrier of typhoid who was probably singlehandedly responsible for infection of 3,000 New Yorkers in 1907. She was probably the most celebrated of a phenomenon called...
Read MorePfizer’s COVID-19 Vaccine Approval: An Extraordinary Event: Everything You Want to Know Answered Simply
This week we saw the approval in public of Pfizer’s brand-new mRNA SARS-Cov2 vaccine under the FDA’s EUA (emergency use authorization) authority. Prior to the pandemic to see approval of something like a drug or vaccine in which...
Read MoreProgenitors of the SARS-Cov-2 Virus May Have Been Circulating for Some Time in 2019 Prior to the Outbreak in Wuhan
For those of you watched the movie Contagion, which came out in 2011, you might be forgiven for believing that it’s not that hard to find “patient zero,” the index patient of a pandemic. Another impression you might have got is...
Read MoreThe COVID Spring
Vaccines There has been a lot of good news on the vaccine front. First, Pfizer announced that its BNT162b2 vaccine was 95% effective against COVID-19 beginning 28 days after the first dose;170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were...
Read MoreThe Winter of our Covid Discontent
Things are not looking good in regard to the COVID-19 virus. Infection rates are totally out of control (see Figure 1a). Testing rate is up since summer but positivity rates are way up and funding issues mean that some states...
Read MoreA Roundup of COVID-19 News This Labor Day Weekend: It’s Monty Python All the Way
Vaccines It’s been an interesting week! First, there have been a number of reports that both the Russians and Chinese have started vaccination programs in their own populations without waiting for phase 3 results of the...
Read MoreCost-effectiveness Modeling of CTPs: The story Behind the Story
One of the many criticisms of early cost-effectiveness studies describing cellular and/or tissue-based products (CTPs), especially those that involved modeling, is that time horizons were too short—effectively the length of the...
Read More