Disease

First, let me get this off my chest. What is the value of these articles, especially those purporting to show no more significant deaths in 2020 than 2019? Will that mean that COVID-19 is a hoax, perpetrated for some ulterior motive?

In that top row, we can see some stratification by risk; the more likely a group perceives their risk, the more likely to get vaccinated. With one very concerning exception, Black Americans.

One of the risks of being alive is getting infected with a nasty microorganism. The coronavirus pandemic has proven that, despite the triumph of biomedical science over many common ailments, some diseases are nearly impossible to stop.

Let's say that there was an upper respiratory bug going around. If you caught it life wouldn't exactly be nirvana, but after a few days in bed with a low-grade fever, stuffy nose, and cough you'd be back to work.

Vaccines must be rigorously tested before they are deployed en masse. The reason is that vaccines can have unpredictable, unintended effects.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked a news coverage of COVID-19 over the past year using textural analysis - where they looked at the tone, tenor, and words of negativity.

How many particles of COVID-19 you are infected with, the viral load, and for how long they may appear in our breath or fluids, viral shedding, are reasonable measures of how able a person is to transmit the virus to another.

One of the main reasons that the coronavirus pandemic is so difficult to stop is because of the high prevalence of asymptomatic carriers. These are people who are infected with the virus and show no symptoms, yet can spread the virus to others.

When the COVID pandemic first emerged, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that he hoped people would permanently stop shaking hands.

Perhaps the most important question that each of us wants to know in regard to the coronavirus pandemic is, "Will I get COVID and die?" Being able to answer that question with some specificity should help us craft smart public health policies.