Search Results for: covid
Understanding the transmission of COVID-19 requires interdisciplinary teams
Covid-19: Health staff in plea for better protection is a depressing headline to be reading at any time, let alone a year and half into a pandemic. NHS healthcare workers have less protection to infection than those in many other countries, for example, the USA. Totally understandably many in the NHS are not happy about […]
A blind spot of some medical doctors in the infection control of diseases like COVID-19
Last week colleagues at Bristol and I published a paper looking at how surgical and cloth masks filter out droplets, and this week I read a recent UK Government SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group For Emergencies) report: Masks for healthcare workers to mitigate airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The two publications are like the proverbial ships passing […]
On COVID-19 transmission, the World Health Organisation is moving with the times
A few days ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) updated its guidance on how COVID-19 transmitted. It now says: “Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, typically within 1 metre (short-range). A person can be infected when aerosols or droplets containing the virus are […]
Interactive plots of COVID-19 infection probability, courtesy of Streamlit and Heroku
As someone who taught himself BASIC in the 1980s and was taught Fortran 77 in the early 1990s*, I do need to try and keep up with modern developments. One of the things I have being wanting to for a while now, is find a way of putting some simple plotting/data analysis on the web, […]
At the same time as parts of Italy were being overwhelmed by COVID-19, the UK government was downgrading the risk from COVID-19
I have been reading a couple of reports looking at the UK government’s guidance on the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers whose patients may be infected with COVID-19. One report by Dinah Gould and Edward Purssell was commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing and is pretty damning of the process […]
Different perspectives on COVID-19’s attack rate
The attack rate of an infectious disease is the % chance that you contract it. I think it is term was introduced by epidemiologists. A high attack rate is bad of course, a lower one would be better, so we want to know what the attack rate depends on. Epidemiologists typically want to know how […]
We’re all different, and that (probably) matters for infection with COVID-19
Above is Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Philip IV of Spain. He is not the best looking royal, and has what is sometimes called the Habsburg jaw, i.e., a very large jaw, attributed in this case to a lot of cousin marrying by his royal dynasty, the Habsburgs. They were rather inbred. Lab experiments on how […]
COVID-19 researchers learning from pioneers of TB research
On Wednesday I watched (via Zoom of course) a webinar by Prof Jose Jimenez: Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and how to protect ourselves: What we know now. You can watch it on YouTube. I learnt a lot from it. Jimenez and coworkers have repurposed a model originally developed for the transmission of TB through the […]
How virus-containing droplets are made
Transmission of COVID-19 likely starts with production of a small droplet that contains one or more SARS-CoV-2 viruses. This occurs somewhere in the lungs, throat, or mouth of an infected person. We have almost no data on this process as it occurs inside the body of an infected person, but we do know how droplets […]
