If you’re over 75, catching covid-19 can be like playing Russian roulette
MIT Technology
Are you hiding from covid-19? I am. The reason is simple: the high chance of death from the virus. I was reminded of the risk last week by this report[1] from the…
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coronavirus
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Another experimental covid-19 vaccine has shown promising early results
The news: An experimental covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech provoked immune responses in 45 healthy volunteers, according to a preprint paper on medRXiv[1]. The levels of antibodies…
Podcast: Covid-19 has exposed a US innovation system that is badly out of date
Ilan Gur always wanted to build things. But after finishing his PhD in material science at UC Berkeley, he says he “bounced around, feeling like a misfit.” He left the…
Is it safe to send kids back to school?
The final crucial question: to what extent do children spread the coronavirus once infected? “If you look at the peer-reviewed literature, it’s very mixed. The simple answer is we don’t…
The US now has more covid-19 tests than it knows what to do with
So how much testing should the US really be doing? American public health experts have never agreed. The economist Paul Romer has said we need to be doing 30 million tests…
Pandenomics: How open data is guiding public policy
In some ways, past experience can be helpful. The financial crisis of 2008-9 gave governments the muscle memory and procedural knowledge to pass through massive fiscal stimulus programs. But this…
The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement
There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them. Its Recovery…
Our biggest questions about immunity to covid-19
We’re still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up…
The UK is abandoning its current contact tracing app for Google and Apple’s system
The news: The UK is going to abandon its current contact tracing app in favor of one based on technology built by Apple and Google, the BBC[1] reports. Tests of…
Podcast: Robots are the new recruits on the pandemic’s front lines
We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has…
