Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the conclusion from Woolf et al. (2020) in JAMA this past week. The authors examine rates of COVID-19 mortality in the US between March and October 2020 and compare them with other leading causes of death from March to October 2018. We see that COVID-19 is currently the 3rd leading cause of death…
That is the topic of a commentary I wrote with co-authors Joanna MacEwan and Farzad Ali, titled “Does COVID-19 Threaten the Progress Pharmaceuticals Have Made in Reducing Cancer Mortality Over the Last 20 Years?” An excerpt is below: Cancer mortality rates have fallen significantly over the last 20 years. Between 2000 and 2010, overall age-adjusted…
Health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities is the answer according to the CDC. STAT News reports: Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 13 to 1 to put health care providers and long-term care residents — two groups that represent about 24 million Americans — at the top of the vaccine priority…
Don’t expect any turkey recipes from the CDC, but the do advise a fair amount of caution during this Thanksgiving holiday. More than 1 million COVID-19 cases were reported in the United States over the last 7 days.As cases continue to increase rapidly across the United States, the safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to…
COVID-19 has had a disastrous effect on the economy. While some portion of the economic effect is people becoming ill, much of the effect is due to individuals changing behavior to avoid contracting the disease. For instance, people are much less likely to go shopping, eat at restaurants, and travel. These latter effects are termed…
Understanding trends in COVID-19 transmission rates is vital both public health monitoring and policymaking decisions. However, diagnostic capacity may be limited, and test sampling is often non-random, and often COVID-19 cases are not reported when patients have mild or asymptomatic disease. What is the solution? A paper in Nature Biotechnology argues that wastewater testing may…