Tag Archives: covid

Who’d thought?

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An interesting article from Scientific America passed through my inbox this morning. The topic was “fertility rates” in the United States during the pandemic years. There was one strain of thought that, couples having more “together time,” would lead to an increase in the monthly number of babies being born. An effect not unlike the imagined effect of major extended electrical power outages. By the way, it was imagined, there has not been a power outage + 9 months baby boom. But the “safer-at-home” period was a lot longer than an overnight power outage. Continue reading →

Chaos and covid

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The last 19-20 months of pandemic have taken a toll on everyone in one way or the other. We all have stories, anecdotes, experiences, and have participated in “have you heard” conversations. The beginnings of the pandemic were just devoid of information. It was chaos in the normal and the mathematical sense. It is the mathematical sense that always interests me. People confuse chaos with randomness. Actually mathematical chaos is quite predictable – if you understand the initial conditions. Of course, there’s the rub. When I think about the early days of the pandemic we have the initial conditions of (a) a population used to ferreting out information from the internet with relative ease and (b) a situation when there wasn’t information. Into the void…nature hates a vacuum… let loose the dogs of war… take your pick. The milieu was ripe for the lowest denominator of accuracy to provide fuel for conversations from water cooler to talk radio, Facebook to “in the know” sites, and all the existing and emerging channels of information and disinformation. Continue reading →

Tragedy as teacher

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COVID-BlogMask, no mask. Social distancing: 3 feet, 6 feet, more? Outdoors, indoors, ventilated, air exchange, airborne transmission… and a whole range of factors to which we have become accustomed. If you are curious about the what, when, where and other interesting factors about the medical and scientific response to Covid-19, take a moment to read what I found to be a fascinating article about the evolving science behind covid-19 transmission.