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The FDA’s vaccine advisory panel spent all of yesterday discussing the results of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine studies. At the end of the day, they voted “yes” to the question of whether the available science suggests the benefits of the vaccine outweigh its risks. The FDA is expected to move quickly to grant…Read more...

Every vaccine has its side effects, but most are mild and/or rare. If you’ve ever had a sore arm after a flu shot, or even a mild headache or fever, you’ve experienced these. The upcoming coronavirus vaccines will have side effects, too, and they might be a little more severe. That’s not necessarily a bad thing,…Read more...

Repeated brief encounters with the same person are now considered close contact, according to a tweak to the CDC’s definition.Previously, for somebody to be a “close contact,” they had to remain within six feet of you for a stretch of at least 15 minutes. The change recognizes that, according to recent research, you…Read more...

Last month, it looked like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had one of the better plans for bringing students back, which included frequent testing for everyone on campus.“If [students] had adhered to what we had asked them to do, we would have had no more than about 700 cases the entire semester,” the…Read more...

Since COVID-19 first started to spread in December 2019, it has made its way around the world. When it came to the United States, there were initially a few cases in Seattle, but the first major hotspot was New York City. Now, a few months later, places like Arizona, South Carolina and Florida are new hotspots for the…Read more...

You may have seen headlines recently that “patients without symptoms” aren’t driving the spread of the coronavirus. That would seem to suggest that all our measures about masks and distancing are useless—but that’s a misunderstanding of the evidenceRead more...

While protesting is essential in a democracy—a hack, you might say, for making your voice heard between elections—any large gathering carries a risk of COVID-19 transmission. But there are ways to reduce that risk, and many protesters have been organizing with those measures in mind. Read more...

On Wednesday, for the first time since March 12, NYC reported no new deaths from COVID-19. To put that number into perspective, during the peak in mid-April, NYC reported an average of 500 deaths a day. This is encouraging news, and worth celebrating. Preventative measures—closing businesses, the public adopting…Read more...

Avoiding large gatherings is part of how we’ve tried to stay safe for the past few months, but protests have something in common with hospital services and (apparently) takeout margaritas: They’re essential to our well-being as a society. Read more...

The CDC has released new guidelines on antibody testing that note it’s possible for a test that’s 90-95% accurate to deliver incorrect positive results more than half the time. That sounds shocking, but it can be true—and it’s important to understand why, if you’re considering getting tested or have already gotten a…Read more...

Contact tracing is a technique epidemiologists and public health officials have long used in the fight against diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. It’s an important tool for identifying those who might be sick and keeping the infection from spreading to others. As the nation continues to reopen, contact tracing could…Read more...

“Quarantine” was never quite right. “Reopening” isn’t an accurate term either. What we’re going through as a society is unprecedented, and we do not have the words to describe it. I think that’s because we can’t name that which we can barely wrap our minds around. Read more...

Poor air quality has long been linked to increased health issues, as well as premature death. Fine particulate matter, also called PM2.5, is the term for small particles found in the air. We have long known that PM2.5 can penetrate into the lungs, causing a number of issues, such as asthma, bronchitis, heart attacks,…Read more...

Update: and we’re done! Join us at 1 p.m. Eastern for a live Q&A with Dr. Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist who is also an infection preventionist. She works in hospitals to make sure patients, visitors, and staff are protected from infection, meaning she’s an expert in how hand washing, masks, and…Read more...

If we cannot stop COVID-19, can we at least look forward to the point in time when we are all survivors of the disease, and presumably immune? It’s a tempting idea, but fatally flawed. Herd immunity can protect individuals, but it won’t keep a population safe from a disease that has no vaccine.Read more...

Contact tracing is a critical tool for containing a disease outbreak. For COVID-19, it’s also a key part of plans like the World Health Organization’s guidelines for easing distancing restrictions. So what is contact tracing and how does it work? Read more...

In the same way my tiny daughter looks forward to Christmas all year, all of us who are physically distancing look forward to “things reopening.” Reopening is more a wish than a plan, since most likely we’ll face months of adjusting restriction. We just want things to be back to normal, right? Well, the World Health…Read more...

You’re staying at home, we hope. But when you spend so much time looking at your own four walls, it’s hard to internalize the fact that the very things you’re not doing—dropping off the kids at day care, seeing your gym buddies for a workout—are what’s truly making a difference. This little demonstration from Laval…Read more...