&ldquo;[M]y professional bias influences my priorities: Ensure the vulnerable around us (like grandparents) do not end up in the hospital with COVID-19 (or flu or RSV). This means we are going to do everything in our power to break transmission chains before gathering for the holidays.&rdquo;

Blurt! — Commonplace Book
pile.org

“[M]y professional bias influences my priorities: Ensure the vulnerable around us (like grandparents) do not end up in the hospital with COVID-19 (or flu or RSV). This means we are going to do everything in our power to break transmission chains before gathering for the holidays.”

Also

“Think of it this way: SARS-CoV-2, the virus, causes COVID-19, the disease — and it doesn’t have to. Vaccination can disconnect the two.”

Ed Yong, How the Pandemic Now Ends (The Atlantic, August 12, 2021)
posted 8/30/2021 1:26pm ∞
“[A] new report published in The Lancet describing 41 early cases in the outbreak indicate that the earliest identified person sickened had no epidemiological links to the [Wuhan animal] market.”

(Added November 2022: This was the first thing I posted about the plague, and the first thing that really made me think it might be something that would affect my family.)

Beth Mole, Here’s the latest on the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan (Ars Technica, January 28, 2020)
posted 1/28/2020 10:26pm ∞
“[T]he modeling estimated that COVID-19 vaccination [in the United States] prevented 3.25 million deaths…. Averted hospitalizations were estimated at 18.6 million…. For infections, the model estimated a dodge of 119.85 million.”

Beth Mole, US COVID death toll would be 4× higher without vaccines, modeling study finds (Ars Technica, December 13, 2022)
posted 12/24/2022 8:00pm ∞
“No longer needing to sing at high frequencies that could be heard over the highway’s rumble, the sparrows’ songs became more expansive, occupying more of the soundscape’s ‘acoustic bandwidth.’ Even those with quiet voices became audible; in those first months, ‘you could hear four times as many birds as you could before,’ says [Professor Elizabeth] Derryberry.”

Shoshi Parks, Why Birds Changed Their Tune During the Pandemic (Atlas Obscura, September 2, 2022, via Jason Kottke)
posted 12/23/2022 8:00pm ∞
“Whenever COVID-19 cases doubled, climate-related tweets dropped by about 5 percent. The doubling of COVID-19 deaths saw climate tweeting decline by over 7 percent. … [A] big boost in case counts could easily offset the arrival of a major hurricane.”

John Timmer, Another casualty of the pandemic: Our ability to worry about anything else (Ars Technica, October 18, 2022)
posted 11/5/2022 8:00pm ∞