Is making mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases profitable?
COVID-19 vaccines have had a huge beneficial impact on patient health. One study found that between December 2020 and June 2021, COVID-19 vaccines saved 240,000 […]
Contagious Disease
Communicable disease: Origin story
An interesting discussion from This American Life (“The Herd“, transcript) talking about the origin of the term “communicable disease” with respect to public health monitoring […]
The rise of telemedicine
We have heard much about how COVID-19 has created a paradigm shift in the use of telemedicine. A paper by Patel et al. (2021) uses […]
COVID-19 vaccine: More good news as Moderna releases results
Looks like more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front. Dr. Fauci’s prediction that the Pfizer/BioNTech foreshadowed positive news for future vaccines appears to have […]
COVID-19, nursing home quality and vaccination
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. […]
Positive news on a COVID-19 vaccine
Great news on progress for a COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer. From their press release: Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in […]
Will fighting COVID-19 disrupt progress against malaria?
That is the key question explored in a recent article from The Economist titled “Masked up, ready to battle bugs“. As individuals in developing nations […]
Pandemic comparison: COVID-19 vs. London Plague
Dasgupta et al. (2020) compares individual behavior in the COVID-19 pandemic with the 1665 London plague outbreak based on the descriptions by Daniel Defoe in […]
What is the “reputational value” of developing a COVID vaccine?
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found […]
Masks work
That is based on an event study approach from a recent Health Affairs article by Lyu and Wehby (2020). Specifically, Mandating face mask use in […]
LA: Distance learning only
The New York Times reports: California’s two largest public school districts said on Monday that instruction would be online-only in the fall, in the latest […]
Some good news
As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the US, there was some good news last week from this year’s AIDS conference. Due to COVID-19, the […]
What explains the decline in COVID deaths despite the rising number of cases?
Take a look at these two graphs. The first gives the number of new COVID-19 cases from John Hopkins University. It is a scary graph. […]
Disparities in COVID-19 hospitalization rates
Azar et al. (2020) use electronic health record data to examine differences in COVID-19 hospitalization rates by patient characteristics. The authors find that: …compared with […]
