Robert Hickson • Oct 04, 2020 •
News reports indicate that a range of therapies are being tried on the President of the United States to treat his SARS-CoV-2 infection. Two of these involve treatments that have not yet completed clinical trials. One was a cocktail of two neutralising antibodies. The second is an anti-viral drug. Monoclonal antibodies The president was initially given a single treatment … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 27, 2020 •
Naomi Forrester-Soto, Keele University Viruses jumping from animals to humans have been the starting point of numerous outbreaks, from Ebola to Zika. Given the similarity of SARS-CoV-2 to coronaviruses found in bats, this probably marked the beginning of COVID-19 too. We know that viruses have passed from animals to humans throughout history, and will continue to do so. Read More
Guest Author • Sep 26, 2020 •
Samantha Vanderslott, University of Oxford If you have been following the media coverage of the new vaccines in development for COVID-19, it will be clear that the stakes are high. Very few vaccine trials in history have attracted so much attention, perhaps since polio in the mid-20th century. A now largely forgotten chapter, summer polio outbreaks invoked terror in parents. Read More
Public Health Expert • Sep 24, 2020 •
Prof John D. Potter* This blog briefly surveys the emerging scientific evidence on the longer-term burden of symptoms and disease in survivors of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these symptoms point to damage in the brain and heart. These long-term harms add to the wide range of other reasons for Aotearoa/New Zealand to persist with its successful COVID-19 elimination strategy. Read More
Guest Author • Sep 23, 2020 •
What is bad luck? Bad luck is spilling spaghetti sauce down your shirt right before an important meeting. When the person in front of you gets the last seat on the bus, that’s bad luck. Bad luck is when it’s sunny outside, so you leave the house without a coat, and it hails almost immediately (unless you live in Wellington, … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 17, 2020 •
Marie Becdelievre January 2020. The number of news article mentioning coronavirus exploded and anxious voices whispered about a global pandemic. Whisper? To me, it was only a whisper. I tend to learn about the world through non-fiction books, conferences, and academic research rather than news and social media, so I did not see the crisis coming. But as whispers … Read More
Robert Hickson • Sep 11, 2020 •
Five things we’ve learnt 1. We know where the virus ultimately came from We know that the virus originally came from bats, and most probably a species of horseshoe bat in South East Asia. However, the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2, which allows the virus to attach to cells and infect them, is more different than those from horseshoe bat … Read More
Siouxsie Wiles • Sep 08, 2020 •
It’s likely you’re being exposed to masses of Covid information on a daily basis, and not all of it will be reliable. Here are some tips for telling the difference, and stopping the spread. Thanks to Covid-19, most of us have a new word in our vocabulary. Epidemiology: the branch of medical science that deals with the who, what, when, … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 04, 2020 •
Michael Plank, University of Canterbury; Andrew Sporle; Kate Hannah; Melissa McLeod, University of Otago, and Nicholas Steyn The risk of dying from COVID-19 is at least 50% higher for Māori than New Zealanders from European backgrounds, according to our study published today. Māori and Pacific populations are historically at greater risk of hospitalisation and death from pandemics. During the … Read More
Alison Campbell • Aug 31, 2020 •
I’m seeing a bit of that phrase in my social media feeds at the moment, in relation to covid-19. In practice, this would mean that if everyone in New Zealand were to catch the virus eventually, that would be 50,000 people dead. The ‘normal’ annual all-cause mortality in this country is around 33,000. It’s been argued that we just … Read More