Reduction in risk from inward travel with/without a negative COVID-19 PCR test
good graph from Paul Dempsey. tl;dr: the effect is pretty tiny; a negative PCR test within 72 hours will not significantly improve infection rates from inbound travel.
(tags: covid-19 travel flying medicine sars-cov-2 pcr twitter graphs)
How to interact with journalists
A joint work between Quinn Norton and Alexandre Dulaunoy on how to interact with journalists. The presentation was given at OHM2013:
You’ve reached out, or they’ve reached out to you. It could be everything from a formal request to PR to someone who sat down beside you in a bar. It could be a 30 second breaking news piece, or a book 10 years in the making. Knowing a little bit about the media can make the whole exchange more fruitful and useful not only for you and the journalist, but a public that hasn’t had a lot of good information about our world.
(tags: howto journalists newspapers pr news media journalism)
Derek Lowe on the “delayed second dose” vaccination idea
The delayed-dose idea had been floated before, and I wasn’t exactly an early adopter, but the more contagious [B. 1.1.7] version of the virus has made me reconsider. But as I was going on about on Twitter the other day, we have to be clear that this is, in fact, an experiment on the population. It seems likely that delaying these doses will likely work out OK. But we don’t have much evidence either way. I’m in favor of doing it, but I’m not happy about ending up in that position. I don’t trust immunology to always work the way that I think it should work, but it seems that we have little choice.
(tags: vaccines b117 covid-19 vaccination immunology derek-lowe medicine)
the current Irish COVID-19 spike starts from the date of pubs reopening
Andrew Flood on Twitter:
NPHET slide from tonights press conference appears to show almost 2,000 cases by December 23rd when shown by collection date. And escalation from 10 days after restaurant pubs opened on Dec 4th is unmistakable.