It’s a busy week here at Turbid Plaque Headquarters, so we’re cutting down on the buffer and bringing you a condensed Filtrate. Contrary to what some folks seem to believe, having political leaders who listen to scientists is a good thing. Maybe turning some scientists into political leaders would help, too. A Congressional race on […]
Besides a constant feed of news, The Filtrate relies on electricity to operate, and last week that was in short supply around here; a brief but violent squall knocked a huge tree across a nearby power line, and Turbid Plaque Headquarters went offline for a couple of days. We’re back now with two weeks’ worth […]
We begin this week’s Filtrate with an important public service announcement: get your flu shot. Pharmacies all over your area probably have signs advertising this service, but if you still have trouble finding the vaccine, you can use this site to locate a nearby flu clinic. I just got mine today (Sanofi Fluzone Quadrivalent, thanks […]
Another week of this awful year has gone by, so it’s time to survey the damage and sift whatever bits of wisdom we can from the news. Welcome to the Filtrate. Pandemic rubbernecking Epidemiologists continue to trace the ways SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and among which groups, producing a mixture of interesting and depressing findings. In Nature […]
Thanks to rapid genome sequencing technology and the work of hundreds of dedicated virologists and wildlife biologists around the world, we now have a good idea where SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, came from. Sometime in the Fall or early Winter of 2019, a closely related bat coronavirus made the leap into […]
The sheer quantity of pandemic-related news this week nearly clogged our system, so we did an additional distillation step to summarize it all. Welcome to this week’s issue of the Filtrate. Pandemic roundup Some of what we though we knew (or just wished was true) about SARS-CoV-2 infection is turning out to be wrong, as […]
A couple of months ago, TWiV fan Dave sent me an email about my apparent emotional stability in the face of, well, all this (imagine me waving my hands at the general state of the world in 2020): Dear sir, How do you stand it? Turbid Plaque and TWiV have been a lifeline for a […]
It’s another Thursday here at Turbid Plaque headquarters, time for us to take all the news that broke this week, grind it up into even smaller bits, solubilize it, and pass it through our selective barrier to deliver only the best stories to you. Welcome to The Filtrate. Counting COVID After battling a superspreader event […]
By adjusting the pore sizes, the Filtrate is now letting some non-pandemic news items seep through. Of course we’ll be continuing our coverage of SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, which means we may need to use strong language to describe the disastrous ongoing US response to this virus. You’ve been warned. Pandemic roundup Hospital staff, also known as “frontline […]
Another week has come and gone, so it’s time to see what the Turbid Plaque news feed dragged in. The color of COVID-19 As everyone should already know, the ongoing SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic has been hitting certain racial and ethnic groups a lot harder than others in the US. In particular, Black and Latinx individuals seem […]