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 […]
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Self-Care in the Time of COVID-19
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 […]
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The Filtrate for 2020.9.10
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 […]
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The Filtrate for 2020.9.3
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 […]
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The Filtrate for 2020.8.20
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 […]
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The Filtrate for 2020.8.13
Celebrating the relaunch of The Turbid Plaque on a platform we hope will make the blogging process smoother, here’s another issue of The Filtrate. This week’s roundup is all about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, because of course it is. The meat of the matter Back in March and April, about 378 years ago in pandemic time, there were […]
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“Immunity Passports” Are a Horrible Idea
A few days ago, the World Health Organization caused a stir by saying that antibody tests may not indicate whether someone is immune from SARS-CoV-2. This led to some understandable confusion, and WHO spokespeople have subsequently walked the comments back a bit. While the messaging might’ve been handled better, the public health experts at the […]
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Coronavirus: Don’t Panic
As SARS-CoV2 blossoms into a global pandemic, friends and family members have been asking for my advice. Of course I recommend listening to “This Week in Virology,” where the virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, have been major topics on most recent episodes, but that alone won’t fill the entire need. Not everyone has […]