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Loud Talkers, a Worrying Anti-Vaccination Strategy, and a Plan to Reopen America Safely
A roundup of stories we’re reading about Covid-19 today
Published in
2 min readMay 14, 2020
- Talking is one way people produce droplets containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus, risking the spread of Covid-19. Talking loudly, scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health recently discovered, is one way to produce even more of the droplets. At MIT Technology Review, science journalist Neel Patel reports that just a minute of loud talking generates at least 1,000 virus-containing droplets. Speak softly, and carry a big mask.
- An antibody test produced by the biotech firm Abbott is the center of a lot of hype, in part because of its endorsement by President Donald Trump and the company’s claim that it’s 99% accurate. But a preliminary study of the test’s accuracy by New York University researchers, reports the Washington Post, missed a considerable proportion of the cases that were caught by rival firms.
- Experts are raising the alarm about an imminent information war involving anti-vaccination sentiment around the Covid-19 vaccine, which is mounting steadily even though the vaccine doesn’t exist yet. As Nature reports, scientists who mapped the anatomy of the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook discovered that “groups opposing vaccines are small in size, but their online communications strategy is worryingly effective and far-reaching.”
- As warm weather arrives and cabin fever settles even deeper into our bones, the need to reopen the country feels increasingly desperate. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and a professor of health policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, cautiously lays out a plan to do so, involving universal masks, the prioritization of nursing homes and high-risk groups, and — a welcome change — spending more time outside.
