Across the globe, stay-at-home measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19 are doing far more than impacting citizens’ health. They are creating unprecedented disruptions to food supply chains that will impact populations worldwide in both the near and distant future. With migrant farmworkers unable or unwilling to travel, many European nations lack the labor
I wanted to give some updates on the various treatments that are showing promising outcomes. With hundreds of ongoing initiatives, it’s near impossible to be aware of them all. The ones I outline below I’ve categorized into anti-viral medicines and antibodies. Anti-viral: An agent that kills a virus or that suppresses its ability to replicate,
Predicting COVID-19’s impact on the workers’ compensation and auto markets is a fluid exercise, as the impact felt will vary by company. However, much will be based on when and how we as a nation resume life post-pandemic. Here are the trends I’m currently observing: Unemployment is skyrocketing: US unemployment claims soared to 6.648 million
I thought a brief overview of the coronaviruses strains would be helpful. Coronavirus: Any of a family (Coronaviridae) of single-stranded RNA viruses that have a lipid envelope studded with club-shaped projections, infect birds and many mammals including humans, and include the causative agents of MERS, SARS, and COVID-19. There are more than 200 types of
COVID-19, like all viruses, seems to hit people differently. Most people are mildly impacted, some moderately and a few are hit very hard. The extremity in severity of symptoms between people is part of what makes this virus so unusual, hard to stop, and scary. The graph above shows just the confirmed cases in
This is one of the best visualizations I have ever seen to show how viral outbreaks work. The Washington Post offers a simulator that randomly depicts an outbreak in a town of 200 and provides four different scenarios. Below are screenshots I took of some of the results generated. The grey blue section represents people
Happy April Fools! Pretty much every blog joke I thought of came across trite, cruel or inappropriate, so I decided to forego attempts at humor this year. Instead, I’m offering up some interesting historical death facts. The infographics in the History of Pandemics are fascinating. You can see COVID-19 in comparison to other great pandemics
