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Tag: epidemiology

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The Mathematics of Predicting the Course of the Coronavirus

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In the past few days, New York City’s hospitals have become unrecognizable. Thousands of patients sick with the novel coronavirus have swarmed into emergency rooms and intensive care units. From 3,000 miles away in Seattle, as Lisa Brandenburg watched the scenes unfold—isolation wards cobbled together in lobbies, nurses caring for Covid-19 patients in makeshift trash bag gowns, refrigerated mobile morgues idling on the street outside—she couldn’t stop herself from thinking: “That could be us.” It could be, if the models are wrong. Until this past week, Seattle had been the…

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How ProMED Crowdsourced the Arrival of Covid-19 and SARS

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It was about 8:30 pm on December 30, and Marjorie Pollack, a physician and epidemiologist, was working in her home office in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Her email pinged. In her inbox was a note from a frequent and reliable contributor to ProMED, an email list of disease alerts for which Pollack serves as deputy editor. The contributor, who speaks and reads Chinese, wanted her to know about a new post that was getting some attention on Weibo, a within-China social media network. The post said that a few hours earlier,…

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An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

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On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31. Related Stories Snakes?! The Slippery Truth of a…

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