COVID-19: Questionable Coronavirus Evolution in Biosafety Level 4 Labs
In one of the greatest scientific understatements since Watson and Crick wrote, “it has not escaped our notice…” in their famous 1953 paper on the double-helical structure of DNA, the authors of a January 2020 paper concluded: “our findings suggest unconventional evolution of 2019-nCoV that warrants further investigation.” The authors of the more recent paper […]
COVID-19: Killer of Black, Brown and Poor of US and Haiti
We are supposed to be thinking this week about the health disparities in the United States based on race and ethnicity, since the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and even USA Today are going on about it. This is the hot topic presumably because of a recent analysis of the demographics of […]
COVID-19: Diagnostics, Hydroxychloroquine, Plasma, Short and Long-Term Solutions
The first infection by the agent of COVID-19, variously called 2019-nCoV or SARS-CoV-2, probably happened around December 12, 2019, based on the interviews in late December with a group of new pneumonia patients in Wuhan, China. Most of the pneumonia cases turned out to be traceable, either directly or indirectly, to the city’s Huanan seafood […]
COVID-19: Background Science to Understand the Pandemic
Pathogenic RNA viruses began to prey in earnest on humans around the time of our industrial revolution. As the human population exploded and then increased its density by a massive effort of urbanization, it also changed land use to encroach on wildlife. Such changes continue today, unabated, even accelerated, as the human population attempts to […]
Life in the Time of COVID-19: Revenge of the Bat
It was dusk. Out of a cave, black clouds of bats were coming out: thick. The fading sun skipped on their velvety wings. It was beautiful. The bats faded into darkness, on their way, on the hunt: tiny knights of nature carrying a deadly weapon about to cure humanity of its follies and arrogance. Their […]
