Member-only story

The Wheat From The Chaff: Understanding COVID-19

Deepti Pradhan
9 min readSep 26, 2020

--

Answers will come from scientific data; anecdotes while sometimes helpful aren’t testable, and can often be misleading. Science is what will help us get to the other side of this pandemic

On January 26, 2020 I landed in New York via Abu Dhabi, after spending almost seventeen hours in an aluminium tube, inhaling and exhaling the same air that 300 other people breathed. A little over a month later, New York saw its first COVID-19 case, on February 29. Transmission was primarily airborne. Almost nine months later, the world has seen more than 32.5 million people infected by SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — and almost one million people have died from the disease. By mid-November, if things continue the way they are, there will be more than 40 million cases worldwide, and more than one million deaths. While cases in the US peaked in July, India now leads the world in the daily average number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, accounting for one in every 20 deaths reported worldwide each day.

Turning on a dime

Irrespective of which hemisphere you are in, the world has been through two full seasons of being partially temporarily closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and half of one season at the start of the pandemic. So far, in the Northern Hemisphere it was half of winter, all of spring, and…

--

--

Deepti Pradhan
Deepti Pradhan

Written by Deepti Pradhan

Employed at Yale University, Deepti is primarily a scientist & patient advocate. She runs Tilde Cafe, a forum to make science accessible (www.tildecafe.org)

No responses yet