Author: lauraspinney
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Caught in the second wave
ON 15 March, just before Covid-19 hit the Lariboisière Hospital in Paris, the head of its emergency service was calm. “My team is ready,” said Eric Revue… This article first appeared in the New Statesman on 29 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.
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Interview: Christian Drosten
CHRISTIAN Drosten, who directs the Institute of Virology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, was one of those who identified the Sars virus in 2003. As the head of the German public health institute’s reference lab on coronaviruses, he has become the government’s go-to expert on the related virus causing the current pandemic… This article…
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Heart attack and stroke patients delay seeking help
FURTHER evidence is emerging of dramatic falls in numbers of hospital patients presenting with serious medical conditions such as strokes and heart attacks since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic… This article was published in The Guardian on 16 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.
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God’s perfume
IN THE EARLY 1990s, the then Mayor of Versailles, André Damien, discovered a folded paper in the drawer of an antique desk he had just bought at auction. When he opened the paper up, he saw that it had written on it a formula for what seemed to be a perfume, so he took it…
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Food, globalisation and pandemics
ONCE a dangerous new pathogen is out, as we are seeing, it can be difficult if not impossible to prevent it going global. One as contagious as SARS-CoV-2 has the potential to infect the whole of humanity. Eighty per cent of cases may be benign, but with such a large pool of susceptible hosts, the…
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On pandemics and inequality
A LOT has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened…? This article first appeared in The Guardian on 12 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.
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When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine?
WHEN will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Public-facing scientists such as the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and his US counterpart, Anthony Fauci, keep repeating that it won’t be before 12 to 18 months. But other voices – including some of those in the race to create a vaccine themselves – have suggested…
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Scientists make ethical decisions too
SOMETIMES the parallels between this pandemic and previous ones are uncanny. Take hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that regulatory agencies all over the world are now hastily authorising for the treatment of hospitalised Covid-19 patients. Outside hospitals, Donald Trump and the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, have expressed enthusiasm for the drug, people are breaking social distancing…
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Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?
WHERE did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading… This article first appeared…
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The state transformed: Singapore
SINGAPORE is a small country and an island nation to boot. But it is also a major commercial, tourism and transport hub that receives more than three times its population in visitors each year. So it is remarkable that at the time of writing it has recorded just 558 cases of Covid-19 and two deaths,…