Author: lauraspinney
-
Outbreaks of all kinds: The Rules of Contagion review
DID you notice? There was a moment when something shifted, and all topics of conversation besides Covid-19 started to sound trivial. Things will surely shift again, as people realise that the self-confinement could last and escapism becomes our collective goal, but for now Adam Kucharski’s The Rules of Contagion is the book you might want…
-
It takes a world to create a pandemic
WHEN I get stressed, a patch of annoying red eczema appears on the inside of my upper right arm. The doctor gives me some cream to rub on it, but I also know that to stop it coming back I have to deal with the underlying problem… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 25 March…
-
Lockdown in migrant camps in Greece
AS the Schengen area closed its external borders last week, in a move designed to replace the closing of member states’ national borders against imported Covid-19 infection, some internal barriers still went up in Europe. The day after the European commission’s announcement, the Greek government introduced a set of measures that would apply to the…
-
“We are ready”: inside the Paris hospitals bracing for coronavirus
WITH the number of cases of Covid-19 doubling every three days in France, the capital is preparing for the worst. In the northern sector of Paris, all 26 beds in the intensive care unit of the Bichat-Claude Bernard hospital are full, and the wards that have been turned over to Covid-19 patients are filling up…
-
When will a coronavirus vaccine be ready?
EVEN at their most effective – and draconian – containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick… This article first appeared in The…
-
Why wait so long before calling it a pandemic?
YESTERDAY, on 11 March, the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, or Tedros as he is known, declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic – that is, according to the WHO’s definition, “the worldwide spread of a new disease”… This article first appeared in the New Statesman on 12 March 2020. To continue…
-
Closed borders and black weddings
PLAGUES – or, to use a more modern term, epidemics of infectious disease – pluck at our most primal fears. We have lived with them for at least 10,000 years, ever since our ancestors took up farming and built the first semi-permanent settlements. And they have always had the upper hand. They know us intimately,…
-
Epidemics expert Jonathan Quick: ‘The worst-case scenario for coronavirus is likely’
IN 2018 global health expert Jonathan D Quick, of Duke University in North Carolina, published a book titled The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It. In it he prescribed measures by which the world could protect itself against devastating disease outbreaks of the likes of the 1918 flu,…
-
Fake news and infectious disease
JUST over 100 years ago, the so-called Spanish flu killed an estimated 50 million people, in probably the worst pandemic the world has seen. It erupted in the northern hemisphere spring of 1918 and circled the globe over the next three years… This article was first published in The Sunday Times on 1 March 2020 . To…