HIV and ID Observations

May 17th, 2021

CDC’s Surprise Mask Policy — and What It Means Right Now for Me

Anyone else out there blindsided by the CDC’s announcement last week about masks?  Fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing … Jeepers, that was fast. Less than a month ago, I was having a conversation with my dog Louie about outdoor mask mandates, wondering when our town would drop this […]

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May 10th, 2021

Goodbye, Physician’s First Watch — We’re Really Going to Miss You

One of the great joys of life is working with great people, and for me, this includes frequent interactions with several skillful medical editors. They scan these posts for typos and awkward sentences, and warn me when I inadvertently include a copyrighted image or an inappropriate video. They also worked, until recently, for Physician’s First Watch, […]

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May 3rd, 2021

Some Colleges Require COVID-19 Vaccination — Why Don’t They All?

Each time a college announces that it requires that students be immunized for COVID-19 to attend in-person classes or to live on campus, I do a little cheer. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a happy dance — especially when it’s right in my neighborhood. Why? Because ever since the pandemic started, carefully done epidemiologic studies consistently show […]

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April 19th, 2021

Is It Time to Eliminate Outdoor Mask Mandates?

I do the morning dog walk in our house. And every day, I put on a mask before going out, just as I have since March of last year. As the data accumulate on the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, it’s definitely time to ask this question — why am I still doing this? After all, it’s […]

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April 11th, 2021

Poll: Will This Video Change Anyone’s Mind About Getting a COVID-19 Vaccine?

Watch this video. It’s a minute long: I first heard about the video because, as mentioned before, I play in a regular poker game with a group of smart friends. Naturally, the in-person game, which started sometime in the early days of the 21th century, has been on hold since March of last year. One can […]

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April 4th, 2021

More Excellent News on COVID-19 Vaccines — and Baseball Gets a Policy Right

Big announcement this week from CDC, saying that people who have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 can safely travel. Of course many didn’t need this permission, as data increasingly show the vaccines not only powerfully protect you, but protect others. But having official endorsement from our cautious federal health agency surely means the data are especially strong. […]

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March 21st, 2021

If You Want Thoughtful and Accurate Predictions About COVID-19, Zeynep Tufekci Has the Answers

The future ain’t what it used to be, said one very wise man. He might have also said, It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, but alas we’ll have to credit that profundity to someone else. Still, both these statements embody the insurmountable difficulty of making accurate predictions — a problem starkly evident during pandemic […]

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March 14th, 2021

Really Rapid Review — CROI 2021 Virtual

For a few years in the early 2010s, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) — in my opinion our premiere HIV scientific meeting — covered almost as many hepatitis C clinical trials as those on HIV. Or at least it seemed that way. This made sense at the time — the startling success of […]

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March 7th, 2021

Exactly One Year Ago, a Memorable Dinner Before a Memorable Year

On March 7, 2020, right before CROI here in Boston, a bunch of us ID types planned to get together for a pre-conference dinner. A mixture of Bostonians and out-of-towners who hadn’t seen each other for a while. A chance to catch up before our busiest (and most important) scientific meeting. What happened? One person landed in […]

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February 21st, 2021

Why Are COVID-19 Case Numbers Dropping?

We don’t know. That part is easy. Also easy is that case numbers really are falling — it’s not just reduced testing — and it’s happening pretty much everywhere. Urban areas and rural. Red states and blue. Places with broad vaccine rollouts and those with hardly any. North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Even countries […]

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