Author Archives: gymnosperm

A seasonal second wave of SARS-2 infections has spread around the Northern Hemisphere since the last post. Generally deaths are far fewer, both because many of the most vulnerable have been exposed and because a younger and healthier group is … Continue reading →

Last year’s seasonal flu vaccine was judged 45% effective. This is typical effectiveness for a seasonal flu vaccine after half a century of practice. Now let’s say 50% of the people will take the vaccine in line with recent studies. … Continue reading →

The time scale of viral evolution is hours. The infectious vectors called virions can each produce thousands of copies of themselves from a single infected cell. Within hours, natural selection will determine which virions will successfully infect another cell/organ/individual; and … Continue reading →

Perusing the state new case curves on https://rt.live/ some patterns become apparent. Some states with early exposure are on a clear downward trend. Some southern states with later exposure are on an upward trend, California being an exception by early … Continue reading →

We had been trying to do this ourselves but found this fun model: https://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html   We can attest that the model parameters agree with our own incomplete efforts. It has lots of fun stuff to play with, and you can … Continue reading →

The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus Botao Xiao1,2* and Lei Xiao3 1 Joint International Research Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Medicine, School of Biology and Biological Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China 2 School of Physics, Huazhong … Continue reading →