Tag Archives: Coronavirus insights

StratfordProductions/Shutterstock Lewis Gough, Birmingham City University A significant proportion of people who contract COVID are left with ongoing symptoms, commonly termed “long COVID”. The nature of these symptoms and the duration of the illness differ between people. While some people are still suffering more than two years after their initial infection, others have recovered, or at least improved. As you’re …

studiostoks/Shutterstock Oliver Laasch, University of Manchester It’s been a tough few years for people who own or manage a business. Lockdowns shut down whole industrial sectors worldwide, turning profitable businesses into loss-making ones, while a lot of smaller businesses went under. Many companies will now be hoping for a return to some type of normality after COVID. However, there are …

Cookie Studio/Shutterstock Stephanie Alice Baker, City, University of London and Michael James Walsh, University of Canberra Opposition to vaccination has existed for as long as vaccination itself. Ever since widespread smallpox vaccination began in the early 1800s, there have been cycles of questioning the safety and efficacy of particular vaccines. The media has played a primary role in publicising these …

ilze kalve/Shutterstock Simon Kolstoe, University of Portsmouth We are all tired of COVID. But even though the news has moved on to other concerning geopolitical issues, it is a fact that COVID is still very much with us. Vaccines have certainly helped drive down its worst effects, but the disease is here to stay, and we must learn to live …

Naeblys/Shutterstock Luke O’Neill, Trinity College Dublin In many countries, as restrictions lift and freedoms are restored, there’s a general feeling that the pandemic is over. There is, however, still the significant concern that a dangerous new variant could emerge. This happened when omicron arrived, but we got lucky with that one. Omicron turned out to be more transmissible, but mercifully …

Cavan-Images/Shutterstock Ruth Ogden, Liverpool John Moores University and Patricia Kingori, University of Oxford It’s been two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID outbreak a pandemic, and since then, people around the world have been asking the same thing: when will it end? This seems like a simple question, but historical analysis shows that “the end” of …

Andrew Lee, University of Sheffield; KK Cheng, University of Birmingham; Sheena Cruickshank, University of Manchester, and Trish Greenhalgh, University of Oxford The World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic on March 11 2020. In the two years since, countries have diverged on their containment strategies, introducing many different ways of mitigating the virus, to varying effect. Here, four health experts …

Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock Eoghan De Barra, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences China, the country that first detected the novel coronavirus, remains one of the few not to have imported one of the exceptionally effective mRNA COVID vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. Instead, it has so far relied on vaccines developed by two Chinese companies, Sinovac and Sinopharm. However, this …

illpaxphotomatic/Shutterstock Paul Hunter, University of East Anglia We’ve known since early on in the pandemic that COVID reinfections could occur. One of the first reinfections reported was in a 33-year-old man from Hong Kong. His initial infection was diagnosed on March 26 2020, with his second infection, with a genetically distinct virus, being diagnosed 142 days later. Since then reports …

file404/Shutterstock Andrew Chadwick, Loughborough University Many worldwide have now caught COVID. But during the pandemic many more are likely to have encountered something else that’s been spreading virally: misinformation. False information has plagued the COVID response, erroneously convincing people that the virus isn’t harmful, of the merits of various ineffective treatments, or of false dangers associated with vaccines. Often, this …