Tag Archives: Covid-19

Stand well back. Oatawa Jefferson Frank, Royal Holloway Markets abhor uncertainty. The coronavirus pandemic is a severe supply shock that will substantially reduce the world’s economic output, and there will potentially be several waves as the contagion returns in the autumn or spring 2021. Many governments are trying to form a bridge over the lockdown period to allow economic activity …

Daniel Laufer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington In Australia, New Zealand and around the world, COVID has turned luxury and semi-luxury hotels into quarantine facilities. Among the four and five-star hotels reported as having been used for temporary detention are Sydney’s Intercontinental, Marriott, Hyatt Regency, Sheraton Grand, Sofitel Wentworth and Novotel Darling Harbour; Auckland’s Rydges, Crowne Plaza, …

Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. China’s economy is now showing strong growth. Shutterstock Steve Schifferes, City, University of London The coronavirus has crippled the world economy. Global GDP suffered its sharpest drop since the end of the second world war in 2020, millions were unemployed or furloughed, and governments pumped trillions of dollars into their economies to prevent greater damage. …

Getting vaccines to rural and hard-to-reach areas is critical for public health and ethical reasons. Hector Roqueta Rivero/Moment via Getty Images Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst To mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the …

Exercising indoors is beneficial for our immune system. SUPREEYA-ANON/ Shutterstock James Turner, University of Bath and John P Campbell, University of Bath People around the world are staying at home as part of social distancing measures to limit the transmission of the novel coronavirus. In some countries people are being encouraged to exercise once a day. However, there’s long been …

Remote working became the new normal in 2020. Elenabsl/Shutterstock Dave Cook, UCL The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that the amount we work would gradually shrink to as little as 15 hours a week as technology made us more productive. Not only did this not happen, but we also began to spend extra time away from home due …

fizkes/Shutterstock Frances Williams, King’s College London For most people, infection with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – leads to mild, short-term symptoms, acute respiratory illness, or possibly no symptoms at all. But some people have long-lasting symptoms after their infection – this has been dubbed “long COVID”. Scientists are still researching long COVID. It’s not well understood, though …

Prostock-studio/Shutterstock Alessandro Siani, University of Portsmouth The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has been authorised for use in the UK, meaning that millions more vaccine doses can now be delivered in the country. This will speed up progress towards achieving widespread immunity to the coronavirus. However, since the start of the pandemic – and particularly since vaccines for COVID-19 started being developed …

I am a physician, and I just got my first shot of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. William Petri, CC BY-SA William Petri, University of Virginia This week I was vaccinated against COVID-19 with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, which brought to mind some frequently asked questions about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. I am a professor of infectious diseases at the …

/Shutterstock Michael Head, University of Southampton The UK has become the first country to authorise the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for public use, with roll-out to start in the first week of 2021. This vaccine is the second to be authorised in the UK – following the Pfizer vaccine. The British government has ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine, …