After enduring a devastating wave of infections, deaths and lockdowns at the start of the pandemic, Italy is putting in place tougher anti-COVID measures, including a vaccine passport.
Evolution explains why the Delta variant spreads faster than the original Wuhan strain. It explains what we might see with future variants. And it suggests how we might step up public health measures.
A$50 million could provide all NSW school classrooms with air purifiers with HEPA filters. This pales compared to the roughly $220 million-a-day cost of Sydney’s lockdown.
As troops enforce Sydney’s lockdown, two experts explain why using military rhetoric and personnel may undermine efforts to control the virus, especially among communities most vulnerable to COVID.
In Africa, it’s more rational to prioritise vaccine access, rapid rollout and community engagement, than pushing the narrative of vaccine-induced population immunity.
NSW needs to mandate masks outdoors, provide adequate financial support, set up a ‘ring of steel’, use rapid tests for essential workers, and ensure cases not in full isolation get to zero, among others.
When politicians and others speak about herd immunity, unfortunately, they are under the misconception that the current tools that we’ve got are adequate to eliminate the virus.
Vaccines can’t provide 100% protection, so it’s not a failure or surprise when some vaccinated people get sick with COVID-19. The good news is their cases are much less likely to be severe or fatal.
Once we achieve herd immunity, people who are not vaccinated benefit indirectly from the immunity of those around them. But it’s not easy to say exactly when we’ll reach this threshold for COVID-19.
Parents face tough choices since young kids can’t yet get COVID-19 vaccinations. An infectious diseases expert offers guidance on navigating summer activities.
The evidence shows the main way COVID-19 spreads is through the air. I propose 3 steps Australia needs to take to protect people from infection risk and other indoor air hazards.
NSW’s successful test and trace strategy controlled the Crossroads Hotel outbreak a year ago without needing a stringent lockdown. But this has not worked as well against Delta.
Policymakers need to make sense of the data so as to predict and manage what’s happening. To address this need, we developed a visualisation tool to track and predict country-level COVID-19 cases.
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand