Pitfalls and opportunities We are all appalled by the feeble US response to the need for COVID testing. This failure was due to misaligned incentives. With no path to monetize infectious disease testing, we did not innovate and could not execute. That’s the past. What about the future? If you…

There is a lot of junk out there You’ve probably heard that antibody testing is key to reopening businesses and schools. Individuals who test positive are likely to be immune to COVID infection, and can safely return to work. …

Maybe a light, but not the end of the tunnel Gilead’s stock jumped today (Apr 17) when a researcher blurted out preliminary clinical trial data on a video chat, and those data were leaked to STAT news. Let’s specify first of all that this is highly inappropriate behavior on the…

Notes on why we failed and how we will succeed — COVID exposed weaknesses in our health care system. And maybe no aspect of the crisis causes more anguish and outrage than our inability to implement coronavirus testing. Effective testing could have controlled the spread of COVID. Effective and widespread testing will be essential to resuscitating the economy. The failure of…

At least for now There is no question that more testing for coronavirus is needed. Without it we can’t treat those who need it, isolate those who have been exposed, or distinguish COVID-19 disease from other respiratory infections. But like all things in life, there can be too much of…

No news is bad news We all hope that effective drugs to treat COVID-19 disease can be found. The number of lives at stake is enormous. It’s not just deaths from infection, but also from the ensuing economic disruption. We learned in the Great Recession of 2008 that long-term unemployment…

No news is bad news We all hope that effective drugs to treat COVID-19 disease can be found. The number of lives at stake is enormous. It’s not just deaths from infection, but also from the ensuing economic disruption. We learned in the Great Recession of 2008 that long-term unemployment…

Why The Coronavirus Outbreak Was Unstoppable High contagion in a world of low trust The death of Dr. Li Wenliang is a tragedy in so many ways. The man was a genuine hero, a doctor felled by a disease contracted from a patient. …

A statistic for non-statisticians — Many people (not you, I hope) are under the impression that statistics can prove things. They can’t. All they do is estimate how likely or unlikely a phenomenon is. But probabilities fit uneasily into the world. We (and our algorithms) have to make binary decisions — yes/no, stop/go — based…