This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

Contact tracing—the gumshoe work of the public health system whereby one goes backward from a known case to see who the patient has been in contact with—revealed that at least sixty people had been exposed to Patient Zero. Amazingly, none of them got sick. Later genetic analyses confirmed that this patient was very likely not responsible for the ep

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Instead of mitigation, the report called for “suppression,” which it defined as “social distancing of the entire population” and household quarantines or school closures. In other words, a strict and government-enforced lockdown, like Italy’s. Finally, it warned that those suppression efforts would “need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes ava

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In addition to the CFR and the mismatch period, another key parameter of SARS-2 was investigated in early 2020: How many new cases does each case give rise to? For each person who becomes infected, how many other people, on average, does that individual infect? This number is known as the effective reproduction number, denoted Re (sometimes also kn

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In terms of evolutionary biology, the virus has had what is known as an “ecological release.” This refers to the expansion of range and the population explosion that occurs when a species is freed from constraints it previously faced. The typical example of this is invasive species introduced by humans such as the cane toads that overwhelmed Austra

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