COVID modelling reveals new insights into ancient social distancing – podcast: lindasky76/Shutterstock Five years since COVID emerged, not only has the pandemic affected the way we live and work, it’s also influencing the way researchers are thinking about the past. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, archaeologist Alex Bentley explains how the pandemic …
A glimpse into a surreal abyss: how COVID ravaged a remote city in the Amazonian jungle – podcast: When the first cases of COVID began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isolation would protect them. It didn’t. …
We finally know why some people got COVID while others didn’t: Throughout the pandemic, one of the key questions on everyone’s mind was why some people avoided getting COVID, while others caught the virus multiple times. Through a collaboration between University College London, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Imperial College London in the UK, we …
Private COVID jabs lead to concerns about creeping privatisation in the NHS: People not eligible for a free NHS COVID vaccine can now purchase one from a pharmacy or private healthcare provider. Tong_stocker/ Shutterstock COVID boosters are now available to purchase from high-street pharmacies and private healthcare providers in England. This means that millions of …
Jobs in South Africa: the labour market is recovering from COVID – but unskilled and less educated people are still being left behind: For more than three decades the South African economy has had very high rates of joblessness. The country’s economy has been unable to create enough jobs for its growing army of workers. …
What COVID diaries have in common with Samuel Pepys’ 17th-century plague diaries: Ground Picture/Shutterstock People keep diaries for all sorts of reasons – to record events, work through difficult situations, or manage stress and trauma. The ongoing COVID inquiry shows diaries also have important political and historic significance. The UK’s former chief scientific adviser Patrick …
The care home sector got £2.1 billion in government COVID aid — our research shows care workers themselves got little support: Danie Franco|Unsplash The Coronavirus public inquiry has made public all manner of decisions taken by the UK government, during the pandemic, that have shocked the nation. In particular, Jenny Harries, current head of the …
mRNA COVID vaccines make ‘unintended proteins’ – we’ve discovered how to fix this problem: MRNA, a type of genetic material that provides the instructions your cells need in order to make proteins, used to be a term mainly used by scientists. But since COVID arrived many of us are now familiar with it thanks to …
Boris Johnson at the COVID inquiry: sullen, evasive and a danger to democracy: Boris Johnson has lost his bounce. As he gave evidence before the COVID inquiry, his body language arguably said far more than the often rambling statements that came out of his mouth. Slumped in terms of physicality, slow in terms of intellectual …
COVID inquiry: how it works, and when we will know if it is successful: The COVID inquiry has already made plenty of headlines, revealing the inner workings of the government and its many personalities during the pandemic. But other than gripping television, what can we ultimately expect from this exercise? People who feel they have …
COVID inquiry heard Boris Johnson ‘struggled’ with graphs – if you do too, here are some tips: In March 2020, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, presented to the nation a graph showing “the shape of an epidemic”. The red line depicting the number of predicted COVID cases rose to a steep peak …
India: how COVID enabled new forms of economic abuse of women: During lockdown many Indian women were isolated and suffered both domestic and economic abuse from the menin their families. Radiokafka/Shutterstock In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, the United Nations (UN) identified what it called a “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence against women. The …
Leadership in a crisis: how President Ramaphosa’s COVID speeches drew on Mandela’s ideas of South African unity: In times of crisis, leaders wield more than just political power. They harness the art of rhetoric in a bid to unite their nations towards a common goal. South Africa, with a tumultuous history marked by apartheid, has …
Memory in action: what the UK’s official COVID commemoration should look like: Whether an actual bereavement or a loss of experience, everyone has lost something to COVID. From early on in the pandemic, grassroots memorials sought to acknowledge this collective experience, including the national COVID memorial wall in London and the annual national day of …
Who tracked UK COVID infections the best at the height of the pandemic? A new study provides the answer: At the height of the COVID pandemic everybody, from health ministers to Joe public, wanted to know two things: how many infected people are there in the country? And is this number going up or down? …
You’ve heard of long COVID, but did you know there might also be a long cold?: At least 10% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, have symptoms that last more than four weeks after the infection. With more than 770 million infections to date, this translates to tens of millions of …
Long COVID patients are much more likely to have multiple organ abnormalities: It wasn’t that long ago that some people speculated that long COVID was all in the mind – a psychosomatic illness. Thankfully, that period of speculation is now behind us. We have compelling evidence that long COVID is very real and very harmful. …
Nobel prize in medicine awarded to mRNA pioneers – here’s how their discovery was integral to COVID vaccine development: Billions of people around the world have received the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. The rapid development of these vaccines changed the course of the pandemic, providing protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But these vaccines would …