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Jun 06 2022 Blueprint The Challenge of Measuring Vaccine Effectiveness In mid-November 2020, as Covid-19 cases were rising and two thousand people were dying every day in the U.S., Americans needed hope. They got it. Hope arrived in a syringe. Effective vaccines were developed in record time, with the promise of ending the current pandemic. The scientific discoveries behind that quick vaccine development are also […]
Apr 05 2022 Blog Post A User’s Guide to U.S. Vaccine Breakthrough Rates With the United States over a year into its vaccination campaign, all eyes right now are on Covid-19 rates broken out by vaccination status—measures of the number of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths per 100,000 vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals. Shared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as many state, […]
Mar 25 2022 Blueprint Variants, Sublineages, and Recombinants: The Constantly Changing Genome of SARS-CoV-2 During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, numerous variants of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged. Some have died out, and some have surged globally. They are all SARS-CoV-2, but they differ in important ways. Think of them as the boughs of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree, each of which has branched off into many smaller limbs. The smaller […]
Feb 16 2022 Blueprint Tracking SARS-CoV-2 and Its Variants in Wastewater: An Old Technique Is Yielding Powerful New Insights in the Covid-19 Pandemic The newest addition to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Covid Data Tracker reports on levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. While researchers, public health departments, and some private companies have been monitoring wastewater since the beginning of the pandemic, this tracker marks an important step in the establishment of the National Wastewater Surveillance System […]
Dec 28 2021 Field Note Vaccine Inequity Increases the Risk of New SARS-CoV-2 Variants Emerging Robust genomic surveillance, along with transparency, communication, and global collaboration, is needed to detect and control emerging variants. To control the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) called on member states to meet a goal of vaccinating 40% of their population by the end of 2021. As of mid December 2021, over 8.6 billion […]