I graduated from medical school in January 2020. Long before starting to study to be a doctor, I had become interested in how diet and health are related, with a particular interest in the paleolithic diet. I think this was borne primarily out of my strong interest in evolution and biology – it just made sense that the diet humans were evolutionarily adapted to over … Read more
Category: Covid 19
What are the harms of lockdown?
You would think that governments always do a cost-benefit analysis before embarking on a certain course of action, especially if it is likely to have significant effects on many different aspects of society. The global lockdowns in response to the covid pandemic probably constitute the largest, most extreme measures taken by western governments since the second world war. So, you would think a careful cost-benefit … Read more
How long does immunity to covid last?
One of the fears of many people in relation to covid has been that the immunity that develops after infection is so short lived that the infection will just keep going around and around and re-infecting everyone (until everyone is dead, I assume).
Two pieces of evidence have been presented to support this belief. The first concerns a few cases of “re-infection” that have been … Read more
Covid-19: New evidence on face masks
A few months back I wrote an article about the state of the evidence on face masks. At that point, there were no good studies looking at the effectiveness of face masks in preventing the spread of covid-19 specifically, but there was a systematic review that looked at all randomized trials that had been done on face masks for the prevention of respiratory infections … Read more
What is long covid?
I’ve been getting questions about long covid and my standard answer has been that I don’t think it’s any different from post-viral syndrome, a condition that affects some people after a viral infection but that usually clears up within a few months. I’ve been generally sceptical of claims of long covid as some distinct entity for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s generally impossible to … Read more
Covid podcast with Ivor Cummins
I recently took part in a podcast with Ivor Cummins of Fat Emperor to discuss covid-19. Over the course of an hour we discuss what has happened in Sweden and what my experiences have been working in the Emergency Room of a hospital over the course of the pandemic. We also discuss the reasons I reached the conclusion that we must have herd immunity in … Read more