Pediatric Covid-19 hospitalizations reach all-time highs; a look at flu and the ICU — I’m a clinical instructor for Harvard Medical School, emergency physician, and director of emergency informatics for Cambridge Health Alliance. When I first put up my surge comparison site almost two weeks ago, I remarked how Covid hospitalizations in Massachusetts had tracked those of last winter at a level about a…

Interactive Site Directly Compares Numbers Between Years — I’ve spent most of the past 2 years caring for Covid-19 patients as an emergency physician while helping my hospital monitor the pandemic in my role as a clinical informaticist. As the country struggled with the Delta variant this summer, I was grateful that, through some combination of vaccines, policy…

Guest/ghost-written by Deceased Unknown Male — I can’t tell you not to gather on Sunday, to skip that party and watch the Super Bowl at home. But that’s only because I can’t tell you anything: Covid-19 killed me last week. I was sixty-eight years old, pretty healthy, with my appointment for the Covid vaccine circled on…

As Covid-19 cases and deaths continue to rise across the country, with record numbers of patients hospitalized, there is increasing focus on monitoring for potential shortages in hospital capacity. I recently posted charts showing the percentage of all beds occupied by Covid-19 patients for every hospital in Massachusetts. As a…

As an emergency physician, there’s very little I do on-shift that isn’t influenced by Covid-19. As a clinical informaticist and data geek, I’ve pored over data from dozens of sources (91-Divoc is my go-to, along with the MA Weekly Public Health Report which has city-specific testing data) to get a…

3 minutes, 3 charts to understand the recent study results — The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced preliminary results of a randomized controlled trial comparing Gilead’s experimental anti-viral drug remdesivir to placebo, finding the drug beneficial for recovery time and with a statistically insignificant trend toward a mortality benefit. “Patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to…

A healthcare worker walks to the bus stop after a long shift. She can’t quite make it… — I was supposed to be off today. Kim sounded desperate on the phone, though; four CNAs called out sick. It’s been impossible for her to keep the schedule covered: The word is out about the virus in nursing homes. People are scared, and I am, too. But an extra 30…

This was originally published on rarelyread.org on 3/20/2020, before I moved my blog to medium.com. After seeing John Burn-Murdoch’s excellent charts plotting COVID-19 case counts and death rates by country, I wanted to see the same information for each state. In particular, I wanted to see visually what the trend…

New York continues to explode; Louisiana, South Carolina and Colorado worrisome; no data for Michigan or New Jersey — Many commenters on prior charts of statewide COVID-19 case counts have noted that unreliable testing makes such trends unreliable or difficult to interpret. …