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. Tracking deaths is better in this regard, but perhaps the most direct measure of the pandemic’s strain on state healthcare resources is the number of patients requiring…