6
votes
How do I evaluate health benefits and health advertisements of products?
Educate yourself! That means reading up. From reliable sources. Most of the information on the internet is mere statements on sites that present health relevant info as easy and simple. But in ...
6
votes
Why are most people who contract COVID-19 asymptomatic?
At this point in time no one can say for sure why many people appear to have asymptomatic infection, and figures range from 20-80% though part of the problem appears to be from false positives in ...
- 13.2k
5
votes
Accepted
Why do most of an average person's UV exposure from the sun occur before the age of 18?
The statistic is false, though there's something meaningful behind it. From Godar et al, 2003:
Since 1986, people have been informed that they get about 80% of their lifetime ultraviolet (UV) dose by ...
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5
votes
Why are people so worried about 2019-nCoV?
The danger posed to society from this disease doesn't come from the mortality rate, rather from the potential to make large fraction of the population ill. Unlike the flu virus, this virus is a new ...
- 2,230
5
votes
Accepted
Can the capacity for COVID-19 tests be amplified by testing multiple samples mixed together and testing each only if positive?
Update Apr 2: Pooled tests are under development now (newspaper in German), the plan is to pool 5 samples and to use the usual amount of each sample (and presumably dilute less) so that sensitivity is ...
5
votes
Why are most people who contract COVID-19 asymptomatic?
The reason why many people who contract COVID-19 are asymptomatic is simple. It is because your immune system can kill the pathogen before you show symptoms. In other words, your body overwhelms the ...
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5
votes
Accepted
To what extent does filling more prescriptions increase the number of medication errors?
There are thousands of papers that study medication errors. They fall into various groups. There is the provider side, the pharmacist side, the technician side, the nursing side, and the system side ...
4
votes
Accepted
Why has the number of medication errors increased by 463% between 2010 and 2016 in the US?
The USA Today article you linked to provides two potential explanations:
The FDA said the spike is because of improvements made to its reporting system over the last two years. Pharmacy industry ...
4
votes
Accepted
Should we all eat more Protein?
It depends on the diet and the person. However, protein myths abound because people look at extreme ends of the scale, and assume that outlier needs are suitable for the masses.
If you are looking for ...
- 6,570
4
votes
What is the cause of the vaping-related outbreak of lung injuries?
There are some data about possible causes of vaping-related lung damage, the type of the damage and symptoms, but not about the changes in medical history questionnaires, vaping habits or e-cigarette ...
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4
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between lifetime incidence and cumulative lifetime incidence?
You're thinking of it like "cumulative" + "lifetime incidence"; they're thinking of it as "cumulative incidence" and answering the question "cumulative incidence ...
- 13.1k
3
votes
What is the principal goal in pooled COVID-19 testing?
The principal goal of pooled testing is to rapidly clear many cases in low prevalence (or incidence) situations.
Long version:
Disclaimer: I'm analytical chemist, i.e. someone who could by profession ...
3
votes
Accepted
Why not "increase temperature indoors to 30 Celsius or more + hydration" as a measure to slow down the new coronavirus spread?
When you say slow down the rate of transmission indoors, most countries that I know of with this condition are in lock-down or practicising social distancing to reduce the risk of spread. So, I ...
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3
votes
Does less than 10% of donated used medical equipment ultimately becomes operational?
That is on the one hand quite a broad question ("these countries") for not a very vague but a very specific number. On the other hand this is indeed a public health issue very much unfocused by the ...
- 6,847
2
votes
Accepted
What is the cause of the vaping-related outbreak of lung injuries?
While it could still be a mixture of acute reasons: metals, dust, plainly unknown toxins; the underlying reason seems not to be that plant matter is vaped, nor that liquids are vaped.
It also seems ...
- 6,847
2
votes
What diet should I eat to perform optimally, maximizing my alertness?
Not knowing what diets you have used, or what your current diet restrictions are, its impossible to suggest a specific food. It also sounds like you are interested in self observation of results. ...
- 21
2
votes
Is there any identified policy China is doing to successfully reduce COVID-19 the other countries aren't using?
To Mask or not To Mask that is the question
One thing China did early on was wearing face masks to protect others. They are still doing it today even though there has been no deaths for 10 days and ...
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2
votes
Is there a graph over time of Covid-19 test positivity rate in the US?
Many websites tracking COVID-19 source their data from John Hopkins. You can explore the data here:
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data
Our World In Data
My ...
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2
votes
What is the principal goal in pooled COVID-19 testing?
There are several use cases.
But the main reason is always to operate in a situation where the number of tests is a bottleneck or constraint. In the USA, this is usually because of limited test ...
- 193
2
votes
Accepted
Efficacy and costs of medical treatments
Your analysis looks similar to:
Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER)
which:
ICER ... is used in cost-effectiveness analysis to summarise the cost-effectiveness of a health care intervention. ...
- 1,513
1
vote
Important thresholds in the number of postive cases of COVID-19 per capita
There hasn't been anything like this published to my knowledge, but this will almost entirely be because this sort of thing doesn't really mean anything unless taken in the context of the socio-...
- 2,786
1
vote
How sophisticated were efforts to track the spread of past pandemics for public information?
In three recent past outbreaks involving a new virus (or an old virus spreading)—the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and the Congo, the Zika outbreak in South America, and the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) ...
- 975
1
vote
Is there a graph over time of Covid-19 test positivity rate in the US?
From your link, The Atlantic has its data tracking project at https://covidtracking.com/data
If you go there you can drill down by state, the number of cumulative positive and negative results. They ...
- 13.2k
1
vote
Why are most people who contract COVID-19 asymptomatic?
Recent studies have reported that about 80% of people infected with SARS-CoV2 are asymptomatic, it means they are "silent carriers". These patients show no or very mild symptoms. As it is known that ...
- 460
1
vote
How representative are the COVID-19 quarantine deadlines to the public health impact?
As of May 2020, many governmental timelines are being developed as the result of COVID-19 forecasting models from public health authorities, although others may be politically or economically ...
- 628
1
vote
What's the evidence for "flattening the curve" by social distancing measures in the context of contagious respiratory diseases?
There actually numerous documents discussing the matter but one moderately cited paper (~300 citations) Hatchett et al. (2007) compared the responses on US cities during the 1918 influenza:
...
- 5,918
1
vote
Can the capacity for COVID-19 tests be amplified by testing multiple samples mixed together and testing each only if positive?
Israel now have the capacity to pool 64 tests in one
“According to the new pooling approach that we have currently tested, molecular testing can be performed on a “combined sample,” taken from 32 ...
- 13.2k
1
vote
Why are people so worried about 2019-nCoV?
If we compare Covid19 to SARS or MERS - COVID19 seems to have a R0 slightly higher than SARS but lower than MERS. From various sources it appears that COVID-19 could be between 2 and 7, so compariable ...
- 111
1
vote
Accepted
In what time frame exactly was the 2009 H1N1 fatality rate overestimated?
If based on WHO situation reports, an estimate of 10% for the case fatality rate for pandemic influenza A(H1N1) 2009 lasted about five to six days, not weeks and not months. This does not mean that a ...
- 975
1
vote
Should we all eat more Protein?
Short answer yes, unless you have got any condition stopping you from doing so.
Now the long answer:
Protein is the building block of the body. If we consider the human body as a huge network of ...
- 52
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