Tom is a writer and aspiring flâneur who today provides creative services to mostly technology-centered clients. He led the Encarta team at Microsoft and, long ago, put KZAM radio on the air.
Not surprisingly, our hunger to believe in Omicron’s possible mildness is blooming faster than scientists can support, even though the science is trending in encouraging directions. Here’s a status report.
Omicron is now considered likely to drive a major new COVID wave over the next few months across the Northern Hemisphere. Case rates will probably break all records, and hospitalizations and deaths will inevitably rise again, hopefully at a lower rate relative to cases in previous waves.
Post Alley writer Tom Corddry has written a series of stories to help us understand COVID and the miraculous breakthroughs of mRNA. In Post Alley's first podcast, he talks about how he dove deep into the data.
mRNA itself isn’t a single substance such as penicillin or aspirin. Instead, it’s a class of molecules with a nearly infinite number of possible variants.
Nearly all of the focus to date on COVID’s impacts has been about hospitalizations and deaths. We have assumed that if we can prevent those two outcomes, we’re past the worst of the crisis. But long COVID might be the third bad outcome, emerging from the shadows.
School Districts are scrambling, parents are frightened, and COVID is sending children to the hospital at rates far higher than before. Will the same happen here, or are we better prepared than they appear to be in Hawaii, Arizona, Florida, Alabama, and Missouri?
Delta has expert COVID-watchers pacing uneasily. Here’s why: it appears to have done the best job yet of stitching together higher transmissibility and greater vaccine evasiveness.
When COVID-19 exploded out of Wuhan, different countries reacted in different ways. Countries which had experienced either SARS, MERS, or the last major round of H1N1 Avian Flu swung...
Our snow-cone mountains will still look snowy in winter, but plenty of people alive today will live to see Rainier, Adams, Baker, Hood, and, of course, Glacier Peak lose their whiteness completely during the summer, the way forcefully de-glaciered St. Helen's does now.