What We Now Know About COVID Prevention and Treatment: A Podcast with Monica Gandhi
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We are two and a half years into the COVID pandemic.\\xa0 We\\u2019ve lived through lockdowns, toilet paper shortages, mask mandates, hospital surges where ICU\\u2019s overflowed, a million COVID deaths, prolonged school closures, development and roll out of novel vaccines, an explosion of social isolation and loneliness, and the invention of the \\u201czoom meeting.\\u201d\\xa0
But what have we really learned over this seemingly endless pandemic other than how to make a quarantini?\\xa0 Well, on today\\u2019s podcast we invite Monica Gandhi to sum up the evidence to date about how best to prevent getting COVID (or at least the severe outcomes of the disease) and how to treat it, including the role of Paxlovid in symptomatic disease.
Monica Gandhi is a professor of medicine and associate division chief of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF & San Francisco General Hospital.\\xa0 In addition to her research publications, she is a prolific writer both on social media and on media outlets like the Atlantic and the Washington Post.\\xa0 Some call her an optimist or maybe a pragmatist, but I\\u2019d call her someone who inherently understands the value in harm reduction when it\\u2019s clear harm elimination just ain\\u2019t gonna happen.
So take a listen and if you want a deeper dive into some of the references we discuss on the podcast, here is a list:
- Medscape article on how \\u201cCOVID-19 Vaccines Work Better and for Longer Than Expected Across Populations, Including Immunocompromised Individuals\\u201d
- Stat news article about variants/COVID becoming more predictable
- A good twitter criticism of the CDC 1 in 5 COVID survivors have long COVID study
- NIH study about long COVID published the day before in Annals of Internal Medicine
- Evusheld and how it works against BA4 and BA5
- Our World in Data COVID graphs