Guest Blogger: Ryan Doty

For school, the kids have been reading and discussing newspaper science articles. In this post, Ryan reviews two articles that we especially enjoyed.

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This post is a review of two articles on the covid-19 disease and its spread through the world. These articles are unique in that they include simulations and animations that provide much better understanding of covid-19.

The first article is called "Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to 'flatten the curve.'” It was written by Harry Stevens and published in the Washington Post.

This article shows graphs and statistics of the different ways to counteract the spread of covid 19. In their article they have 4 different ways to counter the disease. They are: doing nothing, quarantining the infected, partial social distancing, and full social distancing. There were graphs to represent the number of sick, healthy, and recovered people in any small area over time depending on the different strategies to deal with the disease. The best way to flatten the curve in their article was extensive social distancing followed by moderate social distancing, then quarantine, and finally doing nothing. The article’s main point is that you should socially distance yourself to flatten the curve and stop the disease.

The article did a good job of representing the spread of the disease and methods against it.

Something the article could have done a better job of is representing other things after the disease, like how a small percentage of the population would die of the disease and those who practice social distancing might refuse to interact with people who choose not to socially distance themselves and as such would not catch the disease.

The second article is titled “How the virus got out.” It is by Jin Wu, Weiyi Cai, Derek Watkins and James Glanz. It was published in the New York Times.

This article is about the history and the spread of the coronavirus from its first cases in Wuhan, China clustered around the huanan seafood market to now, when the whole world is stuck at home or hospitalized. The article showed red dots moving along major trade and travel routes to show how and where and when the disease got to all the different places it is now.

It does a very good job of showing how many people went to what places in the process of the disease spreading and spread from there. It also shows what measures were put out against the disease as it got to different places, such as when they released information, what rules and restrictions they enforced, and the development of cures and vaccines. While the information in this article about the spread was detailed and very good, the article did little to talk about the measures against the spread and infections of the disease.