Back to the blog as the U.S. heads over a cliff called Thanksgiving
I didn’t mean to disappear from this blog for 3 months! Life as a new professor has been sprint after sprint after sprint, and in the...
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Coronavirus Conundrums
now-and-then updates about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, with a focus on the U.S. and South Africa
I am Allison Ruark, a social epidemiologist and researcher who teaches epidemiology and public health as Assistant Professor at Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois, USA). I have a PhD (2015) from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In mid-March, I started tracking the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in South Africa (where I was living at the time) and the United States (my home country), comparing those epidemics to Italy’s older epidemic as a kind of point of reference. I started posting those data visualizations and other thoughts and observations to Facebook, and soon had hundreds of people following the posts. I've started this blog as a way to more easily incorporate other visualizations and make the information more accessible. I am truly glad that I can help other people make sense of this pandemic during this challenging, unprecedented time. I welcome your comments but can't always respond as promptly as I would like. All views expressed are my own. Please let me know if you notice errors. Eventually I hope to migrate all content to this site, but for now you can view past posts at facebook.com/allison.ruark. There's a subscribe link at the bottom of the page.
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August 13 covid-19 update
This week in brief: South Africa is flattening its curve of new infections, and deaths are much lower than I would have expected at this...
August 6 covid-19 update
I am seeing some good news for South Africa in this week's data, as South Africa has somewhat flattened the curve of new cases over the...
July 30 covid-19 update
First, an apology to those of you who got the notification about 15 hours ago about a new blog post, only to follow the link and find...
July 23 covid-19 update
The U.S. has now had more than 4 million people test positive for the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and will likely reach 150,000 deaths...
July 16 covid-19 update
I am less than 36 hours from a move to another state, and am going to have to keep this post short this week and also skip the...
July 9 covid-19 update
The story this week is once again that of two runaway epidemics. Three weeks ago I noted that South Africa was on track to surpass...
July 2 covid-19 update
Covid-19 update – July 2 There’s no good news for the U.S. or South Africa in this week’s graphs. South Africa continues to have the...
June 25 covid-19 update
Both the South Africa and the United States reported their highest number of cases to date today (June 25): 6,579 in South Africa and...
June 18 covid-19 update
Last week I started with good news from South Africa - HIV and TB co-infection do not drastically increase mortality from covid-19, and...
June 11 covid-19 update
I'll start today with some very good news from South Africa. There has been a lot of concern regarding how co-infection with HIV and TB...
June 4 covid-19 update
As the U.S. has been rocked by violence and injustice in the last ten days, I've been less focused on the pandemic than I have in months....
May 28 covid-19 update
As I'm sure every American knows by now, the U.S. passed 100,000 deaths from covid-19 this week. It took two months and a day to get from...
May 21 covid-19 update
I've been thinking about transitioning to a blog for a while, and this week finally did it. I've been frustrated by my inability to add...
May 14 covid-19 update
South African friends, a lot of you have had questions about whether Western Cape’s higher number of cases is due to more testing...
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