Dear readers,
For those of you in British Columbia, Happy BC Day! We hope you enjoy your long weekend while staying safe. Wear a mask when you’re in public and stay 6′ apart!
COVID19 Demystified is coming up on its fifth month of operation. When we started this initiative we weren’t think about how long we’d do it for. I am beyond proud of every member of our team, from authors to editors to experts, for keeping this going for so long. The goal of this project was to bring COVID19 research to the public, and COVID19 research is continuing to chug ahead. As long as there’s research to be demystified, we’re going to do our best to demystify it. We’re grateful for the support we’ve gotten from others in the STEM community, including the student group STEM Fellowship (check out this post on their blog about us and our work). We’re also so thankful to everyone who’s reached out with offers of help- from joining as an author to providing illustrations to reviewing articles. If you want to help, get in touch!
I know it can seem like the pandemic is endless, but the research shows hope. We’ve written posts summarizing articles on potential vaccine candidates, like this DNA-based one and this inactivated vaccine. Later this week, we will be publishing a post demystifying the Phase 1/2 clinical data on the ChAdOx1 vaccine trial out of Oxford University. There’s been studies investigating potential targets for novel COVID19 drugs and looking into how smoking can effect disease severity. We are making progress- science is making progress- and one day we’re going to look back on this as a time when scientists and researchers across the world came together to fight for us all.
For now, stay safe. Wear a mask, keep your distance, and when the vaccine comes, get it.
Scientists are still fighting for you, and we’re still here to champion them.
Stay safe and keep helping,
Lasya
Editor-in-Chief, COVID19 Demystified