Thank you to everyone who logged onto Slack for last Sunday’s community event! I really appreciated the opportunity to hear your COVID-19 questions and concerns, and I hope the discussion was helpful for those who attended.
One thing I loved about the event was that it didn’t just consist of me answering questions. The readers who attended also helped answer each other’s questions and shared resources, such as information about air filters and local COVID-safe meet-up groups.
To bring those resources outside those who attended the event, I’ve compiled the list here:
- Air monitoring:
- Aranet4 CO2 monitors, a popular option for anyone looking to understand their ventilation.
- Community Access to Ventilation Information (CAVI), a CO2 monitor lending project based in Canada.
- COVID-19 Data Dispatch post about CAVI.
- Air filters:
- Clean Air Stars, a website for businesses interested in assessing and improving their indoor air quality.
- Spreadsheet of portable air filter options from Clean Air Stars.
- It’s Airborne, a blog by ventilation expert Joey Fox.
- Mask advocacy:
- Mandate Masks NY, a New York-based group that’s compiled lists of NYC businesses requiring masks, among other resources.
- Mandate Masks US, the national coordination arm of the same Mandate Masks group; this page links out to other state and local organizations.
- Spreadsheet describing COVID-safe options in the Bay Area, California.
- The People’s CDC has more resources.
- COVID-safe communities:
- Zero COVID Community on Reddit.
- COVID-safe meet-up group for the Bay Area, California.
- One reader recommended searching Facebook for “Still Covid-ing” groups, which exist for many cities and regions.
- Wastewater surveillance:
- WastewaterSCAN, one of the major wastewater surveillance projects in the U.S.
- Biobot Analytics, another major wastewater project.
- COVID-19 Data Dispatch list of national, state, and some local wastewater surveillance dashboards.
- Academic paper listing and describing wastewater dashboards (see the supplemental materials for a big list).
- Vaccinations:
- STAT liveblog of an FDA advisory meeting on COVID-19 vaccines in January, 2023.
- Preprint study describing recommended COVID-19 booster cadence for immunocompromised people.
- Eric Topol on next-gen COVID-19 vaccines.
- Viral spread:
- Paper describing how people with the coronavirus spread it in the air and environment.
- Data visualization article showing how the virus spreads through air (note: this is from fall 2020).
- Estimating how the coronavirus decays in air (also from 2020).
- Long COVID research:
- Paper showing that metformin may help prevent Long COVID.
- My article about NIH RECOVER, with STAT News and MuckRock.
- Recent NIH webinar sharing updates on clinical trials
- Travel:
- JFK Airport in NYC has a new outside waiting area! (At the Jet Blue terminal.)
- SIP valves to allow safer drinking with a mask on.
For both readers who attended the event and those who didn’t, I would love to hear your feedback. Should I host more of these? If yes, what would you like to discuss at events—general COVID-19 questions, or more focus on specific topics? Is Slack a good platform to use? (I.e., would it be worthwhile to pay for pro options on the server?)
Let me know what you’re thinking: email me, comment on this blog post, etc. And thank you again to those who attended last Sunday, I learned a lot from all of you.