Luke Timmerman

For 40 days, the numbers on new COVID-19 cases have been traversing along a flat, steady ridgeline. Now it is back on the ascent. The President may wish to do less testing to make it appear as though case numbers are coming down. But that won’t make the SARS-CoV-2 virus go away. The 7-day moving average shows new cases are... Read More

The information world that we built sometimes has a way of distracting us. It downplays and marginalizes what’s important. Not this week. Let’s start with a few timely, inconvenient truths. As of this writing on June 11: The US has 113,865 dead from COVID-19 and counting. 2 million+ confirmed cases. 20,000 new cases adding up every day. 21 states are... Read More

The emotions this week were especially intense. Anger. Fear. Despair. But there was also hope. That gets me up in the morning. In this slice of America, the biotech industry, many people are mission-driven. People in this industry work every day to improve the human condition by making better medicines. Not everyone feels the full weight, but many in this... Read More

The US death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 100,000 this week. Another 40 million people are unemployed.  We’ve been on this terrible trajectory for what seems like forever, with 20,000 new cases a day and 1,500 or so deaths every day. The New York Times lists 18 states where new cases are increasing and 19 states where cases are decreasing. Memorial... Read More

We all woke up Monday morning and saw an encouraging headline. Then things started to go downhill. To recap, Moderna, the Cambridge, Mass.-based messenger RNA therapeutics and vaccines company, provided a snapshot of preliminary data from its Phase I trial of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate, being tested in collaboration with Tony Fauci’s crew at the National Institute of Allergy and... Read More

We’re suffering from a social disease. It ranks up there with COVID-19. It’s boundless cynicism. We need to tamp this down. Just like we need to wrestle the new coronavirus to the ground. I’m not willing to accept “shit happens” as the national motto. This is a country of can-do problem-solvers. We can do so much better. You can see... Read More

This is a fragile moment. It’s May 1. Some of us have been in social isolation for two solid months. Everyone’s at some point on the continuum of stir crazy. More than 30 million people are out of work. Tempers are flaring. Protestors are carrying guns. It’s obvious we can’t sustain a maximalist social-distancing policy much longer. Today, we have... Read More

The first US death from COVID-19 was reported on Feb. 29. Today, Apr. 24, the US death toll exceeds 50,000. That’s more than Italy and Spain combined. Even though we had early warning. It’s tragic. There’s also a reason why the death toll hasn’t been higher. It’s because of large-scale physical distancing in this expansive country of 330 million people.... Read More

Here we are heading into Easter Weekend. We’re the wealthiest country in the world, and the undisputed superpower of biomedicine. Yet we’re still playing a game of catch up against SARS-CoV-2, which apparently our intelligence community knew was emerging around Thanksgiving. Even after months to get our act together, we still don’t have a coordinated national strategy on exactly how... Read More