While the math you need to understand is timeless and doesn’t change, the models and more generally, the information available about the virus you feed into the math changes constantly. Someone asked where do I go for my information, so I thought I would do a blog about it.
Obviously a really specific “Google alert” can sometimes work (don’t set up an alert for “vaccines for Covid” but rather for “duration of immunity from a Covid vaccine” or “Oxford vaccine” for example). But there is so much information coming out, it’s hard to separate the signal from the noise and so Google alerts are not as great a tool as one would like.
Anyway, the first place I go to for (medical) information about vaccines and drug related to Covid 19 is the amazing blog by Derek Lowe called “In the pipeline”. Lowe is trained as an organic chemist and has worked on drug discovery for many major pharmaceutical companies. He seems to read everything and know everything related to drugs or vaccine development for Covid 19: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/about-derek-lowe Even the comments to his posts by his readers are often informative-which is really unusual.
The preprint server for health sciences, medRxiv is obviously hit or miss: https://www.medrxiv.org/collection/infectious_diseases. There are literally tens of thousands of preprints about Covid 19 with many more added each day. (A preprint is a paper that the authors believe to be true and informative – but it has not yet been peer reviewed and so can not be considered anywhere close to being canonical.)
The way I use it is I scan the titles of as many recent papers as I have time for. Then I look at the institutional affiliations of the authors to see if they come from places I have heard of. Only then do I look at the abstracts of the titles I find most interesting. I confess I read very few preprints completely.
As an example, one preprint I did read was this one: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v1
Why? Because the topic is one I am acutely interested in and the author’s affiliations are top notch. (And yes it was depressing to read.)
What about the popular press (like the NY Times or the Washington Post)? They are hit and miss sometimes it seems. I often just skim the articles to see what papers or people they are citing, then I track down the original sources. Participating in a game of telephone in a pandemic, seems like not such a great idea to me.