With the release of the preprint of the Phase III trial of Sinovac in Brazil (PROFISCOV) and several press releases, there are many reactions. Some words and numbers mentioned by several press releases are grossly taken out of context. …

Some of you may encounter a website* containing early meta-analyses of different treatments, such as Ivermectin, Zinc, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, etc. Some doctors might even be misguided into citing this as if it’s a legitimate and authentic source, claiming that all of these treatments are very effective against COVID-19. …

One year has passed and there are still secrets and properties of SARS-CoV-2 that are yet to be unlocked. We don’t know what the long-term effects of the infection are. However, we are seeing several cases of “Long COVID Syndrome”, as shown in the following figure:

This part indicts governments and naive policymakers: One major problem in the control of infections is the lack of testing. Initial policies only warrant testing among symptomatic cases. However, asymptomatic transmission is the “Achilles’ heel” of COVID-19 control, as an article [2] from the New England Journal of Medicine says…

Next, we deal with problems in epidemiological metrics: Reproductive Number (R0) and Mortality Rate Caution must be taken in interpreting R0 as it is downward biased. We see this with evidence that coronavirus superspreading is fat-tailed [2]. Also, in the case of the Philippines, Rt was simply hovering around 1.00…

The next part of the note deals with naive evidence-based medicine and naive evidence-based public health: Early in the pandemic, the position that the World Health Organization and the Department of Health (Philippines) took was problematic on many levels. They discouraged the use of face masks early on, because there…

The next part of the note exemplifies a principle that major governments and organizations around the world neglected: The first important point mentioned in this paragraph is the fact that traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. Many governments try to use mitigation strategies rather than elimination strategies, while naively…

Last year January 26, 2020, Taleb wrote this note BEFORE COVID-19 became recognized by the World Health Organization as a pandemic in March 11, 2020. We will meditate and discuss this paper, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. …

Each of us is connected in a network. The degree and clustering coefficient shows how connected we are to our families. The centrality shows how exposed we are to different clusters, such as in school and workplace. The path length shows the distance in the network between two persons. Closing…