Yuzuha Shibata

Hello, my name is Yuzuha, and I am a junior at Macalester College. I am majoring in international studies with minors in economics and data science and a concentration in community and global health. I was born in Japan and raised in Hawaii, and in my free time, I like exploring new places with my friends!

Pandemic Journal Passages:

November 18, 2020: "Upon reading the New York Times article, “New Pfizer Results: Coronavirus Vaccine Is Safe and 95% Effective” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/pfizer-covid-vaccine.html?auth=login-google), I found out that there were 44,000 volunteers, half of whom received a vaccine and half of whom received the placebo. Out of all of the volunteers, 170 people were infected with the coronavirus, and out of the 170, 162 were volunteers who received the placebo. There were 10 total cases of severe coronavirus, and out of those 10, nine were those who received the placebo. This all seems very promising, but I had some questions. How did Pfizer get people to volunteer? Who are the types of people who would volunteer for a trial vaccine: people who are more or less worried about the virus? Old or young people? How does the type of person who would volunteer for an experiment contribute to how the data is biased? How did Pfizer try to control for the different environments that their volunteers were exposed to during the time of the experiment? If Pfizer wanted to prove their vaccine was effective and release it before other pharmaceuticals could, they could have manipulated their statistics."

November 27, 2020: "Looking at the data from the CDC (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totalcases), there does not seem to be a specific geographical pattern of where there have been the most coronavirus cases since January 21, 2020 besides a general lower number of cases in the northwestern states. Upon reading, The effect of temperature on persistence of SARS-COV-2 on common surfaces by Riddell et al. (2020) (https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-020-01418-7), I learned that the virus survives on surfaces better in colder temperatures (20 degrees Celsius) than in hotter temperatures (40 degrees Celsius). Based on this finding, there should be more cases of coronavirus in northern states than in southern states; this is true in most northeastern states, but it is not true across the board. There could be confounding factors that affect the number of cases, such as the political leaning of the state, with the lack of fewer cases in the republican south being the result of less precautions being taken."