Reliable estimates of the mortality from SARS-CoV-2 infection are essential to understanding the COVID-19 epidemic and develop public health interventions, but we don't have them. If you realistically think that China, where the disease originated, only had a relative few deaths while, Brazil, which is both crowded and lacking in health infrastructure, has a fraction of U.S. deaths, you don't understand how disease transmission works.

But you should understand how numbers can be manipulated. There is also conspiracy theory that political activists are exaggerating or underestimating the disease in an election year.

Kids often have excitement or anxiety about the return to school. COVID-19 threw a lot of families into disarray when kids started staying home. And it be may present as they go back. School safety protocols for COVID-19 or other things highlighted in the news such as racial tension could cause increases in anxiety.

While a little anxiety is normal, it may that the usual relief found in positive student relationships may disappear along with bullying if kids are again staying home.

Here are some tips for navigating the adjustment if kids are going back to school.


Image: Nationwide Children's Hospital

When we talk about sight or hearing, the mechanisms that lead us to distinguish two colors or two notes have been well-established and translated into practical use. For example, we know which wavelength will appear red and which frequency will make us hear a G note.

We have not made similar progress with smell; we are not able to say how a molecule smells just by looking at its chemical structure.

A new paper examines the brain processes involved in the continuous flow of information arriving from our sense of smell. 

Music training can make us well-rounded, it may change the way we think, and music is fun, but claims that it makes kids smarter may have hit a sour note.

Smart people often play musical instruments as well, so that has led to research trials seeking a causal link between music training and improved cognitive and academic performance, but they have reached conflicting conclusions. Some did suggest - a lot of bad epidemiology happens with that word so caution is warranted - that there may be a link between music training and better cognitive and academic performance. Others found no impact.

In a COVID-19 world, you may not want to visit a doctor but that doesn't mean you have to avoid seeing one.  A new RAND evaluation recommends that clinics even hire a telemedicine coordinator to head their efforts and that they consider offering telemedicine services to patients from their homes.  

It can happen with with modest investments in new staff and technology and can even help expand patients' access to specialized medical care.

Though the world is facing on obesity crisis, at least in the U.S. the culprit is not sugar, it's too many calories of other kinds.

Americans are actually eating less sugar than two decades ago, partially thanks to non-nutritive sweeteners.

The analysis used a nationally representative dataset on household purchases at the barcode level (Nielsen Homescan) in 2002 and 2018 linked with Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP) data and ingredient information using commercial nutrition databases that are updated regularly to capture reformulations. Keyword searches were performed on ingredient lists to classify products containing various types of non-nutritive sweeteners.