Infectious [adjective]

If you’re sleeping in a bed with them, sharing your home with them, and so on, you already have a decent risk of swapping the virus, or really any other infectious disease.

Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, said the focus on transmission in the context of Covid-19 vaccines can be misleading when comparing them to other vaccines.

That could pose a problem even for vaccinated adults, says Mobeen Rathore, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

As we learn how to address current and future pandemics, it is worth understanding what we learned from the great infectious disease fights of the past.

That’s especially true now as new, more infectious coronavirus variants await — putting us at risk of an even bigger surge than the one we saw during the holiday season if we ease up.

Governments will pay $100,000 for a cancer drug that adds a month to a person’s life but only want to pay $5 for a vaccine that can protect against an infectious disease for good.

Part of the concern has to do with the fact that the AstraZeneca study underwent a number of changes after the Phase 3 trial was begun, a fact that, some infectious disease experts say, makes it difficult to interpret the results.

It’s the living people around the person who’s died that probably are far, far more infectious.

Anne Liu, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care, describes the situation in many parts of the country as a “stew of virus.”

This effect is particularly important for people who are infected but don’t yet have symptoms—they feel fine and so may be unaware that they are infectious.