Talk:COVID-19

Semi-protected edit request on 28 January 2026

who is covid ~2026-56755-8 (talk) 02:53, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

COVID is short for "COronaVIrus Disease 2019". WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:06, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: JUS 477 - Youth and Justice

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 January 2026 and 1 May 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jsmit464 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Ssilos (talk) 06:08, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Plain English description of COVID-19 in 2026

This will likely be affected by WP:MEDPOP, but in this Washington Post article is a quote by COVID-19 expert Ziyad Al-Aly: "If in 2020 covid was a German shepherd, it's now a Chihuahua". Mapsax (talk) 00:41, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Well, yeah... That's how immune systems work. Wellthisisanaccount (talk) 05:18, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Update needed: examples

Hi User:Likeanechointheforest. I noticed you put a tag in with update needed. Given the article's lenght, it would be nice to have a list of dated information you noticed. Would you be willing to post that here? And would you be willing to help out addressing those (maybe as part of WP:MEDVS26)? Thanks! —Femke 🐦 (talk) 07:30, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Totally! In the "Other species" section, there's no information on continuing infections in animals post the end of the emergency designation for Covid. In the research section, things are dated "As of December 2020" and "As of November 2020," although a huge amount of research results have been published since then. Likewise, with the research used in discussing "Signs and symptoms," "Pathophysiology," "Diagnosis," etc. The virus has changed a lot since 2020, but most of the research used to inform those sections reveals a biased towards sources from the earliest part of the pandemic.

In the "Treatment-related research subsection," there are descriptions of in-progress studies from 2020, for example about remdesivir, anti-malarial drugs, and anti-HIV drugs, but nothing for example about the anti-HIV drug results and the success of Paxlovid. There's also been a number of other developments with treatment-related research, such as in-progress studies around the world with potentially highly-effective nasal vaccines, and research about post-exposure prophylaxis such as the one discussed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01546-0. Likeanechointheforest (talk) 17:12, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

@Likeanechointheforest: I've made a start, but wow, I hadn't realised how much the article needs to be revamped to go back to B-class level. Would you be interested to help out?

That study seems super interesting! As you might be aware, we normally try to only cite review papers and other overview sources to medical articles per WP:MEDRS, but when a study is big (e.g. likely practice-changing) and secondary sources haven't caught up yet, an attributed statement can be added while we wait for higher-quality sources. In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 17:10, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Comorbidities

The paragraph lists comorbidities by their crude prevalence among the deceased. An example is 66% of deaths with hypertension, while the CDC notes 70% hypertension prevalence above age 60, see https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db511.htm. This invites readers to infer an individual risk the data does not support (the "Table 2 fallacy"). High quality sources for a more realistic picture:

- Williamson et al., OpenSAFELY, Nature 2020, n=17 million (doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2521-4): Hypertension's AHR 0.89, smoking insignificant; risk mostly age, diabetes, obesity and organ dysfunction.

- Clift et al., QCOVID, BMJ 2020 (doi:10.1136/bmj.m3731): in the validated national model, most common comorbidities carry only ~1.2–2.0× adjusted hazard; risk is dominated by age and a small set of severe conditions.

- Levin et al., Eur. J. Epidemiol. 2020 (doi:10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1): infection-fatality rate rises log-linearly with age.

The rest of the article is more in line with these already.

Proposal: Rewrite this to show it more clearly that naive Covid deaths were largely age based, with individual examples that reflect the generally modest risk increase. Additionally, ARR numbers for the less severe but more likely short and long term outcomes are necessary to reflect the reality of the disease, but I was not able to find high quality studies. Input welcome per WP:MEDRS. ~2026-25515-46 (talk) 21:24, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 1 August 2026

Add a Prognosis row to top chart (like other disease pages have.) from known numbers (listed on existing chart) it should be 0.91% risk of death. ~2026-42666-14 (talk) 21:57, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

 Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want made. It doesn't say anywhere in the article as far as I see. Alpha Beta Delta Lambda (talk) 14:40, 2 August 2026 (UTC)