In this historical novel that came out in 2020, Brit Bennet kneads the dough of the well-used ‘passing' plot afresh to spin an intriguing new tale. The Vanishing Half is the story of the identical twins – Desiree and Stella – born in the fictional village-small town in Louisiana called Mallard. The inhabitants of Mallard,…
Because of the noise that people were making on Facebook and the general hype all over the place I finally sat down to watch the movie. Shebi that was how I succumbed to promo and hype and came and went and watched Avatar and that Wakanda movie? Avatar, that dazzling fireworks display of new age…
I’ve been itching to comment on this matter since this award was announced but work has been such a pesky distraction. What came to my mind when those Swedes made the announcement was: Poor Stephen Hawking! If he had been alive, he surely would have shared the award with his collaborator Roger Penrose. Earlier in…
Reading this novel as I did over the better part of two days during the Eid break felt like binging on accumulated episodes of a TV series like Grey’s Anatomy, House, or Bones. The episodic nature was unmistakable, a carryover of the way the novel was birthed. It started life as a weekly blog. The…
COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to soar. During the weekend, the NCDC DG, WHO Officer-in-Charge, and the NCDC Director of Surveillance were in Lagos to listen to our plans for strengthening surveillance and data management and coping with the challenges of case management and isolation. The outbreak is entering a new phase. But it was time…
It was time to get back to the thick of things. For the field epidemiologist, the place of work, by definition, is the field. But the airports had not opened yet and there was no special Presidential Task Force flight going to Lagos. So, again, I hit the road after sixteen days away from the epicentre. I…
The lagoon was a vast sea of quicksilver reflecting the golden light of the morning sun. The rising sun appeared in a hiatus between grey floating clouds, which soon sailed in front of it, the reflection on the water vanishing for a few moments. Today, at the first Third Mainland Bridge interchange, instead of taking…
The ongoing pandemic of a respiratory infectious disease known as COVID-19 which started in December 2019 has occasioned an explosion of information and an outburst of myths. This has been described as an infodemic. More interesting to me as an epidemiologist and teacher are the medical and epidemiologic terms that it has introduced into common…
Saturday, February 1, 2020 It was the time of the year when the nights were longer than the days. So that, by the time we finished morning prayers, it was usually some minutes past six. There was little time to get home, call Uber and get to the train station early enough to catch the…
January 19, 2020. There was a motorcade ahead of us preventing us from overtaking. One of the vehicles was a police pick-up while the others were black SUVs. The SUVs were full of men in military fatigue wielding guns. They menacingly waived down anybody that tried to overtake them. But their speed was not bad…
