How did the COVID-19 pandemic shift seasonal surges of other respiratory diseases?

Study links shifts to buildup of susceptible hosts, explores similar shifts in heart-related deaths

PLOS

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 A German analysis explores what underlies shifts in the timing of seasonal surges of respiratory diseases, as well as shifts in surges of heart-related deaths, that occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Michael Sieber and Arne Traulsen of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Germany, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health on July 15, 2026.

Rates of respiratory infections such as the flu and RSV typically peak during seasons when transmission rates rise. Rates of death from any cause—not just from infection—follow a similar seasonal pattern.

However, the drivers underlying the exact timing of these surges have been unclear. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to explore these dynamics, since interventions like social distancing and masking disrupted typical transmission patterns of other respiratory diseases. Sieber and Traulsen analyzed data on weekly respiratory infection rates and death rates in Germany, covering the last 14 years. 

The analysis showed that, pre-pandemic, respiratory infections almost always surged for a few weeks February and March. After the pandemic began, intervention efforts tamped down infections, eliminating one seasonal surge. Once infections rose again, surges shifted to December or earlier. Now, these peak weeks are gradually resuming pre-pandemic timing.

Using well-established epidemiological modeling tools, the researchers found that population-level loss of immunity after the skipped seasonal surge led to buildup of susceptible hosts, resulting in higher transmission earlier in the season. That is, seasonal transmission variations present a window of opportunity for a surge, and the size of the pool of susceptible hosts at the start of that window determines when, exactly, the surge occurs.

Similarly, typical seasonal surges in rates of death from any cause—but particularly from cardiovascular disease—also shifted earlier post-pandemic. Thus, respiratory infections may be key drivers of the timing of seasonal surges in cardiovascular deaths. More research is needed to explore this connection, but it aligns with other evidence that respiratory infections are a significant risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

On the basis of their findings, the researchers emphasize the importance of monitoring people’s infection history and improving vaccination coverage.

The authors add: “News stories of an earlier than usual onset of the flu season during the COVID-19 pandemic motivated us to look into the available epidemiological data more closely. We were surprised by the magnitude of the shift in timing of seasonal respiratory infections in Germany, and interested in trying to predict if this would turn out to be a long-term effect of the pandemic or if we should expect a quick return to the normal seasonal timing. The most recent flu seasons confirmed that the seasonal timing indeed shifts back to normal within one or two seasons, most likely due to a return to the pre-pandemic population-levels of immunity to the most common respiratory pathogens. We were even more surprised to see that the seasonal dynamics of all-cause mortality, which is dominated by cardiovascular diseases, closely followed the shift in timing of respiratory infections. This adds to the growing evidence that respiratory infections are an important risk factor for cardiovascular problems.”

 

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Global Public Health: https://plos.io/4h5JUD2 

Citation: Sieber M, Traulsen A (2026) Shifts in seasonal timing of respiratory diseases and causes of death following a natural pandemic event. PLOS Glob Public Health 6(7): e0006376. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0006376

Author Countries: Germany

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

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Journal

PLOS Global Public Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pgph.0006376 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Publication Date

15-Jul-2026

 

Does teleworking reduce carbon emissions? It depends on how you do it

Study finds reduced commuting emissions can be offset by intense home workspace utility use

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Teleworking as part of the housing space: The shift of paid work into the home affects CO2 emissions.

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Credit: Egor Kunovsky, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Teleworking such as working from home, coworking or working from other third places can reduce carbon emissions by removing the commute, but if you’re not careful, this benefit will be offset by the carbon cost of the work-related housing space, according to a study published July 15, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Jana Z’Rotz of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland and colleagues.

Teleworking has become increasingly popular in recent years, and it is often viewed as a way to reduce carbon emissions (CO2eq) by cutting down on worker commutes. However, it has also been suggested that these benefits may be countered by increased use of utilities in the home workspace. In this study, Z’Rotz and colleagues used a survey to collect data and estimate the carbon cost of patterns of commuting, home office use, and use of information and communications technology among teleworkers.

The survey was available online to Swiss participants in late 2024, and it received over 1,000 responses from people who had teleworked within the preceding month. The team’s calculations showed that more frequent teleworkers did produce fewer emissions via commuting as expected, but that this improvement was largely offset by the increased carbon cost of work-related housing and technology use, especially when teleworkers used a separate home office space. Therefore, teleworking did not have a consistent overall positive effect on work-related emissions.

These results demonstrate that teleworking does not automatically reduce carbon emissions, and that businesses and individuals hoping to reduce their carbon footprint should make additional considerations, such as more compact at-home workspaces or multi-person remote workspaces. The authors note that these results offer an initial overview, but they were based on simplified emission estimates and lacked a control group of non-teleworkers. They conclude that future studies should expand the data to identify the most environment- and worker-friendly options.

The authors add: “Among teleworkers, a higher number of teleworking days and having a separate home office room are positively associated with CO2eq emissions related to housing space and [information and communication technology].”

 

 

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Climate: https://plos.io/4gBl8L7

Citation: Z’Rotz J, Ohnmacht T, Rérat P (2026) Do teleworking arrangements reduce CO2eq emissions? Effects on commuting, housing space and ICT use. PLOS Clim 5(7): e0000979. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000979

Author Countries: Switzerland

Funding: This work was supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy SFOE as part of the ‘Swiss Energy research for the Energy Transition’ SWEET consortium SWICE (Sustainable Well-being for the Individual and the Collectivity in the Energy transition) (SFOE_SWEET-SWICE to TO). The authors bear sole responsibility for the conclusions and results. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Journal

PLOS Climate

DOI

10.1371/journal.pclm.0000979 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Publication Date

15-Jul-2026

 

What gets published? Sweeping analysis shows prestige, topic and location matter most

Study of 110,000 submissions explores review process at top tier science journals

University of Colorado at Boulder

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Scientists from prestigious universities and large research groups are significantly more likely to have their research published in general, top-tier scientific journals. Meanwhile, authors based in China and those studying politics, economics, gender or other social issues face a significant disadvantage.

These are a few takeaways from a sweeping new University of Colorado Boulder-led study, published July 15 in the journal Science Advances.

The analysis of more than 110,000 manuscript submissions over five years offers the most comprehensive glimpse yet at who makes the cut, and who doesn’t, during the rigorous editorial and peer review process at elite science journals.

“These journals play a special role in the science ecosystem, shaping what ideas get attention, inform society and shape policy,” said senior author Aaron Clauset, a professor of computer science and researcher with CU Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute. “Yet very few studies have been able to open the black box and take a look at their review process.”

The findings raise an important question: To what degree are important scientific discoveries going unnoticed because their authors lack certain characteristics?

By calling out potential biases and making their dataset available to the public, the authors also hope to help journals improve their processes.

“With the rise of AI slop and the ability to mass produce junk science, the role of established gatekeepers like these elite journals becomes more important,” said first author Sam Zhang, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at University of Vermont who earned his doctorate in applied math from CU Boulder.

Probing the ‘science of science’

For a decade, Clauset has studied what he calls “the science of science,” scouring data to paint a clear picture of who enters (and leaves) academia, who gets tenure and whose ideas tend to spread.

“There is no science without scientists, so it’s important to know who has the opportunity to be ‘in the room’ so to speak, and who does not, to make discoveries,” said Clauset.

For the new study, Clauset and Zhang were joined by Dan Larremore, associate professor of computer science at CU, and Nick Laberge, then a doctoral candidate there. They analyzed anonymized manuscript records for 110,303 submissions to Science and Science Advances between 2016 and 2020.

Unlike topical journals, general interest journals cover everything from health to space to politics and are regularly covered by the mainstream media. They strongly influence careers, with grants and tenure often tied to publishing there.

The competition is stiff. In 2023 alone, Science received more than 15,000 submissions.

As a result, such journals have a two-tiered review process: In-house editors make a first pass and then enlist outside subject experts to make suggestions and then accept or reject.

Over five years, the study found, Science accepted just 6.1% of submissions; Science Advances accepted 10.5%. About 83% of submissions to Science and nearly 75% to Science Advances were screened and rejected by in-house editors prior to undergoing peer review. It also found that:

• Papers with 10 or more authors are three times as likely to be published than papers with 1–5 authors.
• Manuscripts with corresponding authors from the most prestigious institutions had an 11.6% acceptance rate, compared to 3.4% for those from the least prestigious institutions.
• Studies with authors from China were more than three times less likely to be published than papers with U.S.- or Canada-based authors. Notably, authors with Chinese names, but based in the U.S., also faced a disadvantage.
• Even pre-COVID, research related to viruses, infection, RNA and immune response had a six-fold greater likelihood of being accepted than research on politics, economics, gender and the societal dimensions of health.
• Work by female corresponding authors was slightly less likely to be accepted. Had this trend not been there, Science would have published about 23 more papers by women per year.

“The fact that we find only a very marginal association with gender is in some sense reassuring,” said Clauset. “But the number is still not zero.”

Are editors and reviewers biased?

The authors stress that the findings do not prove that journal editors or reviewers are inherently biased. Instead, they shine a light on questions they and other researchers should explore.

For instance, Clauset notes, the prestige association was glaring throughout the editorial review and peer review process. Are reviewers inherently biased toward papers that come from Harvard or Stanford, or are those papers truly of better quality?

Are journals somehow biased against Chinese-based researchers, or do Chinese government incentives and other factors prompt China-based authors to submit an inordinately high number of papers?  

In the spirit of transparency, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the journals’ parent organization), volunteered to share the data, as long as the team developed a way to anonymize it.

“The current evidence suggests, overall, these journals seem to be doing pretty well at just treating the science as the science. But this is not a totally clean bill of health,” said Clauset. “In the current environment where the integrity of science is being attacked in bad faith, we need to be thinking about whether the processes at these journals live up to the ideals the scientific community has set for them.”

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aec0494 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals

Article Publication Date

15-Jul-2026

COI Statement

Aaron Clauset is a deputy editor at Science Advances.

Related News Releases

• What gets published? Sweeping analysis shows prestige, topic and location matter most
  (University of Colorado at Boulder)

New study reveals editorial trends at top science journals

An unprecedented dataset of over 110,000 papers submitted to Science and Science Advances provide the scientific community with insights about editorial dynamics and outcome disparities

University of Vermont

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Sam Zhang is an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at UVM. He directs the Science and Humanity lab at UVM’s Vermont Complex Systems Institute which examines the human side of science.

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Credit: Courtesy of Sam Zhang

Studies published in prestigious academic journals receive more attention from scholars and media outlets, shaping public discourse and potentially accelerating academic careers. While the path to publication is often murky, a new analysis of more than 110,000 papers submitted to Science and Science Advances—two leading journals published by the world’s largest general science association—reveals Western scientists, larger teams, top-ranked universities, and select regions have slight advantages in acceptance rates.

The new study by University of Vermont (UVM) and University of Colorado (CU Boulder) researchers is the first to plumb submissions data to top science journals to better understand editorial dynamics. Their analysis stems from an anonymized dataset the team spent years developing to provide a window into the peer review process. The data and analysis were published today in Science Advances.

“This is really a first look at this process that was previously opaque,” says lead author Sam Zhang, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at UVM. “With the rise of AI slop and the ability to mass produce junk science, the role of established gatekeepers like these elite journals becomes more important as these processes get put under strain. These types of open data analysis about what is going on at the journal might help the community prepare and understand for how editorial processes will need to change.”

Key findings

• Group size matters. Studies with 10 or more authors are three times as likely to be published than papers with 1-5 authors.
• Reputation plays an outsized role. Manuscripts with corresponding authors from the most prestigious institutions had a 11.6% acceptance rate, compared to 3.4% for papers from the least prestigious institutions.
• Geographic disparities exist. Papers with corresponding authors originally from China were over three times less likely to be published than papers with U.S. or Canada-based corresponding authors.
• Manuscript topic is key. When COVID-19 was a novel disease, studies related to immunology and RNA were nearly six times more likely to be published in Science than social science on the political and societal dimensions of COVID.

 

The American Association for the Advancement of Science publishes six journals including its flagship publication, Science, and Science Advances, a top-ranked open-access journal. The editors of these journals provided more than 110,000 articles submitted to the publications between 2015 and 2020 for the researchers to build an anonymized dataset and identify patterns within.

“Peer review by scientific experts remains the gold standard for critically assessing whether new scientific work meets or surpasses high standards for scientific discovery,” explains co-author Aaron Clauset, professor of computer science at CU Boulder. “… But the need to keep peer reviews confidential has made it difficult to assess how well these journals achieve the scientific community’s ideals, or to develop and test theories to improve it. Our new anonymized data set, which covers 5 years of detailed peer review data at two elite general science journals, offers a first ever look at how elite peer review works.”

The team found that about 80 percent of submissions to Science and over 70 percent of submissions to Science Advances were screened and rejected by editors prior to undergoing peer review.

“Editors do a lot of the heavy lifting and gatekeeping,” Zhang says. “When scientists submit to journals, they are often emotionally fixated on the peer reviews. But to even get to that stage at an elite journal already puts you in the minority of successful papers. The vast majority never see that stage.”

The number of submissions these two journals combined receive each year is enormous—upwards of 50,000 in 2025 alone, and the number of papers submitted to science journals continues to balloon as artificial intelligence accelerates the number of papers produced each year. For context, the acceptance rate for a paper submitted to premier academic journals is akin to being accepted to an Ivy League college—not everyone can get in. But understanding who may be left out is important, too.

Releasing the dataset of submissions to Science and Science Advances for more in-depth analysis was a goal from the outset and an effort to encourage science journals to be more transparent with their own data and experiment with more equitable submission practices.

“We want the entire community to be able to analyze the data,” Zhang says, “… Seeing it happen at such a standard bearer of science might make other journals less squeamish about pursuing a project like this themselves.”

The authors stress that caution is needed when interpreting the results, particularly for bias.

“A crucial point about our analysis is that none of our findings rise to the level of causality, and they should not be interpreted in that way,” Clauset says. “Rather, what we do find is a number of fascinating associations between certain attributes of manuscripts and their relative success in peer review at elite journals like Science and Science Advances. For instance, we find little overall association between author gender and success in peer review. What little association we do find is consistent with a seniority effect: more senior researchers are somewhat more likely to be men.”

While the scientists were able to track the stages of how a study moved from submission to publication, they could not assess the actual manuscripts for quality of the work accepted versus rejected—there may be justification for disparities in publication rates, too.

For instance, there are institutional and financial incentives in China to submit to these journals, Zhang says, which could increase the number of studies sent that may not be an ideal fit for a general science audience. And while authors from more elite institutions are more likely to get their paper in the door, they also experienced more rejections after being sent out for peer review.

“We don’t know how much of it is due to differences in the novelty and quality of the research versus being sensitive to the status signaling of the authors,” Zhang says. “Realistically, it is likely both. And one thing we would like to see are experiments in double blinding. As of right now, it is single blinded—the authors don’t see who the reviewers are but everyone else sees who the authors are. We really need experiments to really untangle those types of effects.”

In other words, by removing both the names and associations of all authors and editors, it allows scientists to test for bias.

Zhang directs the Science and Humanity lab at UVM’s Vermont Complex Systems Institute which examines the human side of science. Studying the science of science is necessary because science is performed by people who shape how fields evolve: People determine which projects receive funding. People conduct experiments and review each other’s work. And ultimately, people decide which findings should be broadly shared. This is why leading science journals should examine their practices to uncover potential blind spots.

“This is data journals don’t typically look at,” says Zhang. “This might be something an ambitious editor chooses to do voluntarily once every blue moon but making it more of a systemic practice might raise awareness about disparities that are leaking into editorial process that aren’t intentional or undesirable byproducts.”

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aec0494 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals

Article Publication Date

15-Jul-2026

COI Statement

A.C. is a Deputy Editor at Science Advances. All other coauthors declare they have no competing interests.

Brain stimulation safely restored sense of touch for up to decade, first and longest human study of its kind shows

University of Pittsburgh

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Robert Gaunt, Ph.D.
 

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Credit: Credit: University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences

 

What if people who have lost the ability to feel their hands could get that sense back — not through a prosthetic glove, but through tiny pulses of electricity delivered directly to the brain? 

A decade of work by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Chicago, published today in Science Translational Medicine, shows that this approach is not only possible but safe over the long haul. Across five volunteers with spinal cord injuries, the team delivered 168 million pulses of brain stimulation via implanted brain-computer interface device over a combined 27 years of implant time without any serious adverse events — making this the first study of its kind and the longest-running study of the safety of intracortical microstimulation in humans to date.  

“This research plants a flag in the ground for the safety and utility of using brain-computer interfaces to deliver sensory stimulation in clinical settings and, eventually, in people’s homes,” said senior author Robert Gaunt, Ph.D., associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and a member of Pitt's Rehab Neural Engineering Labs. “For brain-computer interfaces to have real impact on people’s lives, they need to keep working safely and reliably for years. This study shows that microstimulation in the brain can do exactly that.” 

Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, have captured public imagination in recent years, fueled by companies racing to translate the technology into products that could help people move, feel or communicate again. But the fundamental question remains: Do these systems hold up over years of daily use, and are they safe? 

Pitt's Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, working with colleagues at the University of Chicago, have been at the frontier of BCI science since the early 2010s. In 2012, the Pitt investigator-led team was among the first in the world to implant electrodes in the motor cortex to let a paralyzed person control a robotic arm and later, in 2015, pioneered the approach of stimulating the sensory cortex to pair movement with a sense of touch. The University of Chicago then implanted their first participant with electrodes in sensory and motor cortex in 2020. 

The new publication, made possible by five pioneer volunteers who committed years of their lives to the research, answers the field's most pressing long-term questions. Is stimulation safe? Do stimulation-evoked sensations drift to other parts of the body or fade over time? Are there unintended side effects? The team's answer, in short: stimulation stayed safe, stable and localized — even after 10 years in one participant.  

Working with those volunteers, the team found that electrical pulses delivered to the hand region of the somatosensory cortex evoked sensations that stayed mapped to the hand and did not shift to other body parts over time.  

Those sensations rarely lingered after stimulation was switched off — on average, only one such “persistent sensation” occurred per roughly 23,000 stimulation trials, and the vast majority lasted less than 10 seconds. None were painful and none required medical intervention.  

Finally, the electrodes became less sensitive over time: 64% remained functional on average — including 60% of one participant's electrodes after a full decade in the brain, though electrodes demonstrated accelerated decay later on in the study.  

“This shows that this technology doesn’t just have to be a short-term solution we test in the lab; industry can start developing long term take-home solutions for patients,” said lead author Charles Greenspon, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Chicago. 

The implications stretch beyond touch. Because the same kind of microstimulation is being tested in other brain regions that process vision or hearing, the safety data reported in this paper lays the groundwork for clinical-grade neuromodulation devices that could one day help restore lost senses more broadly.  

The University of Pittsburgh and University of Chicago collaboration is ongoing. The teams continue to improve the abilities of microstimulation, including how to make the sensations feel more natural, how to better control the device when stimulation is turned on and how to simplify calibrating the many parameters that control sensations. 

This research was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIH BRAIN Initiative, the National Eye Institute, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health (grants UH3 NS107714, R35 NS122333, U01 NS108922, U01 NS123125, R01 NS130302, R01 NS131953) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (contracts N66001-16-C-4051 and N66001-10-C-4056). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or DARPA. 

Additional authors on the paper are Taylor Hobbs, Robin Lienkämper, Ph.D., Joel Ye, Tyler Simpson, M.S., Jeffrey Weiss, M.S., David Weir, M.S., Debbie Harrington, C.C.R.P., Jorge Gonzalez-Martinez, M.D., Ph.D., Michael Boninger, M.D., and Jennifer Collinger, Ph.D., all of Pitt; Ali H. Alamri, Natalya Shelchkova, Ph.D., Ashley Van Driesche, David Satzer, M.D., Giacomo Valle, Ph.D., Nicholas Hatsopoulos, Ph.D., Peter Warnke, M.D., John Downey, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago; Ceci Verbaarschot, Ph.D., of University of Texas-Southwestern; and Lee Miller, Ph.D., of Northwestern University. 

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Journal

Science Translational Medicine

DOI

10.1126/scitranslmed.aec3728 

Article Title

Long-term safety and efficacy of intracortical microstimulation in humans

Article Publication Date

15-Jul-2026