COVID-19 is steady and pretty low, influenza is falling fast, and RSV is climbing. Charts From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page: Influenza case counts continue to go down. COVID-19 continues to be about the same. RSV continues to go up a little bit. In the most recent data (ending 17 Jan 2026) as reported on… Continue reading 2026-01-30 BC
2026-01-30 General
COVID-19 COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness This paper from Greece (2026-01-19) reports that children who had a confirmed COVID-19 infection had worse global longitudinal strain (GLS) — a measure of how much the left ventricle of the heart can contract. Kids who had more severe infections had worse GLS. This paper from Japan (2026-01-21) reports… Continue reading 2026-01-30 General
2026-01-23 BC
COVID-19 Charts From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page: Influenza levels are definitely, clearly down. At this point, it looks like this season won’t end up as bad as many people (including me) thought it would be. Last week there was a slight drop in RSV cases, but I said that I thought it was just… Continue reading 2026-01-23 BC
2026-01-23 General
COVID-19 Long COVID 👧 There has been a lot of hand-wringing about high absentee rates among children, with very little mention of the fact that maybe, y’know, children are sick more than were before everybody started collecting COVID-19 infections like they were baseball cards. Finally, a paper from USA (2026-01-16) does something that starts to… Continue reading 2026-01-23 General
2026-01-16 BC
Flu looks like it might have peaked. COVID-19 case counts in BC dropped slightly, but other jurisdictions (including the USA) have rising COVID-19 counts and the BC wastewater looks like it is trending rising, so I’m going to say that COVID-19 levels are rising slowly. I have less information on RSV, but the shape/size of… Continue reading 2026-01-16 BC
2026-01-16 General
COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness There have been a fair number of articles and post on teh socials wringing hands about how cancer rates in young people were risking — with the implication that it was because of COVID-19 infections or vaccines. However, the data for that hand-wringing had been pre-pancemic. Good news! We just… Continue reading 2026-01-16 General
2026-01-09 BC
COVID-19 COVID-19 is going up slightly, but from a very low base. Influenza is still a much bigger deal right now. Charts From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page: As I suspected, the slight drop in various respiratory illness levels in the last provincial report was in fact an artifact of the holidays. Flu has not… Continue reading 2026-01-09 BC
2026-01-09 General
COVID-19 COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness 🤰 This paper from USA (2025-01-01) reports babies who were exposed to COVID-19 while in the womb had neurological developmental issues compared to babies who were not exposed. Compared to controls, exposed children: 🤰 This paper from China (2025-12-23) reports that eggs for IVF which are taken while the… Continue reading 2026-01-09 General
2026-01-02 General
This is a short posting because there wasn’t much news over the holidays. The province didn’t release any data this week, so there’s no BC-specific posting. (The province says they will release data next Thursday.) COVID-19 COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death This paper from USA (2025-12-23) reports that people hospitalized for COVID-19 had a 2.11… Continue reading 2026-01-02 General
2025-12-26 General
Influenza Transmission 🤧 I just had influenza, so spent some time looking up information about incubation periods and contagiousness to figure out how to keep Spouse from getting sick. O. My. Word. There is so much information that is just plain wrong out there! Almost every web page I visited said that influenza was passed… Continue reading 2025-12-26 General