2021-07-01 General

Testing

You might have heard of “Lateral Flow Tests”. They are a type of rapid test which has been deployed widely in the UK. This study evaluated six different brands of lateral flow tests and found that they are less sensitive than PCR tests, but most of them are still pretty good.

Long COVID

This study looked at Long COVID in children who did vs. those who did not test positive for COVID-19 antibodies. It found that there was no significant difference in Long COVID symptoms between kids who did/did not have COVID-19 antibodies.

This gives several possible hypotheses:

  1. Long COVID doesn’t exist.
  2. There are lots of illnesses which can give Long COVID symptoms.
  3. The antibody tests gave lots of false negatives.
  4. The survey questions were too vague. If you ask, for example, “have you been tired in the past month”, well, lots of people will answer affirmatively.
  5. The kids were fucking with the survey takers.

I suspect that the answer is #2, but I am biased. I have not had COVID-19 to the best of my knowledges, but I have had significant fatigue in the past two years — which I believe came from a chronic sinus infection.

Transmission

This article says that COVID-19 was found in 17.4% of the pets of infected owners. Most cases are mild; the risk isn’t to the animals as much it is to other humans.

Treatments

This study also says that convalescent plasma is not useful in non-severe COVID cases.


This study has found some really effective antibodies. Remember, when faced with a vaccine or infection, the body just generates a ton of different antibodies kind of at random in the hope that a few will be useful. If the immune system finds one which is effective, it makes a bunch more. That means that any one person’s antibodies will have a range of effectiveness.

We humans can look for the most effective antibodies and clone them into monoclonal antibodies and give them as treatments, like Regeneron. That means that finding these very effective antibodies could be a really big deal.