2021-08-09 General

Transmission

This study took COVID patients and counted the virus particles they emitted (well, RNA pieces). They found four interesting things:

  • Being quiet keeps most of your viruses to yourself.
  • A few people were more dangerous when talking than singing.
  • Most of the viral load came from fine aerosol particles. 
  • There was a huge variation between people in how much virus they exhaled. 

Vaccines

Israel has started giving boosters to its older population because they think immunity is waning. (Reminder: they used a three-week dosing interval, not a 12-week or 7-week interval like we’ve mostly used in BC.) This tweet says that it’s effective (it shows cases per 100k in those over 60, with green for double-vaxxed, red for unvaxxed, purple for thrice-vaxxed):

(Note: the vaxxed rate is higher than the unvaxxed rate because the outbreak started in highly-vaxxed areas which were kind of separate from the unvaxxed areas. The unvaxxed areas are now catching up.)


This preprint says that the Phase 2 results for Medicago were good. (Medicago is a Canadian company making a vax with the aid of a plant that’s a relative of tobacco.)

Long COVID/Kids

Buried in this mostly-anecdotes article about Long COVID in kids are reports that in two UK studies:

  • Study1: 9.8% of 2-to-11 y/os and 13% of 12-to-16 y/os still had symptoms at 5 weeks after COVID-19. 7.4% of 2-to-11 y/os and 8.2% of 12-to-16 y/os still had symptoms at 12 weeks.
  • Study2: 4.4% of kids had symptoms >4 weeks after COVID-19, versus ~1% with non-COVID-19 respiratory illnesses. About 2% had symptoms after 8 weeks.