Month: August 2021

2021-08-24 General

Vaccines This thread gives a more general discussion of this preprint and says that while antibody levels in the blood, yeah, do go down for six months, the memory B cells totally rock at ramping up antibodies when needed. This thread gives a more general discussion of this preprint about waning vaccine effectiveness in Israel.… Continue reading 2021-08-24 General

2021-08-23 General

Vaccines This Twitter thread is an excellent discussion of how to understand the “do vaccines wane” discussion. Please go read it. The US FDA today gave full approval to Pfizer, as opposed to the Emergency Use Authorization that it had given. This is important because there were entities which were not legally able to require… Continue reading 2021-08-23 General

2021-08-23 BC

Mitigation Measures The province will be requiring vaccination by 13 September to enter a number of different types of establishments. These include indoor ticketed sporting events, indoor and patio dining in restaurants, fitness centres, casinos, and indoor organized events (e.g. conferences and weddings). UBC will be requiring proof of vaccination to live in the residence… Continue reading 2021-08-23 BC

2021-08-21/22 General

Transmission This great preprint of healthcare workers in the Netherlands finds that despite having similar PCR results for vaccinated and unvaccinated people, vaccinated people actually are less likely to have actual infectious viruses. PCR tests look for pieces of RNA, but the RNA might be fragments, it’s not necessarily whole virus which can cause infection.… Continue reading 2021-08-21/22 General

2021-08-20 BC

Press Briefing The biggest news from today’s snap press briefing was that Interior Health has announced a new set of health-authority-wide restrictions to combat the rising case counts there. This supplements the previous orders which were only for the Central Okanagan. Also, everybody is asked to avoid non-essential travel into the Interior. The next biggest… Continue reading 2021-08-20 BC

2021-08-20 General

Mitigation Measures This article says that masking was responsible for a 68% reduction in transmissions and that regular testing got the reduction up to 77%. This preprint looked at different mitigation measures in schools in Switzerland. Some highlights of the reductions in viral dosage they saw: Keeping all the windows open in winter: 14x Universal… Continue reading 2021-08-20 General

2021-08-19 BC

Statistics +689 cases, +2 deaths, +4,330 first doses, +11,283 second doses. Currently 121 in hospital / 56 in ICU, 5,982 active cases, 150,377 recovered. first doses second doses of adults 83.7% 75.3% of over-12s 82.9% 74.0% of all BCers 75.4% 67.3% We have 497,365 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 24.9 days at… Continue reading 2021-08-19 BC

2021-08-19 General

Vaccines I see a lot of anxiety about vaccines decreasing in effectiveness. In the US, Biden announced that third-dose-boosters would start being delivered on 20 August, never mind that the FDA has not yet approved boosters. Here is an example of someone showing the waning effectiveness of the vaccines: But some of the studies have… Continue reading 2021-08-19 General

2021-08-18 BC

Uh-oh This article reports that Kelowna General has started to cancel surgeries because of the COVID surge. The BC modelling group has released another report, which says we are fucked if we don’t introduce stronger mitigation measures and vaccination rates. Transmission This paper says that wildfire smoke makes COVID-19 more transmissible. Statistics +553 cases, +1… Continue reading 2021-08-18 BC