Vaccines This Research Letter says that six to ten weeks after the second dose, antibody levels were higher in people who got Moderna doses than Pfizer doses. People who also had gotten sick with COVID-19 had higher antibody levels than those who had not. Younger people had more antibodies than older people. This preprint says… Continue reading 2021-08-28/29/30 General
Category: General
2021-08-27 General
Variants This preprint says that Delta is twice as likely to put you into the hospital than Alpha is. Transmission This article says that the US has identified the first cases of COVID-19 in deer. That’s kind of odd, because this article from July 2021 says that the USDA found antibodies in deer. Maybe it’s… Continue reading 2021-08-27 General
2021-08-26 General
Side Effects This paper says that cloth masks are the worst for speech intelligibility. Use a medical mask. Long COVID This preprint from China says that: The proportion of previously hospitalized patients with COVID who had symptoms dropped from 68% at six months to 49% at 12 months. The proportion with fatigue increased slightly, from… Continue reading 2021-08-26 General
2021-08-25 General
Vaccines This preprint says that giving solid organ transplant patients a fourth booster increases antibody levels. I have to wonder when it stops: do we give them five? six? twenty? when the rest of the world is clamoring for their first? This study found that there were three cases of myocarditis per 100K COVID-19 vaccinations,… Continue reading 2021-08-25 General
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
2021-08-21/22 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 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 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 General
Vaccines There has been a lot of discussing recently about waning effectiveness of vaccines. I want to editorialize for a moment: you expect vaccine effectiveness against infection to appear worse in real life than in the studies, and to appear worse over time. More time to get infected. If the vaccine is 95% effective over… Continue reading 2021-08-18 General