Diagnostics Dear Readers, go get yourself a pulse oximeter. A study showed that frequently people with COVID wait until they are short of breath to go to hospital. Unfortunately, with COVID, frequently you feel like you can breathe fine, but your blood oxygen actually is quite low. If your pulse oximeter is reading low and… Continue reading 2021-05-24 General
Category: General
2021-05-22/23 General
Yesterday was a bit of a slow news day, plus I uh forgot to hit the Publish button, so today you get a 2-for-1 post! Schools A US CDC report says that schools that required teachers and staff to use masks had 37% lower rates of COVID-19. Schools which improved ventilation had 39% lower rates… Continue reading 2021-05-22/23 General
2021-05-21 General
Vaccines New data from a UK study of Novavax is out, and it looks really good: 96.4% against COVID Classic and 86.3% against B.1.1.7, with fewer side effects than Pfizer/Moderna/AZ. (No sign of blood clots, either, but rare events like that are unlikely to show up in a trial.) Meanwhile, a Novavax trial in South… Continue reading 2021-05-21 General
2021-05-20 General
Vaccines SinoVac/CoronaVac did a clinical trial in kids down to age 3. They found that compared to adults, the kids had better immune responses and fewer side-effects. They also tested full-doses vs. half-doses, and while a half-dose might be enough for the smallest kids, it interestingly didn’t make the side-effects any better. That surprised me:… Continue reading 2021-05-20 General
2021-05-19 General
Disease This preprint found that patients with COVID-19 made a bunch of antibodies which attacked their own innate immune system. Putting those antibodies into mice with a human ACE2 receptor made them more susceptible to COVID-19. Remember yesterday, how I talked at length about how live attenuated virus vaccines (LAVs) appear to rev up the… Continue reading 2021-05-19 General
2021-05-18 General
Vaccines I took a look at a paper about a South African trial of AstraZeneca — I think this is the final paper of the preprint I’d seen before — and it says that AZ is really crappy against B.1.351. I knew that, I preach that. HOWEVER, something I hadn’t noticed before is that there were no… Continue reading 2021-05-18 General
2021-05-13 General
Vaccines There are lots of papers which look at antibodies — because antibodies (made by B cells) are comparatively easy to measure. Over and over, I’ve seen papers saying that some specific vax does not generate as many antibodies against some specific variant than against COVID Classic. By contrast, this paper looks at T-cells in… Continue reading 2021-05-13 General
2021-05-13/17 General
NB: I hurt a tendon in my hand, so took a few days off from typing. It will probably take me a few days to catch up on all that has happened. Treatments A big study in the UK found that giving people in hospital convalescent plasma (i.e. a source of antibodies) did absolutely no… Continue reading 2021-05-13/17 General
2021-05-12 General
Variants There is a somewhat worrying report from Qatar saying that the efficacy of only one dose of Pfizer is only 29.5% against infection from B.1.1.7 and 54% against hospitalization. If you only have one dose, maybe don’t go licking doorknobs just yet. However, this report, also out today, from the UK from December to… Continue reading 2021-05-12 General
2021-05-11 General
Secondary Effects A study in the UK says that diabetes diagnosis, management, and mortality have been impacted pretty badly during the pandemic. 🙁 Vaccinations Today, Canada passed the 40% mark in what percentage of its population has gotten at least one dose, and it doesn’t look like the vaccination rate is slowing down at all!… Continue reading 2021-05-11 General