Treatments This article talks about the good long-term results of AstraZeneca’s polyclonal antibody (brand name Evusheld). The article says it’s a two shot therapy like a vaccine, and given pre-exposure gives 83% protection over six months, sort of like a vaccine. Unlike a vaccine, however, it should work just as well in people who are… Continue reading 2021-11-18 General
Category: Treatments
2021-11-10 General
Treatments Okay, this preprint is wild — if I understand it correctly. My understanding is that the authors made a thing — a Therapeutic Interfering Particle or TIP — which looks just like SARS-CoV-2 except it has a vastly stripped-down genome, one that doesn’t have all the instructions needed to make the enzymes and proteins… Continue reading 2021-11-10 General
2021-11-05 General
Treatment Fantastic news! Pfizer has a pill which, if you take it in the first three days after symptoms appear, cuts hospitalization by NINETY F PERCENT!!! If taken within the first five days, it’s ~85% effective. The pill, called Paxlovid, is a protease inhibitor, which ought to be easy to make and have low side… Continue reading 2021-11-05 General
2021-11-04 General
Genetics This preprint talks about using virus-like particles to study viruses. It looks enough like SARS-CoV-2 that it can get into cells, but then it can’t replicate. Essentially, it’s shooting blanks. This study identified a specific gene variant (which comes from Neanderthals!) which gives a 2x risk of respiratory failure. About 60% of people of… Continue reading 2021-11-04 General
2021-11-03 General
Deaths/Demographics In addition to just “numbers of deaths”, you can also estimate “years of life lost” to describe how bad an epidemic is. For example, HIV had a huuuuge number of years of life lost because the people who died from it were unusually young. This article looked at years of life lost to COVID-19… Continue reading 2021-11-03 General
2021-11-02 General
Vaccines This article says that vaccine effectiveness in England was only about 50-60% against infection in the June/July 2021 period. There’s a stat called the number needed to vaccinate (NNV), which is a measure of how many people you would need to vaccinate to prevent some outcome. The NNV for 80 year olds to prevent… Continue reading 2021-11-02 General
2021-10-28 General
Treatment This paper says that a single infusion of a new-to-me polyclonal antibody — sotrovimab — is 85% effective at preventing hospitalization when given early to high-risk COVID-19 patients. The FDA already gave an EUA to sotrovimab on 26 May; Canada gave interim approval on 30 July (and bought 10,000 doses on 4 October), so… Continue reading 2021-10-28 General
2021-10-27 General
Treatments Yay! This article says that Merck has licensed molnupiravir such that ~100 developing countries can manufacture it at low cost! This is awesome. (It hasn’t been approved by any countries yet, but it will be soon, I’m sure.) Yay yay! This article reports that a cheap mature drug for depression — fluvoxamine — reduces… Continue reading 2021-10-27 General
2021-10-26 General
Pathology/Treatment A really puzzling and important question has been: why do some people get really really sick from COVID-19 while others breeze through? This preprint reports on measuring the hell out of three groups of people — healthy, hospitalized, and ICE — to figure out what was different between them. They found: At least 10%… Continue reading 2021-10-26 General
2021-10-21 General
Mitigation Measures This article talks about $7.4B in relief spending that the Government of Canada has announced. All three of these programs will go until 7 May 2022. Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will be replaced by the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit and will provide $300 a week to eligible people. The Tourism and Hospitality Recovery… Continue reading 2021-10-21 General