Vaccines There’s a great, long Twitter thread which looks at the effect of vaccines. (It summarizes a paywalled article, if you want to see the whole thing.) One of the elements which I found striking was how the risk of COVID-19 relative to the flu has dropped over time. In mid 2020, the infection fatality… Continue reading 2022-01-29/30/31 General
2022-01-31 Booster Recommendation
I am putting this here in a stand-alone document so that I can refer to it easily. People have been asking me which booster they should get, Pfizer or Moderna? For effectiveness, the answer is always Moderna, though it’s not so bad if you get Pfizer. All the studies I have seen say that Moderna… Continue reading 2022-01-31 Booster Recommendation
2022-01-28 General
Variants I don’t like to warn about variants before there’s data. (I didn’t sound alarms about Mu, for example.) Well, I think it’s time to talk about BA.2 — an Omicron variant. (The Omicron variant which sprouted up first is BA.1.) BA.2 doesn’t look like it is lot worse than BA.1 — not like Delta… Continue reading 2022-01-28 General
2022-01-28 BC
Vaccinations This article reports that a BC judge ordered that a child of divorced parents be vaccinated. (One parent wanted vax and the other did not.) Press Briefing This briefing was reeeally dull. DrH opened with, no shit, a retrospective of the pandemic. I guess it was good for reminding us of what obstacles we… Continue reading 2022-01-28 BC
2022-01-27 BC
Mitigation Measures This article says that the Canucks are being pressured to enforce masking when fans are seated. I am confused, because I thought Dr. Henry said that the rule was that you had to be masked when walking around (after a photo of her, unmasked at a Canucks game, surfaced). Did the rules change?… Continue reading 2022-01-27 BC
2022-01-27 General
Pathology This study found that pregnant women were 1.77x as likely to develop preeclampsia if they got COVID-19; women who had not given birth before were 1.89x as likely. They found the risk of a preterm birth for all pregnant women with both COVID-19 and preeclampsia was 4.05x (and 6.26x for women who had never… Continue reading 2022-01-27 General
2022-01-26 BC
Statistics Today: +2,086 cases, +21 deaths, +1,515 first doses, +1,491 second doses, +42,189 other doses. Yesterday, add 265 cases to the provisional number. Currently 949 in hospital / 136 in ICU, 30,058 active cases, 282,189 recovered. Positivity rate of 19.1% first doses second doses third doses of adults 93.0% 90.4% 45.1% of over-12s 92.6% 89.9%… Continue reading 2022-01-26 BC
2022-01-26 General
Mitigation Measures This preprint looked at high-risk exposures and said that the risk of catching COVID-19 was: 3.02x higher if the infected person was part of your household (versus not), 2.1x higher if the transmission was indoors (versus outdoors), 2.15x higher if the interaction lasted 3 hrs or more (vs. shorter) among unvaccinated and partially-vaccinated… Continue reading 2022-01-26 General
2022-01-25 BC
Press Conference Here’s what I thought was new and interesting from today’s press conference: The case growth rate is dropping, but there are still lots of people sick. The vax card program is being extended to 30 June 2022 for people over 12. If we are in “a better place” before then, they might drop… Continue reading 2022-01-25 BC
2022-01-25 General
Long COVID This preprint says that they found four predictors which are strongly correlated with Long COVID: type 2 diabetes, SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the blood, Epstein-Barr virus in the blood, and specific autoantibodies. (Here’s an article translating the subject into lay-speak. Paywalled, sorry.) This paper also found a Long COVID signature/diagnostic, this time in age,… Continue reading 2022-01-25 General