Influenza still hasn’t peaked. It’s not at record levels, but it’s close — and it is still going up. Meanwhile, measles. 🙁 Measles ‼️‼️ ALERT! This article (2025-02-16) reports that there is a measles case in Fraser which came in on Air Canada Flight 66, arriving from Bangkok Feb 11. Reminder: if you were vaccinated… Continue reading 2025-02-21 BC
2025-02-21 General
Vaccines You might have heard that the USA is having an egg shortage. You might know that 80% of flu vaccines are made with eggs. You might get concerned that egg-based vaccine production would be impacted. Fear not! This article (2025-02-19) reports that chickens who lay vaccine eggs are raised in a “controlled environment”, so… Continue reading 2025-02-21 General
2025-02-15 BC
Flu is still going up, but more slowly. RSV is still slowly slowly going down, COVID-19 is holding steady or maybe going down… but there were almost no COVID-19 deaths this week! (Or the Province’s reporting is messed up, that’s always possible.) Charts From the BC CDC Situation Report: Comparison vs. Other Influenza-Like-Illnesses, from the… Continue reading 2025-02-15 BC
2025-02-15 General
I have been avoiding saying much about the chaos in the US government health sector, but it’s been difficult. COVID-19 Long COVID AGAIN 🧪This paper from Australia (2025-01-13) reports that people with Long COVID and ME/CFS both have bigger left hippocampal subfields than healthy controls. Furthermore, the size of the left hippocampal subfield correlated with… Continue reading 2025-02-15 General
2025-01-07 BC
COVID-19 levels are still lower than it’s been in a long time. Flu levels, on the other hand, are still going up. Charts From the BC CDC Situation Report: Comparison vs. Other Influenza-Like-Illnesses, from the Viral Pathogen Characterization page: Holy cow, was I wrong about influenza being over*! It is WAY higher than it was… Continue reading 2025-01-07 BC
2025-01-07 General
COVID-19 Long COVID AGAIN 😞 This article (2025-02-04) refers to this paper from the USA (paywalled, 2025-02-03), which reports that 1.4% of children surveyed had had Long COVID, and 0.4% currently have Long COVID. 80% of the kids with active Long COVID have an ability limitation that they didn’t have before catching COVID-19. They also… Continue reading 2025-01-07 General
2025-01-31 BC
There is a lot of respiratory illness going around, but right now, it looks like only about 6% of it is COVID-19! The last time there were so few people in hospital with COVID-19 was August 2023, and there haven’t been as few weekly confirmed cases since before testing was severely curtailed during the big… Continue reading 2025-01-31 BC
2025-01-31 General
It is still a little harder finding good articles / papers than a few weeks ago. In addition to all the chaff from Trump in the health sites I monitor, there are now a ton of news articles saying, “Today is the five year anniversary of the first COVID case appearing in <jurisdiction>, what have… Continue reading 2025-01-31 General
2025-01-25 BC
Everything COVID looks low-ish. Not gone, not low on an absolute scale, but definitely low on a relative scale. For example, while the lowest number in hospital with COVID-19 that we’ve seen since Omicron hit was ~65 (in the summer of 2023), right now we’re at about 80. Is this something special to BC, or… Continue reading 2025-01-25 BC
2025-01-25 General
Health news was harder to find this week. A lot of my sources were overrun with articles about what trouble the new US president is fomenting, leaving little room for articles about COVID, mpox, or H5N1. ☹️ You might have noticed that I sometimes mark snippets with “AGAIN”. Why do I bother showing studies that… Continue reading 2025-01-25 General