2021-03-14 General

Long COVID

There’s a preprint showing that getting a COVID vax helped long haulers a little bit:

  • decrease in worsening symptoms (5.6% vaxed vs 14.2% unvaxed)
  • increase in symptom resolution (23.2% v. 15.4%)

They didn’t see any difference in response was between the three different types of vaccines.

That’s great, but note that this was not a double-blind study — the vaxed people were matched with long haulers who didn’t get any shot — so there could be some placebo effect going on here.


There’s a study out of Imperial College UK which shows that old people don’t do as well after one shot of Pfizer as young people do.

That’s kind of worrying. It shows that it’s a good idea to delay the second shot for younger people, but maybe is not a good idea for the elderly. Maybe give everyone over 70 their second shot before giving the under-70s their shot?

Now, that study only looks at antibodies, one piece of the immune system. I believe that the studies that have looked at what happens in people (not test tubes) show much better outcomes for seniors.

VOC

For those of us worrying about B.1.1.7 in BC, we can perhaps look to Florida for reassurance: they have a really high rate of B.1.1.7, but have not seen a surge in cases. This LA Times article focuses on differences between Florida and California, but it does mention some pluses that Florida has, particularly humidity: “some studies suggest that when the air is humid, virus droplets fall to the ground faster, so people are less likely to become infected”. This means that BC won’t have the same countering force that Florida has. 🙁