Mitigation Measures
This paper looked at movement restrictions in the US and found the following (independent) reductions in mobility from mitigation measures:
| Measure | Reduction |
| emergency declaration | 9.9% |
| social distancing policies | 24.5% |
| shelter-in-place | 29% |
Further, they found that a 10% reduction in mobility was associated with a 17.5% reduction in case growth two weeks later.
Vaccines
The US CDC released a report which said that there were 10,262 cases of COVID-19 in vaccinated people between 1 Jan 2021 and 30 April 2021, out of about 355,000 cases, so about 97% of the cases were unvaccinated. Only 0.05% of the cases were vaccinated people who died.
Moderna announced a press release saying that it had seen zero cases of COVID-19 in its study of 12-17 year-olds, and was 93% effective in preventing COVID-19 after one dose.
Disease
This paper says that patients can have diabetes-like symptoms (i.e. high blood sugar, insulin resistance) for up to two months after getting COVID.
Some people (called “supertasters” as a technical term) have a specific version of a particular gene (TAS2R38) that makes their perception of bitter tastes stronger. This paper says that supertasters have milder cases of COVID-19 than people who do not have that version.
The effect was not small. For example, of the participants who later required hospitalization, none, zero, nada were supertasters.
(My first thought was, “How the hell did they think to look for that association?!?!?”, but apparently there is previous research which links TAS2R38 variants to innate immunity in the upper respiratory tract.)
India
I don’t normally talk about what is going on countries outside of Canada unless Canada is obviously involved, but OMG India is having such a catastrophe.
The New York Times tried to figure out what the actual death toll in India is, and they think it’s between 2x and 13.7x the official government figures, so between 600,000 and 4.2 million deaths.
1 comment
Comments are closed.