Mitigation Measures
This article says that PM Trudeau is sticking to his guns: he wants 75% of Canadians partially / 20% fully vaxxed before re-opening the border, as Canada extended the border closure until July 21. Good on him. NB: My husband and I have lots of family in the US, so I am not insensitive to the effects of the border closure.
(Canada is currently at 66% partially vaxxed / 17% fully vaxxed, so we have a ways to go.)
Disease
Scientists have found that weather influences R0 significantly, with 17.5% attributable to temperature, humidity, and UV. They found that 3.73% was the heat, 9.35% was the humidity, and 4.44% was UV, with colder/drier/darker being worse.
This paper compared before-and-after MRI images of recovered COVID-19 patients with controls, and found significant grey matter loss. (Here’s a mass media version.)
SAVE YOUR BRAIN, GET A VAX!!!
Vaccines
This article suggests that Sinovac isn’t very good against Delta. Indonesia is getting slammed by Delta, and this article says that ~400 health care workers who were fully vaccinated with Sinovac have been hospitalized. Note, I don’t know how many healthcare workers there were in the sample — if there were 4M, then 400 having breakout cases is not a big deal.
Also, the Serrana whole-of-community vaccination used mostly Sinovac, and vaccinating 75% of the community pretty much eliminated the virus.
England has almost exclusively Delta cases now. Public Health England has released number #16 of their awesome weekly report, with updated their vaccine efficacy against symptomatic infection estimates (not broken out by AZ/Pfizer):
| symptoms | Alpha | Delta |
| dose 1 | 49% | 31% |
| dose 2 | 88% | 80% |
There’s also data from somewhere related to the Pub Health England data (that I can’t trace to a primary source, arg!) broken out by brand for vaccine efficacy against hospitalization with Delta:
| hospitalization | 1 dose | 2 doses |
| Pfizer | 94% | 96% |
| AZ | 71% | 92% |
Recommended Reading
There’s a new bacterial disease in chimps. (Short.)
I’m not into delving into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. I don’t care if it is a result of lab tinkering or not.
If it was an experiment gone wrong, then its release was pretty clearly an accident — why would China deliberately infect itself? So what good would it do to know that? Maybe so we could shake our finger at them and say, “don’t do that!”? I think they learned that they shouldn’t do it, they don’t need us to finger-wag. We have other things that we clearly need to focus our energy on, like vaccinating the world.
And if it was not an experiment, then we don’t need to do any more looking.
Still, if you care, this article talks a bit more about the lab leak hypothesis.