Vaccination
Half of eligible Canadians have gotten their second dose, woohoo!
Transmission
This study looked at viral loads over time and found three interesting things:
- The total infectiousness (load integrated over time) was very different between different people.
- The viral load went up in saliva before it went up in nasal mucous. They suggest that means that saliva could be a better place to test for COVID-19 than the nose. (However, after the first few days, the amount in saliva was lower than in the nose.)
- Patients with Alpha had a slower viral load rise than patients with COVID Classic.
NB: The “gamma distribution” here refers to a statistical distribution type, not the Gamma Variant of Concern.
This article is about a seroprevalence survey in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mostly there weren’t any surprising, but there was one sentence that said that married people were more likely to be infected than single people. That surprised me.
Long COVID
This article suggests that one possible cause of Long COVID is reactivated viruses. Most people have viruses that they caught a long time ago which are dormant (e.g. herpesviruses like chickenpox and Epstein-Barr virus); the speculation is that COVID-19 “wakes up” these viruses.
Schools
This study found that there was less bullying in schools in Canada (which probably means “in Ontario”) during the pandemic than there was before.
Recommended Reading
This article on breakthrough cases points out that asymptomatic breakthroughs are more common and waaay less worrying than symptomatic breakthroughs. The article also notes that the original Warp Speed success criteria is that a vax would prevent symptomatic disease in 50% of the cases. (Wow, our vaccines are good!)