Vaccines
If someone you know says that mRNA vaccines are too new and/or got rushed into production, point them at this article from 2018 which shows that there were five mRNA vaccines which had already completed trials, with five more in progress:
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This is a really nice graphic showing the value of vaccinations (from San Diego data):
There is some really nice data from Alberta which includes figures of the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths vs time since dose, by age, for both first and second doses. It shows that
- Two doses of vaccines work really well.
- For people under 75, two doses work really really really REALLY well.
Variants
Remember on Friday were I showed how cases were dropping suddenly in the UK? This article suggests that it is because schools are out and so schoolchildren are not getting tested twice a week any more.
This data from Scotland suggests that the UK drops are not due to testing artifacts:
This article tries to figure out why all the downturns.
This preprint found that people who got COVID before getting vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer were much less likely to have a later breakout infection than those who had not gotten infected before vaccination; for Moderna, it didn’t matter if you’d been infected before or not.
Long COVID
This preprint found that people with Long COVID have easily visible changes in their nerves by looking in their eyes with corneal confocal microscopy.
This study found that Long COVID patients had a elevated white blood counts, and they found a statistically significant amount of spike protein in their white blood cells.
This is an interesting video on Long COVID (in the US). One thing which it mentions early is that there is a common Long COVID symptom (tremors and bone pain in extremities) which had been overlooked, and which are so bad the people can’t sleep and get suicidal.
The founder of Survivor Corps made a plea that the research should be on the most debilitating symptoms, not the most common symptoms.
Mental Health
This article reports on a study which found that video chats made the elderly more lonely.
Recommended Reading
This Science article and this New York Times article and this older Scientific American article and this older Nature article are on intranasal vaccines. Pick one, but it’s interesting.
This article (from San Francisco) gives anecdotes about how people have become really rude and awful to restaurant workers.