Transmission
This article says that, starting today, COVID-positive people (basically) in Alberta will need to stay in their home, but the household members will not be required to quarantine as well. Contact tracers also will not notify the contacts of the positive people: the infect are now responsible for telling them.
Starting on 16 August, isolation following a positive test will be recommended but not mandatory.
This seems like a stunningly, gob-smackingly bad idea.
This twitter thread talks about the contagiousness of Delta: more contagious than than MERS, SARS, Ebola, Smallpox, Spanish Flu, the common cold, and as contagious as Chicken Pox.
Deer in the US have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.
My first response was, “how the hell did people get within 2m of deer?”, but then I remembered all the videos of people fostering fawns like this, this, this, this.
Vaccines
AstraZeneca reported that they have shipped a billion doses. Billion with a B.
Recommended Reading
This blog post hates on the term “mild” to mean essentially anything that doesn’t send you to the hospital.
This twitter thread is kind of technical and talks about durability of infection. One thing that I thought was particularly interesting was how varied durability was for different immunities
(EBV is Epstein-Barr virus (causes mononucleosis and is implicated in a shtton of other ailments), vaccinia is what they used to inoculate against smallpox; VZV is chickepox/shingles.)
The Pfizer Q2 earnings report is interesting to see all the many vaccines and treatments which are in the pipeline. Highlights include an mRNA flu vax, a Lyme Disease vax, an RSV vax (<- one of the more common “common cold” viruses), a breast cancer drug, gene therapy for hemophilia, and gene therapy for muscular dystrophy.