COVID-19 Origins
This preprint says they have found a bat coronavirus which looks really close to SARS-CoV-2. It looks to me like that’s the origin!
Does this mean an end to speculation about SARS-CoV-2 coming from a Chinese lab? Oh hell no, because they have too much fun with conspiracy theories and because it’s not an exact match.
Long COVID
This detailed report from the UK government (from 1 April 2021) goes into detail about several ways to estimate the Long COVID rate, and has comparisons with other studies:
| Method/Study | 4-8 weeks | 12 weeks |
| Prevalence of any symptom at a point in time after infection | 9.4% | 5.0% |
| Prevalence of continuous symptoms after infection | 11.4% | 3.0% |
| Prevalence of self-reported long COVID | 14.1% | 11.7% |
| Prevalence among symptomatic infections | 27.0% | 6.7% |
| COVID Symptom Study | 13.3% | 2.3% |
| UK National Core Studies (severe) | 3.0% to 13.7% | 1.2% to 5.4% |
| REACT-2 Study | 37.7% | |
| PHOSP-COVID Study (post-hospitalization) | 71% |
Vaccines
I don’t usually talk about other countries much, but this is interesting: the US Food and Drug Administration decided not to recommend boosters for everybody, but did decide to recommend boosters for people over 65.