Pathology
This article says that people with mental illnesses are at much higher risk of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death. I gather that it’s not the mental illness per se, but the consequences of mental illness that put them at risk.
Mitigation Measures
This article reports that the Government of Canada has ended its COVID-era policy of turning around asylum-seekers from non-checkpoint border crossings.
Consumer Protection
This article says that the US government fined Air Canada for not providing refunds for cancelled flights.
Vaccines
This article reports that the first of 2.9M of the pediatric Pfizer doses arrived in Canada yesterday.
This article reports that Pfizer found that the 30 mg booster was 95.6% effective compared to people who’d only gotten two shots. Repeat, the “control” arm was not a placebo, it was people who had already gotten two shots. So for every 100 people who had two shots who got COVID-19, there were only 4.4 boosted people who got sick.
If two shots are 95% effective against infection, my math says that three shots are 99.7% effective against infection compared to unvaccinated. If two shots are only 80% effective (because of waning effectiveness), then three shots are 98.9% effective against infection compared to unvaccinated.
This article reports that Pfizer’s study of it’s adult vax in 12-17 year-olds was 100% effective against infection. (In case you are sitting there, stunned, asking yourself how they approved the vax without knowing effectiveness data, they approved it based on safety data and antibodies-in-test-tubes data.)
This preprint did a meta-analysis of a bunch of waning studies. They found that vaccine effectiveness dropped a lot between 1 and 6 months after the second dose:
| against | ages | change |
| asymptomatic infection | all | -18.5% |
| asymptomatic infection | older | -19.9% |
| symptomatic infection | all | -25.4% |
| symptomatic infection | older | -32.0% |
| severe disease | all | -8.0% |
| severe disease | older | -9.7% |
This preprint says that a booster after 2 mRNAs increased IgG antibodies by almost 8x and neutralizing antibodies went up by about more than 7x. A booster after COVID-19 infection increased antibody levels by almost 14x.
Long COVID
The estimates which I have seen about how prevalent Long COVID is area all over the map. This letter to the editor of Nature says that 1.7% of people in England have symptoms lasting more than four weeks.
Recommended Reading
This article says that the new anti-COVID pills are not silver bullets.
This article talks about remote work is particularly hard for those young people who never had in-person work before.