Mitigation Measures
This article describes tightened border controls in Canada in response to the threat of Omicron:
- Nigeria, Malawi and Egypt have been added to the list of restricted countries (South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini were already on the list). Those who have been to any of their home countries in the past two weeks will not be allowed into Canada; anybody who is already here needs to immediately go into quarantine.
- Anyone entering Canada from anywhere but the US will need to get tested on arrival and isolate until their test result is known. That is going to expand to all countries except for the US at some future point, but I couldn’t tell when.
This article (by the International Monetary Fund!?!?) says that mask mandates in the US reduced weekly COVID-19 cases by 55 people per 100K, hospitalizations by 11 people per 100K, and 0.7 deaths per 100K.
This article reports that Air Canada had only been doing spot checks of vaccination status, but starting today, they are going to check everyone.
This article says that CBSA has found 374 cases of suspected forged COVID-19 PCR test results used to (try to) enter Canada.
Vaccines
This article reports that the Government of Canada is asking NACI for speedy guidance on boosters. It wasn’t clear to me which guidance they wanted, or why they were asking via press conference instead of through the Health Minister.
This preprint (from Japan) says that Pfizer antibody titres decreased
- more in older people than younger people,
- slightly more three to six months post-vax in smokers than in non-smokers, and
- more in women (−31.6% per month) than in men (−25.1% per month).
Transmission
This article (from Dec 2019) talks about a U-shaped dependency of virus lifetime on humidity. I had seen this before, but this article suggests that as the droplet evaporates, the concentration of salts goes up, and that’s what kills the virus.
This article (from April 2021) also mentions the U-shaped dependency on humidity, and says that they measured that the COVID-19 virus survives better at lower temperature.
Treatments
This preprint says that Paxlovid was effective against five different variants, even though they had mutations in the area which Paxlovid targets.
Pathology
This preprint says that kids with well-controlled asthma are 1.36x more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 as non-asthmatic kids, and those with poorly-controlled asthma are 6.4x more likely to be hospitalized.