Happy New Year!
Measures
In the USA, the US CDC decided that five days was enough time to isolate. Per this tweet, five days later, the number of COVID-19 transmissions in hospitals went up:
In BC, we just dropped to five-day isolation (as long as you have no symptoms). It would be interesting to see a similar chart for BC, but I doubt if the province has adequate data skills to provide it. 🙁
Vaccines
This preprint says that a second dose of J&J is 85% effective against hospitalization after 1-2 months. They said they calculated the efficacy based on people admitted with Omicron between 15 Nov and 20 Dec 20.
Variants
A few days ago, I talked about how there were two ways for a virus to get into a cell, endosomal fusion and via ACE2 receptor. Well, I didn’t have it quite right. This thread explains it: endosomal fusion (Route 2) and cell surface fusion (Route 1) both use the ACE2 receptor, but cell surface fusion requires the TMPRSS2 receptor.
Omicron mostly uses endosomal fusion, which means that if your therapy blocks TMPRSS2 (like Camostat does), then it might work great for Delta but Omicron will just shrug.
On the other hand, if I understand correctly, proteins called cathepsins unlock the little membrane bubble, so if you have a cathepsin blocker (like E64d), the little fucker stays locked in its membrane cage.
Pathology
This tweet says that a smaller percentage of COVID-19 patients in London need mechanical ventilation:
Remember, this could be related to more mild cases showing up because of prior (partial) immunity.
Long COVID
This preprint says that cohorts with all severity levels of COVID-19 averaged more executive dysfunction (a type of cognitive impairment) than those without, and cohorts with worse COVID-19 cases had worse dysfunction:
Note that the error bars on Asymptomatic and Mild are big enough to include Uninfected, though. Also note that these values came from survey reports, so the participants ranked their dysfunction and ranked how severe their cases were.