Vaccines
Studies of the effectiveness of boosters against Omicron in humans (as opposed to test tubes) are starting to come out, and they are not as encouraging as one would like.
- This preprint from the UK says in people who got AZ, a Pfizer booster is 89.1% effective against symptomatic infection and for those who got Pfizer, a Pfizer booster is 84.5% effective in people over 50 (the only ones who had gotten a booster).
- This preprint from Denmark says mRNA boosters are 56.4% effective compared to people with only two doses. It’s effectiveness compared to unvaccinated people would be higher, but I don’t know how much — because the 2-dose effectiveness against Omicron is so crappy.
- This preprint from Ontario says an mRNA booster is 37% effective against any infection. 😬
Variants
This preprint found that vaccinated people with Delta were less likely to have enough live virus in their nasopharyngeal area to grow cultures than unvaccinated people (21% to 40%).
This preprint says that Omicron is infectious for several days before RATs will notice it. !!!
Testing
This article says that the federal government is going to send 140M rapid tests to the provinces. Great, that’s three per person.
Treatments
This tweet had an interesting graph on the decline of the Canadian health care system over the past 40 years:
Now, it is possible that there are good reasons for the decline. There’s not much needs for beds for chickenpox patients, for example. I believe that there has also been a movement to get people out of hospitals as fast as possible. (I recall being in hospital in the US for a week in 1969? for a pediatric bladder infection, and another week to recover from dental surgery in 1970. I think such a long stay was excessive and probably dangerous.)
Recommended Reading
This Twitter thread reviews all the different horrifying things about Long COVID. tl;dr: Hide.
This article answers the question of whether you should just go get Omicron to get it over with. tr;dr: No.