Transmission
Yesterday in the BC blog post, I gave a bunch of evidence for Omicron being a very “pointy” wave, fast up and fast down. Wastewater evidence from the eastern USA is also pointing to fast-up/fast-down. From this tweet, the wastewater SARS-CoV-2 surveillance in Boston:
And from this tweet, the surveillance in New Haven, CT:
If you look at a coarser scale, however, wastewater incidence is still going up, so we aren’t out of the woods yet. From the USA’s Nationwide Wastewater Monitoring Network:
Treatments
No shit, this preprint says that cannabinoids can treat COVID-19.
This press release says that Novartis’ new treatment, ensovibep, is 78% effective at preventing hospitalization for COVID-19 patients.
Vaccines
This study found that Pfizer in 12 to 18 year-olds was hella effective, even though the study was in the Delta timeframe: 94% against hospitalization, 98% against ICU, and 100% against death. Let me remind you that this is compared to unvaccinated teens, so for every 100 unvaxxed teens who were hospitalized, only two vaxxed teens were hospitalized.
Long COVID
This preprint tells how dogs can be trained to sniff out Long COVID. They correctly alerted on about half of the Long COVID samples, and did not alert on any of the non-Long COVID samples.
NB: there was a paper recently which said that Long COVID had two distinct clusters of symptoms, so maybe the dogs can sense one type of Long COVID but not the other?
There was a tweet today that monoclonal antibodies helped one person with their Long COVID. This got the attention of at least one very smart virologist. Interesting idea!
Recommended Reading
This article is on the development of pandemic babies. Tl;dr: their development is behind where it should be.