2022-01-20 General

Transmission

I found this article interesting. They modelled two air flights and got pretty good agreement with reality.

On the first flight, early enough in the pandemic that people weren’t wearing masks, one infected passenger on a 12-hour flight in business class got 12 people sick. On the second flight, four infected passengers on a 5.5 hour flight on a masked flight got only one other person (who visited family in another section for an hour and pulled his mask down during that time) in Economy sick. Their simulations estimated that if everybody on the first flight had been wearing masks, probably only one person would have gotten sick.

Long COVID

This preprint reports that they found numerous focal β-amyloid deposits in the brains of 10 people under 60 who died from severe COVID-19, similar to what Alzheimer’s and Traumatic Brain Injury autopsy brains show. (The paper also points to some previous research that hypoxia can cause these plaques.) Maybe this is part of Long COVID, and maybe it can be treated with anti-amyloid therapeutics.


This paper found that COVID-19 vaccination did not affect fertility in either men or women. COVID-19 infection did not affect fertility in women, but COVID-19 infection did lead to a small, temporary drop in fertility for me.

Recommended Reading

This article talks about pooling tests in the context of rapid antigen tests. Uh, gross!


This article talks about why it’s a bad idea to deny medical treatment to unvaccinated people.