Weather
This article says that the amount of lightning decreased during the pandemic because of less fossil fuel burning and hence fewer aerosols.
Vaccines
This article says that in extremely rare circumstances, people report Long COVID symptoms after vaccination.
Variants
This preprint says that the risk of hospitalization from Omicron is 25% that of Delta, the risk of death from Omicron is 14% that of Delta, and the length of hospital stay is 4 days lower for Omicron than for Delta.
Testing
This paper describes a little wearable sensor which continuously monitors for COVID-19. It’s in research, not production, but that would be awesome.
Treatments
This long thread about recommendations for Paxlovid says that it should not be a first-line treatment: partly because there isn’t much of it, partly because there are REALLY SERIOUS drug interactions, but mostly because the data which Pfizer has given out is kind of thin on the ground.
Pathology
There’s a video which talks about how a Freedom of Information request found that there were only 17K deaths in England and Wales where COVID-19 was the only cause of death listed on the death certificate. I wrote a stand-alone blog post to explain why that doesn’t mean that people only died with COVID-19 instead of from COVID-19. Tl;dr: those are mistakes, the death cert is supposed to have the root cause and the ultimate cause of death.
Recommended Reading
This long thread has links to many studies which all show that kids’ mental health has not gotten worse during the pandemic but actually improved, by many measures: self-harm and suicide attempts, overdoses, mental health hospital admissions, and psychiatric medication prescriptions. Many of the studies were from Canada.
In fact, it sure looks to me like schools are the cause of poor mental health, not schools being closed. I guess it’s not surprising that (some) kids don’t like being locked up every day with people not of their choosing.
This article talks about how they are broadening the really awesome UK medical drug experimentation framework called RECOVERY.