2022-02-11 General – Pandemics in British Columbia

Transmission

Buried in this blog post was something I hadn’t ever known: the volume of air a person inhales/exhales per minute is around ten times larger during exercise than at rest. No wonder DrH closed the gyms.

Treatments

This article reports that the US FDA has approved a new monoclonal antibody — bebtelovimab — for emergency use. Bebtelovimab was not on my radar at all, which I actually find highly encouraging: maybe there are a bunch of other treatments out there which are not on my radar?

Bebtelovimab (AKA LY-CoV1404) is effective against ALL the variants. It’s the column on the right that has no red in it! (I think some of the rows are variants and some are mutations.)

Vaccines

This report says that booster doses dropped in effectiveness. During the Omicron period, boosters:

against Emergency Room care dropped from 87% during the two months post-booster to 66% by the fourth month post-booster;
against hospitalization dropped from 91% during the two months post-booster to 78% by the fourth month post-booster.

This article also reported that effectiveness declined:

The good news is that BA.2 doesn’t look like its immune evasiveness isn’t significantly different (worse) than BA.1 (“Omicron Classic”).

This report updates effectiveness over time against symptomatic disease for two and three doses:

Effectiveness against hospitalization, two doses of Pfizer plus an mRNA booster:

In my General post from two days ago, I said that I expected better vaccines to come around, and one reason was vaccines that used portions of the virus other than the spike. This preprint showed good results in mice against multiple variants using a frankenstein protein that was the spike plus part of the nucleocapsid.

Variants

This article says that BA.1 and BA.2 are as distinct from each other as the other VOCs were distinct. That surprised me, because I thought that BA.1 (Omicron Classic) came suddenly out of nowhere by itself. If BA.2 is that different from BA.1, then wouldn’t that mean their common ancestor had to be circulating for a while? Maybe it was “circulating” in one immunocompromised individual, or maybe it was circulating in an animal reservoir.

Testing

This article reports that the Ontario Science Table now recommends that you should swab your cheeks, tongue or back of throat, and nostrils instead of just your nostrils.

Pathology

This article reports that COVID-19 attacks the placenta, identifying that as the proximate cause of COVID-related stillbirths (and not, for example, infection of the fetus).