Vaccines
This preprint says that if you are unvaccinated and get Omicron, that protects you against Omicron, but your protection against anything else is pretty crappy. If you get Omicron after getting vaccinated, you get really really good protection against all known variants.
Treatments
Two articles have come out in the past week which say that nasal irrigation is really, surprisingly helpful at keeping a COVID-19 infection from progressing to a severe illness:
- This preprint found that irrigating twice per day for fourteen days with salt plus either sodium bicarbonate or povidone-iodine (a disinfectant) cut hospitalization or death by almost 9x.
- If using salt and baking soda seems too low-class for you, there is a nasal nitric-oxide spray (SaNOtize) developed by a Vancouver-based company which this article says just got approved in India. A study found that people using SaNOtize cleared the virus in four days, vs. eight for the control group.
Recommended Reading
Yeah, things are messed up. But read this article to remind yourself of just how amazing — even with all the problems — this vaccine rollout has been.
This article argues that the best thing to do to cut COVID-19 cases is to vaccinate the elderly. Even though they are well-vaxxed, they have severe consequences at such an amazingly higher rate (Someone over 85 is 320x more likely to die that someone in their 20s!), that it’s worth spending effort to vax the unvaxxed elderly.
This article looks at the so-called “Russian flu” of ~1890, which people are more and more willing to pin on a coronavirus, OC43, which is now one of the “common cold” coronaviruses.