2022-03-01 General

Pathology

This article reports that a team can predict with 83% accuracy the severity of COVID-19 by looking at three components of blood (mostly TH17, a helper T cell, and immune system cells IL-17 and IFNG).

Vaccines

Yesterday I referenced a preprint which said that vaccine effectiveness in kidlets was awful. Today, there’s a different report which also says it is not great. For kidlets 5-11 years old, the effectiveness against hospitalization (for undifferentiated Omicron or Delta) was 74% between 14 and 67 days. That probably drops with time — all the older kids’ VEs dropped over time — but the kidlets hadn’t been vaccinated for long enough yet to have that data.

CohortAgainstDominant strain DosesVE
5–11 yrsER or Urgent CareOmicron2, <67 days51%
12–15 yrsER or Urgent CareDelta2, <149 days92%
12–15 yrsER or Urgent CareDelta2, >=150 days79%
12–15 yrsER or Urgent CareOmicron2, <149 days85%
16-17 yrsER or Urgent CareDelta2, >=150 days77%
16-17 yrsER or Urgent CareOmicron2, <149 days34%
16-17 yrsER or Urgent CareOmicron2, >=150 days*
16-17 yrsER or Urgent CareOmicron3 >= 7 days81%
5–11 yrsHospitalizationEither2, <67 days74%
12–15 yrsHospitalizationEither2, <149 days92%
12–15 yrsHospitalizationEither2, >=150 days73%
16-17 yrsHospitalizationEither2, <149 days94%
16-17 yrsHospitalizationEither2, >=150 days88%
* this number makes no sense

Recommended Reading

This blog post by an unpaid volunteer who has the best comprehensive vaccine info tells what she does to keep it up. Spoiler: it takes multiple hours per day.

This is a quite technical paper on fabric masks. It says that cloth masks probably aren’t as good as nonwoven ones (duh), but it also goes into a lot of the science of cloth. If you are a scientist who works with fabrics (perhaps as a craft), you might be interested in this. (Everybody else, give it a pass.)