Long COVID
I have been seeing anecdotal reports for some time on Twitter that Paxlovid helped Long COVID, but nothing that seemed concrete enough to post here. Well, I can now point to this case study from a few weeks ago which says that Paxlovid completely got rid of Long COVID symptoms in one woman. (I am not sure if I didn’t see the study or thought that surely I’d posted about Paxlovid and Long COVID before.) Now, it’s one case, and correlation does not prove causality, but it’s a pretty suspicious correlation, given that one of the theories about Long COVID is that it is caused by reservoirs of COVID-19 which hide out somewhere in the body.
This study found that dogs could smell Long COVID. Well, they alerted on half of the Long COVID patients’ sweat samples and on zero of the controls’ sweat samples.
Testing
Wastewater levels of COVID-19 are trending up in many places in Canada.
Ottawa (from the Ottawa COVID-19 wastewater surveillance web page):
Calgary (from the Alberta COVID-19 web page):
This article says that the province of Quebec stopped looking at wastewater three months ago, but are planning to restart.
BC appears to not be trending up… yet… but this is somewhat old data From this tweet:
Vaccines
This article reports that a study in Israel found that a 4th shot was 78% effective in people over 60 and under 100.
This preprint says that two doses of pediatric Pfizer is 59% effective against hospitalization in kids ages 4 to 17. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s against Omicron and in a population where the controls already have better resistance to COVID-19 than adults.
Variants
This letter says that BA.2 is slightly less vax-evasive than BA.1, so it’s got to be something else that makes it more contagious.
This preprint says that BA.2 patients have almost twice as much RNA in their snot as BA.1 patients do. (Oh look! “Something else”!)
Pathology
This study found that COVID-19 vaccination doesn’t have any effect on pregnancy and this study found vaccination didn’t change post-partum outcomes.
This paper found that co-infection with both influenza and COVID-19 increased the risk of mechanical ventilation by 68% and death by 49% compared to only being infected with COVID-19.
Recommended Reading
This article talks about the implications of brain shrinkage seen with COVID-19 infections. It’s hopeful, pointing out that the brain grows and shrinks all the time in response to all kinds of things.
This article discusses drugs for Long COVID. There’s a lot of “well, this looks promising” and “they are investigating this” but not a lot of “this works!” (If there were results, I’d have mentioned this article up in the Long COVID section.)
This article reviews recent research on COVID-19 and neurological impairments.
This article talks about jurisdictions which attempted COVID-Zero and says that they were, in general, better off. (I think there is some survivorship bias – we don’t see the ones which started trying for COVID-Zero and failed.) (And Davis is NOT COVID-Zero, see below.)
This article talks about how Davis, California (a university town) aggressively attacked COVID-19.