Long COVID
This paper mentions things which appear to make Long COVID worse, and one of them is inadequate rest in the first two weeks.
This (pre-Omicron) paper from the USA says that people who were fully vaccinated and had a breakthrough infection were only 66% as likely to die and 85% as likely to get Long COVID as people who got an infection while unvaccinated.
This report from the USA says that COVID-19 survivors have 2x the risk for lung conditions, and that ~20% COVID-19 patients have some Long COVID symptoms.
Vaccines
This paper from China studied boosting fully vaxxed (with CoronaVac) adults with an orally inhaled version of a viral vector vaccine vs. shots with CoronaVac. The oral-inhalation group had 10x the number of antibodies that the injected group did.
It’s not a great study because they used different vax for injected and inhaled, but either mixing is better than matching or inhaled is better than injected.
This article reports that Pfizer says that a third dose of its toddlervax gives good protection to children under 5, with a vaccine effectiveness of 80%. This is a very very good effectiveness, and I personally would not be surprised if it drops in the real world.
Note that Pfizer had found that 2 shots was good enough for the very youngest kids, but wasn’t good enough for the pre-schoolers.
To compare the two mRNA vaccines across ages:
| Brand | Age (years) | µg of mRNA | # shots | interval primary then booster |
| Pfizer | .5 to <5 | 3 | 3 | 3 wks then 2 months |
| Moderna | .5 to <6 | 25 | 2 | 4 wks |
| Pfizer | >=5 to <12 | 10 | 2 | 3 wks |
| Moderna | >=6 to <12 | 50 | 2 | one month |
| Pfizer | over 12 | 30 | 2 | 3 wks |
| Moderna | over 12 | 100 | 2 | one month |
This Comment from the UK says that vaccine effectiveness with one booster against symptomatic BA.2 and BA.1 is about the same, with effectiveness against BA.2 being ever so slightly better. (The effectiveness against hospitalization for BA.1 with one booster was a better than for BA.2, but the number of people in the study was small and the “with COVID” compared to “from COVID” numbers might have been higher.)
This Letter to the Editor from the USA found that one shot of J&J plus an mRNA booster was comparable in effectiveness symptomatic infection as three shots of mRNA.
This article reports on a study which found that getting a flu shot dropped the risk of COVID-19 in health care workers in Qatar in 2020 (before COVID-19 vaccines were available). It found that a flu shot was 29.7% effective against COVID-19 infection and 88.9% against severe illness.
Pathology
This paper found COVID-19 nucleotide antigens in the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) of 89% of people with active COVID-19 cases. The antigen level correlated with levels of inflammatory markers.
This preprint says that BA.1 is milder than BA.2.
This report from the US CDC says that sometimes people with COVID-19 get better and then worse again, “rebounding”. I had heard of this only with Paxlovid, but they say it can happen without Paxlovid also.
This article reports on a study which found that areas with higher levels of pollution had more severe COVID cases. For every 25% increase in small particles, the risk of hospitalization went up 6% and risk of ICU of 9%. For every 25% increase in ozone levels, the risk of hospitalization went up 15%, ICU went up 30%, and death went up 18%.
Oddly, particles didn’t seem to increase the risk of death; neither did NO2 levels.
If I understand it correctly, this article talks about a paper which says that it has found that peptides (fragments of the spike protein) in spike proteins which can theoretically glom onto each other and thus form microclots (which do bad things).
This seems unlikely to me, since the Novavax vaccine literally dumps a ton of spike proteins into the lymph system. You’d think that if spikes were a problem, they would have seen increased mortality in the clinical trials. Or maybe spikes are only a problem if they get into the blood?
Treatments
This paper confirms that both Paxlovid and Molnupiravir reduce mortality, with Paxlovid being more effective than Molnupiravir.
This preprint says that Paxlovid works better than Molnupiravir.
This paper says that baricitinib and dexamethasone work about equally well for hospitalized patients, but dexamethasone has a bit more bad side effects.
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of “rebound” with Paxlovid: a patient takes Paxlovid for five days, gets better, stops taking it, gets worse. This article discusses Paxlovid rebound.
Transmission
This article says that Omicron spreads faster per unit time than measles. While Omicron has a lower R0 (7 to 14) than measles (12 to 18) Omicron spreads faster, with a generation time of 4-5 days compared to 12 days for measles.
This paper says that people breathe out 132 times more aerosols during maximal exertion than when at rest. Trained endurance athletes expelled more aerosols than novices.
This report has this interesting picture of the relative communicability of later variants compared to COVID Classic. I kind of knew that Omicron was a lot more contagious, but it was another things to see it on this picture.
Recommended Reading
This article talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the overall virus transmission landscape. Tl;dr: because we were all hiding, we weren’t exposed to the “normal” bugs for a while, and that’s making things… wonky.